Life Real Loud
Page 42
Looking forward is always a super-drag: Forty more days? Fuck!! You’re like this, right? You have to gather yourself. You’re surrounded by people who wish they had your problems. If I started whining about my forty days, I’d get pasted.
And then after breakfast I could just sit there. A lot of guys were still in bed. It was the quietest time of the day, breakfast till lunch call. I had my Walkman that I bought from the commissary. They’re thirty-eight bucks and you get little ear buds and I was listening to WQXR, the great classical music station in New York City. It happened to be Beethoven month. I got a poster that was going around town on the buses that said OBEY across the top and THOVEN across the bottom, this picture of Beethoven with his knit brows. I was going to bed at night listening to piano sonatas and string quartets and violin concertos. It was good. If I have to listen to noise I might as well at least filter it through some good classical music.
So Lefebvre fought their noise with his kind of noise and then read. The lighting was way better than at FTC Oklahoma—the usual fluorescent bulbs, but they were bright enough—and he was allowed to keep them on so long as his bunkee said it was okay. “By 10:30, 11 at night I was really ready to go to sleep.”
The first book he read was from the prison library, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which he calls “spooky.” The other one he dashed through before the parcels started to arrive was Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration. His first choice out of the box was Melville’s Moby-Dick. Then Middlemarch. Then Kitchen Confidential. Hoggan had sent him not one but three Murakami books—Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84—which Lefebvre found especially transporting: “His books seem ridiculously normal until something really weird happens and you know you’re deep in psychedelia. I highly recommend Murakami if you’re going to jail because you transcend the walls of your prison.”
Existentialism lives on. Lefebvre pours out the last of the Caymus. We cast a final look at the glowing spaceship across the water before packing and locking up. Back in the Sierra, we hang a right on Sunset and start heading back to Stonehouse. As we roll along the ghostly, undulating road in the early evening, Lefebvre admits the prison experience wasn’t entirely traumatic, at least on that concrete, lived, hour-to-hour level of keeping his head down, nose poked into one book after another. By this point he had become an expert at doing his own time. Still, what was bad about it was on a whole other plane of existence: “I had to struggle really, really hard to keep in that space where reading and listening to music was sufficient medicine for being completely humiliated and disrespected and robbed of my liberty.”
XX (2013–14)
Truly Fine Citizen
One and a half years after serving time in the Manhattan sound sewer, Lefebvre announced to his 919 Facebook Friends that he was currently on a special weight-reduction program and adjusted diet. This seemed to be good news. His one-year probation had finished the previous December, and this willingness to temper his appetites indicated that the invisible psychic chains, wrapped and locked tight around him since January 15, 2007, were now dissolving. As he once said about parking meters that take only credit cards, though, that’s time he can’t get back.
And time is the exercise machine that never stops. The sun rises; the sun sets. Neteller PLC, in an attempt to shake off the ghosts of its recent past, including its $136-million forfeiture to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and cooperating with the FBI, changed its name to NEOVIA Financial PLC in November 2008. Then, in January 2011, NEOVIA purchased Optimal Payments, a Canadian company based in Montreal, for around $50 million. It rechristened itself again, this time as Optimal Payments PLC. Optimal founder Joel Leonoff joined the NEOVIA board as co-CEO along with president and co-CEO Mark Mayhew. Note the switch from Canadian soil to the Isle of Man for Optimal (or OPAY). By the end of July of that same year, a number of former NEOVIA executives, including Mayhew, had left the company. Montrealer Leonoff became its CEO. The deal began to look like a reverse takeover.
And that’s where Neteller sits today, nestled inside the main company, Optimal Payments. On the website CasinoSecurity.com, there is an entry entitled “Neteller Casino Overview.” It calls Neteller “one of the most successful and biggest e-banks today.” Customers use its e-bank services to gamble at any online casino they choose—all in legal jurisdictions, of course. And how do customers get to gamble straight away? The same way they’ve been doing it since Neteller was invented in 1999: InstaCash and F-Cash (both still as lucrative for Optimal as they were for Neteller), EFT, through wire or bank deposit, and Visa or MasterCard.
Leonoff, who in October 2009 dined with former president George W. Bush at an Optimal Payments–sponsored event, is a corporate character worth mentioning. One of the companies he worked for, FirePay, was dinged in 2006 for processing over $2 billion in gambling transactions. The websites were based outside the U.S., but the transactions were made by U.S. customers inside the U.S., specifically in the Southern District of New York, from 2004 through October 2006, around when UIGEA went into effect. At the time, FirePay agreed to pay a non-prosecution agreement forfeit of $19.2 million. There were no criminal prosecutions.
