Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

Then the sentencing date changed, again, this time moving up five days. On Friday, September 23, Lawrence would go before Judge Castel in the morning, and Lefebvre would follow in the afternoon. It was like the Calgary boys had been twinned. Busted within minutes of each other, hit with the same $5-million bail, entered the same guilty plea, offered the same deal, up to five years in prison and $100 million forfeiture. There were just the two differences: Lefebvre, having been arrested for illegal drugs once before, got nailed with urine testing while Lawrence didn’t; and Lawrence, the senior officer of Neteller, had to scrape up sixty million to Lefebvre’s forty. But otherwise, why stop the parallel prosecutions now? Logically, the conclusion had to be that whatever time Castel deemed was necessary to sit in a cell and meditate on crimes against America, almost certainly it would be the same for both.

Marella and Gluck had met with the FBI parole officer a few weeks earlier. Their suggestions for the government were noncustodial release for Lefebvre, five years’ probation, including time served, and no additional fines. “They didn’t see a problem with that,” said Lefebvre. Now he was ninety percent sure it would happen that way. The paranoia that had seeped inside of him over the spring, influencing his thoughts in a negative direction, had receded.

In fact, Lefebvre’s first impression of this proposed denouement was to act like Mickey Rourke aping Charles Bukowski in Barfly . After Rourke gets beaten up in the back alley behind the Golden Horn tavern, he says, “Oh hey, is that the best you can do? Ya betta phone fa help,” to the beefy bartender who’s stomped him twice. In other words, Hey, what do you mean? You put me through all this grief for half a decade and take most of my money, and that’s the best you got? You mean you’re not even going to throw me some time? Wusses.

Lefebvre then made it clear that he did not feel that way. There was a palpable sense of relief that the nightmare might be fading but also a sense of dread about returning to the big house for the third time in his life.

Lefebvre provided a snapshot of the latest circle of bureaucratic hell that he had lately descended into:

There are three words here we need to distinguish. One of them is “bail.” At the moment, I’m out on bail, which is administered by an organization called pretrial services [U.S. Probation and Pretrial Services System]. “Probation” is a sentence the court imposes whereby your probation officer supervises — at different levels, depending on the probation order — your behavior. And “parole,” which is, after you’re sentenced, when they release you from jail on good behavior, it’s a parole situation. So we’re not talking about parole. Right now I’m on bail. And if I’m sentenced to a further period of probation, my lawyers are going to make the pitch that I’ve been on bail for four and a half years and by the report of the probation officer I’ve comported myself excellently and that should be taken into consideration, and the probation should be: time served on bail. That’s the argument they’ll make.

Parole people are different from bail people. I would never have met these guys till now. They’ve got these bureaucratic rules and regulations they make you follow. They want a complete list of all the gifts I’ve given over $500—ever. They want me to list all my vehicles and property, and all my investments. Jane, See-Wing, Geoff, Marian, Nathalie — we had a big army going there for about ten days putting together the package. Not a package — boxes and boxes.

So how does an overly generous guy like Lefebvre remember all the gifts he’s given? He doesn’t. For years the line has been, more or less, five hundred bucks to him is less than transit fare to you. These rules were never designed for the wealthy white-collar criminal elite or, in Lefebvre’s case, guys in the not-so-wealthy-anymore-but-still-okay snack bracket. Continuing to talk about the parole requisitions, he said,

It was really annoying. They’re used to asking those questions of every scumbag who never even had a bank account. The impact of it was whether I was able to pay the fine.

Three cardboard boxes filled with shit. They asked me questions like: “Can you give descriptions of all gifts over $500?” I told him, “There are probably over a thousand gifts and I can probably remember two hundred.” So we gave him a copy of our accounting sheets of all the expenditures paid over the past five years and then just highlighted the ones that said “Gifts.” They don’t even know what they’re asking for. They wanted to know the name of every corporation I was ever a shareholder in, and all the names of the other shareholders. We’re just scratching our heads, going, “What?” You know, who are all the shareholders of Neteller? We gave him all of my credit card receipts and all of my bank shit.

Out of frustration, this had to be the tactic — inundate. Everyone knew the parole officer couldn’t possibly read it all. “Nor could he make any sense out of it,” said Lefebvre. “There is no reference material there, just raw shit.”

Lefebvre admitted that at this point in the game, on the tilted playing field during the summer of his sixtieth, he hadn’t been looking over Marella and Gluck’s shoulders. Yet he knew that in addition to the boxes of paperwork, he’d have to be in New York for an interview. Robert Flemen, U.S. probation officer, worked for the probation office, but he also worked directly for Castel. He reviewed everyone the judge was about to sentence and prepared a report for him. Summing up the experience as “really fucking weird,” Lefebvre said:

“Did your mother have any other relationships?” I was so aghast at that. Fortunately, I had the patience to understand that what he was doing was some Sociology or Psychology 101—he had some checks he had to check in. They were looking to see if there were any disturbing influences in my youth or something like that. I was going to say to him, “You know, my mom didn’t give me permission to discuss that with you — would you like me to ask her?” And then I was going to say to him, “Dude, I’m sixty fucking years old!” Instead, I looked over at Vince, who gave me that “Calm down, John” look, and said, “No, but lots of priests tried.”

The other questions for Lefebvre weren’t any less invasive or absurd:

“Did you ever see anybody ingest alcohol or drugs in your home?” I said, “You mean my home?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “Yeah, me!” In the probation report, he said I responded to all questions appropriately. On the way out of the meeting, after they made me piss, I was shaking my head and I said, “Man,” and he said, “What?” And I said, “You just seem so unthankful.” And he blushed a little bit and kept on with his plastic gloves. But then on the way out, when he was showing me the elevator, he said, “This is the first interview in my career where anybody quoted The Simpsons .”

Lefebvre found the episode so weird and distasteful he didn’t want Flemen’s name to appear in the book. “Just call him Homer.”

On Tuesday, August 23, the presentence report was released. Attorney-client privilege would normally apply, but Lefebvre waived it. The document prepared for Castel was sent as correspondence from Thomas Mixon, supervising U.S. probation officer, to Benjamin Gluck in Los Angeles. The judge will cull what he believes are the important parts of Flemen’s report for the sentencing. A quick perusal nets a few proper names that were not double-checked for spelling. Also, some of the facts seem off-kilter. One small slice of Lefebvre’s history that probably won’t come out at sentencing was that “in 1974, he was able to stop smoking LSD on his own.” More seriously, in Section A, “The Offense,” clauses twelve through seventeen recount the role of the cooperating witness (CW) in the double arrest.