The practical issue was no one wanted to give up turf, so there wasn’t much for Lefebvre to do. Worse, he clashed with the company’s controller:
Al Penner was a loud, tasteless guy. He was fun to be with, too. He hired a guy named Aftab, who wasn’t getting paid much money. I was getting paid three or four times what Aftab was being paid. I started calling them Aftab and Wholetab.
Al has me in his office one day and he’s yelling at me. I say, “Are you yelling at me?” He says, “Yes.” And I say, “Well, fuck you, asshole. What the fuck are you yelling at me about?” He’s banging paper around, I tell him to fuck off and it comes down to either him or me. He’s the VP finance that runs the whole show, in charge of the public offering and all that shit. The next day or so, they let me go. As I’m walking out, one of the guys working there says, “John, tell me you noticed that nobody goes into Al’s office and tells him, ‘Fuck you.’ Tell me you noticed that.”
• • •
Out IPG’s doors, Lefebvre was approaching forty-six years old. In twenty years, nothing had changed—he still couldn’t handle being a lawyer, and he still didn’t fit any corporate office mold. He’d lasted just six months at IPG, and yet Carroll gave him a generous handshake. “I used the six weeks’ pay to stake the music, to get known, to get to learn how to play.”
In July 1997, Lefebvre met twenty-seven-year-old Karen Fowlie at an insurance league baseball game. He was the pitcher; she was the backstopper. “He came to know Karen at one of our Harding Hall & Graburne games,” says Bergman. “This was while we were supposedly together. He wasn’t dating her then, but I’m watching them flirt. I’m watching it happen in front of me.”
Fowlie had gone into insurance after getting her degree in psychology—her father had warned her to be practical—but her heart was in music. After seven years doing corporate insurance, she rebelled. She threw away the husband, the house, and the secure job. She was vulnerable, but determined: Hey I’m going to be a singer, whatever it takes.
A week later, there was a party at Lefebvre’s high-rise apartment on Fifteenth Avenue SW, and Fowlie found herself there. When things wound down, there were just the two of them. “I always felt really safe and secure around John,” she says. “I never felt he had prying eyes and like I was on edge. ‘Here’s a big comforter, wrap yourself up. And here’s a fresh glass of wine. Tell me your story.’ I remember talking to him for hours about life. What I wanted was to be a musician again.”
Lefebvre thought, Oh, you do, do you? Could we write a song a day for seven days? “John was in a similar situation,” she continues. “We wanted to give up these stressful positions and focus on building the dream. ‘Maybe we’ll produce an album and tour—who knows where it could go?’”
Within a week or two, they were off. Fowlie says, “We started writing and playing these songs. We’d get together and have a glass of red wine, mostly in John’s condo. Or else we’d go to my suite, which was also in the Beltline area.” At first they both sang while he played guitar. Then he taught her to play guitar.
They needed cover songs to fatten the live repertoire, so they learned the latest Jann Arden, Amanda Marshall, and Tragically Hip hits. Fowlie was born in 1970 and knew nothing of the sixties. Lefebvre threw in a few favorites like “White Rabbit” from his beloved era anyway. They had a fever to promote themselves, writing press releases and blitzing media outlets. They even shopped their wares in person to restaurant owners who had never thought to showcase live music. Their relationship status remained ambiguous, possibly because of Fowlie’s divorce proceedings. Outwardly it was a musical partnership. “It was a lovely musical pairing for eight months,” is all Lefebvre ever offers when asked about the relationship.
The duo called themselves French Kiss the Fortune Teller, and their first gig was at Michelangelo’s, a beat-up wine-and-appies joint with an artsy clientele on Eleventh Street SW. They played a Second Cup franchise, the Karma Café, and wherever else they could get noticed. They went to Original Joe’s to watch the performers and then hung around after closing for the open stage. “You start jamming at one in the morning,” says Lefebvre, “drinking beer and smoking pot until 3:30 or so, just having a wonderful time, getting up and trading songs.” They darted to the Golden Inn before four o’clock closing, for Chinese. “Then around 5:30 go busk, get sixty, seventy, eighty bucks up in Whitehorn, then go down to the Shamrock Hotel and have bacon and eggs, sausages, for breakfast, then home and crash around nine.”
