Bill Reynolds - Life Real Loud - John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

The guys at the detention centers at both ends were fair, but the federal marshals transporting us were mean and surly. They carried around sawed-off shotguns. I was thinking to myself, Jesus, can’t we just try to act civilized here? But then I thought better of saying anything.

Ahern interjects, “What we got here is failure to communicate,” mimicking a familiar line from Cool Hand Luke .

Lefebvre pulls into Ahern’s Malibu 1 driveway and drops him off. A homebody type, the producer wants his evening quiet time. Then Lefebvre swings the Sierra back down the street to Malibu 2. He paid $13 million for the second property, 25030 Malibu Road, at the beginning of 2006. He treated the premises to a million-dollar makeover, appointing the house with 290-year-old Mongolian rugs and enormous crossbeams in the ceiling, also centuries old, which were salvaged and imported from France. The main living area has a rustic, unpretentious look, almost like nothing was done to it — the exact intent.

The houses sit on a brief stretch, a few quiet miles, of Malibu coastline, southwest of Pepperdine College. The PCH shifts away from this exclusive enclave, northeast around the coastal mountains. On top of the ridge, high above Lefebvre’s comparatively modest abode, sits Cher’s compound. Malibu 2 has no tennis court or swimming pool to compare with Cher, but Lefebvre can shower outside on his rooftop and wave to the helicopter pilots, and he can walk out his side door, off the kitchen, and hang an immediate right into the sand and surf. His instinct is to invite the ageless pop star over for drinks—“I like Cher!”—but while he can compete with her on wealth, he cannot on celebrity wattage. He’s a little frightened of the chilly, even paranoid brush-off he might receive.

There is no highway traffic noise on this quiet stretch of Malibu Road, which is why the prices are the steepest of the steep. “All you hear in the morning,” says Lefebvre, “is the birds.” He thinks his house is now worth about $15 million, but he’s hoping it’ll sell for seventeen. More precisely, he hopes the U.S. government will sell off the seized property at the higher market value. Uncle Sam is nosing around, trying to grab a substantial portion of Lefebvre’s internet fortune. Given this near inevitability, he hopes to convince them to take assets he’s already paid for — ones he hopes will appreciate prior to sale — as opposed to reaching into his icebox for a cold, hard forty mil.

As we wheel into his driveway, Lefebvre punctuates his long anecdote about the day he got busted, “Did you know that in the old days they would put you on a bus and take you to the next county jail, and then the next county jail, and then the next, all the way along to New York? It would have been a month for sure, about sixty to a hundred miles a day.

“They used to say, ‘I’m goin’ for some diesel therapy.’”

On January 17, 2007, I read a business story at globeandmail.com about a Calgarian named John Lefebvre. He was arrested two days previous for alleged money laundering and racketeering through an internet company called Neteller PLC — a company he had cofounded and that was based in the Isle of Man. I wondered if the alleged perp might be the same John Lefebvre I knew back at the University of Calgary in the late seventies. As it turned out, it was. I emailed my friend Shelley Youngblut, editor of Swerve magazine, a weekly rotogravure included with the Calgary Herald .

“Shelley, you have to do a feature on this guy.”

“Could you do it?”

“No way. Term’s just started.”

Shelley figured she would have to let the business section of the Herald handle it. But other than news stories, the Herald left it alone.

A couple of months later, in March, I’d heard through the email grapevine that the guy who had been busted by the FBI was preparing to record an album of his own songs with high-priced session musicians. Surreal. Somehow, these two events — the bust in the immediate past and the sessions in the immediate future — had to be related. I remained skeptical, if not incredulous, about the scheduled sessions.

Still curious, in mid-May I emailed Lefebvre. I wondered if he might remember me from our U of C days. Lefebvre had been elected president of the student union in 1978–79, the year I was appointed program director of the university radio station, CJSW, which was funded by the union, so maybe. He emailed back: “Sure, I remember you.”

And is Al Kooper working on the album you’re recording?

“That’s right,” Lefebvre wrote. “I’m living the dream.”

Lefebvre has played piano and guitar for most of his life — he knows his tonic from his treble clef, his rubato from his staccato — but he’s obviously never recorded in a setting with the highest caliber of musicianship at his disposal. I thought it would be worth it to chronicle this rich man neophyte’s interaction with big-league pros.

I emailed Shelley again. “You have got to do this story: gambling, FBI, Calgarian, rock ’n’ roll — what more do you want?”

“You’re right — so you do it. Term’s almost over …”

This could be an offbeat but entertaining story, one in which the narrative would be driven by questions such as: Could the results of what looks like a grand ego trip be any good? Would the premium paid for access to the top echelon of Los Angeles musicianship be worth it? The sessions invariably seemed like an elaborate, expensive vanity project — what else could they possibly look like?

But Lefebvre, as I find out, rarely acknowledges doubt. He’s elated to have set himself up in style and to challenge himself to record the best-sounding music he can. He has been waiting for this moment his entire life, he says, and is determined to make it into something substantial. And it’s hard not to root for the guy. He has a great feel-good narrative going — the smart, good-natured, dope-smoking hippie who during the internet boom seizes an opportunity to escape the drudgery of lawyering and strikes it rich. Anyone can identify with this. The parallel arc — of the bust and its aftermath — is something people might have a harder time with, but it is no less compelling.

I tell Lefebvre I want to come down to L.A., hang out in the studio, watch him record, and catch up and talk about his legal difficulties. Lefebvre says no problem, but he’ll have to clear it with his veteran producer, Ahern, a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia. As a young man in 1970, Ahern had played on, recorded, and produced “Snowbird,” which overnight transformed a local raw talent named Anne Murray into a world-famous songbird. Ahern went on to record Emmylou Harris’s early solo LPs, and marry her.

Forty years into the business, Ahern prohibits hangers-on. Experience has convinced him that within an hour or two of being inside his studio, visitors start thinking they’re producers themselves. They can’t resist the temptation to tell Ahern what to do. I tell Lefebvre I’m too old to be starstruck by name musicians. Besides, I’ve been in a few no-name bands myself over the years, and I was a music critic for a quarter-century, so I know the truth: most musicians are just damned nice, funny people, with a few wanking wankers thrown into the mix to keep life from being dull. The other truth I know is that “nice” is not the first word that comes to mind with regard to producers: a good number of them are antisocial control freaks who believe your album is actually their album ( see Spector, Phil). Some will go so far as to write this control into their contracts.

A couple of weeks go by. I don’t receive word whether Ahern has given me clearance to enter the Village’s Studio D. Time is tight and flights are now expensive. I send one more email. Lefebvre replies: “Come on down. Any of Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, June 26–28, should work.”