Life Real Loud

by Bill Reynolds

  And that is the one un-zigzagging commitment Lefebvre has made down the decades—his dedication to pot smoking. This side of his life, indulging in his preferred recreational drug, which started in his early teenage years, he might let me in on later: “Yeah, that’s about it, except for the time I was busted for selling acid and did time. I can tell about you that bust, too, if you want.”

  Money hasn’t turned Lefebvre into a different, uglier person, but he knows it has changed how he looks at himself and how he acts around others. “I have to admit I do rely on the money to some extent for my self-esteem,” he says, chuckling quietly. “I’m not perfect, you know what I mean?”

  • • •

  Everything was clicking for Lefebvre until he was blindsided on January 15, 2007. He was walking on the sunny side of the street, and out of the shadows came a sledgehammer to his solar plexus. On the surface, the DOJ-directed arrest made no sense. He is a Canadian citizen, not an American. His former company, Neteller, is now based on the Isle of Man—a state dependent on the British Crown yet self-governing—not in the United States. He’d resigned as president of Neteller Inc., the earlier, Canadian version of the company, in 2002 and ceased to be a member of the board of directors of the Isle of Man–based Neteller PLC in 2006. So his connection to Neteller—minority shareholder—was minimal when the FBI pressed the intercom buzzer. What’s more, he’d been generous with the wealth he’d rapidly accumulated between late 2003 and 2006. It’s difficult to avoid weighing these facts against the charges.

  But from the FBI’s perspective, this Calgary internet entrepreneur had looked the other way when he realized what he was doing was wrong. It’s not about what you do with your fortune once you have it; it’s about whether or not you were breaking the law when you were acquiring it. Michael Garcia, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a press release dated January 16, 2007, stated: “Stephen Eric Lawrence and John David Lefebvre were arrested yesterday in connection with the creation of an internet payment services company that facilitated the transfer of billions of dollars of illegal gambling proceeds from U.S. citizens to the owners of various internet gambling companies located overseas.”

  Mark J. Mershon, assistant director in charge of the New York office of the FBI, added stentorian thunder to the press release: “Internet gambling has become a multi-billion-dollar industry that derives a major portion of its revenues from U.S. citizens. A significant portion of that is the illegal handling of Americans’ bets with offshore gaming companies, which amounts to a colossal criminal enterprise masquerading as legitimate business.”

  Garcia pointed to evidence that suggested that the company founders knew what they were doing was wrong: “At the time that the defendants took Neteller public … the company’s directors … conceded that they were risking prosecution by the government of the United States under existing or future federal laws.”

  This is true. As they prepared to float stock on the AIM in early 2004, Neteller advised interested investors that it did not have a presence in the U.S. but had a contractual relationship with the U.S.-based company JSL Systems (owned by Lawrence and Lefebvre), which transferred U.S. funds to Canada, where Neteller maintained a Calgary office and processed customer accounts through a National Bank of Canada account. It even admitted in the prospectus that the money held in the U.S. was “vulnerable to freezing orders by state and federal prosecutors.”

  Investors decided it was worth the risk; the FBI decided Neteller had crossed the line. Regardless, the question of whether the American government overstepped its territorial powers remains an open one. The DOJ claimed it simply followed the enacted legislation (internet gambling is illegal) and sentencing (twenty years and everything you own). Yet others saw that the long arm of the U.S. law had grown special, international powers. Like the Fantastic Four’s rubbery Reed Richards, it reached out—way, way, way out—to grab hold of the guys who had made the most money, in order to sideswipe them off the road, hang them upside down, and shake out as much cash as possible—and threaten to take away their liberty while it was at it. Calvin Ayre, the Saskatchewan-born and -raised entrepreneur behind the offshore gambling lifestyle site Bodog.com, stated publicly around this time that he would not be flying near U.S. airspace any time soon.

