The Crown wasn’t happy with Harradence’s little coup and appealed. A year was simply too skimpy a sentence, and it brayed for more. The appeal had to occur within thirty days, so Harradence went back to work. This time it wasn’t whom you knew—it was how to outmaneuver the Crown with procedural wrangling. Harradence got adjournments through three different sittings of the court of appeal. He would say, “I’m busy on a trial in Korea,” or “I haven’t had an opportunity to interview my client, he’s in prison.” Whatever, didn’t matter, he just used standard procedure to blow through sufficient time. Finally, in July 1970, Lefebvre was released from jail. In September, he enrolled at the University of Calgary. He’d already been a university student for a month when Harradence finally went up for the Crown appeal.
“The judge said, ‘Let me get this straight—this guy’s just served eight months of a one-year sentence, he’s given us good time, he’s comported himself in an exemplary fashion, he’s now released from his prison term, he’s enrolled in university, and you want to take him out of university and put him back in jail? Appeal dismissed.’”
University wasn’t really part of Lefebvre’s life plan at the time, but it was adopted as part of Harradence’s strategy. He wanted to have his client in school and acting like a fine upstanding young citizen, engaged in higher learning, preparing himself to be a useful contributor to society. It was a smart move, and Harradence outflanked the Crown.
III (1970–79)
Mr. Cab Driver Becomes Mr. President
And so, yes, in September 1970 Lefebvre enrolled at the University of Calgary. He attended school, sort of, for the academic year, but mostly he hung out at the Highlander on Sixteenth Avenue or the Summit Hotel on Fourth Street downtown, which was equally huge and “filled with rock ’n’ roll and hippies and drugs and heroin.” Mostly he played bridge and smoked drugs before dropping out of school altogether to drive a taxi with a guy named John Babick and play music with another guy, Steve Kelly. Babick and Lefebvre split twelve-hour shifts in Car 156 for Yellow Cabs. Kelly and Lefebvre worked a drums-and-guitar cover act, playing hotel lounges in Calgary along with a little roadwork in Radium, BC.
Lefebvre had never played the drums before. He bought a kit and started hitting the skins. “I can play drums—who can’t play drums, right?” There were two motivations for forming the duo. One was that he and Kelly were old high school buddies and had been on the rampage together since tenth grade. Two was the belief that “music was better than working.”
Kelly and Lefebvre found work first at Ranchman’s, a bar in Calgary’s south end, and then at the Summit Lounge downtown, where they played six nights a week. Lefebvre explains,
Steve knew some rounders, greaseballs, and pimps I knew when I was a kid. These brothers, Mel and Sid, they ran a whorehouse called the Chicken Inn at Ninth Avenue and Fourth Street SE. They had a younger brother, Ron, who fancied himself an agent. He knew the guys who owned the rooms, so if you knew Ron you’d be treated right. Steve knew Ron, who got us some gigs at the Ranchman’s. But our main gig was the Summit Lounge. Six nights a week, 7:30 to 11:30, three hours over a four-hour period—played for three hours and smoked dope for one.
Most of the time Lefebvre was hooking up “with one chick or another.” Later, in the summer of 1973, he started living with a woman he’d met at the Summit named Janice Pridham. “I think I got married in 1974.” The relationship was built on partying, good times, and getting high, and it was more or less open. “I was walking through the Safeway one day and this girl started ragging on me, saying, ‘Yeah, you’re the one!’ And I said, ‘Huh?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, your wife broke up my marriage’—I don’t want to talk about it!” It wasn’t particularly unusual behavior for the times, and Lefebvre and Pridham managed to keep the relationship motor running for several years, but the focus wasn’t home life.
“My buddy Bab and I, we went twenty-four hours a day. We owned a ’72 Meteor, a great big old lovely boat, took a lot of gas but in those days it didn’t matter. I really enjoyed the night shift. It was harder to tell if your eyes are bloodshot, right? You’d meet all kinds of weirdos.” The Mercury could hold a lot of passengers. “I got to know all the prostitutes and pimps and drug pushers. It’s a carnival out there.”
