Meranda drives an oversized four-wheel-drive Honda Quicksilver, a leftover from the Out of Bounds trekking business they started after Matteo was let go from Neteller. The Alta is our first stop. Dubbed “Costa Rica’s Ultimate Getaway,” it was, Meranda says, the happening spot in 2003–04, around the time John and Cecilia got married. It is a well-designed hotel in the colonial style. Inside the front door, at reception, the stairs wend their way down and straight, down and straight, down and straight, like a descending corridor imported from a de Chirico canvas. The hotel allows art to be hung along this lengthy portal. At the end are the sumptuously appointed restaurant and the outdoor pool. The amorous, pre-bickering couple were married in the portico on the top floor, the penthouse suite. San José is nestled in the Central Valley, so the view from this balcony is expansive. About eighty wedding guests somehow crammed into this confined space.
Later, Meranda shows me pictures of the ceremony. She points to one photo in particular that has haunted her to this day, shot just as the couple took their vows. Cecilia looks to be crossing her fingers. Meranda has never had the nerve to show the photo to Lefebvre.
Other pictures show various people at the early stages of the Neteller Costa Rica operation. There’s a woman Meranda calls a “whacko” with a “crush on John. He probably doesn’t want to remember her.” There’s a picture of Perle, Steve’s wife, and John, looking happy. There’s a picture of Randall, who turned out to be a crucial early connection.
Meranda recalls, “When we came to San José we had contacts, but Randall was the first guy who came to John’s and my hotel and took us out, showed us around the town, set up phone lines. He worked for Instant Action Sports, a gaming company in town. Because he was my merchant contact, we started a friendship. We had parties all the time. He was the biggest guy and he had the tiniest white car. He would somehow shove us all in and take us all around, never charge money. He was just really happy.”
There’s a picture of Ingrid and Jessica. Meranda says, “Jessica was one of the first local hires. She was my assistant, and worked till the end. Everybody got laid off but her, until we moved the office into my house. Then I got her a job with the sports book people.”
Jessica begged for a cleaning gig back at the party house. Meranda told her Canadians don’t need that kind of help but caved when she said, “Look, my husband’s an asshole. All I want is a pack of cigarettes and not have to ask my husband for the money. So can I just come and work one day a week and you can pay me ten dollars?” One day became two. Then she started doing the cooking and the laundry. “And Ingrid worked with Cecilia and John, in their homes, and took care of them for a long time. Then Ingrid became close friends with Cecilia’s mom. Those two know each other because they both married brothers.”
While the Calgary contingent had success finding the right kind of people to assist them with setting up the office, liaise with bookies, and develop a support staff, Meranda found the bureaucracy impossible: “John and I would go down to this shithole cop shop. You’re stepping in between piss and garbage to get immigration and fingerprints for your residency. Took two times to go through. Still not ready. ‘Oh no, we’re missing this, missing that.’ I left Canada with all my legal documents. I applied for residency even before I left. I had everything—my police record—I knew what I was getting into. I canceled my RSPs. That was the one responsible thing I did when I was eighteen years old, but I had to cancel them. And then I had to pay taxes. Matt said screw it, we’re just going to get married, and I’m going to get my residency somehow.”
Meranda became, along with John, the legal signee for the company. All the phone lines were in her name as well. She still has the Neteller fax line. “It’s under a business name and I can’t change it because I need John here with me to change it. I had to close down the company bank account because he was gone, which was a hard process. I swear—John still has money in his Banco de Nacional account. I don’t think there’d be a million but definitely there was money. When he left, he left.”
A rumor persists that the balance on one of John’s ATM receipts read $400,000,000. Sounds like an exaggeration, but in those days, who could tell what was real and what wasn’t?
Meranda says,
Maybe when he had all those shares. But would he have all that money in Costa Rica? Maybe he had four hundred million colones, because that’s nothing ($800,000). That’s a huge joke here—“Hey, how many millions in colones for that?
Oh yeah, John had a big wad of paper. Anytime you go anywhere, John was holding this [Meranda holds her thumb and index finger to demonstrate a fat wad of bills]. That’s why he needed his man purse, for all his bloody cash.
Meranda’s starting wage at the Calgary Neteller office was eleven dollars an hour, and her salary went up from there, based on increased responsibilities. “It stayed at $5,000 a month for four years. I didn’t get a raise.”
When John took off for Malibu, Rob Eltom, who had been in Costa Rica almost as long as Meranda, eventually took over as her boss. “John was my man I went to for everything—always. I didn’t even go to Steve half the time unless I had to do something with a check.”
Meranda remained at Neteller until early 2007. Eventually she was bumped up to corporate training manager, which required her to travel in the Caribbean to places such as Curaçao, in the Netherlands Antilles, Antigua, and Panama. “We had a training manual,” she says. “I went to sports books we already had accounts with and trained the people on Neteller, the ones that were talking to clients on the phone and via email.” She would show clients how to deposit and transfer funds in and out of Neteller, say, or she would explain the fees that were associated with the transfers, deposits, and withdrawals, or she might explain how long the process normally lasted, or she might explain what InstaCash was, how it worked, and the various games and prizes associated with it. The hope was Neteller’s partners would have enough information to speak knowledgeably and tell their clients what Neteller was all about. For this work she was paid $5,000 a month plus travel expenses, which she paid up front and then filed receipts for reimbursement. “I didn’t sign contracts with the owners/managers,” she says. “That was the ‘R’ team.”
