Caso Lever S01E04: Er Indoors

Until Lever's wife Carmen went to the police on February 18, 2018 and accused me of having attacked her when I was not in fact even in Guatemala, I could be said to have been guilty of overlooking the threat that she posed. (Perhaps a classic case of mosquita muerta.)

First impressions should count, and the first time I came across her roughly four years earlier (the time that Lever was trying to apologise to me for repeatedly kicking his dog), I detected an uncanny emotional vacancy emanating from her. 

Nevertheless, my wife and I soon both had reason enough to be sympathetic, having concluded that, as the little dog appeared to have vanished, she was perhaps likely to become a victim herself. 

We were indeed soon witnessing some unchivalrous behaviour, most memorably when she was heavily pregnant in 2015. I'd been chatting to Lever in front of his main entrance and she pulled up in her car. He continued to converse with me, ignoring the fact that directly behind him she was obviously struggling to open the heavy iron gate. 

During the course of my wife's own first lengthy dialogue with her early in 2015, right outside our gate, a bubbly Carmen Solares had announced her engagement, described her wedding dress and then, rather bizarrely invited V to the event itself in May.

V politely refused of course, and found herself gently lecturing the younger woman on how she should only ask along people she knows rather more deeply and would thus have a vested interest in her wellbeing. 

Around the same time (February 25, 2015) the mother of our two grey tabbies strayed over the wall and into Lever's garden and I had a perfectly civil exchange with his fiancée during which she permitted me to go inside and collect our errant kitty. 

So we both concluded that she was young and possibly a little naïve and given what we had already seen of Lever's behaviour when she was not present, we were inclined towards a compassionate approach.

Indeed, once Lever's apparently deliberate encroachments on our territory became undeniable, my wife advised me to go easy on the pair of them as they were newlyweds, his wife is pregnant etc. 

Then on Saturday August 8, 2015 there was a major rumpus next door. The noise of (a lot of) breakables breaking followed shortly by the bizarre sight and sound of the now Mrs Lever running around starkers in the street outside screeching like a banshee. Her husband, himself only semi-attired, was soon out and began to make use if the sort of deplorable misogynistic language towards her that we'd become all too familiar with later on. 

We didn't see what happened next, but can surmise that he somehow man-handled her indoors and then into what has to have been either a cupboard or a very small room, securing the door. From that point onwards, and throughout the night until almost dawn, she could be heard banging and screaming loudly, pleading to be released. 

 

This was a fairly traumatic experience as we had no sense of what we ought to do and in the end did nothing. (There's video of this incident, which is not for sharing in public.)

 

So on top of our initial inclination towards sympathy we additionally ended up with what one might describe as a legacy of guilt.

Had this been London we'd have instinctively dialled 999 for sure. But here in Guatemala any involvement with local law enforcement tends to come with blowback so, in a sense, we pulled the pillows over our heads. 

The first clear sign that Carmen Solares de Lever intended to be our antagonist was when I had a meeting with the engineer in charge of the water department at Cesar Brañas on February 6, 2018.  

 

For a week he had been conducting an investigation we had requested into the excesses that had arisen on our bill since Lever fashioned a sort of swimming pool in his garden. 

 

Not only were we worried about the unusual extra charges which had cropped up, but we had been alerted by the alcalde auxiliar that we could be liable for any issues that might occur should Lever attempt to empty his pool through our drains and out on the western flank of our property. It was also unclear to us that our plumbing system could cope with such a sudden deluge. 

Up until this stage this official had been helpful, promising me an expediente on the matter, but the moment I joined him at his desk it was clear that something had changed. 'La Canchita' had been in to see him, he confided. 

At this stage all I had asked for was an explanation in writing of the fines and for why the neighbouring property did not feature on their system.I had not made any attempt to report Lever personally for hurto de fluidos to the MP and had no intention of doing so.

 

Yet somehow, as the official reported it, his wife had discovered that we had asked for an investigation into what were essentially our own private affairs and was apparently determined to actively interfere with it, even though this could only lead to a multilateral dispute that was completely avoidable. 

My meeting with the engineer then took a bizarre turn. He asked me if, by any chance, I happened to possess any photos of 'La Canchita' in a bikini. 