They got up again at 3:30, just in time to make the afternoon rush-hour busk. Working-class commuters made an impression on Lefebvre. They treated buskers with respect and generally had a kind word and gave more money than upper-middle-class folks, who were misers with pocket change and tended to avert their eyes, he noticed. Maybe a few were lawyers who recognized him.
The late hours and music making went on for months, yet Lefebvre never fully abandoned the law. His IPG severance didn’t last forever, and busking only got him so far. He needed the extra bread and was still a member of the Law Society, so Bergman slipped him a bit of work here and there to keep him afloat. “It was while I was fucking around,” he said, “French Kissing and the rest of it, that I got back doing some things for Steve.”
French Kiss lasted long enough to fulfill one ambition. With the help of Lefebvre’s brother Ted’s old high school pal Danny Patton, Lefebvre and Fowlie recorded an album. During the late seventies, Patton played bass for the Unusuals, a popular New Wave trio in Calgary. Later, he built a studio in his garage and became a producer.
Even before he met Fowlie, Lefebvre was plotting a return to music, something he hadn’t done for money since the early seventies, with Steve Kelly. At this point he really didn’t care how old he was. He was simply sick of doing everything but what he really wanted to do. So he called Patton, whose studio at the time was located in the basement of a Long & McQuade store downtown. Patton says, “He just phoned me up one night, ‘Do you mind if I come over?’ He brought a bottle of wine—it was only a five-dollar bottle of wine then—and played some songs. We both had an affinity for Procol Harum—not many people do—so we drank the wine and played some of their songs and the Band’s. Karen wasn’t in the picture quite yet. He was just starting to think about throwing the law thing out the door and go busk.”
Fowlie and Lefebvre sometimes played live with Patton on bass guitar and a drummer. Patton suggested they record in a studio north of Calgary, near Gull Lake, kind of a vacation recording. Lefebvre wasn’t happy with the sound they got, so Patton remixed the album in his studio to make it more “Neil Young than Neil Diamond.” Lefebvre still wasn’t happy. Several years later, in 2006, Patton recorded some of the same tunes again, as a demo to shop around to producers. Years after that, in 2011–12, Patton remixed more songs. Lefebvre had spent lavishly, getting the best musicians and the best technical help, but he still couldn’t hear on tape what he was hearing in his head. To this day, Patton is still remixing some of those songs.
Lefebvre trusted Patton and turned to him for advice when he wanted to record an album for real, with big-name players, just before the Neteller bust. But this record, the French Kiss record, turned into a souvenir almost immediately. He hawked it around to lawyer pals and managed to sell a few, but the group went no further. “Once Karen and I finished making the record in 1998,” he says, “we stopped working in music quite so much. It was fun, but it was not my thing.” Over time, it became obvious to Lefebvre that Fowlie’s musical instincts were more pop-oriented and commercial than his.
As Neteller grew into more than cell tissue, French Kiss faded away. Lefebvre’s departure for San José, Costa Rica, in early 2001 killed off the project. Fowlie headed to Santiago, Chile, to work at a school for disadvantaged children. She visited Lefebvre in San José on her way back to Calgary. Eventually, she remarried and moved to Vancouver to restart her music career. Four French Kiss songs were res
urrected on Lefebvre’s first double CD, Psalngs, in 2008, but Fowlie was co-credited with only one. This seems out of character, since Lefebvre was always known to be generous, until she points out, “I have a hundred thousand reasons why I’m not concerned about that.” Turns out Lefebvre’s “royalty” payment for her contributions financed Fowlie’s 2009 solo album, Pushing the Edge.
• • •
Meanwhile, Bergman married a man named Dave McMullen and became Jane McMullen. When pregnant in the summer of 1999, she started talking to Lefebvre about the idea of him taking over her law practice, for about a year, so she could have a bit of time with her newborn. “I had to earn some money,” says Lefebvre, “so I’m working for Steve and some others from Jane’s office. That’s when Steve and I started talking about doing Neteller.”
