Lefebvre needs several dozen sets of flatware for the wedding dinners. Emily and Pádraig’s celebration will go on for three days in the mountains. The couple wants the location to be a surprise for everyone. We cross the street and walk into Rubaiyat, the pricey store for high-end home goods and knickknacks and art. The staff, they’re no dummies. They snap to attention and greet Lefebvre like a king. And he is. He strides in with the look of a California hippie rock star—blue jeans, tan-colored shoes, coat with Asian dragon insignia, long blond-ish graying hair and beard. He greets them all with his good manners and charm and expects to be treated well. He will be. They know when he comes through the door he might drop a bundle—if he can find what he’s looking for or if they can pique his curiosity.
Wherever we go he introduces me, “This is my friend Bill, the writer from Toronto,” making sure everyone is part of his conversation. He engages with staff as he stalks the store, and he gets real picky about the exact type of flatware he’s looking for. He takes an instant liking to one particular design, but the store doesn’t have enough sets in stock for the wedding (he needs six dozen). The lady behind the counter suggests she can get on the phone to Italy, pronto, and maybe have the required additional sets flown in.
“I need them for next week.”
“Oh, I see. I don’t know, John, whether this is possible. I can try …”
The conversation seesaws back and forth. Lefebvre wants flatware and he wants it now. Can she do it? Probably not. After exhausting the discussion of that possibility, he moves on to another design—not as sleek, not as much artistic flair, perhaps even a little bland-looking, but they do have enough sets. He buys them, telling me they’ll be good for Stonehouse, too. Cha-ching. There goes a few grand. They deliver.
Next, we drive over to the Spirits of Kensington wine shop, one of Lefebvre’s favorites, near the Chicken on the Way at Fourteenth Street NW and Kensington Road. Most of Emily’s celebration booze will have to be purchased through the hotel, but he has to buy wine for the guest rooms and the campfire. Post wedding, the leftover wine will be put on a bus to Salt Spring, where Stonehouse will be opened officially. Nathalie, Lefebvre’s cook and housekeeper, later tells us, “It’s a good thing the first guests at Stonehouse were Irish. Now we know all the places beer can be spilled.”
On the way over, Lefebvre gets a call from Jane McMullen. She’s handling the forfeiture, and the DOJ has been pressuring her lately to start rustling up the money. No word on sentencing, but it wants the cash on file by end of year. She tells Lefebvre how it’s going and from where she’s decided to draw one part of the money. He trusts her completely with the task. She still takes care of him, just like the old days.
We walk into the wine shop on Fourteenth. Same pattern. The lady drops everything and attends to Lefebvre, who introduces me, again, as his writer friend from Toronto. The proprietress knows exactly what kind of wine Lefebvre likes: full-bodied, expensive reds. “The one thing I know is that good wine doesn’t give you a hangover,” he’s told me more than once. I believe it, of course, but Louise, his mom, being the one remaining devout Catholic in the family of Catholics, cannot understand the need for high-end wine. “Nobody needs to buy wine that expensive,” she’ll say. “I wish he would just give all of his money away to poor people.”
Her son has given away an awfully big chunk of his money—to the poor, to single moms ignored by banks who need mortgage financing, to shelter kids for football tickets. The scroll of good deeds would hit the floor and roll a country mile, along with the monster commitment to environmental projects. But you know what, Mom, the wine habit stays.
We sample a just-uncorked sixty-buck red. I’m no expert, but immediately I’m convinced the liquid is a marvel that would make wine critic Robert Parker swoon and jot down ninety-three. Various flavors burst onto the tongue, although not in the shrill way of, say, a jazzed-up South African or Australian shiraz; no, they seep into the palate with subtlety and complexity. I try to resist the temptation to down the sizeable sample; it is so good I want to chug it till it’s drained. But I resist, sloshing the ruby liquid around in the large bowl of the glass, using what may or may not be the proper method—holding the base of the glass, keeping the base on the table surface, rotating it in a clockwise then counterclockwise motion to move the liquid around, freeing up its aroma and then judging the lasting nature of the legs it leaves behind on the glass upon returning to rest—before putting more of the silky taste to my lips.
