Theirs was a good balance—Bergman was careful and Lefebvre wasn’t. She called herself the “peasant girl,” saying she came from low means, that her father was a house painter and her mother didn’t work, so she was naturally cautious about money. Later, Lefebvre would remember this about her and ask her to help him out with Neteller.
In 1987, a popular Canadian television series called Street Legal, which portrayed a small Toronto law firm, began its run. It was the sort of business Bergman had in mind when she said she didn’t want to answer to anybody. Lefebvre was probably thinking more about being funky and different, more New York. They found a designer who gave them an idea they thought was fresh—bringing the street front into the office. “There was a street inside the building,” Bergman says. “There was a park and we had a park bench and a light and plants and then the offices were little houses down the side. We had the boardroom, a burgundy-colored house with a blue roof.”
“It was a really cool office to hang out in, thanks to John’s aesthetic sense,” says Greene, who joined the founders after returning from Europe. “It was designed to make you feel like you were on the main street of a small town, because the offices looked like little shops.” There was also a trap door to a dank basement, which is where Lefebvre would go for a toke. Maybe not too often—the customers were right upstairs, and there were grates.
Lefebvre and Bergman wanted to be regular-guy lawyers, with hours like medical clinics, nine to nine Monday to Thursday, nine to six Friday and Saturday. “We weren’t going to offer the cheapest legal services in town,” said Greene, “but we were going to be accessible to the public and less intimidating.” About eight months after opening, former mayor Rod Sykes, who had a column in the Calgary Herald, went to a Friday evening “clinic-warming” to meet the young lawyers and came away praising the U of C law grads’ gambit: “Most lawyers are barricaded behind secretaries and receptionists, and it takes a good deal of resolution to tackle these towers of powers,” he wrote, opining that Sunnyside Legal Clinic took “all the mystery out of seeing a lawyer.”
The work they did, and there were about four of them in the office at any given phase, was a hodgepodge—young offenders, family and wills, general practice, real estate, unions, and labor law; whatever previous agreements had been set up, and whatever came through the door.
Bergman thought it best that the company had two names. One was Sunnyside Legal Clinic, the named they wanted, to emphasize openness. The other was Lefebvre Bergman, the name they also used on signage and letterhead to stay on the good side of the Law Society of Alberta. They fought over the right to use a trade name that sounded closer to the people—the first time anyone had done it in Calgary. The knock from the Law Society was, “Hey, how do you know who the lawyers are behind the trade name?” About a year in, they were hauled before the benchers to justify this breach in protocol, but they survived the admonitions. The restrictions were subsequently relaxed, and more clinics and trade names followed. Bergman was proud to have led in easing some of the “hoity-toity-ness of the legal profession.”
However satisfying it was to genuinely help real people and be non-corporate—Lefebvre would wear blue jeans in the office—it was hard to make a buck doing this kind of work. The hours could be grueling, and many clients didn’t have much, if any, money. Lefebvre and Bergman later joked they made more money selling the building than they ever did on the practice.
And life became busy and complicated. When Lefebvre opened the law shop with Bergman in late 1985, Emily turned five. They were business partners and they were a couple. They spelled each other off at the legal clinic, but the hours were long and Lefebvre had to mind Emily one week on, one week off. After they had been living together for two years, his ex Katharine began dating a child psychologist named Jon Amundson, another Jon, thoughtful and kind. He wrote a letter to Emily’s father applying for the position “Not a dad.” He was committed to bringing Emily into his circle, which included children from a previous marriage, in whatever way the parents deemed appropriate. He understood too well from his work the potential difficulties that might develop between a daughter and stepfather. He offered to teach Emily how to fish.
Bergman, who later became president of Lefebvre’s company, Eagle Medallion Fortress, had a relationship with Emily that was even more nuanced. At first there was a naive attempt at parenting, encouraged by Lefebvre. That didn’t work out so well. Then there was an attempt to find common ground, which was difficult and took time. “Emily and Jane are in a deeply respectful relationship with one another now,” says Lefebvre of their lifelong bond. “I wouldn’t say they’re friends. They consider themselves a particular kind of dear friend.”
