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

Mom was going on about something or other, but Lefebvre couldn’t keep track. He was going nuts and couldn’t concentrate on anything she was saying. Holy shit, I’d better take control of this conversation right now! He started talking about what he wanted to talk about, ripped out of his tree. And off they went, down to his new Oldman Dam property.

The point is, by the time the clerk in New York says, “Sure you don’t want to sit down?” Lefebvre has been smoking this stuff every day for months. The THC content in his body is off the chart.

THC overload now discovered, Lefebvre realizes it’s game over for getting high. For a guy who wants “He never stopped tokin’” for an epitaph, this has to be a tough sacrifice. “Forty million bucks, fuck that,” he acknowledges. “Not toking is the biggest inconvenience of being arrested.”

Ten days after the FBI’s intrusion into his life, Lefebvre’s first drug test is over. He is allowed to leave 500 Pearl Street and return to Malibu, where he can stare at the ocean and the haze and maybe write a few songs — the bust has given him a few ideas.

A bunch of press people come up to him outside. “Got any statements?” they ask. “Got any comments?”

“Yeah, I got a comment.”

Mics shift toward Lefebvre’s mouth.

“Stop global warming.”

“Living the Dream”

Back in Los Angeles, the alleged money launderer once again had to face Devona Gardner, senior officer, California-Central (Pretrial). Ten days before, when Lefebvre had first met her, she’d recommended that he remain incarcerated. He had visited too many countries in his life, she argued; he was a world traveler and constituted a flight risk. Despite this decision, Lefebvre enjoyed and memorized her voicemail spiel: “If this is about any other matter please leave a message and I will return the matter.”

It was a weird experience being back home. He couldn’t concentrate on reading and couldn’t establish his usual routine. He had to see Marella at least once a week for the first three weeks, and he had to see Gardner regularly. He was phoning her daily and visiting twice a week. Foolishly, he drove into L.A. a couple of times before realizing the thirty-mile traffic jam from Malibu to downtown L.A. was crazy to negotiate. He started to ride the seams. “If you’re on a motorcycle you can just take split lanes, so when the traffic’s backed up you’re still moving.” Still, that was a lot of miles. “Eventually, they got it so I only had to come in once a week, then every other week, then monthly. Phone every week. They started slowing it down when they realized I wasn’t a player.”

It was hard for FBI personnel to imagine, but Lefebvre might not be the master criminal they had thought. He tried to settle in, and for sure he wasn’t taking any chances smoking up. He tried to remember the last time he’d gone so long without doing so. His friends and associates in Calgary were supportive but “freaking out.” They wanted to fly down, but at this point, early on, who knew what the DOJ might do? It might arrest anyone close to Lefebvre who was discovered crossing the border. He explains, “Geoff and Jane and all the people who are affiliated with me formally are reluctant to this day to go to the U.S. Jane has gone, but Geoff still won’t. I’m not exactly sure why. Geoff’s a cautious guy. That’s one of the reasons I hired him. If I was money laundering so was he — that’s the way he looks at it. I’ve come to an accommodation with them, so I say to Geoff, ‘That would indicate that they don’t want anything more out of me.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, but what do they want out of me?’”

The other investors stayed away. Ramsay and Choy never went near the border. Glavine and Edmunds, no way. Natland was in the U.S. on January 15 but soon hightailed it north. He rented a car straight away and drove from Las Vegas to Alberta, abandoning his rental at the border and walking across. Once on Canadian soil, he was in — no one’s going to stop a Canadian on his way out of the U.S. A friend had driven to the border to meet him and was waiting. Gordon Herman was in San Francisco when he heard, and he immediately left for the airport. “That,” Lefebvre says, “would have been a harrowing trip.”

Lefebvre was pensive, mulling things over, and he began to write songs about his predicament. The days were solitary and uneventful on the outside, which masked the turmoil inside his head. He says, “I was mostly alone, probably on my own every Monday morning to Friday afternoon. I’d get up. I wouldn’t say I was depressed. I was anxious. Sleep wasn’t going as well as it had. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing, thinking, What the fuck? This whole room, my bedroom with thirty-foot-high ceilings and Tuscan-beamed woodwork and 165-year-old French white oak floors and $40,000 nineteenth-century Turkish mother-of-pearl inlaid dresser — it all kind of looked like it wasn’t mine anymore.”

Speaking about his new reality, he says, “I would get up in the morning, and I was into this cereal, Nature’s Path Spelt Flakes, these Cheerios made out of spelt. You could leave them in milk all day long and they were still hard as rocks. I’d eat those and a basket of blueberries for breakfast and sit out on the porch and watch the surf and drink tea and think about shit.”

Friends started to come down to keep him company, hang out on the deck and listen to the surf blast away at the shoreline — laid-back, almost. Mike Greene came down. Jeff Proudfoot came down. Kyle Blocksom — who in 2008 would become the contractor on Lefebvre’s ambitious redesign of a resort property on Salt Spring Island, a place he would rename Stonehouse — came down with his wife. His musician and producer buddy Danny Patton came down a couple of times, and they played tennis every day. Lefebvre was taking lessons at Tennis Malibu, behind his house, further up in the hills. They went to some concerts together, too, but mostly they sat with a glass of high-end red and looked at the ocean. “That’s what everyone thinks the movie stars are doing, except you’re the only one there,” says Patton. After both trips he experienced something he called Cinderella Syndrome: “At a certain point you’re back in your minivan, drinking your Tim Hortons, going, What happened? Somebody waves the wand and you go back home.”

Lefebvre had more than enough company, actually. There were acquaintances from Malibu and L.A. who would come over and hang out with him, people with whom he could go to Nobu. He didn’t dine out every night, but many. He couldn’t smoke pot, but he drank a bottle of wine every day. He cherished what solitude he did have: “I really did appreciate the time alone. A lot.”

He knew he had a recording date ahead of him, and he forced himself to practice his guitar work and singing. “I’ve been to jail before,” he told Patton, “I know it’s not the Hollywood version.” He stayed cool; he was productive. He wrote fifteen tunes between the bust and June 1. When the DOJ hounded you, he reasoned, it might be a good idea to keep going with that little dream project. Forget about dropping another five million on another environmental cause you love — that could wait — how about dropping a little something on yourself right about now?

Lefebvre recalls, “For the first two or three weeks, I was beside myself, and it was probably in that first week that I phoned Brian Ahern and said to him, ‘You know the plans we had to build a nice studio out in Salt Spring Island to do this recording project? I wonder if there are any nice studios in Los Angeles?’”

Ahern, Patton, and Lefebvre had batted around various locales for doing the recording proper, including Calgary, Nashville (Ahern’s hometown), Salt Spring Island, and Vancouver. Ahern leaned toward the coast: the original plan was, according to Patton, was to ship all the gear to Salt Spring around May.