Life Real Loud

by Bill Reynolds

  Glesby adds, “First impressions might have been a little shocking, especially the way John is, and the way he looks, which is beautiful but some people, they go, ‘Oh, this is the “John”? This is the “Neteller”?’ He doesn’t look businesslike. No, this is the guy everyone is calling ‘Meat Loaf.’ That’s how they related to him: ‘Oh yeah, he’s that guy, Meat Loaf with the man purse.’ The physique, the hair, plus he’s a musician.” No one in San José seemed to have seen Jeff Bridges play The Dude in the Coen brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski—the obvious fictional character to whom Lefebvre would compare.

  If you knew what was happening at Neteller, it was difficult not to want to be a part of it. Glavine went down to visit his buddies in summer 2001. He wanted to be with the Costa Rica gang because they seemed to be having a blast. A few days on the ground and he was hooked:

  I was talking to all of my friends down there—Meranda, Mel, Rob—and then I’m chatting with them online. They’re telling me all this stuff, and I’m thinking, God, that place is awesome! I gotta find a way to work down there. So I asked John, “If I came down there would you have an office for me?” He’s like, “Yeah, we got a little cubbyhole we could probably stick you in.” Then I asked Steve, “Can I take the IT department down to Costa Rica?” It was just two guys then, me and Scotty Morrison. Steve said, “Yeah, go for it, if you can do the same job.”

  Glavine and Morrison arrived in mid-October 2001 and stayed for about a year. Their office space was essentially a broom closet. But what did they care? Calgary winter was coming and they weren’t going to have to deal with it. When the business took off it became more difficult to run IT out of a closet with a fickle internet connection. Glavine explains,

  We were doing bigger builds. It was harder to do the ACH, and just dealing with people on the phone. I couldn’t really hire people down there, and I couldn’t bring anybody down from Canada—there was no room. It was time to head back to Calgary and get a serious IT department. Within six months of going back I had ten guys. Within a year I had twenty.

  Costa Rica was a lot of partying, but we worked hard. All of us were in the office six, seven days a week. Every once in a while a bunch of us would try to take a weekend off and go to a beach, if there wasn’t a big sporting event on. And every night we’d go back to the house and have some drinks and stuff. We’d have some big parties on the weekend. Johnny’d always have the guitar going.

  Glavine lived in the back house of Cecilia Garro Solano’s place in Trejos Montealegre, San Rafael de Escazú, about five miles west of San José. Garro owned a small enclave there with two spacious two-thousand-square-foot four-bedroom houses up front, side by side, facing the street, and one three-bedroom home in the back. Garro was his landlady, and Lefebvre’s as well. Lefebvre first rented space from her, and then other Neteller employees began moving in.

  When Lefebvre arrived in the capital, he called the Parque del Lago home for a good two months. But then he found this rental pad outside the core, in San Rafael, that wasn’t another hotel room or a cramped apartment. To make money, Garro had been renting out one side of the duplex and the house in the back. She was born in Costa Rica and was a single mom. She had lived in New York and in Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles, for twenty-five years. She was completely bilingual. She had brought her mom with her to the States, but the matriarch never learned any English. “Her mom was a typical Costa Rican woman,” says Lefebvre, “an elderly Catholic lady. She watched mass on TV every day, then one hour of rosary. You could watch this nun sit there and say the rosary and you could say the rosary along with her.”

  Garro had been a nurse for most of her professional life. She was also a nurse practitioner, a kind of elevated nurse, which meant she could prescribe medication within certain protocols. “She was Latin and appealing in lots of different ways. When I met her I was fifty and she was fifty-seven and beautiful,” says Lefebvre. The attraction was physical and immediate. “A crime of opportunity,” his buddy Mike Greene later called it. “She was there, and he was there by himself.”

  Lefebvre lived up front, in one half of the oversized duplex, separated from Garro by a wall but still together. He had good reason to be mesmerized. She was a longhaired brunette with a curvaceous, lithe figure. Certainly she was cougar-like. Age wasn’t an issue—she looked a decade younger, and Lefebvre was more than a little smitten, so it happened fast. She became a love interest, first on the down low. She became his fiancée. She became his wife. Then, alas, she became his third ex-wife. But at this point, in summer 2001, everything was hunky-dory.