 

A clumsy attempt at entrapment I surmised, largely because of what was to follow. If I had said yes, I imagine that he'd have pursued another tack, but since I admonished him for his tasteless and unprofessional inquiry, he said he could perhaps find a way to reimburse me for the excess charges we had been asked to pay. 

 

We'd still have to cough up downstairs first, he added, because this compensation would not be coming from the Municipality itself. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more squire. 

I refused. The investigation was never about the money and anyway, accepting a pay-off in this way in front of a witness (he'd made sure that another, mute Muni employee pulled a chair up to the desk during this exchange) could undoubtedly be just another form of entrapment. 

In receiving water and not paying for it, Lever always knew he could be committing a fairly serious delito, and when he admitted the circumstances to me I provided a warning which at the time I thought friendly.

 

On the 23rd of September 2016 we bumped into each other outside and he asked me out of the blue if we pay for our water. I told him that of course we did.

He looked a bit flummoxed and prattled on how he had inherited a 'special deal' from the previous owner whereby the water supply came free of charge. I made my best sceptical face and served up my friendly warning, adding that freeloading would be frowned upon even more so in this village where the often feeble daytime flow of water has been the number one gripe for at least four decades. 

No Meter Lever

Anyway, I had long known about this anomaly.

My refusal of the apparent bribe was arguably the impetus for the false denuncia almost immediately afterwards on February 18 not, as was later suggested, our taste in music (see below).

 

We have concluded that the Levers will use slurs and sham legal counter-attacks against us as a way of throwing up difficult obstacles to any criminal investigation into his own behaviour. 

At a meeting within the Ministerio Público on October 22 last year, their lawyer Claudia Paniagua made a wayward claim that had me looking for my jaw on the shiny terracotta tiles below. 

In a tone that might generously be described as somewhat condescending, she informed V that, "si la señora hace memoria", she ought to recall that Carmen Lever filed that duplicitous police report because she was so upset that we had been playing the track Mayores by Becky G. 

If your jaw is not on the floor now, it should be. An accredited lawyer in this country, with designs on the highest office, suggested in front of a public official in the justice system that being miffed in the manner of a petulant adolescent would be just cause for breaking the law by lying to the police.  

 

And she stated this as if the she were a first hand witness to this dreamt up event. 

 

(Perhaps more significantly, Mrs Lever has now given two completely different sworn testimonies about the events of February 18, 2018 to two different judges at the Juzgado de Paz. By a simple process of elimination, one of these has to be false and thus potentially criminal.)

In my own country you can be jailed for simply ringing the emergency services without a proper pretext.

Having been subjected, during the autumn of 2019, to an intense and really quite loathsome stream of personal abuse via Carmen Solares de Lever's named personal Instagram account, I can honestly say that at no stage during that six week period did it ever occur to me that this alone provoked me into leaving a malicious and bogus statement against her at the local police station. (She dictated that I verbally and even physically abused her that day, "and not for the first time", an account at variance with later assertions that nobody opened the door.)

On the 18th of February 2018 I was up in Campeche Mexico, — and have the passport stamps to show for it — and so could neither have attacked her nor indeed repeatedly played a regeeton track that causes her distress, unless her hearing is astonishingly acute. 

Tellingly, she never mentioned this subjectively-traumatic tidbit of Latin pop at the time of her denuncia, nor indeed in front of the judge. This was a detail added two and a half years later by her new lawyer.

And I checked and found that the track was only added to our iTunes Library a few months after the incident, by which time Lever had been long using music with conscripted lyrics supposedly in order to hurt and intimidate us.

If we really had been blasting out this track non-stop for twenty hours I do think that every human and animal on either side of the wall would have been rendered permanently senseless.

Yet in a way Claudia Paniagua was of course correct to suggest that Mrs Lever's denuncia originated as an ill-conceived act of petty vengeance — just not for the reason she was suggesting. 

We faced up to our accuser on March 12, 2018 at the Juzgado de Paz. 

 

By this time Lever had already commenced his campaign of misogynistic abuse against V. It was shortly after those initial infractions, that I wrote about the former here in my blog, in a rather fresh state of rage. 

