November 11, 1974
Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA
The Wolf of Wall Street true story confirms that, like in the movie, Stratton Oakmont was the name of the real Jordan Belfort's Long Island, New York brokerage house. Belfort and co-founder Danny Porush (played by Jonah Hill in the movie) chose the name because it sounded prestigious ( NYTimes.com ). The firm would later be accused of manipulating the IPOs of at least 34 companies, including Steve Madden Ltd. (their biggest deal), Dualstar Technologies, Paramount Financial, D.V.I. Financial, M. H. Meyerson & Co., Czech Industries, M.V.S.I. Technology, Questron Technologies, and Etel Communications.
Belfort's Stratton Oakmont brokerage firm ran a classic "pump and dump" operation. Belfort and several of his executives would buy up a particular company's stock and then have an army of brokers (following a script he had prepared) sell it to unsuspecting investors. This would cause the stock to rise, pretty much guaranteeing Belfort and his associates a substantial profit. Soon, the stock would fall back to reality, with the investors bearing a significant loss. -NYTimes.com
At its peak in the 1990s, Stratton Oakmont, Belfort's firm that he co-founded with Danny Porush, employed more than 1,000 brokers. -TheDailyBeast.com
No. "We never abused [or threw] the midgets in the office; we were friendly to them," Danny Porush (the real Donnie Azoff) says. "There was no physical abuse." Porush does admit that the firm hired little people to attend at least one party. Jordan Belfort's memoir The Wolf of Wall Street only discusses the tossing of little people as a possibility, not something that actually happened. -MotherJones.com
The events in The Wolf of Wall Street movie took place during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Jordan Belfort and Danny Porush founded the brokerage firm of Stratton Oakmont in the late 1980s. The securities fraud and money laundering charges brought against the firm involved companies that Stratton Oakmont helped raise money for in public stock offerings from 1990 through 1997. In 1996, Stratton Oakmont was banned from the brokerage industry, which eventually forced the company to close its doors. -NYTimes.com
No, at least not according to the former co-founder and president of the Stratton Oakmont brokerage firm, Danny Porush (portrayed by Jonah Hill in the movie). The real Porush says that he is not aware of anyone at the firm calling Jordan the "wolf." Porush says that it's just one of a number of exaggerations and inventions in both Belfort's book and the movie. -MotherJones.com
Yes. In exploring The Wolf of Wall Street true story, we learned that Jordan Belfort claims to have met Matthew McConaughey's character's real-life counterpart, Mark Hanna, in 1987 when he was working at the old-money trading firm of L.F. Rothschild. His new acquaintance was an uproarious senior broker at the firm and introduced Belfort to the excess and debauchery that Belfort would later make a daily staple at Stratton Oakmont. Like in the movie, the real Mark Hanna behind McConaughey's character told Belfort that the key to success was masturbation, cocaine and hookers, in addition to making your customers reinvest their winnings so you can collect the commissions. -TheDailyBeast.com
Yes. In The Wolf of Wall Street movie, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) is shown snorting cocaine off a prostitute's backside and nearly crashing his private helicopter while high on a cocktail of prescription drugs, including Quaaludes, morphine and Xanax. In researching The Wolf of Wall Street true story, it quickly became clear that Belfort used drugs heavily in real life too. In his memoir, he states that at times he had enough "running through my circulatory system to sedate Guatemala."
Yes. Belfort was known to stir his troops into action by belting out words of motivation through a microphone. However, his speeches were often filled with more self-adulation than DiCaprio's speeches in the movie.
The real Jordan Belfort claims this is true in his memoir. The female employee let them shave off her blonde hair for $10,000, which she used to pay for D-cup breast implants. Co-founder Danny Porush also says that the shaving took place, "...the worst we ever did was shave somebody's head and then pay 'em ten grand for it," says Porush. -MotherJones.com
Yes. The character in the movie, Brad Bodnick, who has a goatee and is portrayed by The Walking Dead 's Jon Bernthal, is based on Jordan Belfort's real-life Quaalude supplier, Todd Garret. In his memoir, the real Jordan Belfort claims that Garret sold him approximately 10,000 Quaaludes.
No. According to co-founder Danny Porush (played by Jonah Hill in the movie), the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio's character pals around with a chimp is pure monkey business. "There was never a chimpanzee in the office," says Porush. "There were no animals in the office...I would also never abuse an animal in any way" (though he does admit to eating the goldfish, see below). -MotherJones.com
Yes. According to Jordan Belfort's memoir, the real Donnie Azoff (whose actual name is Danny Porush) did marry his first cousin Nancy "because she was a real piece of ass." After twelve years of marriage, the couple divorced in 1998 after Danny told Nancy that he was in love with another woman ( NYPost.com ). Danny and his ex-wife share three children together.
