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

Ivy Patton, whose husband, Danny, has abetted Lefebvre’s music for years, puts it to me this way: “After we see him there’s this little warm glow that you have, this John glow. He just makes you feel so good.” As for his intimidating amount of money, she says, “He makes you feel like it’s yours too.”

Lefebvre is also egalitarian in his dealings with others. He’s at ease talking in the same direct, friendly manner to waiters, CEOs, cab drivers, artists, musicians, and lawyers. This is what happens when you’ve been both a somebody and a nobody, when you’ve been a regular Joe and then king of the world, when you’ve not only killed time but done time. The only time a tonal shift occurs, to one of formal deference, is when he is on the phone with the lawyers he’s hired to represent him. The change in tenor reinforces the seriousness of the FBI charges — twenty years and one hundred percent forfeiture. And maybe more than one hundred percent, if the DOJ decides any other property he bought — for his mom, say — counts as well.

After I’ve been in the studio room for a few minutes and been introduced to Brian Ahern, Lefebvre says, “Bill, you haven’t changed in twenty years.” Well, he knows how to flatter a guy, so maybe I ought to be on my guard. He does have this preternatural ability to make everyone feel included and at home inside his protective aura. It doesn’t matter whether he’s introducing his family to waiters at chichi restaurants or his Salt Spring Island girlfriend, Hilary Watson, to musicians in the studio, his excitement is infectious.

“Look at this!” he says, pointing to a gold record hanging on the wall that celebrates the fact that the Rolling Stones recorded “Angie” at the Village. Even now, accustomed as he is to his massive windfall, the Village’s atmosphere gives him a tingle. Lefebvre can afford to pay to bask in the storied history, hoping the perfume of pop success will linger over Studio D while he’s here. “Steely Dan recorded here, man!”

It’s true. The Dan recorded its first album, Can’t Buy a Thrill , and several others, here. The Village began in 1922 as a Masonic Temple, but in the sixties, perhaps appropriate to the era, the Maharishi located his Transcendental Meditation headquarters here. The studio itself was founded in 1968. Supertramp, Neil Diamond, Heart, Cher, Stone Temple Pilots, Cracker, John Mayer, Smashing Pumpkins have recorded here, and the list of successes goes on. Recent clients include Kelly Clarkson and Coldplay. Just a week earlier, Lefebvre had breezed by the now ex — Mr. Gwyneth Paltrow, Chris Martin, sitting on stairs, yakking on his cell.

Right now Lefebvre is into the final wrap. A cache of tunes has been digitally stored, awaiting mixes. Tomorrow he’ll re-record some vocal and keyboard parts he and Ahern don’t like. Lefebvre confesses that he’s worried about the lack of guitar muscle on some tracks — not so much on the country-inflected pop but the straight ahead rock ’n’ roll tunes. The way he envisioned the songs in his head, and on his acoustic guitar when he wrote them, isn’t necessarily the way they’re turning out. The rhythm guitar seems buried, and the songs aren’t rocking hard enough for his taste. This, he hopes, is not a big deal, since mixing is a long way off. Generally he sang and played guitar on most tunes, plus a bit of piano, while accompanied by session aces hand-picked by Ahern.

The aces all have history. Al Kooper, for instance, cofounded the Blues Project in 1965. A year later, as a session man, he came up with the famous organ line that propelled Bob Dylan’s six-minute AM radio masterpiece “Like a Rolling Stone.” Then he helped initiate a horn-driven rock craze in 1967 by founding Blood, Sweat & Tears before releasing a string of solo LPs. Kooper is now in his mid-seventies, and Lefebvre says, fondly, that he is at heart still a “seventeen-year-old greaseball from Philly.” Later, Lefebvre will kick a bunch of money Kooper’s way to help him finish his latest solo recording.

Glen D. Hardin was one of Buddy Holly’s Crickets in the early sixties. He then became a member of the Shindogs, the house band that backed up various guests on the television pop show Shindig! in the mid-sixties. In the seventies, Elvis Presley picked Hardin to lead his band. His credits run several browser screens in length, including Gram Parsons, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris.

Others enlisted for the month include drummer Jim Keltner (Little Village, Bob Dylan, on and on and on), whom the others jokingly dubbed “King Jim”; bassist James “Hutch” Hutchinson (Bonnie Raitt); keyboardist Matt Rollings (Lyle Lovett); pedal steel guitarist Greg Leisz (k. d. lang, Bill Frisell); session guitarist Dean Parks; and Patrick Warren, the Chamberlin specialist, who has played with Aimee Mann, Tom Waits, and Joe Henry.

Assessing Ahern’s choices, Lefebvre says, “When these guys are behind you, it’s hard to fall down.”

In 1978–79, Lefebvre was president of the University of Calgary Student Union. He graduated from U of C’s Faculty of Law in 1983 and for a few years practiced at McCaffery and Company, and elsewhere, before chucking the corporate life in favor of becoming a people’s lawyer. With Jane Bergman, another lawyer, he founded a bohemian-style retail outlet called Sunnyside Legal Clinic. After several years, they sold off the clinic and headed to India for a much-needed respite. Returning to Calgary, he opened a leather goods shop. Whiling away the long retail hours alone, he attempted to write a novel. The shop went bust, so he went back to the law. Then he sold coupon books for a living, which was about when his lawyer pals began to worry for his sanity. He subsequently landed at a condo management firm but wondered what he was doing there. By his mid-forties, Lefebvre had about all he could take. He chucked it all to play music full-time. Staying up half the night, jamming at clubs with a musical partner half his age, busking in the morning at CTrain stops for eggs-and-sausage cash, getting up at four in the afternoon, smoking up — now that was a fun life.

All those attempts to flee his profession failed, and Lefebvre was forced to return, over and over, to his bête noir. During the mid- to late nineties, his former partner Bergman tossed him the odd commercial real-estate law gig, which was how he came into contact with the businessman and venture capitalist Stephen Lawrence. A decade younger, Lawrence had also attended U of C and dabbled in student politics. He was an aficionado of satirical pop music and known to friends for his bullshit detector, but otherwise he was a pure business guy. Lawrence wanted to make a fortune and be a player. He received his master’s from the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) in London, Ontario, before returning to Calgary.

At the time, Lawrence required basic lawyerly assistance with the paperwork and filings for purchases and holdings and construction. Lefebvre could sleepwalk through that, and he was an affable guy. He and Lawrence struck up a friendship based on a few laughs and professional respect, even though Lefebvre’s heart would never be in the work.

For a company accused of money laundering, Neteller has an ironic origin: a car wash. In 1997, Lefebvre did some work for Lawrence, who was developing a strip mall in the Midnapore area of south Calgary. Lawrence leased out all of the storefronts but one, the cash-only car wash. He hired Jeff Natland to run that, a teenager who spent his days filling soap dispensers and emptying change boxes, and his nights surfing the internet. Lawrence discovered Natland was a computer geek who used his dad’s credit card to cruise legal gambling sites based in the Caribbean. Lawrence asked Natland if he might be able to create a blackjack program. Don’t see why not, the kid replied. Lawrence considered the idea of starting his own online site in a legal Caribbean jurisdiction. After trial and error, he and Natland realized the most vulnerable point in any online gambling chain was its secure money transfer system. Lawrence and Lefebvre would ultimately create Neteller with the specific purpose of solving that problem.