Yet the exposure that proved perhaps most stressful to me was having to deal with defending myself against cooked up charges in a foreign court, and when my lawyer advised us to seek reconciliation at the conclusion of the audiencia (suggesting that this was the done thing and would probably put an end to the Levers' hostility), I agreed and I believed him — and this has turned out to be one of the bigger mistakes I have made in my life. 

For it's clear to me now that I should have made Mrs Lever face the consequences then and there for her lies, not least because he has made two subsequent false denuncias against me, both now desestimadas.

Indeed, the reconciliation on March 12, 2018 was forged on condition that the Levers build their own wall and the judge duly gave them six months to do so. In order to secure that 'treaty', Mrs Lever must have perjured herself by claiming in the courtroom under oath that she already had a signed-off architectural plan for said wall, and that the application had been duly filed. 

Her lawyer Rebeca Barrios then raised her hand and 'gave faith as a lawyer' that this paperwork, including the plan, was sitting somewhere in the Muni. It was not. (This is something that could get you disbarred in the UK.) They had, in effect, misdirected the judge to their application to build a bodega.

Outside in the courtyard I shook hands with Mrs Lever and really did hope for the best. She had committed to keeping the peace and furthermore to making sure that everyone else in her household knew that she had, and would thus be bound to collaborate.

Yet within a matter of weeks she was seemingly on the warpath again. 

The next move was to go to the Muni and report us for painting our front gate and the edges of the pavement either side. Seriously. You couldn't charaterise this even fancifully as a lio de vecinos, because the matter had nothing to do with the Levers at all.

We had been collaborating with the local COCOPRE with a security matter regarding a mysterious vehicle that tended to park alongside our banqueta every day which somewhat ironically turned out to belong to a fiscal auxiliar at the MP involved in some dangerous liaisons. It was the neighbourhood watch group and the alcalde auxiliar that suggested we paint the pavement edges.

Here she is again in late 2018, apparently dead set on dobbing us in once more, this time for the apparently heinous offence of repairing the cobbled road in front of our house. (It may be worth mentioning here that this empedrado was originally funded and laid down privately by the previous owner of our home, not by the Muni.)

It's that little nod of triumph that makes this clip so delightful.

Around the same time she was also joining in the childish fun of giving the finger whenever possible to our security cameras, more than occasionally whilst accompanied by a toddler.

On the basis of more optimistic advice from the same lawyer, that had defended us against her false denuncia in March 2018, we had installed these cameras in April 2018 precisely to head off the threat of any future legal harassment and, more generally, to tempt the señora to behave herself. 

Ambidextrous?

And yet it is surely she not her pareja who must be held responsible for encouraging their cleaner to get in on the act, recorded here on November 7, 2018 making an entirely uncalled-for obscene gesture at my wife. 

In a way we are glad that we went on record ages ago with INACIF about our growing concern was that Carmen Solares de Lever would in due course start to weaponise her children against us, because that duly happened right on schedule.

I suppose the most recent development is that late last year on October 29, Mrs Lever took her husband and Lic. Claudia Paniagua to the Ministerio Público in order to make another denuncia against us both, this time making use of a more prejudicial statute: pertubacion de la possesion.

On this occasion the attempted stitch-up was even more blatant. Mrs Lever changed the date of the alleged events, picking a subsequent afternoon which allowed her own gardener to contribute to the evidence (something he was filmed doing) 

 

And to cap it all, took along a picture of our young nephew Alex taken the previous day in an attempt to falsify his identity. We suspect the change of day was planned to allow them to say that the image was of our occasional garden helper who only attended on Saturdays.

If her first pack of porkies was something of a knee-jerk reaction, this one was in a sense much more morally repugnant, because it was clearly premeditated and came packaged with grubby inuendo. 

The latter included insinuations about the position of our security cameras, which had been installed by pros and were part of a system documented in detail by the fiscales from the MP the previous February in relation to the aggressive intimidation we'd long been subjected to by her husband. 

 

These possess low-res, wide angle, analogue lenses not telephotos, and the nearest internal camera at the time of the denuncia was situated at least 25m from the property line. 