  Yes, it might be appropriate to inquire why the DOJ would bother to pursue a couple of Canadians formerly of a company based in the Isle of Man, a company trading on the London Stock Exchange and not the NASDAQ. Canada’s self-proclaimed national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, thought this was a logical question. It published an editorial four days after the arrests that offered: “While the U.S. authorities would like to paint [Lefebvre and Lawrence] as criminal masterminds, the fact is that they have broken no laws in either Canada or Britain, where their company is based. Instead, they have run afoul of the hypocritical U.S. desire to restrict gambling on the internet while allowing it to flourish at home, where it produces billions of dollars in tourism and tax revenue.”

  On gambling websites, there were cynical grumbles about the U.S. forcing out international companies simply to give its own gambling business interests time to build competitive models. Non-U.S. interests were making too much money, the argument went, and too much of that money was leaving the country, and so it had to be stopped. The busts attracted the attention of British business commentators, who made much the same complaints. For instance, a week later, London’s Daily Telegraph quoted a “specialist lawyer” named Robert Amsterdam, who termed the arrests “a disgrace.” Amsterdam predicted international legal implications for the U.K.: “This means that the U.S. will impose its jurisdiction, retroactively, on this side of the Atlantic.”

  Another possible explanation as to why Neteller was taken down was its sheer number of transactions. For the first six months of 2006, $5.1 billion went through Neteller, eighty-five percent of that related to U.S. customers. Perhaps this alone was enough to stir the anxiety of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, which could then claim that since it didn’t know where all that money was going, the cash flow might destabilize an already shaky U.S. dollar, which was in danger of losing its status as the world’s standard. It was a nice theory, but the amount of money processed through Neteller annually, although sizable, was a fraction of the trillions in U.S. currency that sloshed around the world every year.

  And then there was the theory floated in the media of the naive Canadian businessmen with the nifty internet idea who got duped by terrorist money launderers, which attracted the attention of authorities through the U.S. Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security. If a U.S. citizen gambled and won, he got his money back, and that money stayed in the U.S.; if he didn’t win, that money was harder to follow. Maybe it went to a gambling operation in Costa Rica and was then laundered into support money for insurgencies in the Middle East or Africa. If you were a Republican you might find logic here, but the fact was, the main functions of Neteller’s 600 staff were to provide security from fraud and to monitor their clientele—clearing customers, taking precautions, and processing secure transactions. In other words, Neteller learned how to filter its clientele. Sure it got beat a few times, because fraudsters tried every trick, but its customer base consisted almost entirely of good, clean, law-abiding citizen gamblers.

  A different angle might cast Lefebvre as a rock ’n’ roll Robin Hood, who stole from the stupid and gave to the worthy. That point of view makes sense in terms of the guy’s personality, and might also find purchase with people who have a poor opinion of gambling in general. But from the DOJ’s point of view, the many charitable donations Lefebvre made after he acquired his money were irrelevant.

  Maybe a better way to look at it, since as voters and taxpayers we’re all responsible for the mainstreaming of gambling culture, is that Lefebvre does privately what the government has been doing publicly for decades. Lawmakers in Canada have used gambling proceeds from voluntary taxatio
n models, such as charity casinos, video lottery terminals, lottery tickets, and the like to finance various programs since 1976. Similarly, Lefebvre has used a large portion of his earnings, which aren’t actual gambling profits but more like tolls for those who wanted to gamble at offshore sites, for his own preferred good causes.

  • • •

  And for his preferred indulgences. Producer Brian Ahern sits in his chair in front of the Neve 88R console in Studio D early in the afternoon on Thursday. He’s “The Thinker,” an Easter Island statue. He has the patience of Buddha. He’s listening … listening … listening. Occasionally he’ll crack a joke or kibitz with the “G-Man,” his engineer Guillermo. Ahern’s been recording music since the late sixties and says things like, “Every moment of time exists in itself.” Then he’ll turn to me directly and tell me it’s deep and that I ought to write it down. Okay, Brian, whatever you say.