Though the movie and Belfort's memoir might seem like gross exaggerations of the truth, depicting heavy drug use and sexcapades in the office during trading hours, they're not exaggerations at all says the F.B.I. agent who finally took Belfort into custody, "I tracked this guy for ten years, and everything he wrote is true." Kyle Chandler portrays the agent in the Martin Scorsese movie. -NYTimes.com
Yes, but according to Belfort the car wasn't a Lamborghini like in the movie, it was a Mercedes. He was so high in a drug daze that he couldn't remember causing several different accidents as he tried to make his way home. In real life, one of the accidents was a head-on collision that actually sent a woman to the hospital. -TheDailyBeast.com
Yes. According to the real Donnie Azoff, whose actual name is Danny Porush, the scene where Jonah Hill's character eats a goldfish is based on a true story. "I said to one of the brokers, 'If you don't do more business, I'm gonna eat your goldfish!'" Porush recalls. "So I did." -MotherJones.com
In one scene of The Wolf of Wall Street movie, bricks of cash are taped to a Swiss woman's body. "[I] never taped money to boobs," the real Danny Porush says (played by Jonah Hill in the movie). According to Jordan Belfort's memoir, the event did happen but his partner Porush wasn't there. -MotherJones.com
Yes. As shown in The Wolf of Wall Street movie, Steve Madden had been a childhood friend of Belfort's partner Danny Porush (renamed Donnie Azoff in the movie and portrayed by actor Jonah Hill). Their fondness for drugs and alcohol reunited the two of them. During the initial public offering of his footwear company, Steve Madden Ltd., Madden acquired a large number of shares of his company, which were actually being controlled by Belfort and his firm, Stratton Oakmont. Once shares became available to the public, Stratton Oakmont got down to the business of selling them to unsuspecting suckers. Billing Madden's company as the hottest issue on Wall Street, Belfort's brokers in turn drove up the price. Eventually, Steve Madden was to sell off his shares when the hype was at its peak, just before the stock began its inevitable decline. Similar to what is seen in the movie, Belfort still maintains that Steve Madden tried to steal his Steve Madden shares from him. However, Jordan Belfort did make approximately $23 million in two hours as part of the deal with Steve Madden, who would later be charged as an accomplice to Belfort's scheme. -NYTimes.com For his part, Steve Madden was sentenced to 41 months in prison and was forced to resign as CEO of Steve Madden Ltd. He also resigned from the company's board of directors. However, he did not leave the company entirely. He kept his foot (or shoe) in the door by giving himself the title of creative consultant, for which he was well-compensated even while he was in prison. -Slate.com
Yes. In real life, Belfort's 167-foot yacht, which was originally owned by Coco Chanel, sunk off the coast of Italy when Belfort, who was high on drugs at the time, insisted that the captain take the boat through a storm ( TheDailyBeast.com ). Listen to Belfort tell the story during The Room Live 's Jordan Belfort interview . As he states in the interview, his helicopter didn't fall off the boat during the storm like in the movie. Instead, they had to push the helicopter off of the top deck of the boat to make room for the rescue chopper to drop down an Italian Navy commando.
FBI agent Gregory Coleman, renamed Patrick Denham for the film and portrayed by actor Kyle Chandler, made tracking Belfort and his firm, Stratton Oakmont, a top priority for six years. In an interview ( watch here ), Coleman says that the factors that drew his attention to the firm were "the flashiness, the brashness of their activities, the blatantness of the way they were soliciting people and cold calling people, and the number of victims that were complaining on a daily basis." -CNBC
Yes. The Wolf of Wall Street movie shows Jordan (Leonardo DiCaprio) hitting his wife (Margot Robbie) with his hand and fist. According to his memoir, he actually kicked his wife Nadine down the stairs while he was holding his daughter. She landed on her right side with "tremendous force."
Yes. In real life, he put his daughter Chandler in the front seat of the car without a seat belt on, before crashing it through the garage door and then driving full speed into a six-foot-high limestone pillar at the edge of the driveway. Like in the movie, he was high at the time.