The R Team consisted of three guys whose first name started with the letter R: Rob Eltom, Rodney Thompson, and Ryan Lang. They were the young dudes getting contracts signed over drinks. Mission accomplished, they’d check out a nice restaurant and then stop by a place like the Irazú Casino to play a few hands. They went to the infamous Del Rey only when asked for business reasons. Ideally, they’d rather hang outside of downtown San José, which was a bit sleazy, and possibly a bit dangerous. After the Neteller bust, Ryan left the company and went on to become a U.S. payment processor for offshore betting mega-companies such as Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, and PokerStars—companies that grew into the U.S. market post-Neteller and more or less owned that market until 2011. Ryan and three other payment processors were caught in a DOJ dragnet code-named “Black Friday” and arrested. About a year later, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara for the Southern District of New York was happy to announce that Ryan had opted to return to Manhattan to enter a guilty plea for fraud, money laundering, and gambling offenses “in connection with a scheme to deceive banks into processing hundreds of millions of dollars in gambling transactions.” Ryan was looking at thirty years.
Meranda’s final days with Neteller were spent working out of her house. Bob Edmunds and Gordon Herman wanted to shut down the San José office but keep her on. They kicked some expense money her way to set up a home office. Meranda took the offer but then found—as many do—that she worked harder when work was home. Before Rob took over John’s responsibilities, Meranda says they hired a guy named Bruce, who was unfamiliar with Neteller’s informal work-hard, play-hard, no-bullshit ethos. He acted like a typical Canadian bureaucratic boss, concerned with displaying power over his employees. Bruce didn’t realize he w
as supposed to get out of the way and let them do their jobs. He assigned Meranda tasks and reports that had nothing to do with improving the company’s fortunes. As she put it, “He made me waste time doing silly stuff that wasn’t really needed.” It made her miserable.
John was clearly the guy who stirred the drink in Costa Rica, but then he met Cecilia, and, after a torrid start, the relationship seemed to develop a kind of evanescence as it formalized. And so, yes, John fled to Malibu, leaving Meranda behind with Matteo and working for Rob. As for Cecilia, she wasn’t going anywhere. This was her home, which was our next stop.
Cecilia’s compound is located in a subdivision called Trejos Montealegre, outside San José. When people give directions, there are no formal addresses. Go past the intersection, you know, the one with the store on the corner—you’ll see it—then turn right. Watch out for that tree, yeah, that one, jutting into the road. You can’t miss it, they’ve painted the trunk white. After you steer around it, go another hundred yards or so, hang a left down that street, then turn left on that street and there, see, that’s Cecilia’s place.
And when you make that first left, take a look out the passenger side. Notice the garbage strewn across the dirt shoulder, half burned. People just pile stuff up and light bonfires: TVs, computers, paper, plastic—you name it, they burn it. Even people living in million-dollar homes can’t be bothered to recycle. They won’t believe you if you tell them computers are filled with toxins. Future generations, they’ve never heard of it.
John had a story about that. There was a bridge nearby. Underneath it, squatters eked out an existence and threw their garbage out onto the street. He suggested to Cecilia that they could pay the kids to clean things up, give them part-time work, pay them by the bag and clean up the neighborhood. Cecilia told him he was out of his mind. The kids wouldn’t pick up anything except bags from down the street and charge him for them. John wasn’t going to fight that logic.
Matteo may be of Italian descent, but he’s also a Tico and a father, and he cares enough about the pollution to become a pest to police. He phones them every time he sees a plume of smoke: “Do you know my daughter has asthma? Get them to stop!”
“Ah, Matteo, how are you?” He’s on a first-name basis with the cops. “Don’t worry, we’ve sent someone to go snuff out the fire.” First rule of law enforcement: placate.
The fire continues to burn. Matteo goes out to inspect. Liars. They let the entire area burn, along with all the toxic plastic junk. Recycling in San José is a work in progress.
Meranda and I drive toward Cecilia’s place in the big van. Meranda is visibly nervous. “I don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s been a long time.” John and Cecilia and Meranda and Matteo, they were buds back in the day. They used to hang out together—a lot. Then J and C broke up, and it was devastating. M & M worked for J and knew J first. Battle lines, however reluctantly on M’s part, had to be drawn. It wasn’t that M didn’t want to see C. They always got along. But M was still at Neteller, so it was awkward.
The point is, Meranda hasn’t seen Cecilia in years. She’s bumped into her on the street a couple of times, said hi, but that’s it. Understandably, she’s a little scared of the reaction she might get from her erstwhile pal. She rings the doorbell. The gardener notices us and comes over. He asks what we want. Meranda answers in Spanish. We want to see Cecilia, if possible, por favor. He leaves. A cleaning lady comes to the door. She asks what we want. We want to see Cecilia, if possible, por favor. She goes away. Another cleaning lady comes to the door. She asks what we want. We want to see Cecilia, if possible, por favor. Meranda apologizes again for the unannounced intrusion. No problemo if we can’t see her, we were just in the neighborhood.
