Life Real Loud

by Bill Reynolds

  There were formal speeches about the money and what it would do, and Lefebvre wore a suit for the occasion. There was also a cocktail hour, but the real blast came when he strapped on his Fender electric guitar to jam with a blues band from the music department called the Roosters.

  “He got a huge charge out of that,” says Calvert. “We planned it to showcase what John does best and that is to party and play music.”

  • • •

  When Lefebvre made up his mind to give it all away, he didn’t mean to imply that he wasn’t going to enjoy himself. Not a chance. One case in point was a benefit jazz singer Diana Krall organized for the Vancouver General Hospital & University of British Columbia Hospital Foundation. The annual bash was held to support research in the areas of leukemia and bone marrow transplants. Krall’s mother had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 1996 and received a bone marrow transplant, which netted her six additional years of life. Krall, moved by this, wanted to help researchers. The fundraisers were held at a large convention room in the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Vancouver.

  Lefebvre entered the picture because someone in his pal Jim Hoggan’s Vancouver public relations office was working on the benefit and snagged him. He attended a couple of benefit shows between 2005 and 2006, buying a table of ten tickets for the first and a half-dozen for the second, bringing along friends so they could mingle with the high-rent musical talent. He had a great time at both, but the real treat for him was watching Elvis Costello, Krall’s husband, perform up close: “Elvis with an acoustic guitar was an amazing experience.”

  At the first event, he recalls, Costello, Krall, Bill Clinton, Tony Bennett, Elton John with his new husband David Furnish, and Sarah McLachlan were the big names. At the second, it was James Taylor, Costello, John, and others. Costello sold a Fender Jaguar from his collection that was once owned by Johnny Marr. Lefebvre bid fifty grand for it—he didn’t know from the Smiths—and gladly watched Costello sign it in front of him.

  There was a silent auction and a proper bidding auction. Clinton pulled out a little book of recipes from his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. It might not have been an official auction item, but he offered it for bid. Lefebvre kept going after it, even after he could have gotten the thirty-page booklet for twelve grand. After that, he started to bid against himself.

  “And then I said something ungentle like, ‘C’mon you guys, what’d you come here for?’” It was all for a laugh—playfully goading his fellow well-heeled attendees. “People started to get the idea to bid and I would release them of their obligations.” He did enjoy letting a few bidders dangle, though—going … going … —before kicking his own bid up another notch. This reckless fun drew the attention of Chip Wilson, the billionaire founder of Lululemon Athletica, who was sitting nearby. He finally had to pipe in, “Who is this guy?”

  “They kept auctioning and I kept buying,” Lefebvre says. “Diamonds and watches and vacation packages and a bunch of art. Over the course of the two events I spent half a million bucks.” Nobody, Lefebvre says, had more fun giving it away. The emcee was Vicki Gabereau, the former CBC host, who, upon finding out the name of Lefebvre’s company, commented, “Eagle Medallion Fortress—that’s a macho name, isn’t it?” Lefebvre replied, “Yeah, real macho. It’s the name my daughter gave to her treehouse when she was a kid.”

  • • •

  Lefebvre got an idea in his head to make this giving business official, creating a formal entity called the Lefebvre Foundation and enlisting old friends like Mike Greene and old lovers like Jane McMullen to be on the board. He was reaching out. He was saying, pick your job description, then come play with me. “When he first asked me to come work with him,” McMullen says, “it was to manage his financial affairs and help with the foundation, which was to give money away to good causes. But it didn’t work out that way. We made decisions to spend $25,000, and the rest was John. A lot of it was ego-driven.”

  McMullen points to a foundation meeting in 2006—a party at Jim Hoggan’s place in Vancouver—as a crucial turning point:

  The Foundation hadn’t been around that long, and we were discussing the board mission statement and how it would operate. It was exciting. John said at some point we were going to have $70 million to work with. And then during the party people were coming up and shaking our hands. David Suzuki’s board members were there and it was, “Oh thank you, thank you,” and we were looking at each other like, “What’s going on here?” Then there was an announcement that a $10-million gift was being given to the Suzuki Foundation from the Lefebvre Foundation. We didn’t know. The next day, we were like, “John, is there anything else we should know about what you’ve already done?”