Lefebvre likes the wine. He likes the lady who serves the wine. He likes the fact that she saves him some trouble by hand-picking a white wine for him, just in case. He says he doesn’t need to sample it. “Sure, I’ll take a case or two.” He trusts her judgment. Truth is, he doesn’t much care for white. His plastic injects the lady’s business with just under ten grand. We walk out. The wine place delivers, too.
We head over to the Paul Kuhn Gallery on Eleventh Avenue SW. Lefebvre hasn’t been in for a while. The attractive, lithe, young woman is in a mood to sell. She entices Lefebvre with some art. She says what’s on the walls is all gone except for two. But look at what’s left, aren’t they both gorgeous? Lefebvre instead focuses on one that has a red dot on the little white card. “I’m sorry, John, that one’s gone.” She tries to distract him by turning his attention back to one unsold piece featuring a nude female immersed in an abstract landscape. She sways him. He looks at the painting. Her bet is on Lefebvre’s love of the female form. “Yeah, maybe.” He appreciates her effort, but he’s not really that interested in buying anything more today. He’s just dropped nearly twenty grand on flatware and wine, for one thing, although I suspect he might have given in if the sales job had been more convincing.
Lefebvre likes to hear the pitches. He’ll buy just about anything if it’s pitched the right way. He likes the fact that he can travel among the merchant class and be noticed and treated with respect and that he can return the favor by dropping buckets of cash to support them. It’s like the king walking among the commoners at a feudal market, spreading around the wealth and good cheer.
But this afternoon the king is interested in picking up a work that’s been with the framer’s shop in the basement for quite some time. “John, we haven’t seen you! I was just thinking about you, wondering when you were going to come around and get your piece.” Lefebvre does walk out with his purchase under his arm this time, and we delicately negotiate the large canvas into the back of his SUV. That’s enough for one day. Maybe tomorrow there will be more purchases to be made for the wedding.
• • •
The next day at 9:30 we gas up and head out to Springbank, Alberta, on a sunny, cool, perfect Western fall morning. It’s hangin’ at the hangar time on Hurricane Drive. We leave Calgary behind as we motor along the Trans-Canada Highway. Springbank is a barely rural community of residential acreages—“barely” in the sense that the city of Calgary has gobbled up annexed land, parceling it into subdivisions with names like Strathcona, Prominence Park, and West Springs. The city is advancing westward, moving closer.
Lefebvre keeps many of his motor toys out here at Springbank Airport. Dale Kirkwood, the pilot, hangs out here, too. He owned his own Ford Mustang in high school, and now his son Justin has his own kiddie drag racer stored in the hangar. It’s fuel-injected and is equipped with a lawnmower motor. Justin is also allowed to use the pool table on the second floor. Once the door is unlocked, we come inside to a whole other level of man-cave, one large room with a high ceiling and the usual industrial metal upper supports exposed. There is a lot of eye candy: two jets, several classic cars, and one vintage motorcycle. A flight of stairs at one end leads to an office where the flight logs are stored. That’s also where you shoot pool. Lefebvre’s business jet is a 1982 Cessna Citation II (Model 550). Immediately, he recalls the interest in his flying habits:
Did I tell you about the meetings with the DOJ? They asked, “What do
es Dale do when he’s not working for you?” I said, “Dale’s never not working for me. Dale works for me—that’s all.”
“Really? Where does he go with your plane?”
“He doesn’t go anywhere with my plane, unless I’m on it or unless one of my guests is on it.”
“Really? It seems like he’s flitting around.”
