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

I email to tell him that I’ll have to clear the cost with my editor, as flights are now getting prohibitive. He emails back right away: If it’ll make any difference, he’ll pay my way down. “Travel up front,” he writes. “I insist.”

I phone Lefebvre and tell him my editor might be concerned about my subject paying for a flight. He understands. I phone my editor, and we chat for a while. We don’t know what to do, since I now have a conflict of interest. Finally, my editor cracks, “Well, Bill, you’re the journalism professor.” We decide it’s okay as long as we tell the reader — as if that will absolve me. I book an executive class flight to LAX but a regular ticket back, and then I send Lefebvre the details. From his BlackBerry comes a one-word imperative: “Upgrade.”

So it’s a go. I tell him I’m not out to do a hatchet job. He had quite a story going even before the FBI started busting Neteller executives. But I have to talk to him about his arrest, his bail terms, and his conversations with the DOJ — at least the ones he can talk about. “I’m okay with that,” he says. “I just want to get my side of the story out there.”

So this is how I reconnect with my old acquaintance — flying business class from Toronto to LAX and then grabbing a cab, on my dime, up Interstate 405. From the back seat of the taxi, L.A. steams like paradise compromised. Mountains float mirage-like in the brown haze. Vehicles scurry up and down the highway in fits and starts, a semi-orderly procession of cockroaches on wheels. The Getty Museum has its exquisitely manicured gardens, but the surrounding L.A. hills are scrub-like and barren. This is, of course, a desert climate, dry as unbuttered toast. The cabbie exits on Santa Monica Boulevard, hangs a left on Butler Avenue, and voilà, my destination, the Village Recorder in West L.A., where I’ll be hanging out with a guy I haven’t seen since 1987.

The last time Lefebvre and I were together, back in September of that year, I’d bought him dinner at Chianti Café in Calgary. The restaurant served not-bad Italian cuisine, although today’s foodie snoots might object to that assessment. I especially remember the obscene-looking but tasty spaghetti and spicy meatballs — the plate featured noodles smothered in a rich tomato sauce and topped with two meatballs — just two — nearly the size of Indian rubber balls. This was the best fare I could offer. I was the editor of Vox magazine at the time, a monthly college radio guide with pretensions to arts magazine status, which had a press run of ten thousand copies and was distributed to 125 businesses in Calgary — clubs, record stores, bookstores, etc. The only contra deal we had at the magazine, negotiated by a former publisher, was with Chianti — four hundred bucks’ worth of food and drink every month in exchange for a full-page advertisement. In those days, that amount went a long way. I used the tab to reward student volunteers, the ones who had helped that month on the production and, especially, with the thankless task of delivering the magazine in the borrowed student union truck.

Lefebvre hadn’t done anything like delivering bundles of Vox to clubs and record stores downtown. He did community work of a different kind, having helped me in his professional capacity as a working lawyer. I’d met him at the Sunnyside Legal Clinic, which happened to be a couple of hundred yards from my rental house, and he listened to my tale of a recent student referendum gone bad. What had appeared to be a win was later overturned in a decision against the radio station. He devised a simple, but what he thought might be effective, plan to ensure that CJSW would win a pending appeal in front of the University of Calgary Review Board. He asked me whether the radio station could possibly afford to fly a man named David Carter — the Speaker of the Alberta Legislative Assembly at the time — down from the provincial capital, Edmonton, and put him up for one night in a half-decent hotel. I checked with our station manager. She agreed to cover the expense.

The problem specifically was with a referendum the previous March in the 1987 student elections. The referendum question asked University of Calgary students whether or not they would agree to pay an additional one dollar per student per term to offset increasing fixed costs at CJSW. For my part, I was hoping the additional dollar would also cover some cost overruns at Vox magazine (hence my personal investment in the decision). What happened was this: CJSW, which had already been guaranteed two dollars per student per term in a 1982 referendum, had won the 1987 referendum by three votes. The margin was thin, but it was still a win. Or was it? The chief returning officer determined that one non-student had voted and another student had double voted. Three votes were subsequently thrown out, which rendered the referendum vote a tie. The chief returning officer recused himself from casting the tiebreaker because he was not a student during that semester. He turned to his deputy returning officer, who voted against the radio station. Instead of winning by three votes, CJSW lost by one.

With Lefebvre’s help we had a chance to overturn what I believed was a partisan decision. At the appeal six months later, Carter informed the Review Board that the established law in Canadian elections was that the first vote of a qualified voter counts. That voter is subject to disenfranchisement only with the second vote cast. Thus, CJSW, in fact, had won the referendum by one vote. Did I ever need more proof that every vote counts? The win on appeal guaranteed that CJSW would receive something in the order of an additional $50,000 per year in student funding, in perpetuity. Over the decades, Lefebvre’s elegant bit of pro bono has netted CJSW over $1.3 million and counting. All he got out of it was spaghetti and meatballs and some plonk.

I go into this anecdote in some detail to explain two things. One: Lefebvre paying for my ticket to L.A. is not the only conflict of interest I have; I have firsthand knowledge of his generous spirit, which predisposes me to think well of him. And two: this early anecdote of Lefebvre’s behavior shows what kind of person he is, the kind who wants to help people and for whom making money is not the guiding purpose of existence.

And it wasn’t the first time Lefebvre helped the university radio station while I was there. As president of the student union in 1978–79, he managed to push through, or at least set up, legislation that more or less guaranteed autonomy and independence for student media, especially the student newspaper, the Gauntlet , but also eventually for CJSW and the student television station, Universatility, when it came into existence.

Once I get to the Village Recorder, Lefebvre heartily welcomes me into Studio D. He’s a large man in his late fifties, still waving his Hendrix freak flag high and still wearing his hair the same shoulder length it was during his campus politics days. His stomach protrudes quite a bit more than last I saw him, and his hair’s gone gray, of course, but he’s as outgoing as ever. The first thing I notice is that he addresses people by their first name, always, and, true to his student politics roots, never forgets a name. If he does, he directly asks for the name again and uses it again right away so he can remember it.

Like a politician working his mojo, Lefebvre meets people up front, eyes focused on his immediate subject. In group situations, he brings everyone within immediate earshot into the conversation, making sure no one gets left out. This is a rare skill, and I’ll see it happen again and again. He’ll confess later that all this glad-handing and remembering names is actually a mask for his insecurities — his way of combating being socially immobilized. No one would suspect this.