  McMullen laughs and then continues, “John is and always has been, even when he had nothing, extremely generous. But he needs the approval of others, which is a lot easier to get with a lot of money.” As for the Lefebvre Foundation, it was over almost as soon as it started: “John had already given away the money,” she says. “There was nothing for it to do.”

  • • •

  As chaotic and capricious as all of the mega-spending may have been, it was clear Lefebvre had no need to develop this bent toward philanthropy from scratch. It never looked like a cover because he’d always been inclined to give rather than take. On my second day in Los Angeles, June 27, 2007, first thing Thursday morning in Malibu, I received a demonstration of his post-windfall generous spirit firsthand.

  We were sitting in Lefebvre’s kitchen, looking out at the beach and the Pacific Ocean, sipping a turbo-charged mix of espresso and dark roast coffee. Beyond the crashing surf, a mud shark basked close to the surface. The surf was loud—Lefebvre estimated that on his fifty-foot-wide lot, any given wave deposited up to seventy tons of water in front of his kitchen window. This was the acoustic environment into which federal marshals some months previous had invited themselves.

  Lefebvre was curious about my last two decades and asked what I’d been up to all this time. I summed up my modest career arc, and he seemed most impressed when I told him I started working at and then edited an alternative newspaper in Toronto called Eye Weekly. I then showed him the fruits of my current vocation, the latest issues of the Ryerson Review of Journalism. My final-year students at Ryerson University in Toronto produced two ninety-six-page glossy consumer magazines every year, with the help of instructors and consultants. The magazine, which had been around for decades, aimed to be a “watchdog on the watchdogs,” founding publisher Don Obe’s goal, and reviewed current issues in Canadian journalism. Lefebvre flipped through, noticed some pages of advertising, and asked if it made money. I told him it did, but not enough to break even. In fact, the two issues lost about $30,000 every year, give or take.

  “I can get behind that!”

  “You should read them first, shouldn’t you?”

  “Well, I will, but I don’t have to. You say it’s a good thing, and that’s good enough for me. The quality will vary from year to year depending on the quality of students, right? So I’m not going to base my decision on this particular year but the whole concept.”

  Later, when writing the Review a check for $25,000, he said, “You think I’m showing off, don’t you?”

  I told him no, not especially—not when he’d made as much money as he had. The way I imagined it was, there must have been a moment when he realized he had a bird’s eye view of the world, and felt disembodied. So vast had the scale of his means changed that he was no longer distracted by the quotidian. He began to see beyond things others could not possibly get past, and got above the financial banalities that haunt most of us. That moment for him occurred about three or four months before Neteller went public, when he was sent $1.4 million in cash: “That was pretty much it.”

  No, I wasn’t concerned about Lefebvre showing off. I was concerned about my potential conflict of interest: journalist guy flies down to L.A. to talk to an o
ld acquaintance from his university days, hangs out for a couple of days, receives $25,000 made out to non-profit magazine he supervises, then writes a story about the donor’s plight for another magazine … bad optics or what?

  And there was a feeling gnawing away that money polluted relationships and colored everything. I remember what Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald had to say about the rich being different, and yes, there had to be a universe of difference between us. But of course there had to be something in it for Lefebvre, too—otherwise why would he bother to spend the money to put me up for a couple of days and talk openly about his life? We sideswiped this delicate negotiation when he said it was okay to discuss his troubles with the law. He just wanted to get his version of the Neteller story out there, and contained within that story would be another story about all the good he was doing with his money. It was something, but it didn’t make the conflict go away.

  Indeed, when I returned to Toronto, I told Paul Knox, chair of Ryerson’s School of Journalism, Lefebvre’s incredible rise-and-fall story. He listened intently. The next day, he phoned me at home and confirmed my queasy feeling. He told me he could see that Lefebvre’s $25,000 donation was genuine and free of strings, since I was his friend and he had explicitly warned me, “Don’t let this affect what you write about me.” But still, for him it didn’t really pass the “smell test.”

