For L & J
INTRODUCTION
Fanfare for the Wanted Man
I was arrested at home in Malibu. I was just sitting down to drink my cup of tea, around nine in the morning, and the intercom rang. The lady from the FBI said, “You have to come to the door immediately.” I stood there, staring at the floor for a few seconds—I was struck dumb a little bit—and then went and answered the door. They came in and put me in handcuffs. They took me down the stairs to my dining room table and started asking questions. My cell phone started to go off … I wasn’t the only one.
Philanthropist John Lefebvre is driving his white Toyota Sierra SUV home. We’re crawling in stop-and-start traffic, heading out of town. Lefebvre used to be a lawyer, and now he’s an alleged money launderer and racketeer. What he wants to be is a professional singer-songwriter, which is why we’re on Santa Monica Boulevard. He’s been working on his first album at a studio called the Village Recorder for almost a month. A microdot of his cash is paying for the name producer, expensive studio, and top-shelf musicianship.
Lefebvre continues,
In the squad car on the way to the Municipal Detention Center in L.A., I phoned my manager but couldn’t get hold of him. I got hold of my assistant. I said, “I’m in the custody of federal marshals, I’m arrested on serious charges, I need help. I need you to talk to some lawyers for me.” She was gobsmacked. We didn’t know my lawyer Vince Marella then—we followed recommendations that came to us through Neteller. My office in Calgary tried to get bail money, but then the bank said, “Hey wait a minute, he’s been arrested for money laundering—can we give him his money?” So, great, you mean I’ve got $110 million in the bank and I can’t get at a measly five million bail? You mean I can’t even buy groceries?
Lefebvre is an old acquaintance from my University of Calgary days, in the late seventies. His pro bono advice once got me out of a jam. I hadn’t seen him in twenty years and then read about him in the newspaper, about how he and another guy had founded a thriving internet company called Neteller and been arrested. And now, here I am, catching the tail end of his recording with a bunch of hotshot players, and listening to a wild and woeful tale.
Early evening L.A., with its potent mixture of smog and sun, is diaphanous and beautiful. As Lefebvre plays bumper cars with the busy eight o’clock snarl heading out of town, he delivers his monologue about that fateful Monday morning over six months ago, January 15, 2007, when the FBI charged him with “conspiring to transfer funds with the intent to promote illegal gambling.” His music producer, Brian Ahern, sits up front, listening closely.
Lefebvre was in the Village’s Studio D with Ahern all day, listening back to the various takes and laying down vocals. He also was watching session keyboardist Patrick Warren induce ethereal noises out of an instrument called the Chamberlin on a Brian Wilson song, “God Only Knows,” one of four cover versions chosen for the sessions.
Lefebvre can easily afford a famous studio and top-notch accompaniment. Just a few years ago, he became a rich man. In 2004, not long after a Calgary, Alberta, company named Neteller Inc. became an Isle of Man company named Neteller PLC, it began trading on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM). The public offering was a huge hit: investors inhaled the stock. Lefebvre’s life until that point had been full of outside gambles and a refusal to settle for his default profession, the law. Then he experienced the kind of extreme windfall that our capitalist system usually doesn’t make available to someone who has been scraping by for fifty years, except maybe through the long odds of a lottery ticket. His business partner, Stephen Lawrence, had found a seam in the online gambling business, an untapped vein, and Lefebvre had joined him to market the concept. The results were miraculous. To paraphrase Grantland Rice, it’s not how you won or lost, it’s how you facilitate the game.