  Ahern has developed his own methodology for the studio. He tells me he’s even given it a name, “strateragy.” This could be another one of his jokes on a journalist, for all I know. He says it’s his way of dealing with musicians who have become too damned good at playing their instruments. He says,

  They don’t want to play more than one take because they know it’ll be more proficient but won’t sound any better. That’s because on the first take they really listen to each other. After they know the part they don’t bother listening to each other anymore.

  So I’ll ask them to play the intro. Then I might ask them to rehearse the chorus, then maybe the ending. They get really frustrated: “Let’s play the song!” they yell. But this way I get them to rehearse the song without actually playing the song.

  Ahern’s “strateragy” includes keeping Warren’s instrument, the Chamberlin, out of the mix so the others cannot hear him—at least until Warren has figured out his part. The machine Henry Chamberlin introduced in 1956—magnetic tape loops, which contain notes from the clarinet and various other instruments, are wound around reels—emits strange, wonderful sounds that can distract the other musicians. It begat the Mellotron, which became popular with English rock royalty in the sixties: “Strawberry Fields Forever” by the Beatles, “2000 Light Years from Home” by the Rolling Stones, “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues, among others. “Patrick is the sorcerer,” says Ahern. “We didn’t want to throw anyone off, or have them play off him too much.”

  Since Ahern is being expansive about his methodology, I tell him I was at Lefebvre’s first-ever recording session. Nothing’s happening in the studio, so he lets me babble. In the spring of 1980, I was part of a joke slate of candidates for student senior government positions during the annual U of C Student Union elections. We called ourselves Parti des Pataphysiques, after French proto-surrealist playwright Alfred Jarry’s so-called science of imaginary solutions. During the presidential forum, instead of our candidate delivering a speech, the collective performed a song, a proto-rap actually, written by the fiery New York ghetto trio the Last Poets. In a move that would be in bad taste now and probably was then (but seemed kind of funny to us and most everyone else), we changed the Harlem group’s original lament of “Wake Up, Niggers” to “Wake Up, Students.”

  The forum went well and convinced campus politicians that, as a club, Pataphysics might be good for campus spirit. We went back to CJSW’s studio to record the faux call to arms, along with a theme song to make Jarry proud, “The Pataphysics Blues” (as in, “I’ve got the pataphysics blues / And I just can’t stop my drinking”). Strangely—and a little suspiciously, I thought at the time—ex-student union president Lefebvre—still at U of C but now working toward his law degree—arrived unannounced at the radio station studio with his pal Bruce Ramsay, the current student union president. Relations between student politicians and radio station personnel had never been too healthy, despite Lefebvre’s move to address student media autonomy the previous year, and the groups maintained a tribal mutual wariness. Yet here we were with the two most senior members of the last two administrations, drinking, smoking dope, and bellowing in unison, “I got the Pata-Pata-Pata-Pata-Pata-Pataphysics bloo-ooooze!!!!”

  “Oh yeah,” Lefebvre pipes in, the story flooding back, “now I remember!”

  • • •

  Lefebvre had a stockpile of songs he’d reserved for the sessions, a baker’s dozen written over the past ten to twenty years. Some were co-written or co-performed with his former music partner Karen Fowlie and dated from the late nineties, when they worked together under the moniker French Kiss the Fortune Teller. Danny Patton, the Calgary musician, engineer, and studio owner, had helped the duo record one self-titled CD in 1998, before they broke up.

  To this pile of songs, Lefebvre added another dozen tunes—written for the occasion and many, understandably enough, about American justice and society—prior to his June “residency” at the Village. He recorded twenty-nine songs in all, enough material for two CDs. Some people might pick the ten or twelve that flow together best, releasing what they consider a strong introduction to their music that also happens to be digestible to the public. Not Lefebvre. Coming from the Department of Go Big or Go Home, he’s looking to release every tune.

  Lefebvre’s songs range from straight country ballads to full-on rock ’n’ rollers, but overall his sound falls in the roots-and-country quadrant of rock and pop. His voice is not robust and can be sharp and thin, but it takes on a likeable, rusty tinge when he’s relaxed.