“Oh, he went to Phoenix to look for a car for me, and he went to Ohio to buy another car. Actually, he went to Brazil and bought a jet. He went three times. Actually, he went four times, because the first time he bought a jet for this other guy. But the last three he bought a jet for himself. He had some trouble getting it back up here. I financed the jet, he owns it—it’s his retirement package. They stopped him at the border because he had a picture on the floor and a film on his cell phone of me shooting my potato cannon. He goes, ‘Artillery? There’s no one shooting artillery. That’s my boss, that’s a potato cannon.’ And they said, ‘Why would you want to shoot potatoes?’”
Lefebvre’s plane was appraised at $2.4 million. He paid $1.4 million and then spent $600,000 putting new engines on it. He bought the hanger for $400,000. That was before the recession hit. Now he’s talking about getting another businessman to share the cost of the hangar, the jet, and Kirkwood’s time. That kind of partnership talk pains him, not just because of the inevitable situation that would crop up where both owners want to fly at the same time: “It’s like a fucking marriage. I hate that.”
Upstairs, Lefebvre stores some of his plane’s seats. The Citation II is built for eight passengers plus the pilot, but it’s more comfortable with four or five. It’s a little larger than average, having six windows instead of the usual three. Its ground speed is 395 miles per hour, about ninety miles per hour slower than commercial traffic. Its altitude ceiling is 43,000 feet, but Kirkwood flies it at around 35,000. The cost of burning fuel to get to the upper limit outweighs the advantages of less wind resistance and engines tuned to work best in thinner air. Not that they haven’t tried it on long-haul trips. “It’s neat, the difference,” Lefebvre says. “At thirty-five it looks like the earth is flat; at forty-three it looks like the earth is round. You start to see the curvature.”
Lefebvre and I talk about his flight to Toronto in February 2008, in a huge snowstorm. He says, “There are advantages to small planes that make them safer in certain conditions: they brake better; they don’t have as much momentum going down the runway; and my plane has reverse thrusters, where the thrust is redirected forward—that slows you down. It’s fifteen percent slower than commercial travel. That’s easy to swallow—it’s way faster than commercial travel if you take into consideration the hurry-up-and-wait, showing up at the airport two hours early.”
Kirkwood uses the same strips as commercial planes. He files a departure time within a certain range so controllers know more or less when he’s coming in. He never gets the “No, you cannot land at this time” line as seen on TV. Lefebvre says, “Sometimes when you pull out to take off, you’re in a long lineup. Once there was a storm in the Midwest, so at O’Hare in Chicago we were behind ninety jets idling on the runway. It took an hour and fifteen minutes for all of that to clear up. That’s just luck of the draw.”
Would Lefebvre use his jet to visit his daughter in Dublin? “No, it’s not worth it. In fuel and engine depreciation, it’s about $1,400 an hour. It’s ten hours there and ten hours back—that’s $28,000. It’s fun but that’s where I draw the line now. Hopping around North America still makes sense, but long trips it’s better to take off your shoes and your belt. You spend $8,000 on first-class tickets and you’ve still got $20,000 to buy shoes and belts with.”
Upstairs, Lefebvre pulls out a book. He says,
This is this year’s maintenance log, and this is the sky plan—every flight plan that has ever been filed by us. Where we went, how far, where we gassed up. It would be useful to me if we hire a guy to make a summary of where the plane went and where we stayed. It would make an interesting read to see where the plane went, for how long, and when. What you’d come up with is stuff like for a year or so of my life I was flying all around North America—let’s go to Malibu for the weekend! My friends went, too. For a lot of those trips, I don’t remember. For eight months Dale was flying twenty-two days a month.
The gusher days.
The hangar is large enough to hold Kirkwood’s jet and doubles as a car garage. The BMW Z8s aren’t here; they’re stationed on Salt Spring Island and down in Malibu. But the wow factor is not lessened. Check out the navy blue GT racer with the white double racing stripe from stem to stern. Ford built this serious pro roadster for one year only, in 1966. Try this machine somewhere in the foothills between Calgary and Banff, preferably on a long straight road in the spring, when the snow has melted but there isn’t much traffic. You can be Steve McQueen in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, cheering on his lover Ali MacGraw to “punch it, baby.” Punch it to two hundred miles per hour, that is. Yeah, go ahead, do it. Lefebvre has.
