Life Real Loud

by Bill Reynolds

  Lawrence’s plan was for Herman to eventually replace him as CEO. But after attending a few important business meetings as COO, Herman increasingly felt like he needed more clout—people would take the meetings more seriously, he thought, if they were dealing with the top guy—and argued for a faster timetable. Lawrence agreed and appointed Herman CEO ahead of schedule, in February 2003. (When it came time for the public offering, in 2004, Herman was both president and CEO.)

  Herman knew what he was doing. The company’s monthly revenues shot from $866,000 in September 2002, when he joined, to $4.335 million in December 2003, ten months after he had taken over as CEO. Neteller had 685,945 member accounts as of March 1, 2004, growing at a rate of 1,600 accounts per day. North Americans held eighty-eight percent of those accounts. About 1,250 merchants had signed up to use the Neteller system, and the growth rate in that department was about thirty merchants per month.

  When Herman took over, Lawrence moved to being president, a responsibility recently vacated by Lefebvre, and also assumed the duty of chairman of the board. Both Lefebvre and Lawrence knew Herman was the right guy to transform Neteller from a Canadian company based in Calgary to an Isle of Man company with an IT office in Calgary.

  In the meantime, Neteller outgrew its Midnapore operations in south Calgary. There were only so many spaces for lease, and it was getting chaotic. Herman landed the old Servpro building on Fortieth Avenue NE and moved the company there—eighteen miles north of Midnapore (on the bright side, it was only four or five miles from downtown). The Servpro building was part of Greenview Industrial Park, an industrial zone in a four-block span between Centre Street and Edmonton Trail, where the old Sunset Drive-In used to be. Once Neteller moved in, it took over the entire building, floor by floor, building one section, moving up, building the next section, moving up. The underground space was gutted and turned into a parking lot. By 2003, there were over five hundred people working there, many of whom were running security checks, grooming accounts, and helping customers. Neteller was on fire.

  Herman managed the growth fine, but it changed the culture of the company just the same. Glavine recalls, “When you have two hundred people, you can’t know everybody in the company by name. And we were constantly hiring. There wasn’t a day we weren’t hiring. You came into work and there were four or five faces you didn’t recognize. The next day there were twenty more faces you didn’t recognize. So you can’t just walk up and say, ‘Hey Johnny, can you do this?’”

  • • •

  Neteller going public would be in the works for a while—the company went public on the London Stock Exchange in April 2004—but already the money had started to flow. Lefebvre recalls,

  When I was in Costa Rica it started to come in. First it was $17,000, and I’m sitting back thinking, Holy fuck! Are you shittin’ me? Take that home to your wife, right? Cecilia’s going, “Really?” Then, six weeks later, I bring home another one, and this one’s $70,000! And then, six weeks after that, it’s $200,000! It went like that in 2001–02. In the year before we went public, the seven of us who began Neteller (Lawrence, Lefebvre, Glavine, Natland, Edmunds, Choy, Ramsay) split $14 million profit. I got, you know, 28.8 percent of that [$4,032,000]. Cash, tax free, in Costa Rica. That was good.

  The irony of it all is that it was Garro who’d insisted on a prenup. When they met, Lefebvre had no money but Garro did. She owned property in Manhattan Beach, L.A., worth a million or two, so naturally she wanted to protect it for her children. Once the money started rolling, the prenup held fast, at least until Lefebvre needed to get away from the marriage. Then he succumbed and gave away the Costa Rica property, the possessions, and some money.

  A change in attitude toward money, the fluidity of it, didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen. Lefebvre illustrates his shift in thinking with a story about his car:

  Before the money really started to come in, I had this Suzuki, a four-wheel drive. San José is in a high valley, with mountains that run along both sides of the city. On the one side there are volcanoes and on the other side there’s this cordillera, where we lived. The valley runs for about fifteen miles and is filled with light. So we’re driving in the hills, and Cecilia reckons that if we go on this certain road we can just go all the way. Turns out she was walking when she did it, but we kept going. At one point we’re driving downhill and the ruts start to get deep, maybe two feet deep. We see that big four-wheel drives have negotiated this by placing dead logs. So we follow, and there is no going back because it starts to rain and it’s getting dark. There is only one way, and that’s forward. And we get to this point where I’m ninety percent sure we aren’t going to make it. So I ask everybody to get out of the car and watch as I try to negotiate this open turn. Then the front corner of the car falls, the car rolls over and I wind up sitting on the ceiling of the passenger side. Cecilia’s screaming, and her son Christian comes up and said says, “Are you okay?” For sure that was the end of the car—on its roof, two hundred yards from the end of this rutty road. They have to tow it out on its roof.

