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

Lefebvre and I talk about his flight to Toronto in February 2008, in a huge snowstorm. He says, “There are advantages to small planes that make them safer in certain conditions: they brake better; they don’t have as much momentum going down the runway; and my plane has reverse thrusters, where the thrust is redirected forward — that slows you down. It’s fifteen percent slower than commercial travel. That’s easy to swallow — it’s way faster than commercial travel if you take into consideration the hurry-up-and-wait, showing up at the airport two hours early.”

Kirkwood uses the same strips as commercial planes. He files a departure time within a certain range so controllers know more or less when he’s coming in. He never gets the “No, you cannot land at this time” line as seen on TV. Lefebvre says, “Sometimes when you pull out to take off, you’re in a long lineup. Once there was a storm in the Midwest, so at O’Hare in Chicago we were behind ninety jets idling on the runway. It took an hour and fifteen minutes for all of that to clear up. That’s just luck of the draw.”

Would Lefebvre use his jet to visit his daughter in Dublin? “No, it’s not worth it. In fuel and engine depreciation, it’s about $1,400 an hour. It’s ten hours there and ten hours back — that’s $28,000. It’s fun but that’s where I draw the line now. Hopping around North America still makes sense, but long trips it’s better to take off your shoes and your belt. You spend $8,000 on first-class tickets and you’ve still got $20,000 to buy shoes and belts with.”

Upstairs, Lefebvre pulls out a book. He says,

This is this year’s maintenance log, and this is the sky plan — every flight plan that has ever been filed by us. Where we went, how far, where we gassed up. It would be useful to me if we hire a guy to make a summary of where the plane went and where we stayed. It would make an interesting read to see where the plane went, for how long, and when. What you’d come up with is stuff like for a year or so of my life I was flying all around North America — let’s go to Malibu for the weekend! My friends went, too. For a lot of those trips, I don’t remember. For eight months Dale was flying twenty-two days a month.

The gusher days.

The hangar is large enough to hold Kirkwood’s jet and doubles as a car garage. The BMW Z8s aren’t here; they’re stationed on Salt Spring Island and down in Malibu. But the wow factor is not lessened. Check out the navy blue GT racer with the white double racing stripe from stem to stern. Ford built this serious pro roadster for one year only, in 1966. Try this machine somewhere in the foothills between Calgary and Banff, preferably on a long straight road in the spring, when the snow has melted but there isn’t much traffic. You can be Steve McQueen in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway , cheering on his lover Ali MacGraw to “punch it, baby.” Punch it to two hundred miles per hour, that is. Yeah, go ahead, do it. Lefebvre has.

Then we come to another stone-cold classic, the dark blue-green 1963 Chevy Impala SS 409, the muscle car. “Giddy up, giddy up, 409,” as the Beach Boys exhorted. “It’s absolutely perfect,” says Lefebvre. “Here, for a laugh … I don’t make everybody do this.”

We crawl under the car. He’s right. There is not a speck of dirt or grease on the beast.

“For instance, the shape of the nuts, can you see these? Have they ever been outside? Everything is new and crisp. Look at the shine on that! Completely restored to perfect. Feel this rubber here — it’s perfect.”

“This is a beautiful car, too,” I say, coming to the dark green 1965 Pontiac Beaumont two-door. Lefebvre starts it up, flooding the room with noise and exhaust.

“That’s a rumble machine,” I tell him. “Smells like an old car. My ’64 Dodge 330 smelled like that.”

Then we come to the Indian motorcycle. The original Indian firm went broke in 1953, and this bike, yellow with tan outlines, is from that era. Lefebvre explains how if you advance the spark too much you can get hurt if it kicks back. “A few more guys broke their legs than were supposed to.”

On the way back to Calgary, Lefebvre decides to take the Old Banff Coach Road SW, the main thoroughfare before the Trans-Canada Highway was built. The area is speckled with country acreages. “Look at these fuckin’ monstrosities,” he says. “Who needs a house that big? Look, it’s like a college. It’s like a medical center. This is the most affluent postal code in Canada.”

For the longest stretch of time, Lefebvre was Neteller’s largest shareholder. This is no longer true. Now he has no shares in Neteller. It’s December, and he’s sold the last of them for about a buck Canadian. Part of McMullen’s forfeiture payment plan, I’m guessing.

“That’s got to hurt,” I suggest to him.

“It was seven million,” comes the quick retort. “How much can it hurt?”

Right. Who couldn’t endure the heartache of cashing out seven million?

“Sure,” he continues, “it could have been seventy million.” He means if the FBI hadn’t wiped out ninety percent in shareholder value.

Griping, he says, “A guy feels funny when quotes appear in the press. A year ago I was rich and now I couldn’t come up with a measly five million. A guy feels funny when he reads that in print because you imagine a single mom reading that and thinking, ‘What an asshole.’”

That quote from my original magazine piece—“So, great, you mean I’ve got $110 million in the bank and I can’t get at a measly five million bail money? You mean I can’t even buy groceries?”—has been a thorn in his pride since the day it was put out there for public consumption in October 2007. A thorn he’s ripped out and needled me with ever since. He wants me to delete the quote from the book. Or at least move it down. Why does it have to be part of the opening? Anyone can empathize with his position, but that kind of wisecracking is part of who Lefebvre is. He’ll often let off-color jokes fly. He’ll often say outrageous things just to get a reaction. You can attribute his acting out to his wealth — he knows he’s rich and we’re not and there’s not much we can do about it — or you can attribute it to his nature, which money hasn’t altered. Or you can attribute it to both. Probably both. Even before he became rich you wouldn’t be able to shut him up if he wanted to let fly.

Eight months after selling the last of his Neteller shares, Lefebvre was still undergoing drug testing. His exemplary behavior had won him more time between tests, though, a huge plus. He got it down to monthly, then quarterly and, finally, now, to semiannually. Sometimes he flew to New York; sometimes he flew to L.A. He’d been arrested in Malibu, but the charges originated from the State of New York, so it should have been New York. However, since he lived on the West Coast most of the time, they let him go south. All this time he’d been cooperating in an ongoing investigation — who knew for how much longer, since they wouldn’t tell him or his lawyers — telling them everything he knew, repeatedly, about the online gambling business. Lefebvre was now Super Model Citizen USA.

And then came July 26, 2009, two and a half years after the fateful MLK day visit. He flew down to L.A. and took his usual round. He’d gone fifty-eight days — nearly two months — without a toke. He figured he was in the clear. Then the guy asked him, “You been around any dope lately?”

“No, not to my knowledge,” Lefebvre said, truthfully. “Why, what are you looking at?”

“Com’ere.”

The tester showed Lefebvre a card with four columns on it labeled with four drug short forms — OPI, COC, mAMP, THC. There was one line across the top of the columns and another line across the bottom of three of them, but not the fourth. The top line said the test was functioning and the bottom line says it was positive or negative. If positive, there was no line.