  Glavine and Garro got along exceptionally well: “She was a really nice lady, always great to me, a motherly kind of figure. She helped me with Spanish. She was doing programs in the community, getting clothes to poor people. My mom came down to visit in March 2002 and she just loved Cecilia to death. Every time I went to Costa Rica she’d ask about Cecilia—even after the divorce.”

  Glesby was there when Lefebvre and Garro first met. She saw instant fireworks. Lefebvre was impressed and made no attempt to hide his attraction. Garro, who was not above painting her face and primping her hair for him, pretended not to notice. She sent out mixed signals. She tried to act like she was above it all, appreciating the attention all the same. As the couple got closer, the Neteller gang wanted to live in San Rafael, too. “Another one of Cecilia’s rentals would come up and one of us would jump at it. We all wanted to live where John was living, because it was so much fun,” says Glesby. She continues,

  I had four roommates, $400 rent and a twenty-dollar electricity bill, so it was okay. We went out for dinner. If we bought groceries it was for a purpose—okay, we’re going to John’s place, he’s going to play a few tunes, we’re going to smoke some doobies and just have a relaxing night. Or we’re going to go to Rob and Mel and my place. Or Rodney, Steve, and Karen’s place, when they lived in the back. We made that the party place because then we didn’t have to mess up John and Cecilia’s place. They could leave and go cuddle and be honey-bunny together, because they were at that stage of their relationship, and we could still party there.

  Glavine lived in the back with Rodney Thompson and his girlfriend, Karen McGinn, a painter. Thompson had arrived from the Cayman Islands to visit Eltom, who convinced him to inquire about staying on. Eltom sold Lefebvre on Thompson—in what he calls an uncharacteristic moment for him, he said Thompson was the only guy who could be better than him at the gig.

  Everyone used to get together at Lefebvre’s and hang out after a long day on the phones: music, often provided by Lefebvre’s guitar and voice, along with some joints and lots of good food and drink—just another relaxing night in San Rafael. The backyard was spacious and beautiful, and many barbecues were thrown. The men did the prepping and cooking while the women stood around and drank and laughed and joked. “Hey, you guys,” they’d tease, “how’s it going in the kitchen?” Eltom and Thompson wouldn’t have had it any other way—both enjoyed cooking and were good at it. Eltom’s special shrimp sauce and his chicken were favorites.

  Garro adored mariachi bands, so Lefebvre hired one to serenade her at one of the barbecues, thereby exposing everyone else to its cacophonous charm. She returned the favor, surprising him at his fiftieth birthday party with live mariachi music.

  The only sour note was Garro’s pet Akita, Wookie, a mean brute of a hunting dog—sort of a husky on steroids—who attacked a terrified McGinn one night. Scott Morrison grabbed Wookie by the jowls, tugging them apart as far as he could—trying to avoid the sensation of flesh being punctured and ripped—while everyone else scattered. Wookie kept trying to snap his jaws, snarling and baring his teeth. As claws started to scratch his skin, Morrison decided to fling the crazed dog as far as he could and run for cover. It was left to Lefebvre, much to his chagrin, to convince the dog to enter his cage. Surprisingly, the violent episode subsided, and in Garro’s pet went.

  Too bad the
same couldn’t be said for the city’s criminal element. Lefebvre was robbed three times in three years and had one close call. One evening it happened at his house. He looked up from reading and there was a stranger rummaging through stuff by the door. Lefebvre recounts: “‘The fuck you think you’re doing here?’ The guy put his hands up and said, ‘No tengo nada!’ [I don’t have anything!]”

  Lefebvre chased him down the street, grabbed him and pulled the shirt over his head—good hockey fight move. He continues, “I’m chasing this guy and I can’t help think, Fuck, what if this guy’s got a knife? And then I’m wrestling with him on the ground, and he’s swinging a rock at me, and I’m thinking, What am I doing? I’ve just left my gate unlocked and my front door open and what if this guy’s not working alone? So I run back and everything seems to still be there.”

