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

Glavine and Morrison arrived in mid-October 2001 and stayed for about a year. Their office space was essentially a broom closet. But what did they care? Calgary winter was coming and they weren’t going to have to deal with it. When the business took off it became more difficult to run IT out of a closet with a fickle internet connection. Glavine explains,

We were doing bigger builds. It was harder to do the ACH, and just dealing with people on the phone. I couldn’t really hire people down there, and I couldn’t bring anybody down from Canada — there was no room. It was time to head back to Calgary and get a serious IT department. Within six months of going back I had ten guys. Within a year I had twenty.

Costa Rica was a lot of partying, but we worked hard. All of us were in the office six, seven days a week. Every once in a while a bunch of us would try to take a weekend off and go to a beach, if there wasn’t a big sporting event on. And every night we’d go back to the house and have some drinks and stuff. We’d have some big parties on the weekend. Johnny’d always have the guitar going.

Glavine lived in the back house of Cecilia Garro Solano’s place in Trejos Montealegre, San Rafael de Escazú, about five miles west of San José. Garro owned a small enclave there with two spacious two-thousand-square-foot four-bedroom houses up front, side by side, facing the street, and one three-bedroom home in the back. Garro was his landlady, and Lefebvre’s as well. Lefebvre first rented space from her, and then other Neteller employees began moving in.

When Lefebvre arrived in the capital, he called the Parque del Lago home for a good two months. But then he found this rental pad outside the core, in San Rafael, that wasn’t another hotel room or a cramped apartment. To make money, Garro had been renting out one side of the duplex and the house in the back. She was born in Costa Rica and was a single mom. She had lived in New York and in Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles, for twenty-five years. She was completely bilingual. She had brought her mom with her to the States, but the matriarch never learned any English. “Her mom was a typical Costa Rican woman,” says Lefebvre, “an elderly Catholic lady. She watched mass on TV every day, then one hour of rosary. You could watch this nun sit there and say the rosary and you could say the rosary along with her.”

Garro had been a nurse for most of her professional life. She was also a nurse practitioner, a kind of elevated nurse, which meant she could prescribe medication within certain protocols. “She was Latin and appealing in lots of different ways. When I met her I was fifty and she was fifty-seven and beautiful,” says Lefebvre. The attraction was physical and immediate. “A crime of opportunity,” his buddy Mike Greene later called it. “She was there, and he was there by himself.”

Lefebvre lived up front, in one half of the oversized duplex, separated from Garro by a wall but still together. He had good reason to be mesmerized. She was a longhaired brunette with a curvaceous, lithe figure. Certainly she was cougar-like. Age wasn’t an issue — she looked a decade younger, and Lefebvre was more than a little smitten, so it happened fast. She became a love interest, first on the down low. She became his fiancée. She became his wife. Then, alas, she became his third ex-wife. But at this point, in summer 2001, everything was hunky-dory.

Glavine and Garro got along exceptionally well: “She was a really nice lady, always great to me, a motherly kind of figure. She helped me with Spanish. She was doing programs in the community, getting clothes to poor people. My mom came down to visit in March 2002 and she just loved Cecilia to death. Every time I went to Costa Rica she’d ask about Cecilia — even after the divorce.”

Glesby was there when Lefebvre and Garro first met. She saw instant fireworks. Lefebvre was impressed and made no attempt to hide his attraction. Garro, who was not above painting her face and primping her hair for him, pretended not to notice. She sent out mixed signals. She tried to act like she was above it all, appreciating the attention all the same. As the couple got closer, the Neteller gang wanted to live in San Rafael, too. “Another one of Cecilia’s rentals would come up and one of us would jump at it. We all wanted to live where John was living, because it was so much fun,” says Glesby. She continues,

I had four roommates, $400 rent and a twenty-dollar electricity bill, so it was okay. We went out for dinner. If we bought groceries it was for a purpose — okay, we’re going to John’s place, he’s going to play a few tunes, we’re going to smoke some doobies and just have a relaxing night. Or we’re going to go to Rob and Mel and my place. Or Rodney, Steve, and Karen’s place, when they lived in the back. We made that the party place because then we didn’t have to mess up John and Cecilia’s place. They could leave and go cuddle and be honey-bunny together, because they were at that stage of their relationship, and we could still party there.

Glavine lived in the back with Rodney Thompson and his girlfriend, Karen McGinn, a painter. Thompson had arrived from the Cayman Islands to visit Eltom, who convinced him to inquire about staying on. Eltom sold Lefebvre on Thompson — in what he calls an uncharacteristic moment for him, he said Thompson was the only guy who could be better than him at the gig.

Everyone used to get together at Lefebvre’s and hang out after a long day on the phones: music, often provided by Lefebvre’s guitar and voice, along with some joints and lots of good food and drink — just another relaxing night in San Rafael. The backyard was spacious and beautiful, and many barbecues were thrown. The men did the prepping and cooking while the women stood around and drank and laughed and joked. “Hey, you guys,” they’d tease, “how’s it going in the kitchen?” Eltom and Thompson wouldn’t have had it any other way — both enjoyed cooking and were good at it. Eltom’s special shrimp sauce and his chicken were favorites.

Garro adored mariachi bands, so Lefebvre hired one to serenade her at one of the barbecues, thereby exposing everyone else to its cacophonous charm. She returned the favor, surprising him at his fiftieth birthday party with live mariachi music.

The only sour note was Garro’s pet Akita, Wookie, a mean brute of a hunting dog — sort of a husky on steroids — who attacked a terrified McGinn one night. Scott Morrison grabbed Wookie by the jowls, tugging them apart as far as he could — trying to avoid the sensation of flesh being punctured and ripped — while everyone else scattered. Wookie kept trying to snap his jaws, snarling and baring his teeth. As claws started to scratch his skin, Morrison decided to fling the crazed dog as far as he could and run for cover. It was left to Lefebvre, much to his chagrin, to convince the dog to enter his cage. Surprisingly, the violent episode subsided, and in Garro’s pet went.

Too bad the same couldn’t be said for the city’s criminal element. Lefebvre was robbed three times in three years and had one close call. One evening it happened at his house. He looked up from reading and there was a stranger rummaging through stuff by the door. Lefebvre recounts: “‘The fuck you think you’re doing here?’ The guy put his hands up and said, ‘ No tengo nada !’ [I don’t have anything!]”

Lefebvre chased him down the street, grabbed him and pulled the shirt over his head — good hockey fight move. He continues, “I’m chasing this guy and I can’t help think, Fuck, what if this guy’s got a knife? And then I’m wrestling with him on the ground, and he’s swinging a rock at me, and I’m thinking, What am I doing? I’ve just left my gate unlocked and my front door open and what if this guy’s not working alone? So I run back and everything seems to still be there.”