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

Bergman and Lefebvre broke up in February 1994, a few months into his retail stasis. It had surfaced that Bergman had been carrying on an affair for quite a while during the clinic days, which caused resentment to fester. She also went back to law, starting a business with an old school chum. Of the affair Bergman says,

It was not one of my strongest moments. We’d had some ups and downs. John’s a big flirt, and that’s hard on a person’s ego. That’s who he is. In my mind it’s a bit of ego gratification. As much as John appears to be egocentric and self-assured, he’s the most insecure person I know. He’s constantly seeking approval from other people.

I used to tell people living with John is like living with Peter Pan. He’s a big kid. When we went traveling it was—“Oh wow, look at that! And look at that!!”—and your own enthusiasm goes through the roof. He’s like that about everything, which is contagious, endearing, and charming. But Never Never Land doesn’t exist, I used to say. And then John came into all of his money and I thought: Well, maybe it does .

Lefebvre then found another scheme to avoid practicing law: selling ads for Go cards, which lasted maybe a year. Go cards were postcards distributed for free, and people putting on shows could buy the space on the card. “For a while people thought it was kind of cool.” The fad didn’t last.

By this point it had become obvious to those around him that Lefebvre would take on just about any goofy project to avoid growing up and getting a real job:

We had these business cards, shorter and fatter, the proportions of a matchbook cover, but bigger. My position at the company was “Human Being.” I’d go to parties with my old law buddies, and I’d say, “Look, I got a new position.”

They were afraid I was in deep — that they’d have to do an intervention.

In 1995, with Bergman’s help, Lefebvre went back to the formal work environment, practicing law again, this time in two subleased offices inside an insurance firm called Harding Hall & Graburne, at Fourteenth Avenue and Eighth Street SW, across from a Mac’s Milk and a Dairy Queen. Bergman, when she was in junior high school, had a debating partner named Tim Meagher, who had become a litigation lawyer. Back from Asia, she kick-started her practice with Meagher’s help. After a while, Meagher left to do more litigation work, which created space for Lefebvre.

That’s where Lefebvre met Gordon Herman, president of the insurance company. A decade later, Herman would become CEO of Neteller and deftly shepherd the company’s public offering to the London Stock Exchange’s junior market. “That’s how I got to know Gord,” says Lefebvre. “And See-Wing Chung, who worked for Gord. He’s my accountant, my bookkeeper. Gord had bought a general insurance company with a view to roll it into a public company; buy a general insurance company, make the books look good, get it really well organized and sell it.”

Lefebvre’s new gig, another doomed foray into law practice, at least put him in contact with two men who would later prove to be invaluable. It was auspicious in another unexpected way. Meagher had a friend from his old College Pro days who needed real estate legal help. He sent his friend to Bergman’s office, but her specialty was family law, wills, and estate. Lefebvre was back to doing real estate and small business, so Bergman passed Meagher’s old painting partner to him.

Lefebvre ended up doing a bunch of work for Stephen Lawrence over the next three to four years. The Ivey School of Business graduate had been a principal at Cavendish Investing Ltd., a private venture capital firm based in Calgary, in the early nineties. Now he was developing commercial properties, and Lefebvre was doing the conveyancing for him. Lefebvre explains, “Steve would have to finance it, and I’d do the mortgage — either sell property or sell units, lawyering on acquisitions or selling of titles.”

It was around this time that Lawrence purchased a property in the Midnapore area of south Calgary. He and Lefebvre didn’t know it yet, but a crucial piece of the Neteller puzzle had just fallen into place. Lefebvre managed to keep working in the office for two years before he and Bergman had another parting. “I just went in,” Lefebvre said, “in the dark of night, and packed up everything except my desk.”

“Jane was kind of smart that way,” Danny Patton later said. “She knew she’d just be number three in a line. She didn’t want to become the third Mrs. John Lefebvre.”

Lefebvre continued to do Lawrence’s real estate deals but had otherwise fled the profession again. This time he was invited to work for a guy named Phil Carroll, who — along with Dave Steele, both U of C commerce graduates — had started Three Buoys Houseboat Vacations in 1982, a business that succeeded by using other people’s cash. They initially convinced investors to spend $55,000 on a boat, which Three Buoys would maintain and charter out to vacationers, while the owner could use the boat for his own holiday and get a tax break. By 1986, investors had put $30 million into the company, and four hundred of these invasive boats sailed Shuswap Lake in British Columbia and the Trent-Severn Waterway in Ontario. By 1989 Carroll and Steele had started another company, called International Properties Group (IPG), and had become its co-CEOs. Lefebvre didn’t quite get it but was motivated.

Lefebvre recalls,

Phil said, “Yeah, come on down, John, let’s go to work.” They were doing the same thing they’d done with houseboats, but with condominiums, buying shit with other people’s money. Instead of houseboats they bought apartment complexes and converted them to condominium strata titles. They would sell one to you as an investor and then manage it for you — rent it out, pay all your condo fees, pay off your mortgage, and then pay you the difference. At the end of the process you owned the place and you didn’t have to do anything. They brought me in to do corporate counsel stuff and I didn’t know a fucking thing about it. It was a fiasco.

The practical issue was no one wanted to give up turf, so there wasn’t much for Lefebvre to do. Worse, he clashed with the company’s controller:

Al Penner was a loud, tasteless guy. He was fun to be with, too. He hired a guy named Aftab, who wasn’t getting paid much money. I was getting paid three or four times what Aftab was being paid. I started calling them Aftab and Wholetab.

Al has me in his office one day and he’s yelling at me. I say, “Are you yelling at me?” He says, “Yes.” And I say, “Well, fuck you, asshole. What the fuck are you yelling at me about?” He’s banging paper around, I tell him to fuck off and it comes down to either him or me. He’s the VP finance that runs the whole show, in charge of the public offering and all that shit. The next day or so, they let me go. As I’m walking out, one of the guys working there says, “John, tell me you noticed that nobody goes into Al’s office and tells him, ‘Fuck you.’ Tell me you noticed that.”

Out IPG’s doors, Lefebvre was approaching forty-six years old. In twenty years, nothing had changed — he still couldn’t handle being a lawyer, and he still didn’t fit any corporate office mold. He’d lasted just six months at IPG, and yet Carroll gave him a generous handshake. “I used the six weeks’ pay to stake the music, to get known, to get to learn how to play.”

In July 1997, Lefebvre met twenty-seven-year-old Karen Fowlie at an insurance league baseball game. He was the pitcher; she was the backstopper. “He came to know Karen at one of our Harding Hall & Graburne games,” says Bergman. “This was while we were supposedly together. He wasn’t dating her then, but I’m watching them flirt. I’m watching it happen in front of me.”