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

“Only thing I know is bail hasn’t come through,” the guard continues. “Only thing I know is what comes to my desk. No money, no document.”

Lefebvre’s being transferred to another facility, but he’s not sure which one. Finally, they tell him, “You’re going to New York by way of Oklahoma City. You need to be in New York next week.”

Lefebvre is crestfallen. Will anyone even fucking know he’s being put on Con Air to Oklahoma City? Will this new place be even worse, with even bigger pricks? How will Vince ever find him, for fuck’s sake? Shit, will they even tell him what’s going on?

The guards suit everyone up in shackles and leg irons. For each already handcuffed prisoner, the chain attached to the foot shackles is methodically pulled up and wrapped around the chest. This cannot be good. The guards tell everyone to just sit tight and wait. At eight o’clock they start loading a bunch of guys, including Lefebvre, onto a bus. Oh man, this cannot be happening. There are about twenty prisoners shuffled up onto the bus, three of them are women. The bus is not full but feels crowded because there are bars separating each of the seats. The prisoners are driven to the municipal airport. When they arrive, the bus sits on the tarmac. They sit in shackles and wait. Lefebvre looks out the window and sees other prisoners in other buses arriving on the tarmac. They’re being transferred from other detention centers, district jails, and city jails. It’s a prisoner-transfer-bus reunion. He sees about 240 people — mostly guys, maybe fifteen or twenty women — incarcerated humans every one of them, charged with some crime and heading for a date with a judge somewhere in the United States, all in shackles and leg irons in the middle of the high desert. They’re all waiting.

Now it’s around one o’clock in the afternoon. Eight hours into day four, and Lefebvre is sitting on a tarmac. Still no one’s been granted permission to use the toilet. The word searing into his mind right now is grotesque .

Finally, the marshals begin the laborious process of loading each shackled prisoner onto Con Air. Once they’re all on they meet their flight attendant, who is one tough-looking lady. She starts her routine from the middle of the plane. She yells into her mic. There will be a bag lunch! This is how the urinal is going to work! Pay attention! One at a time! In order! Up to the washroom and back! Next prisoner! If for whatever reason there is an emergency, just stay calm!

A plane full of shackled people , Lefebvre thinks, Oh help me please, please, let there be no emergency. Right there, on the spot, he almost reconverts to Catholicism. Almost.

At least there is comic relief. Lefebvre spots a guy wearing a Halloween mask. That is to say, his head is one big skull tattoo: the cranium with all the different bones, the nose holes, the teeth marks — the works. Lefebvre examines the man’s full head tattoo carefully, wondering if the guy’s saying to himself, “Fuck was I on last night?!” No question, it takes a while to get past a face like that, but eventually he stops noticing it. Lefebvre starts talking to him. Turns out he’s an okay dude. Acts like the skull tat is passé for him.

Marella arrives back at MDC L.A. in the afternoon. He’s got the document in hand. He’s got the money in hand. “I’m here for Lefebvre.”

“We got no Lefebvre here.”

“Well, where is he then?”

“We only know what we’re told so don’t ask us, ask the federal marshals.”

Marella starts to freak out. Holy shit, where is the guy?

The Hippie Lawyer

Lefebvre never finished his B.A. in English. He wrote the LSAT exam, was admitted to law school, and graduated in 1983. The short, glib version he sticks to is, “I’d knocked up Katharine; I needed a job,” yet he had in fact committed himself to law school before that. However many reservations Lefebvre had about the profession, finishing law school took on an outsized priority once a child was on the way. “I never wanted to be a lawyer — EVER,” he says, just to be clear. It is possible that the party after a grueling exam, in February 1980, is where he sealed his fate, as Emily was born on November 18 of that year. Louise Lefebvre was certainly happy. In a twelve-month stretch, she found herself with three grandchildren.

On the first day of law school, Mike Greene, another longhair, met Lefebvre. Or, more accurately, in two of his classes Greene encountered a force of nature that caused him to think, Who is this bombastic guy who wants to be noticed? They became lifelong buddies, and decades later, when Lefebvre decided he wanted to indulge in the pleasure of giving it all away, he tapped Greene for the board of the Lefebvre Foundation. Greene the law student had just come back from India wearing a beard, George Harrison — style. Lefebvre usually sat at the back and waited for the professor to solicit comments. He was never shy about offering his opinions, which were invariably entertaining and sometimes about the law.

First year was no joke for many students. There were sixty admitted, and the group became close-knit through the school year. Ten percent were axed, which affected everyone’s morale because they had all become friends through their shared struggle. The average age was twenty-nine, and they were an eclectic bunch, including a couple of Ph.D. students and some master’s students. The old adage — the first year they scare you to death, the second year they work you to death, the third year they bore you to death — was in effect. While they watched fellow students worry themselves sick, over-study, and end up sleep-deprived and performing poorly, Lefebvre and Greene weren’t about to let the intensity destroy them. “John and I both had a minimalist approach,” Greene says. “Life is short and we should enjoy it. Some were stressing out while we were playing Frisbee in the field beside the law school.” By third year they were playing an awful lot of disc.

Greene remembers his first major exam, in constitutional law and held in February. The course was demanding, and everyone was exhausted from studying. The test was held in the morning, and it was agreed that there would be a blowout party right afterward, at Lefebvre’s place, to celebrate. “By three o’clock half the party was asleep.” But not Lefebvre. “He and his wife Kathy went down and were using the pool table.” Later, up in the loft, Lefebvre played piano while another guy sang “Helpless.” Greene was quite moved and became a huge fan of Lefebvre’s musical ability.

There were other memorable moments. In articling class, the man who once saved a piece of Lefebvre’s teenaged bacon, Milt Harradence, now a judge at the Alberta Court of Appeal, came to speak. It’s just that Harradence, a man licensed to pack a concealed weapon, a lifelong redneck, and damn proud of it, didn’t come to talk about articles — he came to warn them about communists. He started ranting about certain political situations that by the early eighties needed jumper cables (Gorbachev, glasnost, and perestroika being only three years off).

Lefebvre remembers,

He posited that we had a responsibility as freedom-loving people to fight communism anywhere and in any way we could. There was some nervousness in the room when he said that but when question period came I rose to the occasion and asked, “Mr. Justice, you made some remarks earlier about communism.” He said, “Indeed I did.”

I said, “Does that include in the court of appeal?”

These guys that articled at the court of appeal, they’d heard a discussion between a couple of judges about a case before the courts where a couple of black guys were charged. I don’t exactly remember what the offense was; it wasn’t a sexual offense. Milt was heard to crack off in the background, “Hang the rapin’ niggers.” And then he turned around and looked at the guy I knew and said, “If I ever, ever hear this coming back to me it will be your career.” And then he carried on.