Recently, Optimal Payments executives have been plotting a victorious return to the U.S. market for Neteller. In March 2013, Leonoff was quoted as saying, “We think ten states will offer entry into gaming,” including the massive California market. Then, in October 2013, the State of New Jersey announced that Neteller would be allowed to supply the state with its still-popular payment system. Legal online gaming will be offered through a number of casinos, including the Trump Plaza and the Golden Nugget.
Back in January 2007, after the Neteller busts, the company had reduced its dependency on gaming to sixty percent of revenues and had concentrated its efforts on Asian and European customers. Leonoff has said that when the U.S. market opens up again, he doesn’t think OPAY’s ratio will shift from the one Neteller set all those years ago. It is theoretically possible there is someone out there who believes him.
• • •
Lefebvre spread his money around and tried to do some good, maybe a lot of good. Geoff Savage said the intention had always been to give it all away. It’s just that the FBI accelerated the process in a manner the two buddies could never have predicted. The added bonus was a juicy cut of Lefebvre’s life.
Despite a healthy capitalistic drive to succeed, his exuberance and self-confidence buoying him through decades of false starts, Lefebvre has let affairs of the heart govern much of his life. They continue to do so, in a harmonious way. On November 15, 2013, he sent friends and family an email: “Sitting on our balcony gazing at Duomo and other Medici wonders I asked Hilary if she would marry me. In amazement, she agreed. All the bells of Florence rang as we embraced.”
The Roman Catholic Church dominated Lefebvre’s upbringing, and most of his pals were from the same background. He rebelled against his mother’s religious view of the world, yet she continues to play a central role in his thinking, and his life, as he looks after her in her eighties. For Lefebvre, unlike his mom, it matters not whether God exists—humans will succeed or fail with or without God. He has searched for enlightenment through psychedelics and entertained himself with pot and fine reds. He has always rummaged for a purpose to life and at one time figured becoming a lawyer would help. It didn’t, so he gave up on growing old. He became a middle-aged busker and refused to care about the lack of income.
Then a play came into view, a risky play, and a fun play. He thought, let’s see where this goes. For a man in his late forties, his energy was inexhaustible. He tossed his full weight into the play, yet even then it began to look stillborn. Just another false start … Or was it? No, it was ticking. It was alive. It was kicking. It was running. It was humming.
To be an active part of the internet boom, what would that have felt like? In 1999, a couple of friends of mine quit their day jobs in Toronto and
went into risky digital ventures. After a year or so, they returned to their chosen professions, journalism and the law, with maybe a wrinkle or two and a pinch of wisdom, but no pots of gold stashed away. Lefebvre is another one of those regular guys who went digital during the first boom. He shed his previous skin, too—his previous life, really—to work nonstop on the venture. A rarity, he made it. An extreme rarity, he made it while passing the half-century milestone. Seven or eight years of pure libertarian bliss were followed by five or six years of interrogations, interviews, wire taps, urine samples, email intercepts, and general screaming hell. That was the price of the ride.
When he turns around and scans the horizon, looking north, maybe in his row boat, Ancylosserous II, with his sweetheart at the stern, he in the bow, rowing in tandem, calm indigo below, crystal azure above, he sees that he would have done everything exactly the same way. Exactly, that is, except for that sliver of recklessness, the urge to get more use out of his Malibu shacks and kibitz with the Nobu celebrity tribe, once he had “identified peril.” Oh, and one other thing: “moderating the gradual part of going broke.”
For the man who once stood at the top of a mountain, what he got out of it was an improvised thrill ride, love and appreciation from friends and strangers alike, innumerable disapproving looks from hardheaded business types, a piece of shoreline with a factory on the far side to remind him of his spiritual mission, a few rocks, some seagulls floating overhead, a mermaid, and quiet.