Then we come to another stone-cold classic, the dark blue-green 1963 Chevy Impala SS 409, the muscle car. “Giddy up, giddy up, 409,” as the Beach Boys exhorted. “It’s absolutely perfect,” says Lefebvre. “Here, for a laugh … I don’t make everybody do this.”
We crawl under the car. He’s right. There is not a speck of dirt or grease on the beast.
“For instance, the shape of the nuts, can you see these? Have they ever been outside? Everything is new and crisp. Look at the shine on that! Completely restored to perfect. Feel this rubber here—it’s perfect.”
“This is a beautiful car, too,” I say, coming to the dark green 1965 Pontiac Beaumont two-door. Lefebvre starts it up, flooding the room with noise and exhaust.
“That’s a rumble machine,” I tell him. “Smells like an old car. My ’64 Dodge 330 smelled like that.”
Then we come to the Indian motorcycle. The original Indian firm went broke in 1953, and this bike, yellow with tan outlines, is from that era. Lefebvre explains how if you advance the spark too much you can get hurt if it kicks back. “A few more guys broke their legs than were supposed to.”
On the way back to Calgary, Lefebvre decides to take the Old Banff Coach Road SW, the main thoroughfare before the Trans-Canada Highway was built. The area is speckled with country acreages. “Look at these fuckin’ monstrosities,” he says. “Who needs a house that big? Look, it’s like a college. It’s like a medical center. This is the most affluent postal code in Canada.”
• • •
For the longest stretch of time, Lefebvre was Neteller’s largest shareholder. This is no longer true. Now he has no shares in Neteller. It’s December, and he’s sold the last of them for about a buck Canadian. Part of McMullen’s forfeiture payment plan, I’m guessing.
“That’s got to hurt,” I suggest to him.
“It was seven million,” comes the quick retort. “How much can it hurt?”
Right. Who couldn’t endure the heartache of cashing out seven million?
“Sure,” he continues, “it could have been seventy million.” He means if the FBI hadn’t wiped out ninety percent in shareholder value.
Griping, he says, “A guy feels funny when quotes appear in the press. A year ago I was rich and now I couldn’t come up with a measly five million. A guy feels funny when he reads that in print because you imagine a single mom reading that and thinking, ‘What an asshole.’”
That quote from my original magazine piece—“So, great, you mean I’ve got $110 million in the bank and I can’t get at a measly five million bail money? You mean I can’t even buy groceries?”—has been a thorn in his pride since the day it was put out there for public consumption in October 2007. A thorn he’s ripped out and needled me with ever since. He wants me to delete the quote from the book. Or at least move it down. Why does it have to be part of the opening? Anyone can empathize with his position, but that kind of w
isecracking is part of who Lefebvre is. He’ll often let off-color jokes fly. He’ll often say outrageous things just to get a reaction. You can attribute his acting out to his wealth—he knows he’s rich and we’re not and there’s not much we can do about it—or you can attribute it to his nature, which money hasn’t altered. Or you can attribute it to both. Probably both. Even before he became rich you wouldn’t be able to shut him up if he wanted to let fly.
• • •
Eight months after selling the last of his Neteller shares, Lefebvre was still undergoing drug testing. His exemplary behavior had won him more time between tests, though, a huge plus. He got it down to monthly, then quarterly and, finally, now, to semiannually. Sometimes he flew to New York; sometimes he flew to L.A. He’d been arrested in Malibu, but the charges originated from the State of New York, so it should have been New York. However, since he lived on the West Coast most of the time, they let him go south. All this time he’d been cooperating in an ongoing investigation—who knew for how much longer, since they wouldn’t tell him or his lawyers—telling them everything he knew, repeatedly, about the online gambling business. Lefebvre was now Super Model Citizen USA.
Life Real Loud Page 30