The clinic was a great concept, and it remained open for business until February 1990. The business was doing well—they’d started with just the two of them working all those long hours, and now there were six lawyers in the office—but sustaining enthusiasm becomes difficult when you want to do other things with your life. Bergman and Lefebvre had established themselves on an imaginary small-town main street for over three years. They’d lived out their dream of what a lawyer should be doing, yet in a way they’d also built their own prison. Now they wanted freedom. They couldn’t find any takers for the turnkey operation—partly because the prices they charged walk-in customers were below industry standard—so they sold the firm list, keeping some favored clients and instead working out of the house to save money.
“I was probably the instigator,” says Bergman. “I was thirty and John was thirty-eight. I wanted to travel and John had not done much traveling before then.” The clinic idea was smart, but the smartest entrepreneurial move they made during its run was to buy the building it was situated in: “All that work,” says Lefebvre, “and all we made was $100,000.” It was enough to travel for a year.
VI (1990–97)
The Wilderness
India for two and a half months and Thailand for seven weeks, that’s what Lefebvre and Bergman settled for. The day they closed Sunnyside Legal shop, February 16, 1990, the couple threw a big party at their new house. They had moved from Memorial Drive to Rutland Park in southwest Calgary. That same day, Bergman’s niece died and her mother was diagnosed with cancer. It was a rough go. Her mom fought off the disease for almost two years before she succumbed. She remained in relatively good health for a year and a half, and they both hung back for support. The original plan was to start in Europe, but the couple cut that leg off and headed straight to Mumbai to meet a friend of one of their clients, who showed them around. He took them to a leather goods factory and suggested someone ought to distribute the stuff in Canada. Lefebvre, forever curious, took the bait and decided to open a retail outlet when he got back.
The journey’s wild card was that Lefebvre had never been away from his daughter for more than ten days, and sometimes it felt excruciating to be separated from Emily for so long. On the other hand, he didn’t want to fall into the trap of thinking he could never leave town because his daughter was still there. He also felt that because he had gone off into the world, Emily’s mind might think more freely as well. And it did. A few years later it was, “Hey Dad, guess what, I’m going to Trinity College in Dublin.”
Bergman and Lefebvre met a man from Switzerland, a short, bald bodybuilder in his forties. The guy warned them, “There are two ways to get rich in the world. One of them is to get rich; the other is to spend two nights in India.” They soon figured out he was right.
Lefebvre says,
India is ghastly and amazing. Everything is the same color—the road, the dirt beside the road, the clothes of the people and the skin of the people, all the same color. The dusty brown dirt. Kids playing cricket with twisted branches, socks tied up in a ball. Huts built with sticks and green plastic garbage bags held down by busted bike tires. Kids shitting in the dirt right on the side of the cricket pitch. There’s shit on one side and urine on the ot
her.
We were waiting for a train in Varanasi, in northeastern India, south of Nepal. That’s on the Ganges River, where they put all the temples. There are these steps and they throw all the dead people in there, and people drink the water. They’re mostly burnt bodies. But there are certain bodies that you can’t burn. If somebody dies of snakebite you can’t burn him, because that’s a holy way to die. If someone dies of smallpox you can’t burn him, because that puts all the germs up in the air. So they just throw them in and then you drink the water.
So we’re sitting out there playing cards. We ask about the train, which is an hour late. We wait another hour. Go back again. “The train will be coming in one hour.” Wait another hour. “The train will be coming in one hour.” Fourth time. “Yes, yes, I already told you the train will come in one hour.” “You told me four hours ago that the train would be coming in one hour.” “Why are you so impatient? Yesterday the train was seventeen hours late.”
That was towards the end of our trip. We were bailing out of India at that time, probably heading towards Bombay to fly to Bangkok. When we got to Bangkok we went from the airport down to the train station. We got on a train that was supposed to leave at seven o’clock. At seven o’clock the train left, and Jane started crying.