People in the gambling business—even functionaries such as Lefebvre and Lawrence, who provided the means for quick transfers of money between bookies and gamblers—tend to prefer the cute moniker “gaming” to its harsher analogue. In this milder context, gaming refers to using an internet browser to visit an online gambling site and, using a credit card, bet on something like a Monday Night Football game. Neteller’s electronic wallet system made it much easier for gamblers and bookies alike to move money back and forth. Gamblers hate waiting, because all they want to do is gamble; bookies hate seeing their margin shredded by unscrupulous gamblers using fraudulent credit cards. Lefebvre and Lawrence figured out a way to make everyone happy. Neteller made a lot of money making everyone happy, including investors. Everybody was happy, except the U.S. government, which cried, “Where the hell’s my money!?” Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper used to sing that line in reference to the cutthroats in the music business who stiffed them out of gig money. The government felt the same way about upstart internet gambling moguls. The feds were especially interested in those companies whose operations were based outside U.S. jurisdiction, and where Americans placed offshore bets. U.S. money was leaving the country through this company or that—and here was this small Canadian outfit acting as a two-way tollbooth.
Lawrence was CEO and Lefebvre was president of Neteller. Both owned significant percentages of the company’s shares. Over time, when it became legal to do so, the pair divested from the company and cashed in most of their holdings. By 2006, they had resigned their positions and left the day-to-day running of the firm to others. They remained minority shareholders, retaining 5.5 percent and 5.9 percent of Neteller stock, respectively. In essence, they had done exactly what passes for normal in the internet age: grow a business, watch it become popular, harvest the profit, and then move on.
In Lefebvre’s case, he started to give it all away; in Lawrence’s, he moved on to a new venture. But three days after the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) simultaneously arrested Lefebvre at his U.S. residence in Malibu, California, and Lawrence in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he and his family were on holiday, Neteller vacated the American market, kissing off sixty-five percent of its business. Its stock value plummeted, and Lefebvre lost at least $100 million.
We turn and head north on U.S. Highway 101, a.k.a. the Pacific Coast Highway, or PCH. We’re heading toward Lefebvre’s home—homes, actually—in Malibu. While in town to produce Lefebvre’s recordings, Brian Ahern is staying at Malibu 1, the one Lefebvre bought for $5 million cash in 2004. For a couple of days I’ll be staying with Lefebvre a few doors down, in Malibu 2. Lefebvre continues the story:
It took five or six hours to be booked, and then I was in jail for a few days. They kept me there while my office tried to work this thing out with the bank. Then I was supposed to appear in New York. I was put in shackles and leg irons, and put on a bus with other prisoners. After about three hours, they took us off the bus one by one and shuffled us across the tarmac and onto the plane.
About five or six hours in, people had to pee real bad. One by one we would be allowed to use the washroom. They wouldn’t take the shackles off, so you’d have to figure out how to do it. Needless to say, urination was the most you were entitled to. Wiping your ass with shackles—that is a trick that cannot be learned.
The guys at the detention centers at both ends were fair, but the federal marshals transporting us were mean and surly. They carried around sawed-off shotguns. I was thinking to myself, Jesus, can’t we just try to act civilized here? But then I thought better of saying anything.
Ahern interjects, “What we got here is failure to communicate,” mimicking a familiar line from Cool Hand Luke.
Lefebvre pulls into Ahern’s Malibu 1 driveway and drops him off. A homebody type, the producer wants his evening quiet time. Then Lefebvre swings
the Sierra back down the street to Malibu 2. He paid $13 million for the second property, 25030 Malibu Road, at the beginning of 2006. He treated the premises to a million-dollar makeover, appointing the house with 290-year-old Mongolian rugs and enormous crossbeams in the ceiling, also centuries old, which were salvaged and imported from France. The main living area has a rustic, unpretentious look, almost like nothing was done to it—the exact intent.
The houses sit on a brief stretch, a few quiet miles, of Malibu coastline, southwest of Pepperdine College. The PCH shifts away from this exclusive enclave, northeast around the coastal mountains. On top of the ridge, high above Lefebvre’s comparatively modest abode, sits Cher’s compound. Malibu 2 has no tennis court or swimming pool to compare with Cher, but Lefebvre can shower outside on his rooftop and wave to the helicopter pilots, and he can walk out his side door, off the kitchen, and hang an immediate right into the sand and surf. His instinct is to invite the ageless pop star over for drinks—“I like Cher!”—but while he can compete with her on wealth, he cannot on celebrity wattage. He’s a little frightened of the chilly, even paranoid brush-off he might receive.
