At the border of India and Bhutan, Lefebvre and Taylor and company were confronted with a stark contrast in realities. On the Indian side of the street, at a slightly higher elevation, say about five feet higher, the buildings looked like they’d suffered through the Blitz. Some parts of wall looked to have tumbled into the street, exposing rooms to the elements. Rebar stuck out from the sides of apartment blocks. Stones and bricks jutted from a lumpy, bumpy road. Junk and weeds fell off the cement retaining wall into the narrow canal, about half a dozen feet wide, between the two towns and countries. Various bits of detritus, anything from a pillow to leaves, reposed there. On the Bhutan side, a tidy two-foot cement barrier ran along the canal. The street was paved and smooth. People walked up and down the street. A fence, stylized in a crosshatched pattern and with occasional crowns, ran along the other side of the street. Well-kept houses and mature trees and other foliage were visible above the fence. “These Indian people looked across the border as if they were looking at some magical land where everyone was clean and happy,” says Lefebvre. “They gazed and continued to throw garbage. It was heart-rending.”
That wasn’t the end of the adventure, though—only the prelude. One of the Future Generations guys was a former priest in India and a mucky-muck, so this was going to be a VIP tour all the way. The entourage, which included ornithologist Bob Fleming, traveled in three Toyota Land Cruisers. Lefebvre says, “We drove for a week at breakneck speeds and then crossed the border from Bhutan to Arunachal Pradesh [the ‘Land of the Dawn Lit Mountains’ in Sanskrit]. It was the first time they were going to let people cross that border in fifty years of dispute between India and China about who controls Bhutan and who controls Arunachal Pradesh. We were going to the official opening.”
As they traveled along, Lefebvre began to feel uneasy. Their hosts, in senior posts in the Bhutanese civil government, seemed manipulative. From one town to the next they were being feted and then forced to get up early to catch yet another official meeting, the opening of a dam, perhaps, in the next town. India sent its protectorate a lot of money every year in exchange for hydroelectric energy. While allowing cultural independence, it wasn’t letting go of this resource access. There had been many tussles between Indian-supported people and Chinese-supported people over control of natural resources. Lefebvre says, “We were just a show for people who have aspirations for Bhutan. There was a movement afoot for it to be independent of India. There was also a movement for Bhutan, Arunachal Pradesh to the east of Bhutan, Sikkim to the west of Bhutan, and a whole bunch of the different Himalayan nations to join in one ethnic nation. They were a separate people—very different from Indians and Chinese.”
Hurtling through the lower Himalayas, the roads were steep and narrow, like driving along a shelf. Drops were sheer and abrupt, like a glacial crevasse, and there weren’t that many barriers. At one vantage point they saw, about eight miles ahead, a valley with a waterfall pouring out of the mountainside. Lefebvre recalls,
It was dropping two to three thousand feet. The waterfall went under a bridge right before it started to drop, so you could stop and look down and over. There were these concrete posts two and a half feet high—as if that would stop you. About five posts were missing because a bus had gone over. It would have been about ninety seconds before the first bounce. Then we came to this one corner where it was an inside turn. When you looked up, water was coming out of the mist. Higher than that mist was another overhang of mist, just coming out of the clouds. It was really psychedelic. Everywhere we went was unspeakably beautiful.
Up one side of a mountain they went, and down the next, twelve to fourteen thousand feet above sea level, to reach the next glad-handing meeting. Lefebvre was fed up: “I had a bit of a rebellion. I said, ‘Daniel, this is complete bullshit. We’re putting our lives in peril so these guys can do a dog-and-pony show to show how important they are, for whatever their aspirations are. That’s not what we signed on for.’ He got the picture and started to slow down things.”
