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

Meranda drives an oversized four-wheel-drive Honda Quicksilver, a leftover from the Out of Bounds trekking business they started after Matteo was let go from Neteller. The Alta is our first stop. Dubbed “Costa Rica’s Ultimate Getaway,” it was, Meranda says, the happening spot in 2003–04, around the time John and Cecilia got married. It is a well-designed hotel in the colonial style. Inside the front door, at reception, the stairs wend their way down and straight, down and straight, down and straight, like a descending corridor imported from a de Chirico canvas. The hotel allows art to be hung along this lengthy portal. At the end are the sumptuously appointed restaurant and the outdoor pool. The amorous, pre-bickering couple were married in the portico on the top floor, the penthouse suite. San José is nestled in the Central Valley, so the view from this balcony is expansive. About eighty wedding guests somehow crammed into this confined space.

Later, Meranda shows me pictures of the ceremony. She points to one photo in particular that has haunted her to this day, shot just as the couple took their vows. Cecilia looks to be crossing her fingers. Meranda has never had the nerve to show the photo to Lefebvre.

Other pictures show various people at the early stages of the Neteller Costa Rica operation. There’s a woman Meranda calls a “whacko” with a “crush on John. He probably doesn’t want to remember her.” There’s a picture of Perle, Steve’s wife, and John, looking happy. There’s a picture of Randall, who turned out to be a crucial early connection.

Meranda recalls, “When we came to San José we had contacts, but Randall was the first guy who came to John’s and my hotel and took us out, showed us around the town, set up phone lines. He worked for Instant Action Sports, a gaming company in town. Because he was my merchant contact, we started a friendship. We had parties all the time. He was the biggest guy and he had the tiniest white car. He would somehow shove us all in and take us all around, never charge money. He was just really happy.”

There’s a picture of Ingrid and Jessica. Meranda says, “Jessica was one of the first local hires. She was my assistant, and worked till the end. Everybody got laid off but her, until we moved the office into my house. Then I got her a job with the sports book people.”

Jessica begged for a cleaning gig back at the party house. Meranda told her Canadians don’t need that kind of help but caved when she said, “Look, my husband’s an asshole. All I want is a pack of cigarettes and not have to ask my husband for the money. So can I just come and work one day a week and you can pay me ten dollars?” One day became two. Then she started doing the cooking and the laundry. “And Ingrid worked with Cecilia and John, in their homes, and took care of them for a long time. Then Ingrid became close friends with Cecilia’s mom. Those two know each other because they both married brothers.”

While the Calgary contingent had success finding the right kind of people to assist them with setting up the office, liaise with bookies, and develop a support staff, Meranda found the bureaucracy impossible: “John and I would go down to this shithole cop shop. You’re stepping in between piss and garbage to get immigration and fingerprints for your residency. Took two times to go through. Still not ready. ‘Oh no, we’re missing this, missing that.’ I left Canada with all my legal documents. I applied for residency even before I left. I had everything — my police record — I knew what I was getting into. I canceled my RSPs. That was the one responsible thing I did when I was eighteen years old, but I had to cancel them. And then I had to pay taxes. Matt said screw it, we’re just going to get married, and I’m going to get my residency somehow.”

Meranda became, along with John, the legal signee for the company. All the phone lines were in her name as well. She still has the Neteller fax line. “It’s under a business name and I can’t change it because I need John here with me to change it. I had to close down the company bank account because he was gone, which was a hard process. I swear — John still has money in his Banco de Nacional account. I don’t think there’d be a million but definitely there was money. When he left, he left .”

A rumor persists that the balance on one of John’s ATM receipts read $400,000,000. Sounds like an exaggeration, but in those days, who could tell what was real and what wasn’t?

Meranda says,

Maybe when he had all those shares. But would he have all that money in Costa Rica? Maybe he had four hundred million colones, because that’s nothing ($800,000). That’s a huge joke here—“Hey, how many millions in colones for that?

Oh yeah, John had a big wad of paper. Anytime you go anywhere, John was holding this [Meranda holds her thumb and index finger to demonstrate a fat wad of bills]. That’s why he needed his man purse, for all his bloody cash.

Meranda’s starting wage at the Calgary Neteller office was eleven dollars an hour, and her salary went up from there, based on increased responsibilities. “It stayed at $5,000 a month for four years. I didn’t get a raise.”

When John took off for Malibu, Rob Eltom, who had been in Costa Rica almost as long as Meranda, eventually took over as her boss. “John was my man I went to for everything — always. I didn’t even go to Steve half the time unless I had to do something with a check.”

Meranda remained at Neteller until early 2007. Eventually she was bumped up to corporate training manager, which required her to travel in the Caribbean to places such as Curaçao, in the Netherlands Antilles, Antigua, and Panama. “We had a training manual,” she says. “I went to sports books we already had accounts with and trained the people on Neteller, the ones that were talking to clients on the phone and via email.” She would show clients how to deposit and transfer funds in and out of Neteller, say, or she would explain the fees that were associated with the transfers, deposits, and withdrawals, or she might explain how long the process normally lasted, or she might explain what InstaCash was, how it worked, and the various games and prizes associated with it. The hope was Neteller’s partners would have enough information to speak knowledgeably and tell their clients what Neteller was all about. For this work she was paid $5,000 a month plus travel expenses, which she paid up front and then filed receipts for reimbursement. “I didn’t sign contracts with the owners/managers,” she says. “That was the ‘R’ team.”

The R Team consisted of three guys whose first name started with the letter R : Rob Eltom, Rodney Thompson, and Ryan Lang. They were the young dudes getting contracts signed over drinks. Mission accomplished, they’d check out a nice restaurant and then stop by a place like the Irazú Casino to play a few hands. They went to the infamous Del Rey only when asked for business reasons. Ideally, they’d rather hang outside of downtown San José, which was a bit sleazy, and possibly a bit dangerous. After the Neteller bust, Ryan left the company and went on to become a U.S. payment processor for offshore betting mega-companies such as Full Tilt Poker, Absolute Poker, and PokerStars — companies that grew into the U.S. market post-Neteller and more or less owned that market until 2011. Ryan and three other payment processors were caught in a DOJ dragnet code-named “Black Friday” and arrested. About a year later, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara for the Southern District of New York was happy to announce that Ryan had opted to return to Manhattan to enter a guilty plea for fraud, money laundering, and gambling offenses “in connection with a scheme to deceive banks into processing hundreds of millions of dollars in gambling transactions.” Ryan was looking at thirty years.