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

McMullen laughs and then continues, “John is and always has been, even when he had nothing, extremely generous. But he needs the approval of others, which is a lot easier to get with a lot of money.” As for the Lefebvre Foundation, it was over almost as soon as it started: “John had already given away the money,” she says. “There was nothing for it to do.”

As chaotic and capricious as all of the mega-spending may have been, it was clear Lefebvre had no need to develop this bent toward philanthropy from scratch. It never looked like a cover because he’d always been inclined to give rather than take. On my second day in Los Angeles, June 27, 2007, first thing Thursday morning in Malibu, I received a demonstration of his post-windfall generous spirit firsthand.

We were sitting in Lefebvre’s kitchen, looking out at the beach and the Pacific Ocean, sipping a turbo-charged mix of espresso and dark roast coffee. Beyond the crashing surf, a mud shark basked close to the surface. The surf was loud — Lefebvre estimated that on his fifty-foot-wide lot, any given wave deposited up to seventy tons of water in front of his kitchen window. This was the acoustic environment into which federal marshals some months previous had invited themselves.

Lefebvre was curious about my last two decades and asked what I’d been up to all this time. I summed up my modest career arc, and he seemed most impressed when I told him I started working at and then edited an alternative newspaper in Toronto called Eye Weekly . I then showed him the fruits of my current vocation, the latest issues of the Ryerson Review of Journalism . My final-year students at Ryerson University in Toronto produced two ninety-six-page glossy consumer magazines every year, with the help of instructors and consultants. The magazine, which had been around for decades, aimed to be a “watchdog on the watchdogs,” founding publisher Don Obe’s goal, and reviewed current issues in Canadian journalism. Lefebvre flipped through, noticed some pages of advertising, and asked if it made money. I told him it did, but not enough to break even. In fact, the two issues lost about $30,000 every year, give or take.

“I can get behind that!”

“You should read them first, shouldn’t you?”

“Well, I will, but I don’t have to. You say it’s a good thing, and that’s good enough for me. The quality will vary from year to year depending on the quality of students, right? So I’m not going to base my decision on this particular year but the whole concept.”

Later, when writing the Review a check for $25,000, he said, “You think I’m showing off, don’t you?”

I told him no, not especially — not when he’d made as much money as he had. The way I imagined it was, there must have been a moment when he realized he had a bird’s eye view of the world, and felt disembodied. So vast had the scale of his means changed that he was no longer distracted by the quotidian. He began to see beyond things others could not possibly get past, and got above the financial banalities that haunt most of us. That moment for him occurred about three or four months before Neteller went public, when he was sent $1.4 million in cash: “That was pretty much it.”

No, I wasn’t concerned about Lefebvre showing off. I was concerned about my potential conflict of interest: journalist guy flies down to L.A. to talk to an old acquaintance from his university days, hangs out for a couple of days, receives $25,000 made out to non-profit magazine he supervises, then writes a story about the donor’s plight for another magazine … bad optics or what?

And there was a feeling gnawing away that money polluted relationships and colored everything. I remember what Dorothy Parker and F. Scott Fitzgerald had to say about the rich being different, and yes, there had to be a universe of difference between us. But of course there had to be something in it for Lefebvre, too — otherwise why would he bother to spend the money to put me up for a couple of days and talk openly about his life? We sideswiped this delicate negotiation when he said it was okay to discuss his troubles with the law. He just wanted to get his version of the Neteller story out there, and contained within that story would be another story about all the good he was doing with his money. It was something, but it didn’t make the conflict go away.

Indeed, when I returned to Toronto, I told Paul Knox, chair of Ryerson’s School of Journalism, Lefebvre’s incredible rise-and-fall story. He listened intently. The next day, he phoned me at home and confirmed my queasy feeling. He told me he could see that Lefebvre’s $25,000 donation was genuine and free of strings, since I was his friend and he had explicitly warned me, “Don’t let this affect what you write about me.” But still, for him it didn’t really pass the “smell test.”

The entire issue was fraught with perceptual problems any way you held the lava-hot potato, even though it was obvious the Review really needed the money. The conflict continued to haunt me— Was I being played? — as I wrote the first draft of the my Swerve magazine feature.

Then the decision was taken away from me. It was against Ryerson policy to accept money from someone in trouble with the law, no matter how well intended, generous, and genuine the offer. So I wouldn’t have to wriggle around in ethical quicksand after all. (It would have been a futile exercise anyway.) Instead, I was free to think of Lefebvre’s impulsive (or calculated?), generous (or looking to buy me off?) gesture on that Thursday morning as a routine demonstration of the kind of guy he was.

When Lefebvre found out Ryerson had declined to accept his money, another side of his personality came out. He did not take the rejection well. He threw his toys out of the sandbox. He became apoplectic, went nuclear as they say. And maybe with good reason: he could not understand the university’s pusillanimous concern for optics. He thought whoever the “they” was at Ryerson responsible for the decision a cowardly bunch of weasels. He was a Canadian citizen in good standing, and he wanted to help — what was the problem? Worse, the returned money was accompanied with what he considered an insulting, condescending letter, which infuriated him even more. He left a voicemail on my land line: “Bill! John Lefebvre. Isn’t my fuckin’ money good enough for those cats at Ryerson? The University of Calgary thinks my fuckin’ money’s good enough. The Suzuki Foundation thinks my fuckin’ money’s good enough. The CIBC thinks my fuckin’ money’s good enough. What’s their fuckin’ problem?”

My initial thought was Hmm, has Justine heard this message yet?

But then, I had to wonder why I thought I needed to protect her from foul language — she’d heard it all in the schoolyard a thousand times already. And anyway, it was all for naught. Sometime after this incident, Lefebvre met my daughter and taught her and her friend Sarah a dirty nursery rhyme. In as deep a baritone as possible for an eleven-year-old girl, preferably marching while belting it out, my daughter sang: “Arsehole, arsehole, a soldier I shall be / Too pissed, too pissed, two pistols on my knee / Fuck you, fuck you, for curiosity / I’ll fight for the old cunt, fight for the old cunt, fight for the old country.”

Lefebvre taught her and her pal that ditty in about two minutes flat, and then he had them sing it into his iPod recording device and listen back to it on his high-end stereo at top decibel level.

Lefebvre has always made a charming first impression on young people, who instantly catch the idealism and the child inside him, and respond immediately. He laughed about the off-color song and said, “You have to teach it to them now, Bill, before they’re twelve. Otherwise you’ve lost the window when it’ll be funny to them.”