When he was finally arrested in 1998 for money laundering and securities fraud, Jordan Belfort was sentenced to four years in prison. This was after agreeing to wear a wire and provide the FBI with information to help prosecute various friends and associates. In the end, the true story reveals that he served only 22 months in a California federal prison. His cellmate in prison was Tommy Chong of "Cheech and Chong" fame, who was serving a nine month sentence for selling bongs. -TheDailyBeast.com
It wasn't so much a what as it was a who. Tommy Chong (one half of "Cheech and Chong") was Jordan Belfort's cellmate in prison. After laughing at some of Belfort's stories from his days running the firm, Chong encouraged him to write a book. -TheDailyBeast.com
Jordan Belfort attempted to model his writing after Hunter S. Thompson ( Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ), who was known for using plenty of exclamation points.
Danny Porush, renamed Donnie Azoff for the movie and played by actor Jonah Hill, served 39 months in prison for his part in the corrupt dealings of Stratton Oakmont, the firm that he co-founded with Jordan Belfort. Porush currently runs a medical supply business in Florida, where he lives with his second wife Lisa in a $4 million mansion. A 2008 Forbes article pointed out his company's fraudulent tactics, which included trying to persuade people to order diabetic supplies and getting them to provide information about their physicians that could be used to bill Medicare. A number of complaints surfaced accusing Porush's company of sending unsolicited packages that were accompanied by unexpected Medicare charges. Back in 2001, Porush was arrested in connection to a fraud scheme surrounding Noble & Perrault Collectibles, a company that sold commemorative coins over the phone. Victims saw their credit cards charged repeatedly, at times for thousands of dollars, while often never receiving any merchandise for purchases that were largely unauthorized to begin with. -Sun Sentinel Enjoying a well-to-do life in Florida, Daniel Porush and his wife drive matching Rolls-Royce Corniche convertibles. With regard to The Wolf of Wall Street movie, Porush said, "I really have no comment other than to say I would never try to profit from a crime I'm so remorseful for." -NYPost.com
Catching the Wolf of Wall Street includes more of Belfort's outrageous stories that were not included in his first book. As we investigated The Wolf of Wall Street true story, we discovered that Jordan's books, The Wolf of Wall Street and Catching the Wolf of Wall Street , netted him a $1 million advance from Random House. He also earned $1 million for the film rights to his story ( TheDailyBeast.com ). In a response to criticism over these profits and future profits from the movie, Jordan Belfort said the following via his Facebook page, "I am not turning over 50% of the profits of the books and the movie, which was what the government had wanted me to do. Instead, I insisted on turning over 100% of the profits of both books and the movie, which is to say, I am not making a single dime on any of this." According to Jordan, the money is being used to pay back the millions still owed to those who were scammed by his brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont.
Yes, the real Jordan Belfort appears at the end of the movie as the person who introduces Leonardo DiCaprio's character before he takes the stage at his Straight Line seminar.
Yes, but only loosely. The brokerage firm in the movie Boiler Room , released in 2000, was inspired by the illegal practices of Jordan Belfort's Stratton Oakmont firm. In the movie, actor Ben Affleck portrays Jim Young, the Belfort-esque co-founder of the firm, who, like Jordan Belfort, trains his brokers in the "pump and dump" scheme. -NYTimes.com
Watch The Wolf of Wall Street movie trailer. Also, view Jordan Belfort interviews and home video footage of him speaking at a Stratton Oakmont party in the 1990s.
Jordan Belfort Speaks at the Stratton Oakmont Christmas Party (1994) The real Jordan Belfort speaks at the 1994 Stratton Oakmont Christmas party. He tells the firm's employees that he is "proud" of what he has accomplished and that the employees should also be proud of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity they have been given. At the end, he shares a moment with co-founder Danny Porush (Jonah Hill in the movie). The video was posted by Mary Detres, author of the book , which provides an insider's account of what it was like to work at the notorious brokerage firm. |
Jordan Belfort Interview Grant Lewers interviews Jordan Belfort on in 2010 about his memoir . Belfort talks about his life and what led him to start his firm. He offers his four keys to success that he teaches during his seminars and he recounts various stories, including his drug addiction, the story about his yacht sinking from the book, and trying to commit suicide. |
FBI Agent Gregory Coleman Interview (2007) This CNBC interview is from 2007, around the time of the release of Jordan Belfort's first memoir . Following a brief interview with Belfort, during which he describes himself as an "arch-criminal" who was in a way a "cult leader," FBI agent Gregory Coleman speaks about why he was so determined to catch Belfort. |
The Wolf of Wall Street Trailer 2 The second trailer for the Martin Scorsese movie , based on the autobiography of the same name by Jordan Belfort. The movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey and Jonah Hill. |
The Wolf of Wall Street Trailer Martin Scorsese directs Leonardo DiCaprio in the film adaptation of Jordan Belfort's memoir chronicling his life as a fast-living, corrupt stockbroker during the 1990s. Belfort's criminal ways caught up with him in 1998 when he was convicted of securities fraud and money laundering for which he spent 22 months in Federal Prison. |
The guide will examine the life and fraudulent activities of Jordan Belfort , whose real-life events inspired the movie “ Wolf of Wall Street “. It will delve into Belfort’s career, particularly his time at Stratton Oakmont and the financial schemes that eventually led to his downfall.
