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

One day, shopping at a florist, Lefebvre left his man purse on a hook outside the store and went in. He liked to keep beautiful flowers around the house, and there he could buy an armful of tropicals — birds of paradise, ginger plants, and so on — for a few bucks. Pulling out his wad of cash from his jeans pocket, he dropped some bills and then hopped into his car. About forty-five minutes later, back home, flowers in vases and arranged, he reached for his wallet and realized he’d left behind his ID, his credit cards, and the equivalent of US$7,000 in cash — the biweekly payroll for Neteller’s Costa Rica office — in his bag. Lefebvre tried not to freak out as he headed back to the florist, not expecting anything. In San José, if you leave a door unlocked, anything inside will be rifled through, guaranteed. Anything that can be taken will be. Your car, your truck, your house, your garage, your yard — all of it, scoured regularly. Lefebvre was thinking about having to cancel his credit cards and, more daunting, standing in one of those interminable lines to replace his Cédula de Residencia, the ID card he needed to remain in the country. Amazingly, the bag was hanging there, right where he’d left it.

Another time, he wasn’t so lucky. Someone pulled a smash-and-grab on his three-year-old Suzuki, and Lefebvre got beat for his tennis gear. He explains, “The guy, a sort of Robin Hood of robbers, returned my driver’s license, my passport, my Cédula de Residencia — all of the things that were useless to him but he knew were important to me. One of the things he found in my wallet was my Scotiabank debit card. So he went to my bank and handed over a bag and said, ‘This might belong to a client of yours — I found it in the garbage.’”

Life in San José was a peach — and then it wasn’t. After the courtship phase, Lefebvre’s relationship with his fiancée became strained. He began to notice problems that, if he’d only had the eyes to see them, were there all along. The couple married in late November or early December 2002—Lefebvre doesn’t remember. Besides, the wedding wasn’t the actual wedding. A few months later he and Garro had a civil ceremony to receive the official marriage certificate. Lefebvre says, “Cecilia was withholding the final step in an extortionistic way, to enforce good behavior.”

For the December fete, Garro asked a preacher friend to wed them, and the bacchanal lasted a week. Lefebvre flew bunches of Canadian friends into Juan Santamaría International on the Wednesday and Thursday, and the ceremony and dinner were held on the Sunday at the Alta, a trendy hotel that had recently opened in Escazú, in the hills west of San José. Lefebvre recalls, “It had a huge hallway four stories high, and kind of wound down to a restaurant with a big pool. The rooms just cascaded down. It was new but looked like an old castle.”

Then the guests all loaded into buses and headed down to the coast to Parque Nacional Antonio, which is where Lefebvre and Garro were building their dream house, right at the edge of the jungle. Lefebvre came up with a name for it — JOKONGLE — an invented word from four root names — JO from Cecilia’s son Christien Johnston, who became the marketing director and co-owner of the project once it was finished, well after Lefebvre left; KON from Cecilia’s son David Konwiser, who grew up in Manhattan Beach, L.A., became an architect, and returned to Costa Rica to take over the building project after Lefebvre’s departure; G from Cecilia Garro; and LE from Lefebvre, who had thrown himself into the design of what was to be an impressive structure, the kind only he could come up with (one of its features was a private “toke deck”).

They all stayed at a swank joint, Hotel La Mariposa at Manuel Antonio Beach, and partied there. Lefebvre leased a forty-foot sailboat, and thirty people went on a one-day cruise with haute cuisine on the vessel. That leg of the party lasted a few days before people started to drift away. It was a long celebration, one reason why Lefebvre might have trouble remembering the exact date. Then again, it’s Cecilia, and he tends to stare off into the distance when the subject of his third marriage comes up. He has said more than once he’s going to dig out the wedding pictures, they’re on an old MacBook, but he never gets around to it. The basic facts are: married around December 1, 2002, in Escazú, Costa Rica; separated October 1, 2004, when Lefebvre fled to his getaway in Malibu, California; divorced March 11, 2010. By then Lefebvre had settled on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, and Garro and sons had opened their dream house. They called it Punto de Vista, and it is available for private functions such as weddings. Lefebvre grumbles, “Point of View, now there’s an original name.”

Lefebvre says,

There were complicated things about her. She swore up and down that she would never marry a Latin because he’d fuck around on her, but that she’d marry me because I wasn’t a Latin. Then she married me and treated me like I was a Latin trying to get whatever I could wherever I could get it. It was hard to manage because I was actually quite straight and narrow on that score. I had suffered the slings and arrows of betrayal myself and learned that was not a nice way to treat one’s fellows. It was a lot easier for me to sleep at night (a) knowing that I was a victim not a perpetrator, and (b) that I shouldn’t have any questions to answer at the pearly gates or whatever. It was just a lot easier to live my life in a respectful way. I haven’t always been that perfect, but at that time I was pretty perfect.

And I pay a huge price for that, right? At that time there is what, four billion people in the world? You’ve got to reckon two billion of them are women—1,999,999,999, that’s the price. For that sacrifice you’d like to be respected and trusted. But it runs deep in their culture. We had a relationship for two years and I was married for a little more than one when I ran. It was going seriously downhill, and we just couldn’t talk without it getting worse.

Lefebvre began to suspect Garro was the most narcissistic woman he had ever met. He relates what he thinks is a particularly glaring example: They would agree to go to out to dinner at six, and Lefebvre would be ready to go at the appointed time but Garro wouldn’t. At seven, he would still be waiting. No sign of her. At eight, nothing. At nine, still no sign. Finally, three and a half hours later, she would come downstairs. She was ready to go. When Lefebvre complained about her making him wait so long, she would say, “Do you know how many men there are in the world who would be honored to wait three hours for me?”

Lefebvre remembers one other instance he hopes will illustrate his point. He was watching television reports in August 2004 that revealed attendance at the Olympics was down. He said, “Cecilia, why, when we can go anywhere in the world, are we stuck here? Let’s go to Athens!” Garro wasn’t listening. She was preoccupied with her camera and complaining about it. Lefebvre suggested she should read the manual. Garro replied, “People who love me do these things for me.” He convinced Cecilia to go to Athens, along with his friends Geoff and Lyn Savage, who watched in dismay as their pal was caught in recurring episodes of The Bickersons .

If the relationship was almost done by the wedding, by Athens it was open warfare. Anyone who knows Lefebvre well enough will say the one thing he hates more than anything is bullshit, and he was finding out that his third wife had an inexhaustible supply. The situation was the definition of hopeless, and it drained him. Lefebvre lasted only a couple of months beyond Athens before pressing the eject button.