Babick was living with a woman named Gloria Parker, who owned a club located on Ninth Avenue. “In those days, they didn’t allow strippers in alcohol joints, but they’d allow them in these non-licensed places. You’d go to these strip clubs and sneak in your own booze. There would be girls stripping and hookers hanging out: ‘You come here for a good time or you just here to look?’ Then you’d take the girl to a motel and she’d take your money off you there.”
Gloria’s little sister Angie was an eighteen-year-old bombshell. Her family was from Saskatchewan, and her dad was a bootlegger. Her brothers and her dad all had done time at one point or another, according to Lefebvre. “She was old enough so she came to work at her sister’s club. We hung around a bit, went to parties. I’d wake up in the morning and she’d be sitting on top of me. Those were crazy days. I was running around at night, probably on my wife, Janice.” Lefebvre’s bombshell eventually grew up, came out, and ran a now-defunct gay club. “It had been a famous club around Calgary for a really long time.”
Babick and Lefebvre were both business partners and good friends in the early seventies. They upgraded to a ’74 Meteor and continued driving until Lefebvre returned to school in 1975. They saw less of each other after that, although Lefebvre did continue to drive a green Co-op cab part-time at night while at school. The last time he recalls hanging out with Babick was at a 1978 Rolling Stones concert in Anaheim.
Lefebvre got out of jail at age nineteen and spent five years not looking ahead. He’d put a lot of mileage on the cab odometer and collected welfare when he wasn’t driving. He’d earned gig money and returned to construction or gardening to support his pot-focused lifestyle—a kind of cuts-grass-to-buy-grass situation: “I was an inveterate pot smoker, so I was always doing things that permitted that. Steve and I played music for five or six months. When I was doing that I wasn’t driving a cab, but when I wasn’t doing music I was driving a cab, or sometimes doing construction labor. In the summers, I did gardening. A couple of winters I might have been on unemployment insurance, smoking hash oil. Those were the days.”
The problem was, those days were feeling like a rut. Lefebvre explains, “Between when I left university the first time, and returned at night time in fall 1975, I wound up running off and smoking a lot of hash and being a drunk hippie. For four or five years that’s all I did—grow my hair, drive a taxicab, collect unemployment insurance, smoke hash oil. After a while it felt like I had to gather my brain, do some personal development.”
After taking a night course in the fall of 1975, Lefebvre returned to U of C full-time in January 1976. It was school for real this time, although he managed to keep his schedule open for mushrooms, pot, and skiing. He thought, what could be better? He was getting a student loan and didn’t have to work. He found the Art Building’s leafy solarium, with the soothing ambient noise of its fountain, especially comfortable: “I’d enjoy sitting and reading Shakespeare, good literature and philosophy, watching girls and flirting. So to me it was like, Okay, if I can get money by sitting around reading good books, that’s a good gig.”
Once he got back to school, Lefebvre sold drugs occasionally. He was careful to sell only to people he knew. He wasn’t really out to make money. “I wasn’t above selling dope,” he says, “but it was to make free dope. You know, buy a couple of pounds and end up owning four ounces. That would be perfect. There was blond Lebanese and really stinky Afghani brown. That stuff was more like rubber, really great hash, off the end of a cigarette.”
Some didn’t like mixing hash smoke with tar and nicotine from cigarettes, so hot-knifing became the way to go. Instead of inhaling directly, they would use a pop bottle
with the bottom removed. The larger opening would capture the sudden burst of smoke from the knives. “That was durding.” The origin of the word durd is murky, but Lefebvre thinks it might have been an on-campus student group, the ski club: “Guys would take two hot knives out and there was this explosion of four-hundred-degree smoke. It was like running through a house burning down, sucking back the air. You’d cough and everybody would laugh. We’d get so fucked up, drunk and smoking so much hash we just didn’t know what we were doing. It was brilliant. I watched guys hot-knifing their own lip. I never did do that. I’m surprised we’re still alive.”
