Good with Money

Contents

One

Stumbling into Tech

Two

Making Money

Three

Like Winning the Lottery

Four

America Is Not Pleased

Five

Charge Me Triple

Six

A Real-Life John Tipton

Seven

Good with Everything

Landmarks

Cover

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Body Matter

A man who dies rich dies disgraced.

Andrew Carnegie

One

Stumbling into Tech

I am standing on a sloped, wide-open stretch of Salt Spring Island, overlooking a glorious West Coast vista of ocean and distant mountains. It is the peak of summer, and the sky is a domed cup of blue. Salt Spring is the largest of the Gulf Islands, and somewhere in the distance are islands Galiano, Mayne, and Pender. A few kilometres away is the invisible American border that zigzags through the ocean and separates the San Juan Islands, on the horizon to the southeast. I’m here so that John Lefebvre can show me around his guesthouse property, a small collection of buildings that sit on four acres. Called Stonehouse, it was his year-round passion project before he got arrested thirteen years ago.

Lefebvre is a bear of a man, big and tall with shaggy grey hair. Today he’s wearing, as he often does, a casual blazer with a leather man purse over one shoulder. Everywhere there is something to take in, something lovely or remarkable to enquire about. There are arts and crafts furniture and vintage cars in mint condition and a recording studio and soaring post-and-beam construction and perfectly placed skylights—and that never-ending view. There’s even a stone circle in the style of Stonehenge that stands in the adjacent field, the work of artist and mason Ron Crawford. Two long-haired girls, both islanders, sit cross-legged on the grass, eating lunch. Lefebvre waves at them, greets them by name. They wave back. They might work for him, but it’s unclear. It’s the hippie-spirited Salt Spring Island way: keep it casual, stress-free. Serenity now.

Lefebvre has poured about $9 million into Stonehouse, including the cost of the property and renovations. It sits on agricultural land, so there are limitations on what he can do with it, and as far as businesses go, it’s been a losing proposition. There are only five large guest suites for rent, and although it’s a five-star property that gets stellar reviews, there’s only so much revenue the guesthouse can bring in each year. But you get the feeling it was never about that. The property doubles as his office space and playground. It is the place where he and his wife Hilary Watson got married a few years ago, with tables set for eighty guests, covered in linen and crystal, and a stage for the band and a dance floor. He oversaw every detail of the renovation and the decor with his own particular vision, incorporating so much artwork that it has the feel of a gallery. Two massive bronze sculptures of headless kimono-wearing figures bookend the main entrance, each big enough for a dozen children to climb over. There is the long worn-wood table in the open dining area, the same table where he sat with the FBI the morning of his arrest in one of his Malibu homes. The kitchen counter is an imported slab of orange onyx lit from below, a giant glowing gemstone. He offers anecdotes about how he picked out the tiles for the bathrooms, and the hanging art pieces in the lobby. Some details are painstaking to the point that nobody but Lefebvre might appreciate them, such as the tiny, square cast-iron bird motifs he has incorporated throughout the guest suites, in the mouldings and between tiles. When he sees the smiling woman who manages the place, he gives her one of his bear hugs.

In what he calls the garage-mahal, which is really a sleek contemporary loft, there is floor-to-ceiling artwork covering the two-storey walls. Lefebvre buys art with what seems to be a hoarder’s compulsion. He picks up a painting still wrapped in its brown paper and wonders what it is.

He unwraps it.

Oh, that one.

He remembers the artist, a local woman named Hannah Stone, but he can’t remember when he purchased it.

Isn’t it beautiful? he says happily and places it back down.

Lefebvre is openly proud of Stonehouse, which is an airier version of his home a few kilometres away, but on the ocean. On another trip, he shows me that house too. Perhaps because he’s a big man, he likes things larger than life—the house has a ceiling as high as a cathedral. Huge bronze sculptures, busts of people, flank that entrance too, and the interior, which feels dark and gothic, is packed with art, as are the grounds that slope to the rocky beach. As we walk and talk, I am startled by a human-sized sculpture of a dark cloaked figure. He says it also startled a visitor of his, the Dalai Lama’s brother, who stayed at a guesthouse on the property with his wife, the founder of the Tibetan Nuns Project. He counts the Dalai Lama among his acquaintances, and many other accomplished people who’ve done deeply interesting, thoughtful things.

Lefebvre has always had a cavalier relationship with money: he can take it or leave it, he says. Because he avoided tedious tasks or anything remotely resembling a grind, he also had an uneasy relationship with a law career, and all the long hours and weekends spent working that the profession often demands. And he didn’t fit the mould of a lawyer at all. In other lawyers’ company, he felt like an outsider. He enjoyed meeting with clients, but he saw the corporate culture that valued fancy cars and country club memberships as the antithesis of 1960s counterculture. He tried various ways of making his profession adapt to his lifestyle, including working in his own community-oriented law office, where he’d take on pretty much any case that walked through the door. The end result was a career that moved in starts and stops, seguing into unlikely ventures, such as his stint as the owner of a leather goods shop, and another as a musician busking for change from commuters on their way to their white-collar jobs. These diversions—impulses to flee, really—went on for many years. By the time he was in his late forties, in the 1990s, he was pulling in around $35,000 a year from various legal work his friends found him, about the equivalent of what a junior reporter was making at a community newspaper. He’s always lived for the day, so he wouldn’t have taken stock. But to the observer, he was a middle-aged man with two failed marriages, buried under a mountain of debt to friends and family, and living on the second floor of a three-storey rental building in Calgary’s inner city Mission district, where he grew up. As a boy he’d had a paper route on the very same street. When his daughter came to stay with him, she’d take the bedroom and he’d sleep on a futon in the living room. He was grateful the neighbours didn’t complain about his upright piano, which he played often. His social nights consisted of friends at his apartment and wine that came in big bottles. His mother had loaned him the down payment for a lease on a $17,000 Toyota RAV4 Crossover SUV, and when he drove to restaurants or bars to play a gig, he felt consoled when he pulled up in it. He might be playing for a few dollars, but he had that car.

