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

Lefebvre says,

My mom was excited to meet Dalai Lama. She might have been more excited to meet the other His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, who, in my estimation, was absolutely the most un-humble representative of Christ that ever existed. So we were sitting there with Victor Chan, and in a few minutes His Holiness was shown in, and he sat down. I was shown to a chair, and my mom was to my left, sitting between His Holiness and me. We shook hands and then sat down.

We talked about walking down both sides of the street, because I was doing the Four Great Rivers initiative in China, and I was telling His Holiness how it was delicate for me, because on one hand, I was assisting the Chinese on a conservation project and meeting Chinese guys who were spying on each other in case anyone ever mentioned Dalai Lama in anything but pejorative tones. And then on the other hand, I was meeting His Holiness and setting up the Dalai Lama Center in Vancouver. So I said, “I think of myself as swimming down the middle of the river.” So he said, “Ah yes, very important. Very, very important.” And he talked to my mom. We talked for about twelve, maybe fifteen minutes, and it was fine.

At one point, Dalai Lama put his hand on my mom’s knee. My mom put her hand on her own knee, and without looking he put his hand on my mom’s hand on her knee. She was startled and right away he took away his hand and apologized. She said, “No no, it’s fine, it’s quite lovely actually.”

Chan grabbed a few pictures of Lefebvre and his mom with His Holiness before the Dalai Lama was whisked off to a big show downstairs in BC Place. Lefebvre’s mom then sat down again, winded.

Lefebvre continues,

A guy on the Dalai Lama Center board said, “Louise, are you okay?” She goes, “Uh-uh-uh-of course I’m okay!” She was absolutely breathless from having met this cat.

Dalai Lama is a gentle gentleman, but not in the sense of being withdrawn. You know him to be a powerful guy, but he’s a gentle powerful guy. He’s tremendously learned about spiritual matters, but nothing he knows is beyond any of us, and he knows that.

By the time it was over, Mom was taking a different view of Ratzinger.

If the Dalai Lama ever comes to Stonehouse, he will want Louise Lefebvre to be there. And if he does come to ask what’s so funny about peace, love and understanding, this is what he will find: one main kitchen with an under-lit onyx center island; eight Sub-Zero fridges; gel mats on heated concrete; one cook/housekeeper (Nathalie Carles) using only the finest organic ingredients and Restoration Hardware cleaning products; a massive suspended television set; a couple of imposing sculptures hanging from the ceiling; a Bösendorfer on which to pound out Lefebvre tunes; automatic, rain-sensitive, temperature-controlled skylights; a garage with five double doors with an art gallery and vintage car collection inside; a steam bath with a wine fridge and two Sub-Zero beverage drawers stocked with sodas, mineral water, and beer; courtesy guest slippers, bathrobes, towels, almonds, tissues, and flashlights; ten bathrooms in total on the property, with five hose and rain-shower heads and wall-mounted sprayers, each with steam baths; four kitchenettes in the other buildings, along with three large-screen TVs; three freestanding soaker tubs; multi-button controls for speakers, iPod dock, radio, pot lights, and heating in every room; and a groundskeeper or two to tend the tree-lined driveways, 126 planters, and wild grass down the hill toward the inlet.

Oh, and customized sleek black polyester-nylon-spandex bomber jackets with small, fine white print in capital letters across the shoulder blades: STONEHOUSE.

On the drive back to Lefebvre’s place on Sunset Drive, we take a route that hugs St. Mary Lake. Randy Bachman, the former Guess Who and BTO guitarist, now host of CBC’s Vinyl Tap , lives at the end of the lake. He sometimes performs in public with his son Tal, also a musician, but isn’t seen around the island that much. No matter, Lefebvre can always be counted on to be his inadvertent stand-in — he’s been mistaken for Bachman more than once. Lefebvre can imagine why Bachman maintains a low profile. “He meets people who, as Brian Ahern says, ‘gurm’ him, that is, suck up and take his time, which can be annoying. If people just responded, ‘Hey, you’re Randy Bachman of the Guess Who!’ and then walked on, it’d be okay. But many people are into this celebrity thing and want to cling.”

After a few more conversations, Lefebvre is forced to cut his June hanging-out time short by a day. He has to fly to New York for his three-month checkup. Pissing for the Man. What’s in his urine has nothing to do with his crime—“conspiracy to use the wires to transmit in interstate and foreign commerce bets and wagering information”—but urinate he must. If any drugs are found to be in his system, he breaks parole, he breaks the law, he gets charged, he’s strapped to the DOJ’s anvil, and the hammer will come down with Promethean regularity.

Which is why it is might a little bit reckless, if not crazy, that Lefebvre smokes pot for the first few weeks after he pisses. He calibrates it this way: it takes two weeks for traces of THC to leave the body, so at the six-week mark he starts to curtail his marijuana-smoking habit. He starts to shut the valve down. By the time he gets within two weeks he’s been well clean for a while — just in case.

Why does Lefebvre take the chance? Good question. Pot smoking and long hair are crucial to understanding Lefebvre. Pot smoking should be legalized, he thinks — except that in the U.S., Washington and Colorado notwithstanding, there is too much money to be made in the prison industry to ever consider doing that nationwide. And the long hair? Well, as mentioned, Lefebvre’s been arguing in favor of long hair ever since he was twelve.

Now it’s October 2008, and I fly to Calgary to meet up with Lefebvre again so he can show me his residence and his airplane hangar and to chat some more. He invites me to see another property, south of Calgary — his wild, rustic, prairie foothills land. Sure, why not? Let’s go. Oldman Dam is about two hours from Calgary. Lefebvre scooped up the parcel for a million bucks and hasn’t done a thing to it. He’s thinking about it, but he also thinks about just leaving it the way it is.

Lefebvre phones up a buddy of his, Mick Verde, who’s at work, and cajoles him into coming along. We drive south on Macleod Trail. It’s so windy a dust storm blows across the main drag. Then a huge blue tarp disengages from a construction project and flies across. Then insulation tiles go airborne like tumbleweeds. Then more dust. Later, after we reach our destination, we’ll get pelted with wet snow from a massive black cloud before the sun breaks out to warm us. A routine Cowtown apocalypse.

Lefebvre’s doing the driving, and what is he concerned about most? Getting pulled over by the cops. Why? Well, the one thing that could wreck his pot-smoking strategy during this DOJ interregnum of his life would be to get pulled over for speeding, get run through the computers, be identified as a parolee — with the whiff of pot smoke inside the Lexus hybrid SUV. Lefebvre would be a target, a prize for some cop patrolling Ian Tyson — land down near Longview, right? What cop wouldn’t want to say, “Hey, I got Lefebvre smoking pot in his car. He’s breaking the terms of parole as well as the law, right? He’s fucked, right? We got ’im!”

Yes, that is Lefebvre’s biggest fear right now, so the conversation between the two old buddies goes something like this:

Verde: Johnny, what’re you doing now?

Lefebvre: I’m keepin’ an eye on it, Mick. About sixty-five.