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

Meranda is upset with herself for not giving Cecilia any advance warning. But if she had, I doubt we would have ever gotten as far as we did. Meranda tells me later she considers herself a spiritual being. She believes in reincarnation. She is convinced we all have a purpose on the planet and that, further, everything happens for a reason. This episode of her life, it would seem, must be cataloged under that latter, ineffable category.

“There’s another hangout,” says Meranda, pointing to a corner building, an L-shaped one-and-a-half-story structure with two yellow awnings announcing El Fogoncito, where John used to bring the gang to wolf beers and scarf tacos. As we head downtown, Meranda tells me that when John set up shop in Costa Rica in the spring of 2002, he was given endless bureaucratic grief from the locals. She remembers the precarious but comedic way in which employees were paid.

“John, it’s Friday. Payday, time to cough up.”

John would say sure and cut her a check. She’d go down to the bank, and they’d refuse to honor it. She’d phone back. “John, you have to come down here in person. They won’t cash the check.”

Off John would go, down to the Banco Nacional, to show the clerk his identification and Neteller papers. He would demonstrate and write his signature.

“No, it’s not the same.”

“Yes, it is. I’m the guy.”

“No, it’s not exactly the same. There’s a little curlicue that’s different right there.”

“Okay, look, here’s my checkbook. Here I am, writing out a check. You know who I am. You see my identification.”

“No sir, your signature. It’s still not identical.”

As we drive by the new soccer stadium, the one with no parking, Meranda tells me about the Chinese commitment to Costa Rica. Investors had built living quarters/dorms for Chinese workers while they were here to build the stadium, the intention being to donate the barracks and convert them to apartments for the poor once the workers headed home. Meranda says, “We’ll see.”

We look at the stadium. Meranda says its crown looks like Liberty’s in New York Harbor, except wider. She says, “I keep telling Matteo we should buy a parcel of land across from the stadium and build a parking garage. We’d be the only game in town.”

Meranda receives another flashback while we’re driving around in San Rafael, Escazú, looking for the Scotiabank John used. As we watch trucks belch fumes, she remembers John and Steve, the two principles, waiting at an intersection near the Neteller offices downtown. The cab’s windows were down. When the light changed, the bus just ahead in the adjacent lane excreted its exhaust straight into the cab. While they were eating thick, acrid, bluish smoke, Steve said, “Now that’s the smell of money!”

Now we’re in Paseo Colón, San José, on a street that is close to the actual downtown borderline of San José proper. Meranda is looking for the internet café Neteller first used for its fledgling operation, as well as the Dos por Uno Pizza joint nearby. They’re both gone.

Up ahead, the terrain is crawling with vehicles. “You see that— that’s San José. Uh-oh, I hope we can get out of this.” The cars and trucks hit the downtown in the morning and — BAM! — the flow slows to a trickle. Wait and crawl, wait and crawl. Meranda looks a little panicky. “I have to get back, Merissa’s class is almost over.” Is there an escape hatch, one last right-hand turn down a one-way before we get sucked into the great blue maw of exhaust, heat, and human stewing? She can’t remember. Ah, there it is, hang a right, get the hell out of this. Now I understand why they prefer living up the hill in Escazú.

To be continued tomorrow morning, I hope. I had asked Meranda about the Hotel y Casino Del Rey, the supposed world-famous gambling house with dozens and dozens of prostitutes milling about. It’s located in downtown San José. She demurred. In the old days, ten years back, the boys would offer to take her with them to their business meetings in these sorts of joints. She doesn’t need to prove anything now, so she’d asked around and found a guide for me, a guy with whom she used to do business, known only by his sobriquet.

Around six o’clock, “the chauffeur” zips into the B&B driveway in his late-model SUV. He lives miles from the B&B but was willing to pick me up. He drives to some restaurant that looks like a typical American yuppie joint in a new suburban-like strip mall. It looks like a place acceptable to a certain kind of gringo: well lighted, decent furniture and stereo system, high chairs and tables along the window, which is to say along the outside, because it is wide open. At first I wonder about someone racing out of the parking lot to steal money, but the strip mall is so shiny new the neon business signs must have been unpacked yesterday, and the ambience disarms me.

It’s usually packed, says the chauffeur, but Monday is light on patrons, maybe twenty in total. Might be a pickup bar, hard to say. We order margarita after margarita and talk about this and that for an hour or two until a buddy of his, Tony, shows up. Then we all climb into the chauffeur’s SUV and head to the Del Rey. Meantime, I interview the chauffeur at the restaurant for his take on Costa Rica, bookies, gaming, and companies like Neteller.

“No recordings, please.”

“How about a few brief notes?”

“Umm … I guess that’s okay.”

The chauffeur knows the biz, all right. He’s still in it, although since the big busts went down everything’s been on a “First Rule of Fight Club” basis. You don’t necessarily hang a gaming shingle up in web-land and declare yourself open for business. But the chauffeur says it’s still a going concern, probably bigger than ever. He laughs at the federales . He thinks they’re not only hypocrites; they’re as thick as a just-opened bottle of Heinz if they believe the U.S. government can seal every web-created perforation in gambling laws and jurisdictions.

The chauffeur orders a fifth margarita. I decline. He’s smoking cheap cigarettes throughout our conversation, a buck for a twenty-pack. Taste lousy, but I keep snagging them off him. Sensing I might need ballast, the chauffeur orders tapas. The ones he picks are kind of like tostadas stuffed with chorizo meat shavings and vegetables. Not half bad. We wolf down a few before the chauffeur saves some for his buddy.

Tony arrives. He’s in a foul mood — he had a bad experience with the cab driver — and famished. The chauffeur hands him some tapas, and Tony starts to chill out. They’re single straight guys and, I’m thinking, have women on their minds a lot. Tony confesses later that he really likes good-looking Costa Rican girls. That’s one of the beautiful things about being in San José, he says. When the chauffeur insists on picking up the tab I accept his gesture gratefully yet can’t help but wonder about the cash flow situation.

As we head off to the Del Rey, I take a look around at San José at night and think, yes, it could help to have a guide with a car. You never know when you’re going to get the runaround from a cabbie. You never know when you might get beat for your wallet. You never know when you’re walking around here which street is dangerous and which one isn’t.

The chauffeur is a fountain of wisdom. He tells us about new online companies that do everything Neteller once did but using electronic tokens. This way, gamblers buy the tokens and retain their anonymity. His big dream, he tells me, is for some heavy money to silently invest two mill in some new can’t-miss project of his. He was workin’ on something big, as Tom Petty once sang. The chauffeur swears online gambling is bigger than ever.