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Belfort spent 22 months in prison, during which he found his passion for writing. Soon after his release, he published his first memoir, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” recounting his time as a stockbroker, later popularized in the 2013 Martin Scorsese film, in which he is depicted by Leonardo DiCaprio.
After various scandals and a term in prison for fraud, Jordan Belfort has reinvented himself as a motivational speaker, his primary topic being the distinction between greed, ambition, and passion on Wall Street.
Jordan Belfort was born in 1962 in the Bronx, New York City, to Jewish parents, who were both accountants. Around 16, Belfort and his close childhood friend earned $20,000 selling Italian ice from styrofoam coolers at a local beach.
After graduating from American University with a degree in biology, Belfort planned on using the money earned selling ice cream to pay for dental school, subsequently enrolling himself at the University of Maryland School of Dentistry. However, he dropped out on the first day after the school dean warned the students saying: “The golden age of dentistry is over. If you’re here to make a lot of money, you’re in the wrong place.”
While Jordan Belfort had a tumultuous business life and a flair for corrupt practices, his personal life wasn’t far from it. While running his company Stratton Oakmont, Belfort was already divorced from his first wife, Denise Lombardo. Jordan Belfort’s first wife, Denise Lombardo, whose movie character in “Wolf of Wall Street,” was played by Cristin Milioti.
You may also recognize the name Naomi, Jordan Belfort’s wife, portrayed by Margot Robbie in the movie “Wolf of Wall Street.” In real life, Naomi’s name is Nadine Caridi, Belfort’s second wife . Nadine and Jordan Belfort had two kids together (or Belfort and Naomi in the movie), but ultimately divorced in 2015 after domestic violence accusations.
Belfort’s ex-wife Nadine now goes by the name of Nadine Macaluso and works as a therapist, using her experience to help other women in abusive relationships via social media. Nadine has said she “ walked away from my marriage with absolutely nothing ,” reasoning “ it was the right thing to do ,” after realizing Belfort’s money was all “blood money.”
@drnaelmft I left my marriage from The Wolf of Wall Street with my kids and my curtains. #wolfofwallstreet #wolfofwallstreetmovie #wallstreet #nadinemacaluso #drnadinemacaluso #drnae #drnadine #marriedtothewolfofwallstreet #margotrobbie #margotrobbieofficial #tiktok #tiktokviral #tiktoker #tiktoknews #tiktokcelebsnews #tiktokfamous #naomiwolfofwallstreet #wolfofwallstreetnaomi #leonardodicaprio #leonardodicaprioedit #martinscorsese #martinscorsesefilms #martinscorsesemoviesbelike #icon #tiktoktherapist #tiktoktherapy #therapy #therapist #90s #longisland #wallstreet #wallstreet90s #goldcoast ♬ You Found Me – Instrumental Pop Songs & Kris Farrow
Jordan Belfort’s yacht was named after his second wife Nadine (or Naomi in the “Wolf of Wall Street” movie), which was previously built for Coco Chanel in 1961. It ultimately sank off the Sardinian east coast in 1996 after Belfort insisted on sailing out in high winds against the captain’s advice.
It is estimated that Jordan Belfort’s net worth peak was around $400 million in 1998; however, the exact figures are unknown. Despite his fraudulent past, Jordan Belfort has leveraged his years working in the financial industry, engaging in different ventures.
Motivational speaking, book sales, movie rights, as well as various real estate, stocks, and crypto investments, have accumulated Jordan Belfort a sizeable fortune, which as of February 2024 was an estimated $115 million, according to data from caknowledge . However, Medium estimates it at between $100 million and $134 million.
A large chunk of Belfort’s annual income of $18 million comes from book sales (a book titled “The Wolf of Wall Street”) and motivational speaking events worldwide, where he shares his story of triumph and failure. He also makes an impressive $50 million by selling the movie rights to his story.