When something new locks down his interest, Lefebvre tends to become exclusively focused, and that’s what happened with the Neteller project. Lawrence and Lefebvre were becoming more than lawyer-businessman—they were becoming business buddies. They shared a connection to U of C student politics. In the early eighties, when Lefebvre went to work for McCaffery, Lawrence had been elected as a student representative on the programming committee of the student union. His committee chose and booked bands into the MacEwan Hall Ballroom and organized other social events. Lefebvre says, “Oh, we were great friends. I enjoyed him a lot. We drank whiskey and smoked cigars and bullshitted with each other. You didn’t go out with Steve, sitting around having a drink with him, without sooner or later plotting some kind of scheme, some kind of way to make money.”
As Lawrence got serious about building his new Internet idea into a bona fide business, Lefebvre got more stoked. French Kiss, covering for McMullen, and lawyering in general were all dropped without ceremony. “With my requisite level of enthusiasm, I ran Jane’s business into the ground,” he says. “I phoned Jane in September and said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t practice law anymore, I’ve got something more rewarding to do.’”
Bergman, who had given birth back in May, recalls, “I’m pissed off. Here I go again, dealing with this crap that John’s left behind.”
They discussed what it would cost Lefebvre to let the business die and settled on $25,000. Not that he could pay. After ten years of start-ups and shutdowns, he owed everyone money. He says, “Jane was disappointed the law practice wasn’t there as an escape valve for her. She is really not comfortable being reliant on the income of, for instance, a husband.”
Lefebvre paid off his debt to McMullen in late 2004, penalizing himself with a highly usurious interest rate. He handed her a $500,000 Christmas present and, over a year later, a $500,000 birthday gift. “She was shaking and welling up,” he says, “like all the fears of her life had just been obviated. You’ll always find some things to be afraid of. She had children—that’ll do it.”
VII (1997–2001)
Sometimes You Play an Inside Straight
In 1997, Stephen Lawrence wanted to develop a strip mall located in Midnapore, a subdivision about twenty miles south of downtown Calgary. Two decades before, Midnapore had become an official neighborhood, although it had been annexed by the City of Calgary back in 1961. Lawrence leased all but one of the retail bays at the Midpark Boulevard SE location. Rather than sell Midnapore Car Wash, Inc., he decided to operate it himself. Not only was it located just off the main thoroughfare, Macleod Trail SE, it functioned like a small-business deduction.
To run this side business, Lawrence hired a kid named Jeff Natland, whose father had been after him to stop messing with his computer all day, get out of the house, and go find a real job. Good for responsibility, toughened you up, made you a better person—the usual. But that was old-school thinking because, in fact, Natland was working. He was developing software for businesses, and he was making money. When he took the brainless gig working for Lawrence at the car wash—taking out the coins, putting in the soap—he was also writing programming and helping friends and others who needed it.
“Steve was a bit of a tech nerd at that time,” says Steve Glavine, who took over from Natland as head of IT at Neteller in the summer of 2000. “He had a subscription to 2600, the hacker magazine. Him and Nat were always talking about this and that, and one day Steve said to Jeff, ‘How can we just sit on a beach and make money?’ From what I’ve heard, Jeff’s reply was, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll tell you tomorrow.’ He went home, did a little research, came back the next day and said, ‘We need to start a gambling site in Costa Rica.’”
Natland’s research included gambling online. Here was this kid wasting days at the car wash. Then he went home and wasted his nights on the internet. The ensuing conversation went something like:
Lawrence: Hey Jeff, you know people are actually betting on the net?
Natland: I was doing it last night.
Lawrence: Really? How?
Natland: With my dad’s credit card.
Lawrence: Think you might be able to program a blackjack game?
Natland: I don’t know, why not?
Lawrence: What about a roulette game?
Natland: Sure, why not?
While Natland programmed an elementary gaming site, Lawrence sought help from certain Costa Ricans to set up a site in that country, where gambling is legal, or at least not illegal, in brick-and-mortar casinos as well as online.