At the time of installation the Levers were in effect benefiting from the privacy afforded by our wall and the plants and trees that we were growing alongside it. 

Anyway, article 279 of the local code specifies that wild and damaging allegations of this nature need, at the very least, to be supported by a third-party dictamen and the Levers presented nothing of the sort. Only insinuations.

Incidentally, I won't be making any statements in any of these posts that I would not be prepared to repeat — under oath — at the juzgado. These are all descriptions of concrete events or dialogue.

 

I do have scruples about perjuring myself. And I am being very careful to properly distinguish between events I suppose to have happened and those I know to have happened, and can prove it. 

Whilst Lever himself is WYSIWYG. his wife on the other hand could be characterised as nearly all artifice. And far more ruthless. 

The lesson here is that one should take care not to acquire as an embittered foe someone who hasn't really worked hard to get where they are, for individuals with acquired status can act on a sense of inherent vulnerability. 

Anyway, the question that any good historian would now be asking is this: is this all just a case of a man who acted as a presumptuous and mildly anti-social next-door neighbour —  hell-bent on getting away with whatever he could whenever he could — ultimately led astray by a spiteful spouse, whose ill counsel would ultimately escalate what had begun as a minor border controversy — easily resolvable with a dollop of good manners — into a ruinous and potentially deadly conflict?

Or put it another way: a bloke who was so pig obstinate about not building his own wall or discharging his other obligations as a property owner in Guatemala, that he allowed a containable situation to crumble alarmingly. 

Well, Lever left all common decency behind remarkably quickly. 

And once that happens, the perpetrator can either come clean and take the punishment or he can try to duck and dive like a shirker, whilst in the meantime doing everything in his power to demean his victim. 

Once toxic people lose the ability to control you, they soon resort to an attempt to control how others perceive you. 

The incident below was a kind of drive-by derogation. In the evening of the 8th of November, 2018 Lever found us clustered in a small family group, children included, outside our home as he whizzed past on his Douchati shouting "Ahhh, it's the cunt and the ugly bitch", yobbishly.

We ignored him and continued to do so as he settled in his own entrance and began lecturing several generations of my wife's family from a distance about how she had married me for my money.

One of the children present produced a cellphone and captured the tail end of the encounter...

The two of us met in La Antigua 32 years ago. I had just graduated and my future wife was working here in IT. 

 

We were introduced by her family. During the time we later lived in London she was taken on by two of the biggest investment banks in the City, Bankers Trust and Merril Lynch and was for a long time the higher earner. When I co-founded an ultimately successful digital media company, we had been together for years and in that particular story I owe her so much. 

Before spouting such disrespectful and libelous nonsense, Jason Wade Lever needs to take a long hard look in the mirror. 

Overall then, I am inclined to see his reluctance to open a water account with the Muni and his use of his wife to hamper any investigation into this as a symptom of a more sinister phenomenon, into which Mrs Lever's persistent meddling with the authorities slots largely as a sub-plot.

By way of a cliffhanger though, I will report that long before we were brushed away by the Departamento de Agua in early 2018, on April 29, 2014 someone had burgled the water meter from right outside our main gate, resulting in a minor flood in the vicinity that lasted several days. 

Fortunately, we were advised at the time by an old friend, then the alcalde auxiliar, to properly report this a crime to the PNC, along with the meter's numerical ID.

These devices have some minor intrinsic resale value. But we wondered at the time why of all the water meters in the village, the as yet unidentified thief chose ours. 

It was some time before we apprehended the possible connection between this theft and the fact that the missing meter was registered to our address, which was suddenly being shared.

UPDATE

 

On October 12, 2023, after a legal battle lasting over four years, Lever was finally convicted - specifically for the misogynistic verbal assault of Friday July 26, 2019 and its aftermath.

During the course of last year Lever's attempts to avoid facing his victim became ever more blatant and an arraigo was imposed. Faced by the consequences of his continued attempts to enter and leave the country in disregard of this judicial order, he finally presented himself at the Juzgado de Paz. 

 

He first tried to pay off his victim, then tried to turn his own trial into a reverse-prosecution, whereby my reports of the Levers' bad behaviour were presented as bad behaviour. Neither of these ruses prevented the imposition of justice in the end.