PHOTO SECTION
Musical duo John Lefebvre and Steve Kelly, looking like Tom Petty and Burton Cummings, Calgary, 1971. (John Lefebvre)
Student Union president John Lefebvre with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, University of Calgary, 1979. (The Gauntlet Publications Society)
Future Neteller cofounder Stephen Lawrence, Zeta Psi Fraternity member, yearbook picture, University of Calgary, 1982. (Tallystick)
John Lefebvre rocking it up, creating his own publicity shot with time delay, Calgary, 1971. (John Lefebvre)
Neteller’s humble foreign nerve center, downtown San José, Costa Rica, 2002. (Meranda Glesby)
John Lefebvre and his daughter Emily, somewhere up a jungle river, near remote Parque Nacional Corcovado, Costa Rica, winter 2003. (Maura Ni Chinneide)
John Lefebvre and Elvis Costello at Diana Krall’s annual benefit dinner, Vancouver, 2005. (Courtesy Krall Centre, Vancouver General Hospital, and VGH and UBC Hospital Foundation)
John Lefebvre with legendary producer Brian Ahern (center), and the even more legendary Glen D. Hardin, Elvis Presley’s band director, Los Angeles, 2007. (Courtesy Glen D. Hardin)
John Lefebvre with the author, after a squall, at Lefebvre’s Oldman Dam property, a two-hour drive south of Calgary, October 2008. (Mick Verde)
John Lefebvre, rocking on, Salt Spring Island, August 2008. (Laura Lind)
John Lefebvre and Hilary Watson arrive at 500 Pearl Street in Manhattan, on their way to Judge P. Kevin Castel’s courtroom, sentencing day, October 25, 2011. (Jeff Day)
The Neteller hockey jersey, spotted at an open house, hanging in a basement closet, in John Lefebvre’s Mount Royal home, Calgary, June 2009. (Laura Lind)
John Lefebvre cranking out blues-rock with the Roosters, the day it was announced he had donated $1.2 million to the Faculty of Arts, University of Calgary, October 2005. (University of Calgary)
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jack David for giving the green light (and not applying deep pressure). Thanks to Shelley Youngblut, who gave the original green light in Swerve magazine in Calgary. Thanks to Jeff Proudfoot, whose suggested title, Life Real Loud, won out over The Man Who Gave It All Away. Thanks to Geoff Savage, Jane McMullen, Steve Glavine, Meranda Glesby, Bob Edmunds, Louise Lefebvre, Rob Eltom, Anne Lefebvre, Mike Greene, Lyn Savage, Robb Lucy, Marian Bankes, Matteo Nicola Brancacci, Nathalie Carles, Mick Verde, Lynn Demers, Jim Hoggan, Katharine Armitage, Cecilia Garro (for coming to the gate), Harold Kirkpatrick, Lesley Hayes, Oscar Hansen, Pat Blocksom, Kyle Blocksom, Karen Fowlie, The Chauffeur, Hilary Watson, Luke Watson, Enid Marion, Pádraig Ó’Cinnéide, Emily Lefebvre, Neil Osborne, Ann Calvert, Roman Cooney, editors at the University of Calgary’s The Gauntlet, Grant Burns, Allen Baekeland, Michael Lipton, Terry Tompkins, Steve Bromstein, Brian Ahern (for letting me hang out in Studio D), Ricky Fataar, Billy Payne, James “Hutch” Hutchison, Greg Leisz, Patrick Warren, Barry Bookin, Simon Sidi, and Danny Patton. Thanks to Kevin Connolly, Nancy Foran, Ian Pearson, and Peter Norman for editing advice; to Jeff Day for showing me how they shoot news photos, New York–style; to Ivor Shapiro, Paul Knox, Lynn Cunningham, Kamal Al-Solaylee, Tim Falconer, Steve Trumper, and other colleagues at the School of Journalism, and to my students at Ryerson, for enduring their colleague/instructor going on (and on). Thanks to David Abrahamson, Ian Brown, Miles Maguire, Roberta Maguire, Norman Sims, William Langewiesche, Zsuzsi Gartner, and Kathleen Anderson for various bits of advice. Thanks to the folks at Out-of-Bounds B&B in Escazú and Costa Paraiso in Dominical for the hospitality in CR. Thanks to Crissy Calhoun, Rachel Ironstone, Troy Cunningham, Erin Creasey, and Jenna Illies at ECW. Finally, pt. 1: thanks to John Lefebvre for his good memory and for seeing both sides of most arguments. Finally, pt. 2: thanks to my wife, Laura Lind, who has heard it all so, so many times. Peace and love on the right-wing planet.
About the Author
Bill Reynolds is graduate program director at the School of Journalism, Ryerson University, Toronto.
Copyright © Bill Reynolds, 2014
Published by ECW Press
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2
416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Reynolds, William, 1956–, author
Life real loud : John Lefebvre, Neteller and the revolution in online gambling / Bill Reynolds.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77090-572-6 (ePUB)
978-1-77090-571-9 (PDF); 978-1-55022-941-7 (BOUND)
1. Lefebvre, John, 1951–. 2. Lefebvre, John, 1951– —Trials, litigation, etc. 3. Neteller. 4. Internet gambling. 5. Money laundering—United States. 6. Musicians—Canada—Biography. 7. Philanthropists—Canada—Biography. 8. Lawyers—Canada—Biography. I. Title.
GV1302.5.R49 2014 795.0285’4678 C2014-902535-1 C2014-902536-X
Cover design: Natalie Olsen/Kisscut Design
Cover image: © Jordan Manley
Author photo: Jeff Day
The publication of Life Real Loud has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,793 individual artists and 1,076 organizations in 232 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.