Lefebvre and Bergman had intended to hit Indonesia before heading back, but Bergman was homesick.
• • •
Once he returned, Lefebvre started practicing law from home, working for favored clients. Then, in the fall of 1993, he acted on his lawyering-avoidance scheme: the leather goods shop. The couple sold their Rutland Park house, and Lefebvre’s half helped to finance the venture. It wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good business proposition, but Bergman figured she shouldn’t be too vocal about her misgivings. Instead, she suggested he ask Bruce Ramsay, his old student union buddy. Ramsay was shrewd and knew a good business play when he saw one. Ramsay backed Bergman: John, not a wise move. Lefebvre went ahead anyway. “Off you go,” she told him, “go crazy.”
Lefebvre found a spot right in the heart of the Seventeenth Avenue SW yuppie shopping strip. The pun-lover called his leather goods oasis Saviour Skin. He painted the interior red and green. The colors would stay; Saviour Skin would not. Hemporium, “Calgary’s Original Hemp Store,” is there now. It’s been there since 1995, when it took over from Saviour Skin. And unlike Lefebvre’s business, it has been a success. Lefebvre smokes a lot of pot—maybe he missed his moment.
“John is a great ideas guy,” says Bergman, “but he doesn’t pay attention to details. So he has an idea and thinks it’s cool, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to sell. I was in the store one day when in came some guy from Danier [a Canadian leather goods retail chain]. ‘I’m just coming to look at what you’re trying to sell here. What do you think you’re doing?’ He looked around and he knew in an instant he didn’t have to worry. It wasn’t going to last long.”
“I had this idea,” says Lefebvre, “that this guy I met, Raju, would provide me with leather cheap. It was cheap, it was late, and it was wrong. It was basically unsalable.”
Lefebvre was Saviour Skin’s only employee. For a year and a half, he opened the store every day, seven days a week. Then he stopped paying for the jackets. Then Raju got the sheriff to seize the goods, and the store closed.
The Rutland Park house windfall was now gone, and Lefebvre had driven Bergman nuts with all this waiting around for customers who never arrived. It wasn’t all drudgery—he got to smoke up, he got to play cards, and he wrote 120 pages of a novel he called Crash Heaven, in which the hero was a Vietnam War veteran turned heroin-smuggling CIA undercover agent.
Lefebvre says, “He was involved in one of those covert operations, where they co-opt Golden Triangle drug lords to fight against communists. The Americans were helping deliver the heroin, and he wound up getting some pot in a sting operation and had to disappear. He became rich and wound up his life being a smuggler. The fact that there’s so much hypocrisy going on—Americans assisting heroin smugglers—seemed like a good idea.”
Bergman and Lefebvre broke up in February 1994, a few months into his retail stasis. It had surfaced that Bergman had been carrying on an affair for quite a while during the clinic days, which caused resentment to fester. She also went back to law, starting a business with an old school chum. Of the affair Bergman says,
It was not one of my strongest moments. We’d had some ups and downs. John’s a big flirt, and that’s hard on a person’s ego. That’s who he is. In my mind it’s a bit of ego gratification. As much as John appears to be egocentric and self-assured, he’s the most insecure person I know. He’s constantly seeking approval from other people.
I used to tell people living with John is like living with Peter Pan. He’s a big kid. When we went traveling it was—“Oh wow, look at that! And look at that!!”—and your own enthusiasm goes through the roof. He’s like that about everything, which is contagious, endearing, and charming. But Never Never Land doesn’t exist, I used to say. And then John came into all of his money and I thought: Well, maybe it does.
• • •
Lefebvre then found another scheme to avoid practicing law: selling ads for Go cards, which lasted maybe a year. Go cards were postcards distributed for free, and people putting on shows could buy the space on the card. “For a while people thought it was kind of cool.” The fad didn’t last.