  It was an attitude development thing. Ever since then, the thinking has been: Ah well, I was getting sick of that car anyway.

  • • •

  Lefebvre managed to keep his head about it, although he sure had a good time spending some of the money. When he did blow a wad it didn’t seem to make any difference—none—to his bottom line. When he paid $44,000 for his nieces’ clothes, the money replenished itself. When he bought a special numbered-edition Z8 sports car, the money replenished itself. So he bought another one with a lower limited-edition number stamped on it. When he bought an Afghani rug several hundred years old, the money replenished. When he cleared out his closets and donated all the brand names to charity and bought a whole new wardrobe, ho-hum, the money replenished. Even flying anywhere and everywhere on his private jet couldn’t stem the flow.

  Lefebvre has always had an insouciant air about life and the world—he would rather have a good time than a long time—but then he struck it rich after he’d been around a long time. He wasn’t the kid in the candy shop, though many friends still thought he acted like a big kid. That was part of what was so appealing about him. Here he was, in his early fifties, and that was a blessing. Danny Patton puts the thorny issue of how to handle untold wealth when you’re the one holding this way: “Some people with money are reservoirs and just keep it. And some are streams and it flows.” He feels Lefebvre fell into the latter category and believes his pal would never have survived if he had come into his fortune in his twenties.

  And it was true: for a rich guy, Lefebvre had been through more than most. He explains, “I was lucky because I had been out on the street enough. I’d been a gardener to pay for my life. I’d been in jail—being a con helped. I had a strong sense that these guys who thought they were big shots because they came into money were just idiots. If that was the measure of their big-shot-ness, they were nothing. I had that firmly before my mind through the whole thing.”

  Lefebvre is referring to some of the kings of the gambling industry, guys who traveled with entourages and personal bodyguards in limousines—rogue principalities traveling from casino town to party town. “They actually thought they were cool because they had money,” Lefebvre says of the caricatures he met. “And that’s okay, because most of the people around them thought that too: ‘Hey, you’re really cool because you have money.’”

  Then again, there were also the civilized business guys, such as Anurag Dikshit, who looked and traveled like the new digital executive he was—no mafioso airs for him. Dikshit graduated from the Indian Institue of Technology in Delhi, India, and was in his mid-twenties when Ruth Parasol hired him to be PartyGaming’s group operations director in 1997. He played an integral role in launching PartyPoker.com in 2001. The DOJ came after him, too—not for money laundering but for violating the Wire Act. In 2008, he pled guilty in the same manner as Lawrence and Lef
ebvre, telling the justice system, yes, he now believed he had broken the law. In 2010, he was forced to forfeit to Uncle Sam $300 million of his billion (or billions) in restitution—but U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff did not send him to jail.

  • • •

  As Neteller grew into a much larger concern, run by Herman, a more button-down business guy, it still had a party reputation to live up to. Colin Bush, who worked security detail, was notorious in this regard. He was once thrown out of a Neteller Christmas party at the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise—before the party started. Neteller had rented nearly an entire wing of the hotel for the occasion, a massive fete on a Saturday night. Bush had arrived early, on Friday afternoon. To kill time, he started shooting pool in the basement pub. After a while, overly refreshed, he became testy and threw a pool cue. That was all it took. Steve Glavine and Bob Edmunds, meanwhile, were driving up from Calgary the next afternoon. They were looking forward to the bash because, Glavine says, “Our Christmas parties were epic.” When they arrived they couldn’t find their partner in good times, Colin. They asked around, “Where’s Bushy?”