While Lefebvre toiled away part-time on Lawrence’s real estate files in Calgary, including taking care of the legal documents for the Midnapore strip-mall project, he continued to busk and play clubs with Fowlie in French Kiss. Lawrence told him he and his wife, Perle, would be flying down to Costa Rica with this Natland kid. They wanted to spend six months immersing themselves in San José’s gambling culture and start their own business. They might not come back and might have to send for him.
The first couple of weeks, Natland stayed at the Hotel Del Rey. Nothing wrong with that, except it’s a gambling house and a whorehouse and he’s a kid. “And Jeff’s saying, ‘Yeah, Steve, the girls are so nice here.’ And of course they’re all prostitutes,” says Glavine. At any given time the place was lousy with hookers. “That was the genesis of Neteller.”
Lawrence and Natland were in for a rough apprenticeship in the volatile gambling business. They tried to test-drive their own little start-up, GambleUSA.com—the name being a “poke of the stick in Uncle Sam’s eye,” says Lefebvre—but found a lot of bad road. The pair started out with a casino site, which offered blackjack, roulette, and other games online. They weren’t rolling; they were taking baby steps.
Glavine said, “They had a house, they had the servers, everything. Jeff was running the whole thing and Steve would pop down every so often to see what was going on, or what was needed. Jeff hired a bunch of guys from Canada to come down and work for him, but they really didn’t know what they were doing.”
Lawrence and Natland got a firsthand look at the money flowing through sports betting, and they wanted in on the action. It was obvious that the National Football League’s Super Bowl Sunday was the number-one betting day of the year, but college basketball was also huge. The annual National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament constituted the largest ten-day stretch of the year for gambling. NFL Sundays and Monday Night Football were routine business by comparison.
So GambleUSA.com moved into sports betting territory. Caveat emptor: you had to know what you were doing at that level. In no time, what became apparent to Lawrence and Natland was, so far as online betting was concerned, they were mired in the minor leagues. They had no experience setting lines, and if you didn’t shift them as new information came in, bettors noticed and arbitraged against you. GambleUSA.com received a good spanking. Like Fagin in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Lawrence and Natland decided that, hmm, perhaps they ought to review the situation. They packed it in, sold off the website and headed back to Canada.
Glavine explains,
It’s a hard racket. You need a guy changing the lines constantly. You get your lines out of whack, somebody will just pound it. They had this guy there who was cutting lines—that’s what they called it, changing the odds on the games. He’d be there in the morning, changing the odds, and then he’d f-off in the afternoon and go for a drink. All of a sudden, one of these games, the quarterback would break his arm, the odds would swing, and nothing would change because this guy’s gone, and they’d get hammered. This went on for a while and then Steve sold it for next to nothing.
Lawrence and Natland met some unusual people down there, such as “Nick Barlow,” an American who ran about ten online casino websites. He would prove useful. Lawrence set up a Western Union account, which they used to transfer some money for Barlow. “Nick was just a guy we had some traction with,” says Lefebvre. “He was obviously one of the guys we continued to work for once we got Neteller going.”
Competing against other bookies in San José wasn’t Lawrence’s greatest business triumph, but one crucial aspect to online gambling beamed through this fog of frustration: Lawrence realized that while it was difficult, if not impossible, for him to make a buck in legal gambling jurisdictions on the actual gambling side, that wasn’t the real problem with online gambling. The problem hobbling the entire industry wasn’t the stiff competition in the gambling business itself. It wasn’t even the FBI getting tough on gambling (although that was always a looming hazard). It was the money transfer issue. “It was operating in a vacuum,” says Lefebvre. “They needed to bring in some professionals to create reliability and security to the money transfer side of the business.”
Throughout Lawrence and Natland’s first run at internet gambling, the trickiest aspect was moving the money. Like most of the industry, they used person-to-person Western Union, bank wires, and other means, but nothing was satisfactory. Lawrence figured if they could solve the bottleneck in the flow of gamblers’ money to and from bookies, if they could keep ahead of the fraudsters trying to break into websites to steal account information, and if they could operate legally in a kind of gray area that the FBI couldn’t touch—a lot of big ifs—that was a business with the potential to make some real money. GambleUSA.com may have been a failure, but it produced the idea for Neteller.
Life Real Loud Page 14
