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

As the dessert plate is served, Emily and Pádraig return to the subject of celebrity, specifically Cindy Crawford and her Gerber baby food scion husband, Rande. They were sitting at the next table for the first hour or so. Hilary says what caught her eye at first was this extraordinarily good-looking man. Later, I look it up and find out, yes, it’s true, Rande Gerber used to be a model. Almost as an afterthought, Hilary says Crawford, at forty-one, is still beautiful.

Our fast-talking waiter appears one last time: “Was everything all right, John?”

“Except for it being too much food it was perfect,” Lefebvre replies, signing off. Under a couple grand — chicken feed. “Thank you.”

We head back to the house. Lefebvre, Hilary, and I are in the Sierra, while Emily drives Pádraig home in her dad’s BMW Z8. She’s moseying along in the sleek sports car, below speed limit. Lefebvre smirks and says, “Guess it’s too bad Dad’s following her.”

Once we’ve settled in the living room, Lefebvre pulls out his CD-Rs of the day’s rough mixes. I stare at the Bösendorfer gleaming across the room as we listen to the new tunes at high volume to see how they play outside the confines of the Village’s studio walls. Some seem a little muddy because they haven’t been mixed, but others already sound okay. Emily wears a look of disbelief as she hears Dad do his Dylan imitation on “Independence Day.”

I sit back, listen, and let my thoughts drift. I remember my conversation with Lefebvre this morning about Neteller, his bust, and the possible consequences. He said, “Bill, you have to realize, everybody was doing it — the banks, the credit card companies, other monetary transaction companies — everybody was processing transactions involving offshore gambling sites.”

Sure, everybody was doing it — maybe most everybody’s still doing it in some form or other. But it’s the Neteller guys who got nabbed, not the Visa guys.

“Yes,” said Lefebvre, “but think of it as a speed trap. A radar gun is set up. Visa speeds by … whoosh. MasterCard speeds by … whoosh. Chase Manhattan speeds by … whoosh. Western Union speeds by … whoosh. Neteller speeds by … zap! Everyone was speeding, but Neteller got caught.”

So was it a case of the DOJ going after the little guy?

“Maybe,” said Lefebvre, “but that doesn’t matter. The fact is I’m guilty.”

In a DOJ press release dated July 10, 2007, the exact words of the FBI’s Garcia were: “Lefebvre pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to use the wires to transmit in interstate and foreign commerce bets and wagering information; to conduct illegal gambling businesses; to engage in international financial transactions for the purpose of promoting illegal gambling; and to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business. During the course of the plea allocution, Lefebvre admitted that, during the time he operated the Neteller Group, he learned that laws in the U.S. prohibited certain funds transfers for the purpose of promoting gambling, and as a result, he knew his conduct was wrong.” (Lefebvre’s partner Stephen Lawrence pleaded guilty in a similarly worded press release dated June 29, 2007.)

Lefebvre’s sentencing is scheduled for November 1, 2007, although he says they’re all but certain the date will move to April 2008. (Ultimately, the sentencing date will go into limbo and remain there until October 25, 2011.) The FBI will milk Lawrence and Lefebvre for every morsel of information it can get and use them as lures to hook other online gambling executives.

The DOJ has demanded that he be partially responsible for paying $100 million in restitution, which means, yes, Lefebvre will have to find that forty million. It has also recommended a jail sentence of up five years, although Lefebvre’s cooperation with U.S. attorneys and FBI agents will almost certainly shorten this length. The penalties will be decided upon down the road, but overall they’re not looking bad. “No, it’s not bad at all,” says Lefebvre. “I don’t have cancer. All those poor fuckers I met in jail, they’re looking at ten to twenty years and they’re not going to be rich when they get out.”

For now, Lefebvre has met the DOJ’s other crucial condition: admit guilt. Yet “guilt” is such a relative term in this case. Gambling is ingrained in our culture. Many commentators point out that the concept of subprime loans — the 2008 world stock market crisis being caused by mass defaulting on subprime mortgages — was nothing more than a complex Ponzi scheme perpetrated by Wall Street traders. Texas Hold’em is a television game, wildly popular with the general public. Math whiz Johnathan Duhamel, from Boucherville, Quebec, became a national hero when he won the 2010 World Series of Poker. Now nerds can aspire to win fortunes at poker as well as the usual dreaming of becoming the next Kobe Bryant or Sidney Crosby. Las Vegas has successfully rebranded itself as a family destination. Websites aimed at young users offer free games that essentially teach kids early how to gauge odds — sort of priming the market pump. All levels of government enjoy healthy gambling profits, throwing a bit of the cash at the resultant societal ills as a sop.

Lefebvre chooses to see his ordeal as nothing more than a traffic ticket, but he knows it’s a much heavier beef. The FBI has compromised his liberty, and in his legal mind he knows its stance is hypocritical. He also knows he must show contrition in order to receive mercy, so he gets out his frustration, and true feelings, in song. “Justice was a word that used to have sense / Now it’s just another barb in your fence / Land of the Free, incarcerate me,” he sings on “Mr. Bully Boy,” one of his new songs.

Gambling is not the first activity labeled a vice by the law over which Lefebvre has confronted society’s hypocrisies. He got an education in North America’s war on drugs a couple of years before the Nixon administration declared illegal drugs Public Enemy Number One and the media created the term “War on Drugs.” That was the LSD bust in 1969 he promised to tell me about. And so for Lefebvre the correct posture is to remain philosophical about his current imbroglio: “Being busted when I was seventeen, doing time when I was eighteen, was a big part of what prepared me for this. I knew by the time I was nineteen that there wasn’t much difference between the guys who were in jail and the guys who were not in jail. There’s no big dividing line.”

But there is a legal dividing line, and Lefebvre was identified as being on the wrong side of it. Maybe he did get screwed, but who knows? If this hadn’t happened, maybe he wouldn’t have gotten around to recording twenty-nine songs in a big-time studio with big-time musicians. However, the price to play was steep: the DOJ’s proposed forfeiture is the equivalent of the budget of a modest Hollywood flick. “Nothing but the best for my songs,” Lefebvre jokes. Oh, and being saddled with a guilty plea beside his name. Oh, and facing a lifetime of complications crossing the U.S. border. Oh, and doing time (again).

But on the sunny side, Lefebvre has what he wants: he’s recording his first solo album, at age fifty-six. And so maybe it’s worth it for the guy who said publicly almost a decade ago, when he donated $1.2 million to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary, “Art is a way for people to step up and express themselves as human beings; every time you do that, it makes you a better person.” If the DOJ hadn’t come a-knocking, maybe he never would have had the follow-through to test his mettle against some of the best musicians in the world.

The song “Independence Day” ends and the Malibu living room is momentarily quiet. I worry about Lefebvre’s chances for freedom. I recall his lyric “I love the government / I hope they get one someday,” and then remember one of his many anecdotes: