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

“Maybe we should wait till Milt’s dead to tell that one?” Lefebvre asks. Harradence died in 2008.

Greene shared a house with Lefebvre and Armitage near Holy Cross Hospital. He articled at the court of appeal then took a position at Burnett, Duckworth & Palmer, a large corporate outfit. It was a mistake. “The economy tanked so there were a lot of realizations and bankruptcies. The litigation was people trying to collect money or people trying not to pay money because they didn’t have it anymore. That’s how my litigation career was developing, and it was a killer. I thought, ‘What have I done with my life?’”

Greene later came into contact with Sheldon Chumir — a lawyer and human rights lecturer at U of C, and, later, that rarity, a successful provincial Liberal MLA in Alberta, who became a mentor. Under Chumir’s direction, he moved into civil liberties and would eventually find his true calling in immigration law. But at this point, 1984–85, he was so disillusioned he postponed his career and traveled for a year.

In the summer of 1983, Lefebvre was called to the Bar. He’d made it through the exams, and the next step was, well, was he of sufficiently good character to be called? He walked into a hearing of the Discipline Committee of the Law Society, strode toward the principal, Robert Boyden, and held out his hand. It was refused. Boyden believed he needed to maintain an impartial posture. Uh-oh. The chair said that while this was “an informal hearing,” he hoped Lefebvre had brought counsel with him. Lefebvre started freaking out. A discussion of the candidate’s work at the student union ensued.

After serving his term as student union president, the candidate had chosen to retain his position on the Review Board for a couple of years. Something was mentioned about drugs and character. But gentlemen, pot was ubiquitous — does anyone not remember the Beatles chortling “everybody smokes pot” way back when?

But hold on, Mr. Candidate, when was the last time you smoked pot? The Clintonian “I did not have sex with that woman” answer: “Back in my student union days, sir.” (Of course, that was only yesterday, when he was still officially on the Review Board, but no need for Boyden to hear that detail.) The 1969 trafficking beef was recalled. “But sir, that was 1969; this is 1983.” Tom Hayden participated in the 1968 Chicago riots, sir, and he is now serving in the California State Assembly. Then, an admission: “I am disclosing my propensity to run close to the edge.”

Minor ordeal over, Lefebvre was admitted to the Bar by the sober-minded and straight-laced Chief Justice Ken Moore, an old friend of his mother from her “dating days.” The party was held at Louise’s house in her Roxboro neighborhood. In Alberta, admission is often used as an occasion to roast the candidate, but Moore was far too serious for that.

Almost three years after Emily entered the world, Lefebvre’s marriage to Armitage imploded. They both found places in the Sunnyside neighborhood and committed themselves to sharing custody. Armitage found a three-bedroom apartment and a roomie, a woman named Janice Beaton, who later started an excellent coffeehouse in lower Mount Royal called Caffe Beano. Beaton was friends with the scion of a Belgian chocolate family, who himself went on to foodie fame with Chocolaterie Bernard Callebaut.

Lefebvre says,

Emily grew up in relatively yuppie circumstances. Her dad may have been a fringe-y guy for a yuppie. I didn’t go out and exercise at Heavens. I wasn’t so much a Club Med lawyer.

We went through a difficult time when we were breaking up. I’ll quote the judge at my careless driving trial—“Something went on here and it wasn’t all that elegant.” Every time Emily came over to my place we’d have great food and lie around on the floor and watch The Simpsons . Katharine had to be the bad cop.

Lefebvre, done with school and marriage again proving to be something beyond him, had his own worries. His marriage had produced Emily—“At least we got that right”—and he needed work. An articling position was available at McCaffery and Company, a firm that specialized in foreclosures, so he took it. Lefebvre was treated like a grunt. Older students weren’t ideal articling candidates, because they had minds of their own and weren’t so malleable. Firms liked young recruits, kids who’ve never lived outside their parents’ home, because they were easy to mold. Lefebvre had never liked anyone telling him what to do — ever — and he chafed. But he did his job, which was to act as a kind of bagman, delivering cases of scotch during the Christmas season, or the foreclosure orders, or the grant. Lefebvre would ask advice of Mike McCaffery, the foreclosure king in Alberta. It was a good time to be in foreclosures, as a recession began to hit Calgary hard by 1982. “Yeah, buying cases of whiskey for witnesses,” Lefebvre says. “I never met a meat packer who didn’t take the whiskey.”

“His hair was cut reasonably short at the time,” Greene recalls. “Johnny was doing his best to do the corporate lawyer shtick while he was in his articles and during the first couple of years. It fit him like a bad suit, but he did try. I remember seeing him wearing suits, and he did not look comfortable.”

One problem for the fledgling lawyer is that senior partners find ways to glue juniors to their ongoing files, essentially getting grunt work for free. During this stretch of servitude there is no time to develop clientele, and a junior might be forgiven for ridiculing the idea that he would ever make partner. Lefebvre got stuck with one such case. “Did John ever mention the pork producers trial?” asks Greene. “The combines investigations prosecution, one of the biggest the feds had ever done, accused pork producers of price-fixing. These poor junior lawyers would have to sit through this drudgery for months and months. It was mind-bendingly boring, the wreck of more than a few legal careers.”

The good news at McCaffery was Lefebvre met Geoff Savage, who would become another lifelong friend. After the Neteller geyser went off in 2004, Lefebvre needed people around him that he could trust, and he talked Savage into becoming the overseer of the empire. Savage was a couple of years younger but had graduated earlier and started at McCaffery in 1980. Lefebvre’s friends were generally younger because he had started university so late. Savage and Lefebvre immediately connected. They hung out after work, went cross-country skiing together, and hiked. For laughs they mountain-biked as fast as possible in pitch dark through Calgary’s Weaselhead trails. Two decades later, one of the ulterior reasons Savage had for suggesting to Lefebvre that they resettle on Salt Spring Island was he hoped it might rekindle their youthful mania for the outdoors — sailing, kayaking, riding mountain bikes.

Savage later moved to Wilson Laycraft and focused his practice on the winding down of companies — bankruptcies, insolvencies, receiverships — which generally meant working for the banks. It was complicated work, yet he’d always loved reading the fine print. Savage explains his work:

By the time a bank pulls the pin on a company, you’ve got every damn creditor imaginable doing everything they can and the principals of the company hiding assets hither and yon. Most people don’t understand that there is a lineup of priorities. You go to case management meetings and there’ll be twenty-five or thirty lawyers there and everyone is barking from their client’s position. I’d start by saying, “I don’t understand why twenty-seven of you guys are here.” Just be extremely rude. The next case meeting there would be five fewer lawyers. There’d be two or three more meetings. My client, the bank and government and one or two other players would be the only ones who would have anything to fight about. It’s tough to convince them to stop billing their clients and get out.