  One day, shopping at a florist, Lefebvre left his man purse on a hook outside the store and went in. He liked to keep beautiful flowers around the house, and there he could buy an armful of tropicals—birds of paradise, ginger plants, and so on—for a few bucks. Pulling out his wad of cash from his jeans pocket, he dropped some bills and then hopped into his car. About forty-five minutes later, back home, flowers in vases and arranged, he reached for his wallet and realized he’d left behind his ID, his credit cards, and the equivalent of US$7,000 in cash—the biweekly payroll for Neteller’s Costa Rica office—in his bag. Lefebvre tried not to freak out as he headed back to the florist, not expecting anything. In San José, if you leave a door unlocked, anything inside will be rifled through, guaranteed. Anything that can be taken will be. Your car, your truck, your house, your garage, your yard—all of it, scoured regularly. Lefebvre was thinking about having to cancel his credit cards and, more daunting, standing in one of those interminable lines to replace his Cédula de Residencia, the ID card he needed to remain in the country. Amazingly, the bag was hanging there, right where he’d left it.

  Another time, he wasn’t so lucky. Someone pulled a smash-and-grab on his three-year-old Suzuki, and Lefebvre got beat for his tennis gear. He explains, “The guy, a sort of Robin Hood of robbers, returned my driver’s license, my passport, my Cédula de Residencia—all of the things that were useless to him but he knew were important to me. One of the things he found in my wallet was my Scotiabank debit card. So he went to my bank and handed over a bag and said, ‘This might belong to a client of yours—I found it in the garbage.’”

  • • •

  Life in San José was a peach—and then it wasn’t. After the courtship phase, Lefebvre’s relationship with his fiancée became strained. He began to notice problems that, if he’d only had the eyes to see them, were there all along. The couple married in late November or early December 2002—Lefebvre doesn’t remember. Besides, the wedding wasn’t the actual wedding. A few months later he and Garro had a civil ceremony to receive the official marriage certificate. Lefebvre says, “Cecilia was withholding the final step in an extortionistic way, to enforce good behavior.”

  For the December fete, Garro asked a preacher friend to wed them, and the bacchanal lasted a week. Lefebvre flew bunches of Canadian friends into Juan Santamaría International on the Wednesday and Thursday, and the ceremony and dinner were held on the Sunday at the Alta, a trendy hotel that had recently opened in Escazú, in the hills west of San José. Lefebvre recalls, “It had a huge hallway four stories high, and kind of wound down to a restaurant with a big pool. The rooms just cascaded down. It was new but looked like an old castle.”

  Then the guests all loaded into buses and headed down to the coast to Parque Nacional Antonio, which is where Lefebvre and Garro were building their dream house, right at the edge of the jungle. Lefebvre came up with a name for it—JOKONGLE—an invented word from four root names—JO from Cecilia’s son Christien Johnston, who became the marketing director and co-owner of the project once it was finished, well after Lefebvre left; KON from Cecilia’s son David Konwiser, who grew up in Manhattan Beach, L.A., became an architect, and returned to Costa Rica to take over the building project after Lefebvre’s departure; G from Cecilia Garro; and LE from Lefebvre, who had thrown himself into the design of what was to be an impressive structure, the kind only he could come up with (one of its features was a private “toke deck”).

  They all stayed at a swank joint, Hotel La Mariposa at Manuel Antonio Beach, and partied there. Lefebvre leased a forty-foot sailboat, and thirty people went on a one-day cruise with haute cuisine on the vessel. That leg of the party lasted a few days before people started to drift away. It was a long celebration, one reason why Lefebvre might have trouble remembering the exact date. Then again, it’s Cecilia, and he tends to stare off into the distance when the subject of his third marriage comes up. He has said more than once he’s going to dig out the wedding pictures, they’re on an old MacBook, but he never gets around to it. The basic facts are: married around December 1, 2002, in Escazú, Costa Rica; separated October 1, 2004, when Lefebvre fled to his getaway in Malibu, California; divorced March 11, 2010. By then Lefebvre had settled on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, and Garro and sons had opened their dream house. They called it Punto de Vista, and it is available for private functions such as weddings. Lefebvre grumbles, “Point of View, now there’s an original name.”