There is no highway traffic noise on this quiet stretch of Malibu Road, which is why the prices are the steepest of the steep. “All you hear in the morning,” says Lefebvre, “is the birds.” He thinks his house is now worth about $15 million, but he’s hoping it’ll sell for seventeen. More precisely, he hopes the U.S. government will sell off the seized property at the higher market value. Uncle Sam is nosing around, trying to grab a substantial portion of Lefebvre’s internet fortune. Given this near inevitability, he hopes to convince them to take assets he’s already paid for—ones he hopes will appreciate prior to sale—as opposed to reaching into his icebox for a cold, hard forty mil.
As we wheel into his driveway, Lefebvre punctuates his long anecdote about the day he got busted, “Did you know that in the old days they would put you on a bus and take you to the next county jail, and then the next county jail, and then the next, all the way along to New York? It would have been a month for sure, about sixty to a hundred miles a day.
“They used to say, ‘I’m goin’ for some diesel therapy.’”
• • •
On January 17, 2007, I read a business story at globeandmail.com about a Calgarian named John Lefebvre. He was arrested two days previous for alleged money laundering and racketeering through an internet company called Neteller PLC—a company he had cofounded and that was based in the Isle of Man. I wondered if the alleged perp might be the same John Lefebvre I knew back at the University of Calgary in the late seventies. As it turned out, it was. I emailed my friend Shelley Youngblut, editor of Swerve magazine, a weekly rotogravure included with the Calgary Herald.
“Shelley, you have to do a feature on this guy.”
“Could you do it?”
“No way. Term’s just started.”
Shelley figured she would have to let the business section of the Herald handle it. But other than news stories, the Herald left it alone.
A couple of months later, in March, I’d heard through the email grapevine that the guy who had been busted by the FBI was preparing to record an album of his own songs with high-priced session musicians. Surreal. Somehow, these two events—the bust in the immediate past and the sessions in the immediate future—had to be related. I remained skeptical, if not incredulous, about the scheduled sessions.
Still curious, in mid-May I emailed Lefebvre. I wondered if he might remember me from our U of C days. Lefebvre had been elected president of the student union in 1978–79, the year I was appointed program director of the university radio station, CJSW, which was funded by the union, so maybe. He emailed back: “Sure, I remember you.”
And is Al Kooper working on the album you’re recording?
“That’s right,” Lefebvre wrote. “I’m living the dream.”
Lefebvre has played piano and guitar for most of his life—he knows his tonic from his treble clef, his rubato from his staccato—but he’s obviously never recorded in a setting with the highest caliber of musicianship at his disposal. I thought it would be worth it to chronicle this rich man neophyte’s interaction with big-league pros.
I emailed Shelley again. “You have got to do this story: gambling, FBI, Calgarian, rock ’n’ roll—what more do you want?”
“You’re right—so you do it. Term’s almost over …”
This could be an offbeat but entertaining story, one in which the narrative would be driven by questions such as: Could the results of what looks like a grand ego trip be any good? Would the premium paid for access to the top echelon of Los Angeles musicianship be worth it? The sessions invariably seemed like an elaborate, expensive vanity project—what else could they possibly look like?
But Lefebvre, as I find out, rarely acknowledges doubt. He’s elated to have set himself up in style and to challenge himself to record the best-sounding music he can. He has been waiting for this moment his entire life, he says, and is determined to make it into something substantial. And it’s hard not to root for the guy. He has a great feel-good narrative going—the smart, good-natured, dope-smoking hippie who during the internet boom seizes an opportunity to escape the drudgery of lawyering and strikes it rich. Anyone can identify with this. The parallel arc—of the bust and its aftermath—is something people might have a harder time with, but it is no less compelling.