For all these reasons, and several more, John Lefebvre was not on track to become a super-millionaire with assets of around $350 million U.S. by age fifty-three. And yet, to everyone’s surprise, that’s what he did.

I have agreed to write his book for him, to tell his story, so this is an authorized account, Lefebvre’s version of his story as he’s told it to me. Over the course of several months, we met up on the island, but also near his apartment on Vancouver’s west side, at a favourite French café with marble-topped bar and tables. One day, sitting by an open window, a tall African woman walks by in a traditional twisted-up head wrap and long dress, an explosion of colours against a grey strip of gentrified Kitsilano, the usual mix of Whole Foods and Urban Outfitters. Lefebvre’s face lights up and he shouts, Hey! and gives her the thumbs up. The woman laughs and smiles and waves at him as she sashays down the street. At first I think they know each other, but then I realize he’s just showing her his appreciation. Another time, we are in the same café when an elderly man walks in wearing nothing but a long fluffy blue bathrobe and slippers. He sits down and orders lunch, obviously a regular because the formal waiters don’t flinch. Lefebvre is delighted. We both admire the man’s too-old-to-give-a-shit approach to life. With his cell phone, Lefebvre discreetly takes a photo for Hilary, his fourth wife.

He enjoys the characters, perhaps because he too is one. He’s always worn his hair long, and when the company that made him rich—Neteller, an online money transfer service launched in the late nineties—was hitting its stride, he dressed like he was a dude waiting for the surf. As a fledgling musician, when he’d play on stage he’d wear sequin-covered suits made in Nashville, like those worn by country singers. He has a contagious laugh, and a bookish voice, the kind you might hear on public radio. As do a lot of hippies who’ve spent many hours tripping, he likes to talk about consciousness. He’s articulate and often speaks with a formal parlance. He likes to prod friends who don’t share his political views. He’s playful, he bores easily and he refuses to toe the line. While his male friends tend to call him Johnny, his female friends call him John.

But he can get pensive too, and sullen, so that you don’t know what he’s thinking. There are things that he’s unloading these days because he finds them burdensome. He calls the spectacular oceanfront real estate he owns a headache, including Stonehouse, which he’s listed on the international market. And he’s downsizing in other ways. He’s planning to sell the waterfront acreage where he and Hilary live, and to build a smaller house on the lot he owns next door. It will be tucked further back among the trees, but it will still have the oceanfront view, two small waterfalls and a tennis court. This is the plan. He regards this as simplifying and streamlining his life. Pricey acreage comes with too many responsibilities, he tells me. I look forward to living the remaining years of my life free of that responsibility, among others.

Around the time Lefebvre got rich, Forbes magazine, which has made it a mission to track and define wealth as best it can, said, Today, in terms of London or Parisian splendour, a magnate who has $300 million to his name can comfortably be considered among the superrich and can conduct himself accordingly. Lefebvre’s idea of conducting himself accordingly was to part with almost all of it, as if he were the guinea pig in an experiment on rapid acquisition and equally rapid dissipation. I’d give an exact number if I could, but Lefebvre says he doesn’t keep track of such things.

In the spring of 2019, he asked me to write a book about his life and his views, specifically his views on how the world should conduct itself. I met with him and his part-time business adviser, a man named Donald Mackenzie, whose work involves random projects for rich people. I’d met Mackenzie before, so I knew the trim, stylishly dressed figure to look for when I entered the art gallery café. He wore black-framed hexagon-shaped glasses and a paisley tie and greeted me with a hug. Mackenzie is a business consultant and lives in a big house with his husband outside the city; he also owns a pied-à-terre downtown. When he lived in London, England, years ago, he and his partner lived in singer Freddie Mercury’s mansion for the last two years of the singer’s life. Mackenzie once showed me a picture of Mercury wearing a bespoke vest covered in cat images that he had made for the singer one Christmas.

When Lefebvre walked in and sat down, I was taken aback by the long grey hair and man purse. He does not look like most people; he is a throwback to another era. He was gregarious and direct, and extremely keen that I sign onto the project. It could make you famous, he said.

I knew nothing of Lefebvre’s story until I did a little research and found the details of his involvement in Neteller, an electronic money transfer service that enabled online gamblers and bookies to make easy global transactions. A friend and client had come up with the idea, and Lefebvre, looking for another opportunity that wasn’t law, joined in. They stumbled upon this idea at the tail end of the dot-com bubble, which was a six-year spree that lasted until 2000, during which time thousands