  “Oh, he’s down in town because he’s not allowed in the hotel.” So Bush missed hotshot Canadian blues-rock guitarist Colin James, who headlined the party. Glavine recalls a few other epics, such as an office party at the Vintage Chophouse in Calgary: “Johnny’s on stage and Gord’s playing, and Bruce. We’d given everybody two or three drink tickets for the night, and it was getting to be around ten or eleven. Everybody’s out of tickets and having to buy pricey drinks. So Johnny stands up, grabs the microphone and says, ‘This is a free concert!’ He picked up the bar tab for the rest of the night. Things got out of hand. The shots started flying. Yeah, that was a good one.”

  • • •

  Lefebvre was all for a good party—always—but he also wanted to help. He began to realize he could have a great time seeing the world while being generous to the less fortunate. It was partying, in a sense, but it also had a sense of purpose, almost a higher order to it. He wanted to change things for the better.

  In November 2004, Lefebvre, freshly minted resident of Malibu, California, flew to Tuscany for a boys’ weekend with some buddies. The planned bacchanal went awry when one of the buds, because of a miscommunication, brought his young children with him. The weekend never threatened to become a case of what happens in Toscana stays in Toscana.

  After Italy, Lefebvre flew six hundred miles north to Frankfurt to start another kind of party. He met his old buddy Jim Hoggan; Hoggan’s wife, Enid Marion; and Geoff Savage. The purpose of the Frankfurt rendezvous was to launch a trip to Bhutan—a trip Lefebvre was financing with four first-class tickets to India, five thousand miles away (approximate cost: $60,000). Lefebvre was looking for more ways to invest in good-works projects, and Hoggan was helping him direct more of his fortune.

  Sometime after the Calgary drug raid of 1969, Hoggan departed for the West Coast, eventually entering law school at the University of Victoria around the time Lefebvre was enrolled at the University of Calgary. The two kept in touch through Jim’s brother Joe, who was a social-connector type. He made sure everyone reconvened at least every couple of years, snowboarding at Whistler, for instance, or reminding Lefebvre and Bergman to stop in Vancouver en route to India in 1990.

  For Hoggan, the lifelong bond with Lefebvre had formed because of their shared interest in the drug culture—LSD, other psychedelics, and marijuana, never hard drugs. That interest lasted but a year. Hoggan was lucky enough not to have been arrested, but things changed for him anyway. “After the bust, the whole thing just stopped,” Hoggan says. “I don’t know why. I maybe smoked dope once in a while.”

  Lefebvre thinks he and Hoggan represented the two sides of the hippie dream. “He’s the political activist, and I’m the mystical hedonist, whatever that is. Put the two together and we’re fulfilling the dream we had when we were kids. It’s kind of like Hesse’s characters, Narcissus and Goldmund. One of them is doing it as the monk and the other’s doing it out in the world, fortunate not to have picked up the plague yet.”

  The double portrait is apropos to a point, but the Lefebvre-Hoggan relationship is not quite as neat as the one Hesse’s 1930 novel delineates. When Lefebvre came into his money, “mystical hedonist” might have been the appropriate moniker. But pleasure-seeking and navel-gazing only got him so far before he reached his limit. He wanted new horizons, and the two of them went to work to raise eco-consciousness out of Vancouver. Hoggan introduced Lefebvre to David Suzuki, for instance, and to the Dalai Lama’s right-hand man, Victor Chan. And with Lefebvre’s Neteller earnings, he and Hoggan would create a website designed to aggressively debunk climate-change deniers. And now here they were on another adventure, this time to help protect one of largest areas of biodiversity on the planet.

  The quartet flew on Lufthansa direct from Frankfurt to Delhi International Airport and plunged themselves into instant culture shock. Lefebvre and Hoggan had been to India before, so they knew about its extremes. They were booked into the Sheraton. Not five-star, but good enough. The hotel amenities were fine, but when they walked outside they saw people sleeping in the ditch. That was India. Lefebvre’s first job as tour guide was to take everyone to see the Red Fort, the seventeenth-century emperor’s palace, and the Chandni Chowk (moonlit square). The famous market has a wide boulevard and runs two miles east to west to the old town of Delhi. Lefebvre recounts,

  On either side there are little roads the size of this rug. The air is filled with electrical wires going everywhere, all stolen electricity. Even so, people were running puny little diesel generators. It’s noisy and people die and when people die the living walk down the street and throw flowers on them. You’re supposed to cry and stop, and there are snake charmers and people selling and radios blaring. I’d look back and Jim would be going [makes throat-slitting gesture].

