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

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.

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 .”