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

When I was in Costa Rica it started to come in. First it was $17,000, and I’m sitting back thinking, Holy fuck! Are you shittin’ me? Take that home to your wife, right? Cecilia’s going, “Really?” Then, six weeks later, I bring home another one, and this one’s $70,000! And then, six weeks after that, it’s $200,000! It went like that in 2001–02. In the year before we went public, the seven of us who began Neteller (Lawrence, Lefebvre, Glavine, Natland, Edmunds, Choy, Ramsay) split $14 million profit. I got, you know, 28.8 percent of that [$4,032,000]. Cash, tax free, in Costa Rica. That was good.

The irony of it all is that it was Garro who’d insisted on a prenup. When they met, Lefebvre had no money but Garro did. She owned property in Manhattan Beach, L.A., worth a million or two, so naturally she wanted to protect it for her children. Once the money started rolling, the prenup held fast, at least until Lefebvre needed to get away from the marriage. Then he succumbed and gave away the Costa Rica property, the possessions, and some money.

A change in attitude toward money, the fluidity of it, didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen. Lefebvre illustrates his shift in thinking with a story about his car:

Before the money really started to come in, I had this Suzuki, a four-wheel drive. San José is in a high valley, with mountains that run along both sides of the city. On the one side there are volcanoes and on the other side there’s this cordillera, where we lived. The valley runs for about fifteen miles and is filled with light. So we’re driving in the hills, and Cecilia reckons that if we go on this certain road we can just go all the way. Turns out she was walking when she did it, but we kept going. At one point we’re driving downhill and the ruts start to get deep, maybe two feet deep. We see that big four-wheel drives have negotiated this by placing dead logs. So we follow, and there is no going back because it starts to rain and it’s getting dark. There is only one way, and that’s forward. And we get to this point where I’m ninety percent sure we aren’t going to make it. So I ask everybody to get out of the car and watch as I try to negotiate this open turn. Then the front corner of the car falls, the car rolls over and I wind up sitting on the ceiling of the passenger side. Cecilia’s screaming, and her son Christian comes up and said says, “Are you okay?” For sure that was the end of the car — on its roof, two hundred yards from the end of this rutty road. They have to tow it out on its roof.

It was an attitude development thing. Ever since then, the thinking has been: Ah well, I was getting sick of that car anyway.

Lefebvre managed to keep his head about it, although he sure had a good time spending some of the money. When he did blow a wad it didn’t seem to make any difference — none — to his bottom line. When he paid $44,000 for his nieces’ clothes, the money replenished itself. When he bought a special numbered-edition Z8 sports car, the money replenished itself. So he bought another one with a lower limited-edition number stamped on it. When he bought an Afghani rug several hundred years old, the money replenished. When he cleared out his closets and donated all the brand names to charity and bought a whole new wardrobe, ho-hum, the money replenished. Even flying anywhere and everywhere on his private jet couldn’t stem the flow.

Lefebvre has always had an insouciant air about life and the world — he would rather have a good time than a long time — but then he struck it rich after he’d been around a long time. He wasn’t the kid in the candy shop, though many friends still thought he acted like a big kid. That was part of what was so appealing about him. Here he was, in his early fifties, and that was a blessing. Danny Patton puts the thorny issue of how to handle untold wealth when you’re the one holding this way: “Some people with money are reservoirs and just keep it. And some are streams and it flows.” He feels Lefebvre fell into the latter category and believes his pal would never have survived if he had come into his fortune in his twenties.

And it was true: for a rich guy, Lefebvre had been through more than most. He explains, “I was lucky because I had been out on the street enough. I’d been a gardener to pay for my life. I’d been in jail — being a con helped. I had a strong sense that these guys who thought they were big shots because they came into money were just idiots. If that was the measure of their big-shot-ness, they were nothing. I had that firmly before my mind through the whole thing.”

Lefebvre is referring to some of the kings of the gambling industry, guys who traveled with entourages and personal bodyguards in limousines — rogue principalities traveling from casino town to party town. “They actually thought they were cool because they had money,” Lefebvre says of the caricatures he met. “And that’s okay, because most of the people around them thought that too: ‘Hey, you’re really cool because you have money.’”

Then again, there were also the civilized business guys, such as Anurag Dikshit, who looked and traveled like the new digital executive he was — no mafioso airs for him. Dikshit graduated from the Indian Institue of Technology in Delhi, India, and was in his mid-twenties when Ruth Parasol hired him to be PartyGaming’s group operations director in 1997. He played an integral role in launching PartyPoker.com in 2001. The DOJ came after him, too — not for money laundering but for violating the Wire Act. In 2008, he pled guilty in the same manner as Lawrence and Lefebvre, telling the justice system, yes, he now believed he had broken the law. In 2010, he was forced to forfeit to Uncle Sam $300 million of his billion (or billions) in restitution — but U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff did not send him to jail.

As Neteller grew into a much larger concern, run by Herman, a more button-down business guy, it still had a party reputation to live up to. Colin Bush, who worked security detail, was notorious in this regard. He was once thrown out of a Neteller Christmas party at the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise — before the party started. Neteller had rented nearly an entire wing of the hotel for the occasion, a massive fete on a Saturday night. Bush had arrived early, on Friday afternoon. To kill time, he started shooting pool in the basement pub. After a while, overly refreshed, he became testy and threw a pool cue. That was all it took. Steve Glavine and Bob Edmunds, meanwhile, were driving up from Calgary the next afternoon. They were looking forward to the bash because, Glavine says, “Our Christmas parties were epic.” When they arrived they couldn’t find their partner in good times, Colin. They asked around, “Where’s Bushy?”

“Oh, he’s down in town because he’s not allowed in the hotel.” So Bush missed hotshot Canadian blues-rock guitarist Colin James, who headlined the party. Glavine recalls a few other epics, such as an office party at the Vintage Chophouse in Calgary: “Johnny’s on stage and Gord’s playing, and Bruce. We’d given everybody two or three drink tickets for the night, and it was getting to be around ten or eleven. Everybody’s out of tickets and having to buy pricey drinks. So Johnny stands up, grabs the microphone and says, ‘This is a free concert!’ He picked up the bar tab for the rest of the night. Things got out of hand. The shots started flying. Yeah, that was a good one.”

Lefebvre was all for a good party — always — but he also wanted to help. He began to realize he could have a great time seeing the world while being generous to the less fortunate. It was partying, in a sense, but it also had a sense of purpose, almost a higher order to it. He wanted to change things for the better.