We wait. I recall John’s vexation at having to wait three hours for Cecilia one night after they had agreed to go out to dinner. We could be here a while.
But no, I’m wrong. After about ten minutes, Cecilia makes her appearance. She walks slowly toward us. She comes to the gate. We peer at her and she peers at us. The gate separates us. She is not going to open the gate for her dear old friend Meranda; this is the implication. She remains ensconced behind black wrought iron, protected from us, from the world. She looks as if she has isolated herself, as if she has come down from self-imposed exile in the bell tower because an unexpected visitor has come to her self-designed prison. Even though it is perhaps not quite visiting hours, she wants to see who it is who dares to disturb her peace. She is lithe, maybe even wiry. Cougar-like, yes, although out of cougar range now, probably in her mid- to late sixties but looking like she would prefer to remain forty despite the wrinkles. She wears a dark shirt and dark trousers to greet the intruders.
After John and Cecilia broke up, a mean-spirited rumor circulated that she’d started dating a KFC executive but dumped him because he wouldn’t bring home any chicken. When he explained he was on the business side of the operation, not the cooking side, she didn’t or preferred not to understand—a real tica, they called her.
“She’s let herself go since they broke up,” Meranda says later. “Cecilia use to doll herself up in a witchy way.” In her wedding photo, she has rich brown hair, whereas the woman standing in front of us maintains her hair at a considerable length but its color is now many shades of gray.
Cecilia won’t look at Meranda, which is meant to be a cut. Meranda feels bad. No warning—we came to her door. What did we expect? Meranda apologizes for the visit but wants to say hi and introduces me as someone who is writing a book about John and would like to speak to her. Planning ahead, I thought it would be a good idea not to ask permission to talk to her about her relationship with John (what I really want to talk about), but instead mention Punto de Vista, the place her son David Konwiser redesigned from the original plans John and Cecilia drew up. This tactic, based on the theory that if you want to soften someone up you should talk about what they want to talk about first, turns out to be exactly the wrong one. It gives Cecilia an out. She thanks me for the compliment but says, “John had nothing to do with the project,” and legally she doesn’t want to say anything. Meaning if she talks and I write something down she could be implicated in the Neteller bust—obviously there’s a fear of losing what she has. I’m shut down.
I stand here before the mysterious, beautifully desiccated lady named Cecilia and, like a moronic stone statue, do not snap off a picture. What is she going to do, reach out and grab my camera? She’s behind bars. Take a shot, dummy. Then again, hers is an image not easily forgotten—shrew-like, a paranoid Marianne Faithfull as rich exile.
Oh well, do not cry for Cecilia. John gave her the cars, his stake in the houses, plus he bought her another house next door. Musicians are moving in, John, they’re going to be so noisy, please, help me. Okay, okay, here’s another house. So Cecilia came out of it with something like three houses up front, plus the one in the back where all the Neteller employees partied and slept—plus the resort. John reportedly pacified her further with something between $1.3 million and $3 million, depending on who’s talking. John is not, but he won’t deny it, either.
Meranda is upset with herself for not giving Cecilia any advance warning. But if she had, I doubt we would have ever gotten as far as we did. Meranda tells me later she considers herself a spiritual being. She believes in reincarnation. She is convinced we all have a purpose on the planet and that, further, everything happens for a reason. This episode of her life, it would seem, must be cataloged under that latter, ineffable category.
• • •
“There’s another hangout,” says Meranda, pointing to a corner building, an L-shaped one-and-a-half-story structure with two yellow awnings announcing El Fogoncito, where John used to bring the gang to wolf beers and scarf tacos. As we head downtown, Meranda tells me that when John set up shop in Costa Rica in the spring of 2002, he was given endless bureaucratic grief from the locals. She remembers the precarious but c
omedic way in which employees were paid.
“John, it’s Friday. Payday, time to cough up.”
John would say sure and cut her a check. She’d go down to the bank, and they’d refuse to honor it. She’d phone back. “John, you have to come down here in person. They won’t cash the check.”
Off John would go, down to the Banco Nacional, to show the clerk his identification and Neteller papers. He would demonstrate and write his signature.
“No, it’s not the same.”
“Yes, it is. I’m the guy.”
“No, it’s not exactly the same. There’s a little curlicue that’s different right there.”
“Okay, look, here’s my checkbook. Here I am, writing out a check. You know who I am. You see my identification.”
“No sir, your signature. It’s still not identical.”
As we drive by the new soccer stadium, the one with no parking, Meranda tells me about the Chinese commitment to Costa Rica. Investors had built living quarters/dorms for Chinese workers while they were here to build the stadium, the intention being to donate the barracks and convert them to apartments for the poor once the workers headed home. Meranda says, “We’ll see.”
We look at the stadium. Meranda says its crown looks like Liberty’s in New York Harbor, except wider. She says, “I keep telling Matteo we should buy a parcel of land across from the stadium and build a parking garage. We’d be the only game in town.”
Life Real Loud Page 34