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

People down there, they try to negotiate themselves into a position where they don’t have to do any more work for you. They’ll say they can’t do anything more for you until you have uno, dos, tres, cuatro más cositas .

And the lawyers are complete liars. They take money from you and then they don’t do anything. They’ll say, “Well, I’m having some difficulties.” What they mean is, “I’m having some difficulty doing anything at all except taking your money.”

Another reason for Neteller to set up shop in Costa Rica was the cheap labor. Lefebvre and Lawrence realized they needed to grow the company — and fast. They needed more employees on the phones helping customers work through their issues, and more shift workers. The brute arithmetic was that Canadians cost fourteen bucks an hour and Costa Ricans cost three. So Lefebvre hired a bunch of locals to work the phones. Some worked hard and stayed with the company; some didn’t. According to Lefebvre, “Many Costa Ricans did the least possible they had to and not get fired. We probably had to have two more people than we needed just to make up for the downtime. But even with all the fucking around they still did some actual work.”

Sometimes the work-avoidance irritants went into scary comedy territory. Lefebvre says,

One guy, José, was sending back and forth messages about the Beloved Leader, about when the plane comes down in the farm field and we all leave to go to heaven. It was weird, halfway between Jim Jones and some paramilitary thing — or just a drug deal.

Fortunately, around this time we had a keystroke program installed. Some guys were burning up tens of thousands of our dollars of telephone time talking to their friends all over the world — we didn’t have many customers in El Salvador, for example. They didn’t realize we had the capacity to see that they were on the phone for two hours, five nights a week, with somebody in Nicaragua while they should have been working. Or they were surfing the internet, or downloading viruses onto our computers — we had to take control.

That’s how we learned that José was operating this clandestine undertaking from one of our computer stations. Then, late one night, he brought a woman to the office. All of the people doing telephone customer service were sitting in a room at about a dozen stations. I had an office just off to the side, which was sort of private. I could close the door. And José brought a woman up and took her into my office, for about an hour, and then she left. Then José went back to work. He later insisted that it was his wife.

José’s justification was funny, as though he didn’t see anything wrong with taking a woman into the boss’s office for a rendezvous so long as it was his wife. But no matter, Lefebvre knew he had the guy, because people in the office had seen the woman. He explains,

We were able to insist to José that he bring his wife around to meet us. He was busted. So he was fired without us having to mention that we had him on a keystroke program doing a drug deal. When you get information on a guy, you’ve got to be careful because, first of all, you don’t know what he’s doing, and second, you don’t know what’s going to happen to you if he finds out that you found out that he’s doing something.

We were fortunate to be savvy enough not to blow that one.

When Lefebvre arrived in San José in April 2001, he stayed at the Hotel Parque del Lago, located on Paseo Colón, San José. He oriented himself a bit and looked around for office digs, not to mention a more permanent residence, and then sent for Glesby. She arrived about a month later, on May 2, two weeks short of her twenty-fourth birthday. Then Lefebvre called for Eltom.

Eltom had given notice at his apartment and then moved out, but then everything stalled — he couldn’t fly down to San José because there was no place for him to work. Lefebvre and Glesby were still scrambling around trying to find office space — any office space. He had to wait about a month. He was given $500 in spending money. He went through that. His stuff remained mostly packed as he slept on various couches, just waiting for the word. He stayed in a hotel or two, waiting. It was like absurdist humor, but also frustrating.

Finally, Eltom boarded a plane, his first-ever flight. Lefebvre and Glesby had it sorted: he would work out of an internet café (now a strip club) and Glesby the pizza joint while Lefebvre kept searching for permanent digs. Neteller offered the internet café owner a deal: give us one computer station full-time, all the time, and we’ll pay you the full freight by the hour. The guy wouldn’t go for guaranteed income. They couldn’t believe it but kept working him over. Eventually he relented, but he still could not see the advantage to his business. To him, if Neteller was occupying one station all the time, how was anyone else going to able to use it? Eltom called this Three Stooges logic “CR madness.” To him, working in San José was like working at a carnival. When he wanted to smoke, he wouldn’t light up inside — he’d go outside and sit on the steps. Inevitably, cops would swing by to hassle him. To them, you don’t do that. You must be up to no good. It was befuddling.

Eltom eventually learned enough Spanish to get by. He learned it in the most natural circumstance possible for a young man: trying to pick up beautiful Costa Rican women. “Some people take lessons. I figured, what more motivation do I need?”

For three or four months straight, it was Glesby and Lefebvre during the day and Eltom from 3 or 4 p.m. until 2 a.m. Lefebvre also put an anuncios , classified ad, in the weekly English-language Tico Times to hire bilingual staff for a call center. His Spanish was poor, but he had to get over worrying about this handicap, take control, and find a good space for Neteller.

In its heyday, Costa Rica would have had hundreds of online gambling sites. There were plenty of educated people kicking around who spoke English fairly well, and there was a lot of customer service involved in taking care of all those sites. Costa Rica was fertile ground, an offshore bookie sanctuary the Americans couldn’t touch. A lot of young people worked the phones.

“We didn’t know it would expand so fast,” says Glesby. “The first office we had was more than enough.” She handled customer service from nine to five, maybe nine to nine, and helped Lefebvre when she had spare time. He found her an office on the top of the Dos por Uno Pizza in San Pedro. She worked in the manager/owner’s office. “We went to each sports book. Rob was sales, I was accounting, and Steve and John were the owners. We went door to door, a lot of face to face: ‘Hi, how are you, we’re here, hey, let’s do some business.’”

Glesby adds, “First impressions might have been a little shocking, especially the way John is, and the way he looks, which is beautiful but some people, they go, ‘Oh, this is the “John”? This is the “Neteller”?’ He doesn’t look businesslike. No, this is the guy everyone is calling ‘Meat Loaf.’ That’s how they related to him: ‘Oh yeah, he’s that guy, Meat Loaf with the man purse.’ The physique, the hair, plus he’s a musician.” No one in San José seemed to have seen Jeff Bridges play The Dude in the Coen brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski —the obvious fictional character to whom Lefebvre would compare.

If you knew what was happening at Neteller, it was difficult not to want to be a part of it. Glavine went down to visit his buddies in summer 2001. He wanted to be with the Costa Rica gang because they seemed to be having a blast. A few days on the ground and he was hooked:

I was talking to all of my friends down there — Meranda, Mel, Rob — and then I’m chatting with them online. They’re telling me all this stuff, and I’m thinking, God, that place is awesome! I gotta find a way to work down there. So I asked John, “If I came down there would you have an office for me?” He’s like, “Yeah, we got a little cubbyhole we could probably stick you in.” Then I asked Steve, “Can I take the IT department down to Costa Rica?” It was just two guys then, me and Scotty Morrison. Steve said, “Yeah, go for it, if you can do the same job.”