Meanwhile, Lefebvre’s marriage to Pridham was on life support: “You want to be decent, but there’s a certain fundamental basic enthusiasm for spreading our genes far and wide that sometimes more than other times is difficult to rein in.”
The next September, Lefebvre entered his first full academic year. He volunteered to be on the executive of two campus organizations, one of which was the English Society. Lefebvre loved words and always had a thing for the Bard, even while unabashedly admitting to a fondness for puns, the so-called lowest form of humor. “Oh, I’m terrible,” he says, laughing about his lifelong infatuation. At U of C he fell under the spell of James Black, an Elizabethan scholar: “Jim is one of the most intuitively great Shakespeare teachers of all time—not that I’m qualified to say that—but he’s a guy who brings a spectacular knowledge of the King James Bible and all the current literature of the time.”
Lefebvre took but one class with Black but was so beguiled that, many years later, after making millions with Neteller, he came up with an idea he thought might work alongside the extravagant donation he was already giving to the U of C Faculty of Arts in 2005: “Jim was a great reader. When I gave that gift to the faculty, he’d retired but was invited to the ceremony as a special guest. I got chatting with him and came up with this idea of him giving free ninety-minute Shakespeare lectures.” Over three years Black gave thirty-seven free lectures to the public. Lefebvre spent extra cash to film the proceedings so the lectures would be available in perpetuity on DVD.
Black influenced, or echoed, Lefebvre’s thinking in another way. A high school dropout originally from England, he’d worked in the oil patch as a young man. He began to notice university students seemed to get the better jobs. He wondered about that and visited the University of Alberta, where a student counselor talked up English literature to him. Black and Lefebvre were of similar temperament. Black thought, Wait a minute—I go to school, read books, and get a good summer job? I’m in. In his senior years, he began to wonder whether the same formula couldn’t apply to graduate school, doing his doctorate and becoming a professor. It could, except in the summer he could keep reading and writing.
Another professor made a lasting impression on Lefebvre. Political scientist Tom Flanagan was director of policy research for the right-wing populist Reform Party of Canada from 1991 to 1993. He influenced the current incarnation of Canada’s Conservative Party, now the elected governing party as well as the party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who attended U of C.
Lefebvre says, “Tom is strident in his free enterprise views—he studied Milton Friedman. Governments shouldn’t pay for lighthouses; people who sail boats and make money from boats should pay for lighthouses. I didn’t buy all of it, but it was good to hear. It became evident that a lot of my friends who might be thought of as pink were actually impractical and hadn’t thought anything through. It was emotional, not economic thinking.”
Joining a second campus organization had a far-reaching effect for Lefebvre. As a member of the quasi-judicial body called the Review Board, he learned and helped to interpret and enforce the laws of the student union. In the winter term of his second full year, 1978, he decided to parlay this knowledge into a run for office. Not just any office—president.
Lefebvre began his quest for the presidency of the student union by casting himself as an outsider. He had to use this tactic because he had never been on student council. At one forum he tried to assure the crowd he wasn’t a normal politician because he was “too used to telling the truth.” He wouldn’t shower students with promises he couldn’t keep because, after all, the student union president “isn’t a powerful position.” All he would promise was to work hard and provide strong representation. At another forum he thanked his audience for their interest in student politics and cautioned them that the crucial issue was who would be the next president. “Watch us all closely,” he said. “If you vote potluck, you’ll get potluck representation.”
It was a three-way contest. The other two prominent candidates were both stronger on paper, but neither clicked enough with the student body to run away with it. Lefebvre looked sincere and handsome, his shag haircut and bushy sideburns framing his strong eyes and slight chin cleft. His checked shirt and blue jeans made him look authentic and believable. He was older than most students yet boyish, and he had an aura of calm about him, projecting a wise, easygoing authority. No doubt his personality was infectious, and some people got a contact high from being in his presence. His charisma ultimately overcame the lack of bona fides, and the voting broke his way. He squeaked through the middle—the vote totals of the top three candidates went 824/716/670. The outgoing president called it a “stunning victory” and batted away the Gauntlet student newspaper’s admonishing headline, “Winners lack experience,” saying the new executive would do “an admirable job.” Interviewed by the Gauntlet after the election, and asked to provide a thumbnail sketch of himself, Lefebvre replied: “One foot in the church and one foot in the gutter, a Bible in one hand and a joint in the other.”
