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

The clinic was a great concept, and it remained open for business until February 1990. The business was doing well — they’d started with just the two of them working all those long hours, and now there were six lawyers in the office — but sustaining enthusiasm becomes difficult when you want to do other things with your life. Bergman and Lefebvre had established themselves on an imaginary small-town main street for over three years. They’d lived out their dream of what a lawyer should be doing, yet in a way they’d also built their own prison. Now they wanted freedom. They couldn’t find any takers for the turnkey operation — partly because the prices they charged walk-in customers were below industry standard — so they sold the firm list, keeping some favored clients and instead working out of the house to save money.

“I was probably the instigator,” says Bergman. “I was thirty and John was thirty-eight. I wanted to travel and John had not done much traveling before then.” The clinic idea was smart, but the smartest entrepreneurial move they made during its run was to buy the building it was situated in: “All that work,” says Lefebvre, “and all we made was $100,000.” It was enough to travel for a year.

The Wilderness

India for two and a half months and Thailand for seven weeks, that’s what Lefebvre and Bergman settled for. The day they closed Sunnyside Legal shop, February 16, 1990, the couple threw a big party at their new house. They had moved from Memorial Drive to Rutland Park in southwest Calgary. That same day, Bergman’s niece died and her mother was diagnosed with cancer. It was a rough go. Her mom fought off the disease for almost two years before she succumbed. She remained in relatively good health for a year and a half, and they both hung back for support. The original plan was to start in Europe, but the couple cut that leg off and headed straight to Mumbai to meet a friend of one of their clients, who showed them around. He took them to a leather goods factory and suggested someone ought to distribute the stuff in Canada. Lefebvre, forever curious, took the bait and decided to open a retail outlet when he got back.

The journey’s wild card was that Lefebvre had never been away from his daughter for more than ten days, and sometimes it felt excruciating to be separated from Emily for so long. On the other hand, he didn’t want to fall into the trap of thinking he could never leave town because his daughter was still there. He also felt that because he had gone off into the world, Emily’s mind might think more freely as well. And it did. A few years later it was, “Hey Dad, guess what, I’m going to Trinity College in Dublin.”

Bergman and Lefebvre met a man from Switzerland, a short, bald bodybuilder in his forties. The guy warned them, “There are two ways to get rich in the world. One of them is to get rich; the other is to spend two nights in India.” They soon figured out he was right.

Lefebvre says,

India is ghastly and amazing. Everything is the same color — the road, the dirt beside the road, the clothes of the people and the skin of the people, all the same color. The dusty brown dirt. Kids playing cricket with twisted branches, socks tied up in a ball. Huts built with sticks and green plastic garbage bags held down by busted bike tires. Kids shitting in the dirt right on the side of the cricket pitch. There’s shit on one side and urine on the other.

We were waiting for a train in Varanasi, in northeastern India, south of Nepal. That’s on the Ganges River, where they put all the temples. There are these steps and they throw all the dead people in there, and people drink the water. They’re mostly burnt bodies. But there are certain bodies that you can’t burn. If somebody dies of snakebite you can’t burn him, because that’s a holy way to die. If someone dies of smallpox you can’t burn him, because that puts all the germs up in the air. So they just throw them in and then you drink the water.

So we’re sitting out there playing cards. We ask about the train, which is an hour late. We wait another hour. Go back again. “The train will be coming in one hour.” Wait another hour. “The train will be coming in one hour.” Fourth time. “Yes, yes, I already told you the train will come in one hour.” “You told me four hours ago that the train would be coming in one hour.” “Why are you so impatient? Yesterday the train was seventeen hours late.”

That was towards the end of our trip. We were bailing out of India at that time, probably heading towards Bombay to fly to Bangkok. When we got to Bangkok we went from the airport down to the train station. We got on a train that was supposed to leave at seven o’clock. At seven o’clock the train left, and Jane started crying.

Lefebvre and Bergman had intended to hit Indonesia before heading back, but Bergman was homesick.

Once he returned, Lefebvre started practicing law from home, working for favored clients. Then, in the fall of 1993, he acted on his lawyering-avoidance scheme: the leather goods shop. The couple sold their Rutland Park house, and Lefebvre’s half helped to finance the venture. It wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good business proposition, but Bergman figured she shouldn’t be too vocal about her misgivings. Instead, she suggested he ask Bruce Ramsay, his old student union buddy. Ramsay was shrewd and knew a good business play when he saw one. Ramsay backed Bergman: John, not a wise move. Lefebvre went ahead anyway. “Off you go,” she told him, “go crazy.”

Lefebvre found a spot right in the heart of the Seventeenth Avenue SW yuppie shopping strip. The pun-lover called his leather goods oasis Saviour Skin. He painted the interior red and green. The colors would stay; Saviour Skin would not. Hemporium, “Calgary’s Original Hemp Store,” is there now. It’s been there since 1995, when it took over from Saviour Skin. And unlike Lefebvre’s business, it has been a success. Lefebvre smokes a lot of pot — maybe he missed his moment.

“John is a great ideas guy,” says Bergman, “but he doesn’t pay attention to details. So he has an idea and thinks it’s cool, but it doesn’t mean it’s going to sell. I was in the store one day when in came some guy from Danier [a Canadian leather goods retail chain]. ‘I’m just coming to look at what you’re trying to sell here. What do you think you’re doing?’ He looked around and he knew in an instant he didn’t have to worry. It wasn’t going to last long.”

“I had this idea,” says Lefebvre, “that this guy I met, Raju, would provide me with leather cheap. It was cheap, it was late, and it was wrong. It was basically unsalable.”

Lefebvre was Saviour Skin’s only employee. For a year and a half, he opened the store every day, seven days a week. Then he stopped paying for the jackets. Then Raju got the sheriff to seize the goods, and the store closed.

The Rutland Park house windfall was now gone, and Lefebvre had driven Bergman nuts with all this waiting around for customers who never arrived. It wasn’t all drudgery — he got to smoke up, he got to play cards, and he wrote 120 pages of a novel he called Crash Heaven , in which the hero was a Vietnam War veteran turned heroin-smuggling CIA undercover agent.

Lefebvre says, “He was involved in one of those covert operations, where they co-opt Golden Triangle drug lords to fight against communists. The Americans were helping deliver the heroin, and he wound up getting some pot in a sting operation and had to disappear. He became rich and wound up his life being a smuggler. The fact that there’s so much hypocrisy going on — Americans assisting heroin smugglers — seemed like a good idea.”