  The entire issue was fraught with perceptual problems any way you held the lava-hot potato, even though it was obvious the Review really needed the money. The conflict continued to haunt me—Was I being played?—as I wrote the first draft of the my Swerve magazine feature.

  Then the decision was taken away from me. It was against Ryerson policy to accept money from someone in trouble with the law, no matter how well intended, generous, and genuine the offer. So I wouldn’t have to wriggle around in ethical quicksand after all. (It would have been a futile exercise anyway.) Instead, I was free to think of Lefebvre’s impulsive (or calculated?), generous (or looking to buy me off?) gesture on that Thursday morning as a routine demonstration of the kind of guy he was.

  When Lefebvre found out Ryerson had declined to accept his money, another side of his personality came out. He did not take the rejection well. He threw his toys out of the sandbox. He became apoplectic, went nuclear as they say. And maybe with good reason: he could not understand the university’s pusillanimous concern for optics. He thought whoever the “they” was at Ryerson responsible for the decision a cowardly bunch of weasels. He was a Canadian citizen in good standing, and he wanted to help—what was the problem? Worse, the returned money was accompanied with what he considered an insulting, condescending letter, which infuriated him even more. He left a voicemail on my land line: “Bill! John Lefebvre. Isn’t my fuckin’ money good enough for those cats at Ryerson? The University of Calgary thinks my fuckin’ money’s good enough. The Suzuki Foundation thinks my fuckin’ money’s good enough. The CIBC thinks my fuckin’ money’s good enough. What’s their fuckin’ problem?”

  My initial thought was Hmm, has Justine heard this message yet?

  But then, I had to wonder why I thought I needed to protect her from foul language—she’d heard it all in the schoolyard a thousand times already. And anyway, it was all for naught. Sometime after this incident, Lefebvre met my daughter and taught her and her friend Sarah a dirty nursery rhyme. In as deep a baritone as possible for an eleven-year-old girl, preferably marching while belting it out, my daughter sang: “Arsehole, arsehole, a soldier I shall be / Too pissed, too pissed, two pistols on my knee / Fuck you, fuck you, for curiosity / I’ll fight for the old cunt, fight for the old cunt, fight for the old country.”

  Lefebvre taught her and her pal that ditty in about two minutes flat, and then he had them sing it into his iPod recording device and listen back to it on his high-end stereo at top decibel level.

  Lefebvre has always made a charming first impression on young people, who instantly catch the idealism and the child inside him, and respond immediately. He laughed about the off-color song and said, “You have to teach it to them now, Bill, before they’re twelve. Otherwise you’ve lost the window when it’ll be funny to them.”

  So, yes, I preferred to think Lefebvre’s gesture to hand over $25,000 to a magazine that critiqued the practice of journalism in Canada was impulsive and generous. I preferred to think that for him it seemed like a perfectly acceptable way to spend twenty-five grand, and was a routine demonstration of the kind of guy he was. He always got excited when talking about the things his money could do, and he liked to think he really could change the world for the better.

  C’mon, what else would you do with $150 million except help people and do some good?

  XI (2006–07)

  Omens

  Michael Lipton, a Toronto lawyer who specializes in gambling law, agreed to see me in his Bay Street office, on the twenty-second floor, to dicuss Neteller, Lawrence and Lefebvre, and the legal climate online gambling was facing. He gave me a mouthful about the DOJ’s aggressiveness regarding online gambling all the way back to its infancy in 1997. He summed it up this way: “The DOJ has a really clear record in which it has said, ‘We think internet gaming is illegal. It’s illegal in all forms—sports betting, casino-style games, poker.’” Lipton said the DOJ will prosecute even if state laws aren’t broken. “We don’t recognize those laws” was its rejoinder.