  During my second afternoon in Studio D, Lefebvre starts working on “Independence Day,” his rocking, bittersweet ode to the USA. He barks out his words John Mellencamp–style. The strangulated delivery sounds like braying, which makes the lyrics—Lefebvre playing his love of L.A. off his rage at the current Washington administration—sound dumber than they should. The words require a subtle delivery, one that nudges and winks at the listener rather than preaches. I start to wonder whether he shouldn’t let that great guitar hook he’s fashioned, basically a reworked “Shakin’ All Over,” do its business and channel some of his inner Bob Dylan—maybe, say, that purring, sly delivery the old coot conjures on “Things Have Changed.” I say this out loud to no one in particular, hoping to catch Lefebvre’s ear. I don’t.

  Eventually Ahern recognizes Lefebvre is trying too hard and constricting his voice. For the next take he attempts to convince the singer to be more conversational. Once the spirit of “Dylan” is invoked, though, Lefebvre starts trying to mimic the Voice of His Generation. Literally. After three or four takes, it sounds like the young Bobby Dylan is right there in the room. Lefebvre listens back to his mimesis. Ahern loves it and cracks, “We had a special guest singer for this song.”

  “Aw,” Lefebvre then drawls, “he’s a washed-up old star.”

  Later, Lefebvre tells me, when I started to squawk about the vocal, making suggestions, Ahern told him in the lounge, “I need a water gun.” Apparently, without much effort and on my second afternoon in the studio, I’d become the hanger-on Ahern detests, the guy who sits on the couch and tells him how to produce his records. “Fortunately Brian respects you,” Lefebvre says, “because he used your idea.” Later on, Lefebvre sang over the Dylan imitation with his own interpretation—but the phrasing and the volume never returned to their original, hectoring form. I felt vindicated.

  Lefebvre admits his hired guns were a little doubtful about what Ahern had gotten them into: “More than a little skeptical, truth be told.” But he insists Jim Keltner and company didn’t come because he was some rich guy who could afford to rock out with the best; they came and played the songs because Ahern asked them. After a while, though, Keltner started to say things to him like, “Hey John, that was a good tune.” And later: “Jeez, that was a good one, too. How many you got, John?”

  Lefebvre says, “All the guys told me they were willing to come back and add parts or whatever I need. They might not have said that at the beginning, but they did by the end.”<
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  • • •

  Hilary Watson—the woman Lefebvre calls, in habitual hippie vernacular, his “lady friend”—and I sit in the studio lounge while everyone takes a break. It’s now around six o’clock on Thursday. A never-ending stream of Fox News propaganda blares from an oversized television set. It is impossible to deny. The demure Watson shrugs off her irritation.

  Fox seems to be the favorite among the musicians. Whether they believe the gibberish sprouting forth or it’s simply the most consistently entertaining television on offer is up for debate. Every time Lefebvre sits down to eat lunch, he shakes his head and rails against the political madness. Ahern’s response to Fox’s continuous warnings that the terrorists are coming to destroy America any second now is “We ought to just go in and kill ’em all.” It sounds as though he’s in favor of committing genocide just so the news industry will stop polluting the airwaves. Then again, who says music people have to be left wing? Maybe he agrees with Ted Nugent and the Fox News point of view. Ahern might be the vigilant sphinx rather than the sanguine Buddha.

  Watson edits out the barrage by turning off the sound. We make small talk about Salt Spring Island. That’s home for her, and where she met Lefebvre. She’s worried about tending to the overly large garden attached to her new house. Her teenaged children look at her in shock, she tells me, and derisively comment on how Mom will take really, really good care of that garden—yeah, right.

  I don’t want to bother Watson about this, but earlier I asked Lefebvre about all the women on his MySpace page. Crassly, I inquired as to their vocation—island gold diggers, perhaps? “Nah,” said Lefebvre, “they’re just friends from Salt Spring. There are a lot of females from Salt Spring on that page. I helped one of them record her hip-hop album last year.”