Lefebvre and friends, sucked into the political games of a few hosts with separatist aspirations, finally reached the capital. He says, “We were at a party in Thimphu and they introduced us to the minister of culture from India. He was also head of secret service and was trying to find out what we were there for, asking questions in a nice way. Daniel came around and warned us, saying, ‘That guy is secret police. There are probably others, too, so don’t admit you know anything about separatism. If they ask, tell them we’re here for the opening of the border international development to help build the Four Great Rivers Conservation Park in Tibet.’”
Then they visited one of the queens of Bhutan. She had planned a big party for the foreigners. “The king was about ready to retire,” says Lefebvre of His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who would abdicate in 2006 to make way for his eldest son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck. “He was about fifty when we were there, and he had married four sisters. They each had their own palace and he would move between them.”
The second-eldest queen, Her Majesty Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangcuck, hosted the special occasion. Lefebvre says, “We sat in a big room, and they passed around this skanky rice wine that tasted like tapioca with rum in it. We had to drink it and like it. Then they offered more and we all said, ‘I don’t usually drink.’ Yeah, right. The queen was very gracious.”
So were the tour drivers. They didn’t want to say anything directly, but they couldn’t stop looking at Lefebvre and wondering about him. When WWF television programming became available in their country, the Bhutanese became enraptured. So much so that the king of Bhutan decided to ban it, which didn’t do wonders for his popularity. The tour drivers had been giving Lefebvre surreptitious double takes and couldn’t help put two and two together. It did make a bit of sense: he’s a big guy, and he’s got long hair. But they were too polite to ask, and so they went to Jim Hoggan instead. “We don’t want to cause any trouble,” said one driver, “but is your traveling partner a WWF wrestler?”
The Bhutan trip lasted six days, but its effect lingered. Lefebvre later met with the Tarayana Foundation, a partner of Future Generations. The two organizations joined forces to establish income generating activities, develop artisan training centers, and assist in educating the country’s rural poor.
Bhutan wouldn’t leave Lefebvre’s mind for long, but for now, at the Indian border, they needed to get their passports stamped and get back. He recalls,
We went up to the top of this mountain on the Arunachal Pradesh part of Bhutan. There was an army base there, and they told us we had to go to the air force base within the army base. We were walking through the guard station past all these Bhutanese and Indian soldiers. Everywhere you went in Bhutan there were these Indian soldiers carrying cannons. It was all just a big security thing to make sure people knew this was India. We were all white, nicely dressed, and just walked through the gate across this army base. They stood back and looked at us, and we just said, “Carry on.” They treated us like sahibs. White guys didn’t get to go to Bhutan much.
We were walking across this field, checking for leeches, which you see lots of in Bhutan. You see cows and their noses are bleeding because they put their heads down to graze and the leeches get on them and there’s blood everywhere. You had to be careful because they’d get on your socks and they’d get on your legs and you’d have to pull them off or put salt on them.
When they reached the end of their hike, a landing strip greeted them. The mountain had been flattened to allow for air transport, but there was still a six-percent grade. “You’d land going uphill and take off going downhill,” says Lefebvre. “If you were taking off going downhill and needed to abort it would be tricky.”
They stood around with Indian soldiers and Bhutanese soldiers, waiting for a Soviet-era helicopter to arrive. They were to be evacuated to Sikkim, where they would get their passports stamped. “All of a sudden this huge chopper appears in the
distance,” says Lefebvre. “Whop! Whop! Whop! It was a troop carrier. We put forty people on it at the top of this mountain and departed at 13,500 feet. We followed the river down into these flatlands and rice fields. When we got there we said, ‘We’re not going back.’ Bhutan was beautiful, but what they were doing with us was less than beautiful—just rushing us around—and we felt like we were in danger.”
When Lefebvre and company landed back in India, the locals didn’t know what to do with them. In fact, there was no one there in charge of letting people into the country. So they had to sit and wait. It’s India, what else is new? Hoggan recalls hours and hours wasted in a horrible airport. They finally got back to Delhi and allowed themselves a couple of days where they wouldn’t have to lose their stomachs at every hairpin turn. They ended up in a hotel in Agra, southwest of Delhi, and presto, just like regular tourists, they looked out their windows and saw the Taj Mahal. Normal stuff, for a change.