Lefebvre wasn’t the only student with joints on the brain. When Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau visited the University of Calgary in 1979, Lefebvre as student president walked across campus with him. There are pictures of them shaking hands and walking, and Trudeau spoke to U of C students in a forum setting. The first question asked was, “Have you ever smoked dope?” Trudeau’s reply was, “Never in Canada.”
It is difficult to overstate the importance of this student election victory for Lefebvre’s subsequent life. He was a one-term president, choosing not to run again, yet many union friends have stuck by him for life. He met John Hind, elected to the programming commission, who became his accountant. He met Bruce Ramsay, another untested politician, the former president of the campus ski club, who was elected vice president, services. Ramsay was elected president the following year, succeeding Lefebvre, and has invested in several of Lefebvre’s schemes over the years. Lefebvre also met Jeff Proudfoot, one of the few incumbents to survive the election, who was elected vice president, finance. Ramsay and Proudfoot have been two of Lefebvre’s closest pals for decades. To this day they arrange annual motorcycle trips to different parts of the country. “John, Bruce Ramsay, and I used to go hiking in the mountains a lot,” says Proudfoot. “One time we were doing the Burgess Shale in BC, and when we got to the top we had a glass of scotch and a joint and John said, ‘Boys, this is life real loud.’”
The role of the presidency was also a study in human nature, of the shallowness of people in the presence of power. “That was a good lesson,” says Lefebvre. “I knew I was getting plenty of attention that was attention not for me personally but for my office. Even the social, flirty kind of attention wasn’t about me—it was about social station.” Later he would try to apply these lessons to dealing with people in the presence of extreme wealth.
There was concern whether the inexperienced administration could get up to speed quickly enough or whether it even wanted to. For one thing, Ramsay had been president of the ski club, the biggest party gang on campus. Proudfoot, by this point a long-time student politician and thus part of the establishment, was initially wary of the upstarts. He had been through three administrations, all well-run organizations that accomplished things. “There was some trepidation about John,” he says. “Prior to him
most people had worked their way up through the ranks to become president. Well, lo and behold, John came flying in, and at the same time Bruce came flying in, so I, who had lived with the establishment and the staff around the building and lived in MacEwan Hall, was thinking, Oh God, who are these guys?”
Fear of the unknown dominated the first couple of weeks. Some of Proudfoot’s regular adversaries had been ousted, and now he didn’t have a clue as to what he was getting—maybe a repeat of the same tired arguments he’d fought and dispensed with the past three years: “Now I had two wild cards who didn’t know each other sitting around me.”
To Proudfoot and other experienced student politicians, the student union wasn’t some radical organization whose purpose was to chase after the latest cause; it was a business. A quarter-million dollars went through its budget every year. There were full-time employees who outlasted student politicians, there was payroll, there were labor laws, and there was a union:
But John stepped up. From the first meeting there was a lot more there than I’d anticipated from the campaign advertisements. The thing I saw first was he sat down and ran a meeting. And student council meetings, they’re bedlam. You’ve got a bunch of kids with opinions, everybody clamoring to be heard. You need a strong person in the chair: We’re going to have an agenda, we’re going to stick to the agenda, we have an allotted time. Some things we’re going to have to shelve, but we’re going to have to get through the business at hand, because people’s pay rests on decisions we make. I was impressed that he seemed to understand we had to run a business.
When Proudfoot was first elected to the student union in 1975, universities were in the shadow of the Vietnam War. Typically, on campus, there was much bickering between left and right over the war and its after-effects. “A lot of my youth was tainted by that. I lived with a draft dodger in my third year. His parents would come up a couple of times a year. He’d move into the living room and they’d move into his room. It was weird having someone’s parents moving in, but he wasn’t a wealthy guy.”
Life Real Loud Page 9