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

Fox seems to be the favorite among the musicians. Whether they believe the gibberish sprouting forth or it’s simply the most consistently entertaining television on offer is up for debate. Every time Lefebvre sits down to eat lunch, he shakes his head and rails against the political madness. Ahern’s response to Fox’s continuous warnings that the terrorists are coming to destroy America any second now is “We ought to just go in and kill ’em all.” It sounds as though he’s in favor of committing genocide just so the news industry will stop polluting the airwaves. Then again, who says music people have to be left wing? Maybe he agrees with Ted Nugent and the Fox News point of view. Ahern might be the vigilant sphinx rather than the sanguine Buddha.

Watson edits out the barrage by turning off the sound. We make small talk about Salt Spring Island. That’s home for her, and where she met Lefebvre. She’s worried about tending to the overly large garden attached to her new house. Her teenaged children look at her in shock, she tells me, and derisively comment on how Mom will take really, really good care of that garden — yeah, right.

I don’t want to bother Watson about this, but earlier I asked Lefebvre about all the women on his MySpace page. Crassly, I inquired as to their vocation — island gold diggers, perhaps? “Nah,” said Lefebvre, “they’re just friends from Salt Spring. There are a lot of females from Salt Spring on that page. I helped one of them record her hip-hop album last year.”

I doubt Watson has much to worry about. Lefebvre showed me a screen shot of her on his computer earlier, a selfie she had emailed to him. When stretched to cover the entire screen, it evokes thoughts of seventeenth-century portraiture. The digital artwork might be titled “Beautiful Modest Woman from Salt Spring Island.” Lefebvre’s assessment: “She makes a picture look good.”

Lefebvre bursts into the room, still perky seven hours into the day’s recordings and overdubs. “Sorry I left you, honey — had to take that call. It was Vince. They’re ready. It’s going to be the tenth, the sixth, or the third, whichever suits him.” That means next week or the week after, Lefebvre will plead guilty to money laundering and racketeering. Vince Marella, who works out of an office on Century Park East in L.A., has been discussing terms of the plea for months, and now they’re ready to deal. If Marella thinks Lefebvre ought to go ahead and plead guilty, maybe he should. Marella has represented senior corporate clients for three decades, according to his law firm’s website, and is “recognized as being one of the foremost white-collar criminal defense lawyers in the nation.”

I ask Lefebvre about the deal Marella is cooking up. He says he can’t talk about it, but he certainly won’t be getting the book thrown at him — twenty years and everything he owns. Under Marella’s guidance, and with Lefebvre cooperating with the feds, it’ll probably be more like an admission of guilt, around forty million bucks in cash forked over to Uncle Sam, and maybe fifteen or sixteen months in jail — if he’s lucky. In the United States, a convict must serve eighty-five percent of the sentence before being paroled, so even in this scenario, Lefebvre is looking at a substantial stretch. The bewildering ordeal seems over — a relief, obviously. All the same, the possibility of hard time becomes less chimera and more looming fact of life.

There is another possibility: Lefebvre pleading not guilty. He could argue that the U.S. has no jurisdiction, that he hasn’t been president of Neteller in some time, and that it’s like charging a former CEO of Exxon in connection with the Valdez oil spill.

“It’s not that simple,” says Lefebvre.

Meaning, when you’ve been arrested and charged with money laundering and racketeering, the DOJ is not playing touch football. The government begins with twenty years and everything you own. Then the agents assigned to your case ask — cue up that famous Al Kooper organ part — do you want to make a deal? If you do, maybe, just maybe, they might consider cutting you slack. If Lefebvre decided to plead not guilty — to not cooperate with the DOJ in its ongoing gambling investigation — the Americans would seek permission from the Government of Canada to freeze his assets. Not only would Lefebvre find it difficult to buy those groceries, he wouldn’t be able to scrounge up enough coin to pay a lawyer. The only recourse for Marella would be to appear before the judge and plead his case to unfreeze a small portion of the accused’s funds to initiate representation.

Still, doing time? The guy who used to be big man on campus is going to the big house? After cooperating? There was a quote in the Globe and Mail after the January arrests, referring to Lefebvre and Lawrence: “These are good guys,” said the unnamed source, an associate of Lawrence. “This is a little scary — this is super extra-territorial.”

The day’s recording session sputters out. Now Lefebvre wants to meet his daughter, Emily Lefebvre, and her fiancé, Pádraig Ó’Cinnéide (Kennedy), at Nobu, which is a three-minute drive from Malibu 2. Emily, born in 1980, is the proud result of Lefebvre’s second marriage.

Lefebvre has been married three times — four counting his common-law relationship with Jane Bergman (now McMullen). His first was to Janice Pridham, in the early seventies, before university (Lefebvre can’t remember the year). The relationship fell apart the year Lefebvre was elected president of the student union, 1978. His second marriage, to Katharine Armitage, a U of C nursing student, was of the shotgun variety. The union fell apart, but Lefebvre and Armitage remained devoted to raising their child. “Katharine and I, we tried,” he says, “but Emily turned out great.”

The two parents lived near one another in Calgary’s Sunnyside neighborhood to share the parenting load more easily. Lefebvre entered a long-term relationship with fellow lawyer and business partner Bergman, which began in the mid-eighties and sputtered out around a dozen years later. Then, in 2003, Lefebvre became entranced with a fifty-seven-year-old Costa Rican woman named Cecilia Garro, his landlady. While setting up Neteller’s San José office, he fell into a serious courtship, which resulted in marriage. The union went bad almost immediately, leading Lefebvre to bolt for Malibu in the fall of 2004. Lefebvre remains on good terms with all of his exes, except for Cecilia, whom he has not seen since their marriage imploded.

Emily and Pádraig live in Dublin. She’s a student at Trinity College, and he’s an IT guy. They’re back on North American soil to attend a wedding and see Emily’s relatives. Her dad tells me Emily has an appealing take on Paris Hilton: “She thinks she’s a big shit because she’s got sixteen million. What a chump!”

“That’s Emily,” Lefebvre says. “She’s got her head screwed on right.”

I know nothing of the world-famous Nobu. Neither did Hilary, until her kids shrieked when she told them where they’d be dining tonight. As we approach the entrance, Lefebvre says, “This place is popular around here, you might see celebrities and that sort of shit.”

We have an 8:30 reservation, for which we arrive on time. We sit down and, once Lefebvre asks for the multi-course omakase menu, or chef’s choice, it begins. Our wisecracking server brings on the cascade of dish upon dish upon dish of ornately, exquisitely prepared sushi. After just over two hours, it halts. My favorite is the one shaped like a gigantic winged insect, which you are supposed to eat whole. Lefebvre demonstrates, and I obediently follow, chewing then swallowing the oversized locust. He says about one-third of the people he brings to Nobu tell him it’s the greatest restaurant they’ve ever been to; the rest say it’s fantastic. The food does indeed have its share of wild taste sensations, but now we’re stuffed.