  You walk to the other end of the Red Fort, which comes to an intersection. You turn right and down the block is a spice market. You hear people coughing, and as you walk into it you start coughing. These guys are sitting on mountains of spice going AAAACHOOOOOOO! AAAGGCHHHHHHA AHHAAA WAAAAHAAAA! Everyone’s coughing from the cayenne in the air. You’re gagging—the place is not in the open air anymore. There are tunnels and you’re walking down and I say to the guy, “No, no, no!” and we turn around and run back. You’re seeing lepers and kids that are all slimy and covered in snot and they’re trying to touch you.

  At the opposite end, away from the Red Fort, at the intersection, was a four-story printing business. The shop ran off pictures of Hindu deities such as Shiva, the auspicious one, and Ganesha, the elephant that rides a mouse. Ganesha’s head represents the soul, the most real of all realities a human can experience, while the trunk indicates Om, or cosmic reality. Meanwhile, the body symbolizes corporeal everyday living, the sneezing, coughing, wheezing, physical reactions to the snot and piss and shit that confront us.

  Lefebvre recalls, “If you walked up the stairs and acted like you belonged there, everybody let you go, because you’re a sahib, right? If you were a bit aggressive, you could get on the roof four stories up. You’d look down the alleyway to see two and a half, three miles of people crowded in. Those tuk-tuks, the three-wheeled rickshaws that have a cab on the back that conveys two people, they’re all just honking at each other. Beep-beep! Beep! Beep-beep! Nobody’s moving.”

  The next day, the four travelers flew from Delhi to a town close to the Bhutan border. From India’s human congestion they headed toward a country containing only six hundred thousand souls. “People were completely knocked out by how weird India was,” says Lefebvre. “The water that ran beside the road was black, like oil. Who knows what was in it? People just throw their shit everywhere; they shit on the street. Then you get to this place where poor Indian people are crushed up against the border, staring into Bhutan.”

  On the map, from Delhi to a crossover point—P
huentsholing, Bhutan, say—the road runs about nine hundred miles. Near the border, they met their Bhutan contacts from Future Generations, including its president, Daniel Taylor, a self-made visionary who was creating organizational structures to reduce pollution in this densely populated region of the world by changing the way Southeast Asians looked at their major rivers and their environment in general. Lefebvre’s party would see the Brahmaputra River, which sweeps out of Arunachal Pradesh, underneath Bhutan through places like Guwahati and Dhubri, the plains of India, and then swings south to Bangladesh. The Brahmaputra is massive, one of four rivers (along with the Yangtze, Salween, and Mekong) of the project to which Lefebvre contributed money. Hoggan knew Taylor a little. Lefebvre, who had met Taylor just once before, said, “I gave him three or four million bucks.”

  The area of focus was the southeast quarter of Tibet, officially the prefectures of the Tibet Autonomous Region, China, which was the source of the rivers. Downstream live one billion people, about fifteen percent of the world’s population. Referring to Taylor, Lefebvre says,

  This cat we were running with figured out how to cajole the Chinese into agreeing to turn this whole corner of the Four Great Rivers area into a conservation project. Coming up to the Olympics, the Chinese were hungry for mechanisms of achieving international esteem, which they couldn’t achieve by stopping the pirating of CDs, or human rights violations, or shooting Tibetans in the back for trying to escape to India, or all those things the Chinese have become so adept at. When they were presented with this opportunity to become green, they jumped at it.

  The Four Rivers Project is astonishingly huge, the biggest conservation of biodiversity on the planet. Taylor went to the Chinese, and I gave him $400,000 to do it, to propose the Green Long March. Mao Zedong went on the Long March in 1933, and Daniel came up with the idea of the Green Long March for 2008. Now, every year, people all over China go on one-week or ten-day walks. It gives the biggest single population on the planet—ethnic or national or however you want to measure it—this opportunity to express their feelings about conservation. That’s huge, because if we don’t take China down that road it doesn’t matter what the rest of us do.