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

Once he got back to school, Lefebvre sold drugs occasionally. He was careful to sell only to people he knew. He wasn’t really out to make money. “I wasn’t above selling dope,” he says, “but it was to make free dope. You know, buy a couple of pounds and end up owning four ounces. That would be perfect. There was blond Lebanese and really stinky Afghani brown. That stuff was more like rubber, really great hash, off the end of a cigarette.”

Some didn’t like mixing hash smoke with tar and nicotine from cigarettes, so hot-knifing became the way to go. Instead of inhaling directly, they would use a pop bottle with the bottom removed. The larger opening would capture the sudden burst of smoke from the knives. “That was durding.” The origin of the word durd is murky, but Lefebvre thinks it might have been an on-campus student group, the ski club: “Guys would take two hot knives out and there was this explosion of four-hundred-degree smoke. It was like running through a house burning down, sucking back the air. You’d cough and everybody would laugh. We’d get so fucked up, drunk and smoking so much hash we just didn’t know what we were doing. It was brilliant. I watched guys hot-knifing their own lip. I never did do that. I’m surprised we’re still alive.”

Meanwhile, Lefebvre’s marriage to Pridham was on life support: “You want to be decent, but there’s a certain fundamental basic enthusiasm for spreading our genes far and wide that sometimes more than other times is difficult to rein in.”

The next September, Lefebvre entered his first full academic year. He volunteered to be on the executive of two campus organizations, one of which was the English Society. Lefebvre loved words and always had a thing for the Bard, even while unabashedly admitting to a fondness for puns, the so-called lowest form of humor. “Oh, I’m terrible,” he says, laughing about his lifelong infatuation. At U of C he fell under the spell of James Black, an Elizabethan scholar: “Jim is one of the most intuitively great Shakespeare teachers of all time — not that I’m qualified to say that — but he’s a guy who brings a spectacular knowledge of the King James Bible and all the current literature of the time.”

Lefebvre took but one class with Black but was so beguiled that, many years later, after making millions with Neteller, he came up with an idea he thought might work alongside the extravagant donation he was already giving to the U of C Faculty of Arts in 2005: “Jim was a great reader. When I gave that gift to the faculty, he’d retired but was invited to the ceremony as a special guest. I got chatting with him and came up with this idea of him giving free ninety-minute Shakespeare lectures.” Over three years Black gave thirty-seven free lectures to the public. Lefebvre spent extra cash to film the proceedings so the lectures would be available in perpetuity on DVD.

Black influenced, or echoed, Lefebvre’s thinking in another way. A high school dropout originally from England, he’d worked in the oil patch as a young man. He began to notice university students seemed to get the better jobs. He wondered about that and visited the University of Alberta, where a student counselor talked up English literature to him. Black and Lefebvre were of similar temperament. Black thought, Wait a minute — I go to school, read books, and get a good summer job? I’m in. In his senior years, he began to wonder whether the same formula couldn’t apply to graduate school, doing his doctorate and becoming a professor. It could, except in the summer he could keep reading and writing.

Another professor made a lasting impression on Lefebvre. Political scientist Tom Flanagan was director of policy research for the right-wing populist Reform Party of Canada from 1991 to 1993. He influenced the current incarnation of Canada’s Conservative Party, now the elected governing party as well as the party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who attended U of C.

Lefebvre says, “Tom is strident in his free enterprise views — he studied Milton Friedman. Governments shouldn’t pay for lighthouses; people who sail boats and make money from boats should pay for lighthouses. I didn’t buy all of it, but it was good to hear. It became evident that a lot of my friends who might be thought of as pink were actually impractical and hadn’t thought anything through. It was emotional, not economic thinking.”

Joining a second campus organization had a far-reaching effect for Lefebvre. As a member of the quasi-judicial body called the Review Board, he learned and helped to interpret and enforce the laws of the student union. In the winter term of his second full year, 1978, he decided to parlay this knowledge into a run for office. Not just any office — president.

Lefebvre began his quest for the presidency of the student union by casting himself as an outsider. He had to use this tactic because he had never been on student council. At one forum he tried to assure the crowd he wasn’t a normal politician because he was “too used to telling the truth.” He wouldn’t shower students with promises he couldn’t keep because, after all, the student union president “isn’t a powerful position.” All he would promise was to work hard and provide strong representation. At another forum he thanked his audience for their interest in student politics and cautioned them that the crucial issue was who would be the next president. “Watch us all closely,” he said. “If you vote potluck, you’ll get potluck representation.”

It was a three-way contest. The other two prominent candidates were both stronger on paper, but neither clicked enough with the student body to run away with it. Lefebvre looked sincere and handsome, his shag haircut and bushy sideburns framing his strong eyes and slight chin cleft. His checked shirt and blue jeans made him look authentic and believable. He was older than most students yet boyish, and he had an aura of calm about him, projecting a wise, easygoing authority. No doubt his personality was infectious, and some people got a contact high from being in his presence. His charisma ultimately overcame the lack of bona fides, and the voting broke his way. He squeaked through the middle — the vote totals of the top three candidates went 824/716/670. The outgoing president called it a “stunning victory” and batted away the Gauntlet student newspaper’s admonishing headline, “Winners lack experience,” saying the new executive would do “an admirable job.” Interviewed by the Gauntlet after the election, and asked to provide a thumbnail sketch of himself, Lefebvre replied: “One foot in the church and one foot in the gutter, a Bible in one hand and a joint in the other.”

Lefebvre wasn’t the only student with joints on the brain. When Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau visited the University of Calgary in 1979, Lefebvre as student president walked across campus with him. There are pictures of them shaking hands and walking, and Trudeau spoke to U of C students in a forum setting. The first question asked was, “Have you ever smoked dope?” Trudeau’s reply was, “Never in Canada.”

It is difficult to overstate the importance of this student election victory for Lefebvre’s subsequent life. He was a one-term president, choosing not to run again, yet many union friends have stuck by him for life. He met John Hind, elected to the programming commission, who became his accountant. He met Bruce Ramsay, another untested politician, the former president of the campus ski club, who was elected vice president, services. Ramsay was elected president the following year, succeeding Lefebvre, and has invested in several of Lefebvre’s schemes over the years. Lefebvre also met Jeff Proudfoot, one of the few incumbents to survive the election, who was elected vice president, finance. Ramsay and Proudfoot have been two of Lefebvre’s closest pals for decades. To this day they arrange annual motorcycle trips to different parts of the country. “John, Bruce Ramsay, and I used to go hiking in the mountains a lot,” says Proudfoot. “One time we were doing the Burgess Shale in BC, and when we got to the top we had a glass of scotch and a joint and John said, ‘Boys, this is life real loud.’”