I tell Lefebvre I want to come down to L.A., hang out in the studio, watch him record, and catch up and talk about his legal difficulties. Lefebvre says no problem, but he’ll have to clear it with his veteran producer, Ahern, a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia. As a young man in 1970, Ahern had played on, recorded, and produced “Snowbird,” which overnight transformed a local raw talent named Anne Murray into a world-famous songbird. Ahern went on to record Emmylou Harris’s early solo LPs, and marry her.
Forty years into the business, Ahern prohibits hangers-on. Experience has convinced him that within an hour or two of being inside his studio, visitors start thinking they’re producers themselves. They can’t resist the temptation to tell Ahern what to do. I tell Lefebvre I’m too old to be starstruck by name musicians. Besides, I’ve been in a few no-name bands myself over the years, and I was a music critic for a quarter-century, so I know the truth: most musicians are just damned nice, funny people, with a few wanking wankers thrown into the mix to keep life from being dull. The other truth I know is that “nice” is not the first word that comes to mind with regard to producers: a good number of them are antisocial control freaks who believe your album is actually their album (see Spector, Phil). Some will go so far as to write this control into their contracts.
A couple of weeks go by. I don’t receive word whether Ahern has given me clearance to enter the Village’s Studio D. Time is tight and flights are now expensive. I send one more email. Lefebvre replies: “Come on down. Any of Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, June 26–28, should work.”
I email to tell him that I’ll have to clear the cost with my editor, as flights are now getting prohibitive. He emails back right away: If it’ll make any difference, he’ll pay my way down. “Travel up front,” he writes. “I insist.”
I phone Lefebvre and tell him my editor might be concerned about my subject paying for a flight. He understands. I phone my editor, and we chat for a while. We don’t know what to do, since I now have a conflict of interest. Finally, my editor cracks, “Well, Bill, you’re the journalism professor.” We decide it’s okay as long as we tell the reader—as if that will absolve me. I book an executive class flight to LAX but a regular ticket back, and then I send Lefebvre the details. From his BlackBerry comes a one-word imperative: “Upgrade.”
So it’s a go. I tell him I’m not out to do a hatchet job. He had quite a story going even before the FBI started busting Neteller executives. But I have to talk to him about his arrest, his bail terms, and his conversations with
the DOJ—at least the ones he can talk about. “I’m okay with that,” he says. “I just want to get my side of the story out there.”
So this is how I reconnect with my old acquaintance—flying business class from Toronto to LAX and then grabbing a cab, on my dime, up Interstate 405. From the back seat of the taxi, L.A. steams like paradise compromised. Mountains float mirage-like in the brown haze. Vehicles scurry up and down the highway in fits and starts, a semi-orderly procession of cockroaches on wheels. The Getty Museum has its exquisitely manicured gardens, but the surrounding L.A. hills are scrub-like and barren. This is, of course, a desert climate, dry as unbuttered toast. The cabbie exits on Santa Monica Boulevard, hangs a left on Butler Avenue, and voilà, my destination, the Village Recorder in West L.A., where I’ll be hanging out with a guy I haven’t seen since 1987.
The last time Lefebvre and I were together, back in September of that year, I’d bought him dinner at Chianti Café in Calgary. The restaurant served not-bad Italian cuisine, although today’s foodie snoots might object to that assessment. I especially remember the obscene-looking but tasty spaghetti and spicy meatballs—the plate featured noodles smothered in a rich tomato sauce and topped with two meatballs—just two—nearly the size of Indian rubber balls. This was the best fare I could offer. I was the editor of Vox magazine at the time, a monthly college radio guide with pretensions to arts magazine status, which had a press run of ten thousand copies and was distributed to 125 businesses in Calgary—clubs, record stores, bookstores, etc. The only contra deal we had at the magazine, negotiated by a former publisher, was with Chianti—four hundred bucks’ worth of food and drink every month in exchange for a full-page advertisement. In those days, that amount went a long way. I used the tab to reward student volunteers, the ones who had helped that month on the production and, especially, with the thankless task of delivering the magazine in the borrowed student union truck.
Life Real Loud Page 1
