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

The first book he read was from the prison library, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying , which he calls “spooky.” The other one he dashed through before the parcels started to arrive was Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration . His first choice out of the box was Melville’s Moby-Dick . Then Middlemarch . Then Kitchen Confidential . Hoggan had sent him not one but three Murakami books— Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 —which Lefebvre found especially transporting: “His books seem ridiculously normal until something really weird happens and you know you’re deep in psychedelia. I highly recommend Murakami if you’re going to jail because you transcend the walls of your prison.”

Existentialism lives on. Lefebvre pours out the last of the Caymus. We cast a final look at the glowing spaceship across the water before packing and locking up. Back in the Sierra, we hang a right on Sunset and start heading back to Stonehouse. As we roll along the ghostly, undulating road in the early evening, Lefebvre admits the prison experience wasn’t entirely traumatic, at least on that concrete, lived, hour-to-hour level of keeping his head down, nose poked into one book after another. By this point he had become an expert at doing his own time. Still, what was bad about it was on a whole other plane of existence: “I had to struggle really, really hard to keep in that space where reading and listening to music was sufficient medicine for being completely humiliated and disrespected and robbed of my liberty.”

Truly Fine Citizen

One and a half years after serving time in the Manhattan sound sewer, Lefebvre announced to his 919 Facebook Friends that he was currently on a special weight-reduction program and adjusted diet. This seemed to be good news. His one-year probation had finished the previous December, and this willingness to temper his appetites indicated that the invisible psychic chains, wrapped and locked tight around him since January 15, 2007, were now dissolving. As he once said about parking meters that take only credit cards, though, that’s time he can’t get back.

And time is the exercise machine that never stops. The sun rises; the sun sets. Neteller PLC, in an attempt to shake off the ghosts of its recent past, including its $136-million forfeiture to the U.S. Department of the Treasury and cooperating with the FBI, changed its name to NEOVIA Financial PLC in November 2008. Then, in January 2011, NEOVIA purchased Optimal Payments, a Canadian company based in Montreal, for around $50 million. It rechristened itself again, this time as Optimal Payments PLC. Optimal founder Joel Leonoff joined the NEOVIA board as co-CEO along with president and co-CEO Mark Mayhew. Note the switch from Canadian soil to the Isle of Man for Optimal (or OPAY). By the end of July of that same year, a number of former NEOVIA executives, including Mayhew, had left the company. Montrealer Leonoff became its CEO. The deal began to look like a reverse takeover.

And that’s where Neteller sits today, nestled inside the main company, Optimal Payments. On the website CasinoSecurity.com, there is an entry entitled “Neteller Casino Overview.” It calls Neteller “one of the most successful and biggest e-banks today.” Customers use its e-bank services to gamble at any online casino they choose — all in legal jurisdictions, of course. And how do customers get to gamble straight away? The same way they’ve been doing it since Neteller was invented in 1999: InstaCash and F-Cash (both still as lucrative for Optimal as they were for Neteller), EFT, through wire or bank deposit, and Visa or MasterCard.

Leonoff, who in October 2009 dined with former president George W. Bush at an Optimal Payments — sponsored event, is a corporate character worth mentioning. One of the companies he worked for, FirePay, was dinged in 2006 for processing over $2 billion in gambling transactions. The websites were based outside the U.S., but the transactions were made by U.S. customers inside the U.S., specifically in the Southern District of New York, from 2004 through October 2006, around when UIGEA went into effect. At the time, FirePay agreed to pay a non-prosecution agreement forfeit of $19.2 million. There were no criminal prosecutions.

Recently, Optimal Payments executives have been plotting a victorious return to the U.S. market for Neteller. In March 2013, Leonoff was quoted as saying, “We think ten states will offer entry into gaming,” including the massive California market. Then, in October 2013, the State of New Jersey announced that Neteller would be allowed to supply the state with its still-popular payment system. Legal online gaming will be offered through a number of casinos, including the Trump Plaza and the Golden Nugget.

Back in January 2007, after the Neteller busts, the company had reduced its dependency on gaming to sixty percent of revenues and had concentrated its efforts on Asian and European customers. Leonoff has said that when the U.S. market opens up again, he doesn’t think OPAY’s ratio will shift from the one Neteller set all those years ago. It is theoretically possible there is someone out there who believes him.

Lefebvre spread his money around and tried to do some good, maybe a lot of good. Geoff Savage said the intention had always been to give it all away. It’s just that the FBI accelerated the process in a manner the two buddies could never have predicted. The added bonus was a juicy cut of Lefebvre’s life.

Despite a healthy capitalistic drive to succeed, his exuberance and self-confidence buoying him through decades of false starts, Lefebvre has let affairs of the heart govern much of his life. They continue to do so, in a harmonious way. On November 15, 2013, he sent friends and family an email: “Sitting on our balcony gazing at Duomo and other Medici wonders I asked Hilary if she would marry me. In amazement, she agreed. All the bells of Florence rang as we embraced.”

The Roman Catholic Church dominated Lefebvre’s upbringing, and most of his pals were from the same background. He rebelled against his mother’s religious view of the world, yet she continues to play a central role in his thinking, and his life, as he looks after her in her eighties. For Lefebvre, unlike his mom, it matters not whether God exists — humans will succeed or fail with or without God. He has searched for enlightenment through psychedelics and entertained himself with pot and fine reds. He has always rummaged for a purpose to life and at one time figured becoming a lawyer would help. It didn’t, so he gave up on growing old. He became a middle-aged busker and refused to care about the lack of income.

Then a play came into view, a risky play, and a fun play. He thought, let’s see where this goes. For a man in his late forties, his energy was inexhaustible. He tossed his full weight into the play, yet even then it began to look stillborn. Just another false start … Or was it? No, it was ticking. It was alive. It was kicking. It was running. It was humming.

To be an active part of the internet boom, what would that have felt like? In 1999, a couple of friends of mine quit their day jobs in Toronto and went into risky digital ventures. After a year or so, they returned to their chosen professions, journalism and the law, with maybe a wrinkle or two and a pinch of wisdom, but no pots of gold stashed away. Lefebvre is another one of those regular guys who went digital during the first boom. He shed his previous skin, too — his previous life, really — to work nonstop on the venture. A rarity, he made it. An extreme rarity, he made it while passing the half-century milestone. Seven or eight years of pure libertarian bliss were followed by five or six years of interrogations, interviews, wire taps, urine samples, email intercepts, and general screaming hell. That was the price of the ride.