Lefebvre says, “We took the flight back on Lufthansa. There were huge first-class seats that actually folded down flat. You could lie on your side. Not these little pods. When sitting up straight, you could almost throw a sugar cube to the seat in front of you. They brought around this tray with a mound of Caspian caviar bigger than half a softball. Days before, we were eating hardboiled eggs deep-fried in chicken fat, and here we were eating caviar like it was Corn Flakes.”
Lufthansa had treated them to three kinds of caviar and champagne both ways, but somehow it tasted a lot better on the flight home.
X (2005–06)
The Man Who Gave It All Away
Within two years of going public, Neteller’s capitalization on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM swelled to over $2 billion. Over time, founders Lawrence and Lefebvre sold off sizeable chunks of their personal stock holdings. For the amount of time and effort they’d put into their project, 1999–2005, they had done well. It is difficult to quantify Lefebvre’s fortune, given the stock tanked when he was busted. But at one point, he started to wonder how they could possibly keep up with and spend all this money. Which part of the sky really was the limit here? Neteller seemed to be headed for the next galaxy, so it would be legitimate to ask the question: How much did Lefebvre want to change the world? The answer was a lot. How much money did he have to do it? A helluva lot, and there would be a helluva lot more where it was coming from. He was thinking he needed a foundation and targets for the money. He was trying to figure out how to change the world. When he got started, he managed to spend tens of millions on things he believed in.
Here is one small example—one of many—of giving it all away. Lefebvre hooked up with Flora MacDonald, the octogenarian, one-time Secretary of State for External Affairs who has been devoting her post-political years to humanitarian work. MacDonald’s charity, Future Generations Canada, helps support women and children in Tibet and Afghanistan. Lefebvre could get behind that. He was helping Daniel Taylor’s project in Tibet, so why not Flora MacDonald’s in Afghanistan? He gave money to support Afghan communities who were forming a joint-village shura, or council, of sixty-five villages in the Shaidan District of Bamyan Province. He spent money on mosque-based literacy programs for women and children—programs that spread to over 350 communities in three provinces. He supported a community health worker program. He supported reforestation in the Shaidan Valley of Bamyan Province and the erection of check-dams and the digging of ditch irrigation systems to mitigate drought in Ghazni Province. And he helped to establish English and computer courses for 135 girls and boys in the Jaghori District of Ghazni Province.
Lefebvre wasn’t just throwing money at every cause in sight; he was also saying to all his friends, “Write yourself a job description and come and play.” Geoff Savage says, “He did that with most of us.” Savage himself wasn’t so sure—he was making a good living as a lawyer for the banks—but Lefebvre kept at him. And after the extravagant wedding reception in Costa Rica in the fall of 2003, Savage thought seriously about what it would take to retire himself. More time went by, and he didn’t see Lefebvre again until the Athens Olympics, where Savage witnessed his friend’s marriage meltdown. By November 2004, now ensconced in Malibu 1, Lefebvre went right back to hammering on Savage to retire his law practice and become the CEO of John.
Savage says, “At that point in time he was a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar man. We decided there was going to be no active business and we were going to be doing philanthropy. I started studying up on it.”
Savage needed more than six months to unwind his twenty-five years’ worth of clients, but since he now had agreed to join Lefebvre, they started to look for places to live. Savage figured Lefebvre might want to live in Ireland to be near his daughter, but no, he wanted to stay in Western Canada. Savage visited Lefebvre in Malibu, and the conversation focused on dwellings. Lefebvre asked Savage, “Well, Geoff, if you could live anywhere in Canada, where would it be?”
“Southern Vancouver Island,” Savage told his friend. “Somewhere in that vicinity. It has the best weather.”
Lefebvre got on his computer and found some high-end real estate on Salt Spring Island. They flew up to have a look. Savage says, “We looked at ten houses in a day, and at the end of the day he picked the one on Sunset Drive. A month later, he closed. Then he said, ‘Now let’s buy you a house, Geoff.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I’m not going to argue too vociferously about this.”
By December 2004, Lefebvre was showing up in Calgary, wanting to buy the Calgary Stampeders football team, invest in movies, invest in seismic programs—whatever caught his fancy. “He kept going on the business end of things, buying places in Calgary, none of which came through,” says Savage. “He was trying to buy the Bank of Montreal building, run it as a nightclub, a private club. He was going in fifteen different directions. Meanwhile I’m going, ‘John, I’m trying to wind down my practice, not wind it up.’”
But Lefebvre had difficulty heeding caution. Most of the time he barreled ahead: “He has unbound enthusiasm and no real restraint,” says Savage. “He can say today, ‘I have to cool my jets,’ but then he gets wound up on something, or somebody else shows up with a great idea and he’s taken with it. The way I put it is, there’s what you want and there’s what you need. And the way he’d put it is, what I want is what I need. At that point I go, ‘John, it’s your money.’”
• • •
Savage says the whole idea from the beginning was to give it all away. When Lefebvre returned to Canada, he was able to bring back his fortune, untaxed, because of his residency status in Costa Rica. The Canadian government allows citizens to come back to the country and bring wealth earned abroad back with them. Once they’re in the country again, any money earned in Canada, from that day forward, gets taxed. That was a sweet situation, yet Lefebvre did not pull the typical business move. He did not take action to protect his millions.
Stephen Lawrence, however, would have, according to Savage. He would have started to consolidate his wealth, gotten it out of Canada, moved it offshore, moved assets into family trusts, that sort of thing. Not Lefebvre. Savage says, “The original concept was no active businesses, no significant business risk, relatively conservative investments that would manage themselves, and we use the excess cash to fund whatever makes the most sense to us, and in the meantime have a lot of fun. Then, shortly after I agreed to retire from law to do that—and not practice any law—suddenly we’re into a great range of active businesses and whatever philanthropic things he wanted to do. And the principal, it’s been whittled away—we are going to be well and truly retired sooner than anticipated.”
Savage defended his friend burning through all this money, trying to help so many, so quickly. The thinking went: There is so much to do in the world—if you’re going to help, do it now. Get it done. “If it’s all gone in a year,” he said, “so be it.”
• • •
On October 12, 2005, the University of Calgary announced a
$1.2-million donation to its Faculty of Arts from John Lefebvre of Neteller. The Calgary Herald reported the next day that the money would be spent on “scholarships, a professorship, studio space, and special projects.” Lefebvre told the reporter, “The arts make better human beings.” Dean Ann Calvert called the gift an “incredibly generous gesture.”
The announcement had been in the works for some time. Lefebvre knew Calvert’s husband, Bob, a lawyer, from the old days. He kept thinking about those early mornings playing piano in Craigie Hall. He kept thinking about the great Shakespeare class he’d taken. And he kept thinking that the arts faculty could use the money more than the law faculty. He invited the Calverts to Salt Spring Island for a pleasant weekend of hanging out and kibitzing and maybe coming up with creative ways to spend the donation.
While Ann Calvert supervised, she and her colleagues—and Lefebvre, who wanted to remain arm’s length in principle but relayed his ideas anyway—devised ways to maximize the contributions for arts in general and students in particular. The exercise proved joyous from start to finish, whether it was getting Lefebvre’s old English professor, James Black, to record his Shakespeare lectures for posterity or upgrading technical facilities for student use.
By far the best time Lefebvre had, though, was being the guest of honor at a cocktail party Calvert threw for him on campus. She ordered everyone at her disposal to put an embargo on press release material and keep quiet about the nature of the announcement. “We invited all these people who knew John when he was at university. They came but they didn’t know why. It was packed.”
Life Real Loud Page 23