  The DOJ had been acting aggressively against online gambling well before the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) came into effect in October 2006. On July 17 of that year, a federal grand jury, through the Eastern District of Missouri, announced a multiple account indictment against BetonSports PLC founder Gary Kaplan, BetonSports.com CEO David Carruthers, and nine others associated with the U.K.-based firm. Three years earlier, it had used the 1961 Wire Act and money laundering statutes to chase down William Paul Scott of WorldWide Telesports Inc., based in Antigua, and ordered a $6,976,924 civil forfeiture. That was the same year PayPal and its owner, eBay, forfeited $10 million in a civil suit. And two years before that, in 2001, Jay Cohen had been arrested even though his company, WSEX, was based in Antigua. The DOJ didn’t care. It said most of its customers were U.S.-based, so this was a U.S. business as well as an Antiguan business, and it charged him under the Wire Act. Cohen was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison.

  And there were other, passive players. Many major banks, such as the aforementioned Citibank and Chase Manhattan, and major credit card companies, such as Visa and MasterCard, accepted transactions from American customers directed toward offshore gambling casinos. The feeling was: if I sit in Cleveland and wager money at an online casino in Antigua, I’m gambling in Antigua, not in the U.S. This apparent loophole, which of course was not explicitly covered in existing gambling legislation, the Wire Act, allowed these large businesses to look the other way and accept the processing fee revenue, which would have been somewhere in the one-to-two-percent range. But the DOJ was moving to close that aperture.

  Through this time, Neteller Inc. developed a strategy to rechristen the company Neteller PLC and relocate the business to the Isle of Man as of October 1, 2003, as Company Acts registered number 109535C, a private company limited by shares. Three months later, on January 1, 2004, Neteller Ltd. began carrying on business as a public limited company. This was advance preparation for a “Placing of 17,500,000 Ordinary Shares of 0.01 pence each of the Company at a price of 200 pence per share and Admission to trading on the Alternative Investment Market,” one of the subtitles of the final prospectus document that was issued April 8, 2004. The public offering of 15,000,000 shares (2,500,000 additional shares were for the principals) was set to go live on April 14, 2004, and ownership of the new concern was divided into two camps, the Corvina group (Lawrence, Lefebvre, and Natland, the original trio), with 69.35 percent, and the Alberta group (Choy, Edmunds, Glavine, and Ramsay), with 26.07 percent. Three months later, the changeover became offic
ial. On April 1, 2004, Neteller Ltd. was officially re-registered as Neteller PLC and started trading publicly on AIM.

  Investors decided the risk was manageable. Neteller’s stock grew like dandelions in a pesticide-free park, reaching—at its zenith in 2006—about £9 per share. By the time UIGEA was signed into law, October 13, 2006, Neteller’s market capitalization was over $3 billion. The new law was designed to shut down access to these seemingly untouchable offshore businesses. Through international treaties with various departments of justice, the DOJ was given official status to move on companies and directors of companies it perceived to be breaking U.S. laws, whether or not those companies were actually located in the U.S.—not that it hadn’t been doing so already, but the new law gave it more ammunition.

  The gambling bill was tucked at the tail end, pages 213–244, of a much larger Homeland Security bill focusing on mariner safety, something called the “Security and Accountability for Every Port Act of 2006,” or SAFE Port Act. The bill was passed during the waning days of the Republican Party’s hold on the House of Representatives in the U.S. Congress, just prior to the 2006 midterm elections, the results of which snuffed out the GOP’s House majority. The new legislation targeted electronic wallet companies that focused on the gambling business, but it wasn’t what ultimately tripped up Lefebvre. That aggression came out of New York.

  • • •

  University of Calgary Dean Ann Calvert and Lefebvre regularly talked on the phone about how best to use his generous donation to the Faculty of Arts at U of C. In the fall of 2006, she took one such call from him. He sounded worried, which was out of character, and it was the first time he had ever alluded to Neteller in a negative way. “He wasn’t specific,” she says. “‘It’s kind of weird in the States right now,’ was all he said, and ‘I might not be spending a lot of time down there.’”