By this point it had become obvious to those around him that Lefebvre would take on just about any goofy project to avoid growing up and getting a real job:
We had these business cards, shorter and fatter, the proportions of a matchbook cover, but bigger. My position at the company was “Human Being.” I’d go to parties with my old law buddies, and I’d say, “Look, I got a new position.”
They were afraid I was in deep—that they’d have to do an intervention.
• • •
In 1995, with Bergman’s help, Lefebvre went back to the formal work environment, practicing law again, this time in two subleased offices inside an insurance firm called Harding Hall & Graburne, at Fourteenth Avenue and Eighth Street SW, across from a Mac’s Milk and a Dairy Queen. Bergman, when she was in junior high school, had a debating partner named Tim Meagher, who had become a litigation lawyer. Back from Asia, she kick-started her practice with Meagher’s help. After a while, Meagher left to do more litigation work, which created space for Lefebvre.
That’s where Lefebvre met Gordon Herman, president of the insurance company. A decade later, Herman would become CEO of Neteller and deftly shepherd the company’s public offering to the London Stock Exchange’s junior market. “That’s how I got to know Gord,” says Lefebvre. “And See-Wing Chung, who worked for Gord. He’s my accountant, my bookkeeper. Gord had bought a general insurance company with a view to roll it into a public company; buy a general insurance company, make the books look good, get it really well organized and sell it.”
Lefebvre’s new gig, another doomed foray into law practice, at least put him in contact with two men who would later prove to be invaluable. It was auspicious in another unexpected way. Meagher had a friend from his old College Pro days who needed real estate legal help. He sent his friend to Bergman’s office, but her specialty was family law, wills, and estate. Lefebvre was back to doing real estate and small business, so Bergman passed Meagher’s old painting partner to him.
Lefebvre ended up doing a bunch of work for Stephen Lawrence over the next three to four years. The Ivey School of Business graduate had been a principal at Cavendish Investing Ltd., a private venture capital firm based in Calgary, in the early nineties. Now he was developing commercial properties, and Lefebvre was doing the conveyancing for him. Lefebvre explains, “Steve would have to finance it, and I’d do the mortgage—either sell property or sell units, lawyering on acquisitions or selling of titles.”
It was around this time that Lawrence purchased a property in t
he Midnapore area of south Calgary. He and Lefebvre didn’t know it yet, but a crucial piece of the Neteller puzzle had just fallen into place. Lefebvre managed to keep working in the office for two years before he and Bergman had another parting. “I just went in,” Lefebvre said, “in the dark of night, and packed up everything except my desk.”
“Jane was kind of smart that way,” Danny Patton later said. “She knew she’d just be number three in a line. She didn’t want to become the third Mrs. John Lefebvre.”
• • •
Lefebvre continued to do Lawrence’s real estate deals but had otherwise fled the profession again. This time he was invited to work for a guy named Phil Carroll, who—along with Dave Steele, both U of C commerce graduates—had started Three Buoys Houseboat Vacations in 1982, a business that succeeded by using other people’s cash. They initially convinced investors to spend $55,000 on a boat, which Three Buoys would maintain and charter out to vacationers, while the owner could use the boat for his own holiday and get a tax break. By 1986, investors had put $30 million into the company, and four hundred of these invasive boats sailed Shuswap Lake in British Columbia and the Trent-Severn Waterway in Ontario. By 1989 Carroll and Steele had started another company, called International Properties Group (IPG), and had become its co-CEOs. Lefebvre didn’t quite get it but was motivated.
Lefebvre recalls,
Phil said, “Yeah, come on down, John, let’s go to work.” They were doing the same thing they’d done with houseboats, but with condominiums, buying shit with other people’s money. Instead of houseboats they bought apartment complexes and converted them to condominium strata titles. They would sell one to you as an investor and then manage it for you—rent it out, pay all your condo fees, pay off your mortgage, and then pay you the difference. At the end of the process you owned the place and you didn’t have to do anything. They brought me in to do corporate counsel stuff and I didn’t know a fucking thing about it. It was a fiasco.
Life Real Loud Page 13