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

In 1999, Lawrence pinpointed his niche: processing internet gambling transactions in a new and efficient way. Meanwhile, the gregarious Lefebvre sold the idea to a couple of crucial investors and talked it up to bookies in Costa Rica and other places. Lawrence was the business brain, Lefebvre the sales and marketing brain. Natland was the IT brain but didn’t want to stick around. He headed to Silicon Valley, where venture capitalism was white-hot. Lawrence and Lefebvre came up with a company name, Neteller. It was just the two of them in 2000. They worked out of a cavernous office space downtown. They split their circadian rhythms into twelve-hour shifts and worked the phones, building the business from nothing. Lawrence had other businesses to attend to, so Lefebvre then stretched himself, working up to eighteen hours a day. He didn’t need money because this was his life: sleep, drive, work, repeat. For months.

Then, after restricting themselves to a meager monthly draw, and Neteller surviving a few near-death experiences, the pair suddenly started to make a profit in 2001. That profit soon ramped up. It became a gushing profit, an endless oil-well-pumping kind of profit. And then not just a gusher but a perpetual motion machine of profit, shooting checks at Lawrence and Lefebvre and the other five original investors like a pinwheel firing rockets on Independence Day.

Lefebvre and Lawrence started pulling in bonuses in the tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. It was “Listen to a story of a man named Jed,” except the man’s name was John, and his gusher went off in 2003, burst high then morphed into Jack’s beanstalk. Lefebvre, who had been busking on the streets of Calgary just a few years before, was insanely wealthy by his early fifties, worth a quarter of a billion, maybe even $300 million on paper, in just four intense years.

What did a man like Lefebvre do with this sort of wealth? Well, he threw it around like a happy-go-lucky hippie. He bought things with the knowledge that it did not make one iota of difference to his bank balance — and it didn’t, because the green stuff kept blasting his way faster than he could spend it.

And so, like anyone who has ever come into a sudden convoy of cash, Lefebvre has his toys — in Malibu alone, a pair of houses, a silver BMW Z8 in each garage, and a seven-foot Bösendorfer grand in the living room of Malibu 2. His real home is not Malibu and Los Angeles, although he enjoys the buzz of money and celebrity and sun and smog. His actual residence is located on the west side of Salt Spring Island, one of the Southern Gulf Islands, about thirty miles north of Victoria, British Columbia. Salt Spring is a former hippie community that became popular in the eighties and nineties with yuppies — wealthy yuppies, that is — and is now home to approximately ten thousand permanent residents. In addition to a home on Sunset Drive, Lefebvre bought a shuttered drinking establishment called the Vesuvius Inn, which overlooks Vesuvius Bay and is a five-minute drive from his Sunset Drive home. He intends to reopen the music venue, which would give him a regular place to jam with other island musicians — who knows, maybe Guess Who/Bachman-Turner Overdrive guitarist Randy Bachman or 54–40 drummer Matt Johnson. Lefebvre also keeps a house in Calgary, his hometown, in the Mount Royal neighborhood. His personal jet, a 1984 Cessna Citation II, is parked and maintained at a hangar in Springbank, Alberta, fifteen miles to the west of Calgary.

Still, at some point, the spending began to exhaust Lefebvre. He decided to fulfill a vision of what he thought he was destined to do: give it all away. “I always thought,” he says, “being a philanthropist would be a good job.”

Lefebvre gave money to friends and family, and he gave money to people who asked for it if he decided they needed it. Then he started to think on a grand scale: what if I start giving money — lots of money — to environmental organizations? So he created the John Lefebvre Foundation, which gave millions to the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education; the David Suzuki Foundation (which proclaimed Lefebvre the largest financial supporter of environmental charities in Canadian history); his friend Jim Hoggan’s DeSmogBlog, which set out to expose the climate-change deniers as frauds sucking on oil industry teats; and Daniel Taylor’s Four Great Rivers Project in Tibet, which raises environmental consciousness in China.

The word philanthropist had a nice ring to it. Lefebvre could see himself playing the role indefinitely. Until the Neteller project, his life had been a bizarre zigzag. He barely accepted being a lawyer, grasping at one dubious job opportunity after another — anything to relieve the boredom of law. His first two marriages had failed, and there was a long, successful common-law relationship, until it wasn’t. The string through all of the personal and professional turmoil was that nagging, intermittently urgent desire to play music full-time.

And so life’s chain jerked him around until he got hold of it and took control. For all the late-blooming, starry-eyed ambition he now indulges, and for all the nouveau-riche lifestyle he has accessed in recent years, Lefebvre is a surprisingly earthy rich man. His baubles and endless disposable income haven’t changed him much. He’s like the Peter Pan who knew he was growing older but refused to acknowledge it. He struggled with the despised concept of maturity but then, at the half-century mark and with the Neteller assist, realized that he now didn’t have to mature, would never have to, and his wide-eyed enthusiasm just got wider.

Lefebvre seems to have kept the seven deadly sins in check, at least to the extent that they haven’t overwhelmed him. After running a gauntlet of excess, he was told by his doctor that he needed to cut down on the number of expensive reds he consumed. It’s true that Lefebvre has become a wine snob. For him, a bottle of plonk goes for around seventy bucks in Canada. Regusci Winery and Caymus Vineyards in Napa Valley produce two of his favorite everyday cabernet sauvignons. The doc didn’t tell him to cut down on the pot smoking because he didn’t have to — the DOJ’s mandatory piss tests took care of that.

And that is the one un-zigzagging commitment Lefebvre has made down the decades — his dedication to pot smoking. This side of his life, indulging in his preferred recreational drug, which started in his early teenage years, he might let me in on later: “Yeah, that’s about it, except for the time I was busted for selling acid and did time. I can tell about you that bust, too, if you want.”

Money hasn’t turned Lefebvre into a different, uglier person, but he knows it has changed how he looks at himself and how he acts around others. “I have to admit I do rely on the money to some extent for my self-esteem,” he says, chuckling quietly. “I’m not perfect, you know what I mean?”

Everything was clicking for Lefebvre until he was blindsided on January 15, 2007. He was walking on the sunny side of the street, and out of the shadows came a sledgehammer to his solar plexus. On the surface, the DOJ-directed arrest made no sense. He is a Canadian citizen, not an American. His former company, Neteller, is now based on the Isle of Man — a state dependent on the British Crown yet self-governing — not in the United States. He’d resigned as president of Neteller Inc., the earlier, Canadian version of the company, in 2002 and ceased to be a member of the board of directors of the Isle of Man — based Neteller PLC in 2006. So his connection to Neteller — minority shareholder — was minimal when the FBI pressed the intercom buzzer. What’s more, he’d been generous with the wealth he’d rapidly accumulated between late 2003 and 2006. It’s difficult to avoid weighing these facts against the charges.