  Lefebvre says,

  There were complicated things about her. She swore up and down that she would never marry a Latin because he’d fuck around on her, but that she’d marry me because I wasn’t a Latin. Then she married me and treated me like I was a Latin trying to get whatever I could wherever I could get it. It was hard to manage because I was actually quite straight and narrow on that score. I had suffered the slings and arrows of betrayal myself and learned that was not a nice way to treat one’s fellows. It was a lot easier for me to sleep at night (a) knowing that I was a victim not a perpetrator, and (b) that I shouldn’t have any questions to answer at the pearly gates or whatever. It was just a lot easier to live my life in a respectful way. I haven’t always been that perfect, but at that time I was pretty perfect.

  And I pay a huge price for that, right? At that time there is what, four billion people in the world? You’ve got to reckon two billion of them are women—1,999,999,999, that’s the price. For that sacrifice you’d like to be respected and trusted. But it runs deep in their culture. We had a relationship for two years and I was married for a little more than one when I ran. It was going seriously downhill, and we just couldn’t talk without it getting worse.

  Lefebvre began to suspect Garro was the most narcissistic woman he had ever met. He relates what he thinks is a particularly glaring example: They would agree to go to out to dinner at six, and Lefebvre would be ready to go at the appointed time but Garro wouldn’t. At seven, he would still be waiting. No sign of her. At eight, nothing. At nine, still no sign. Finally, three and a half hours later, she would come downstairs. She was ready to go. When Lefebvre complained about her making him wait so long, she would say, “Do you know how many men there are in the world who would be honored to wait three hours for me?”

  Lefebvre remembers one other instance he hopes will illustrate his point. He was watching television reports in August 2004 that revealed attendance at the Olympics was down. He said, “Cecilia, why, when we can go anywhere in the world, are we stuck here? Let’s go to Athens!” Garro wasn’t listening. She was preoccupied with her camera and complaining about it. Lefebvre suggested she should read the manual. Garro replied, “People who love me do these things for me.” He convinced Cecilia to go to Athens, along with his friends Geoff and Lyn Savage, who watched in dismay as their pal was caught in recurring episodes of The Bickersons.

  If the relationship was almost done by the wedding, by Athens it was open warfare. Anyone who knows Lefebvre well enough will say the one thing he hates more than anything is bullshit, and he was finding out that his third wife had an inexhaustible supply. The situation was the definition of hopeless, and it drained
him. Lefebvre lasted only a couple of months beyond Athens before pressing the eject button.

  • • •

  No doubt Lefebvre’s personal troubles took a psychological toll on him. How things could go so wrong with his marriage and so right with his company was a bit of conundrum. As for the tolls his company collected every day from online gamblers, there were fewer hitches. Neteller, unhooked from PayPal’s teat, still had a few riddles to solve with the money transfer bottleneck, but it was nowhere near like before. As this fledgling, undercapitalized operation from Canada challenged multinational corporate brands in internet commerce, the focus continued to be on developing its own security measures.

  Lefebvre says, “When we started out, the one thing Neteller brought to the table—that was valuable for the internet the world over, not just to gaming—was the fresh view of internet money transfer security. Essentially what Neteller developed was kind of a club approach to whose money the club will accept. You join the club, you prove yourself, and once you’ve proved yourself to be someone who’s actually interested in using the financial transactions and not just trying to scam people, then we permit you more latitude.”

  Neteller began to move vigorously into EFT territory because it was much more efficient than hooking up its system to credit cards, which bookies hated anyway. The company still put gamblers on an initial credit card limit of $250, but the next trust-building move changed: customers couldn’t use their credit cards again until they connected their bank accounts to Neteller’s bank account via EFT, exactly like paying a mortgage or receiving a paycheck deposit. Transactions would then be conducted on a real-time basis.

  Neteller verified accounts by using a method borrowed from PayPal. First the customer had to hook up his bank account to Neteller. Within a day or so of the connection, Neteller would deposit a small amount of money into the customer’s bank account. Within another day, Neteller would withdraw an amount that was smaller than the deposit it had made the day before. Then the customer had to give Neteller the details of the transactions. “Say we deposit seventy-five cents,” says Lefebvre, “and the day after that we withdraw sixty-two cents. The customer just made thirteen cents, but he has to check his bank account to tell us how much we deposited and how much we withdrew. If he comes up with the right numbers, he’s golden and we can go to work. From that point on, people weren’t running up their credit card bills.”