Furthermore, Belfort has invested roughly $27 in luxury real estate, owns multiple high-end cars worth $4 million, has an estimated cash reserve of over $32 million, and has an investment portfolio valued at around $15 million, adding crypto-related products.
Jordan belfort’s podcast.
Besides working as a motivational speaker and earning money through books and movies, Belfort keeps sharing his doings through a personal YouTube channel called The Wolf of Wall Street, where he posts monthly episodes of a podcast, “The Wolf’s Den,” where he shares his business ventures, motivational speaking events, life events, and new partnerships.
For example, in his session from January 13th with Robert Beadles, speaking to the founder of the Monarch crypto wallet, he shared his outlook on Bitcoin and the current crypto market and discussed the new regulations surrounding Bitcoin outlook for 2023 and the likely events that would follow.
Early endeavours.
At 23, Jordan Belfort became a door-to-door meat and seafood salesman on New York’s Long Island, dreaming of getting rich. He grew his business to a string of trucks and several employees, moving 5,000 pounds of beef and fish a week. But as he expanded too fast, the lack of capital ultimately failed the business, and he filed for bankruptcy at 25.
After the meat and seafood business went bust, Belfort’s interest turned to Wall Street, where he got a position as a trainee stockbroker at L.F. Rothschild. However, he was later let go after the company experienced financial difficulties due to the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987 .
Jordan Belfort eventually ended up at Investor Center, a small brokerage firm on Long Island, in 1988. There, he was introduced to penny stocks (high-risk securities with small market caps that typically trade for a low price over-the-counter (OTC) and are therefore less regulated than stocks traded on a major market exchange), which would later propel him to success.
A year later (1989), Belfort started an over-the-counter brokerage house in the franchise “Stratton Securities” with partner Danny Porush. Within five months, the two had earned enough to buy the whole Stratton franchise, renaming the company Stratton Oakmont. The company essentially functioned as a boiler room that marketed penny stocks and defrauded investors with pump-and-dump stock sales.
Stratton Oakmont did astonishingly well over the next several years, at one point employing over 1,000 stock brokers, and was linked to the IPOs of nearly three dozen companies. However, during his years at Stratton, Jordan Belfort led a life of lavish parties and intensive recreational drugs (especially methaqualone under the brand name “Quaalude”), which resulted in addiction.
Part of Belfort’s strategy was to teach his brokers his infamous sales pitch, the “ Kodak pitch ,” by which they were directed to cold-call clients and entice them with a trusted blue-chip company, only to then recommend stocks with higher margins for the seller, such as penny stocks.
The name came from using the blue-chip company Eastman Kodak as the bait. The goal of the pitch was solely to gain the client’s confidence in the trustworthiness of their firm by recommending a familiar household name that larger brokerage houses such as Merrill Lynch might recommend.
From there, the client would receive future updates on Eastman Kodak and new stock pitches involving a penny stock that Jordan Belfort was illegally manipulating and funneling money through. Unfortunately, the penny stocks often had little or no actual fundamental value and later crashed, obliterating the client’s investment while Belfort and his company pocketed millions. Naturally, during these events, Belfort claimed that he only tried to help his clients invest in the future of America.
Recommended video : “Don’t hang up until the client buys or dies”
Steven Madden was introduced to Stratton by Danny Porush (the key partner at Stratton) and welcomed into the firm with a $500,000 early investment . Next, Stratton organized an IPO that gave themselves up to 85% (illegal as the underwriter of the public offering) of the company, subsequently dumping the shares almost right after the company went public to their clients, banking $20 million .
Madden eventually paid millions to the government and spent considerably more time (30 months) locked up in federal prison than Belfort (22 months).
The irony here is, however, though Steve Madden was taken public at a ludicrous valuation at the time (3 million shares worth $15 million), yet, as Madden writes in his memoir: “if you bought Steve Madden stock that day, even at the inflated price, and held onto it, you would be very rich today.”
Meanwhile, Eastman Kodak, the original blue chip company that served as bait to potential investors, has since filed for bankruptcy. Interestingly, in a twist of fate, the bait stock went bust, and the scam penny stock could have turned relatively small retail investors into millionaires today.
Law enforcement officials targeted Stratton Oakmont throughout its lifetime. Finally, in December 1996, the National Association of Securities Dealers (now the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) expelled Stratton Oakmont, forcing it out of business. Jordan Belfort was subsequently indicted for securities fraud and money laundering in 1999.
Belfort’s demise can largely be attributed to his private attempts to move his money out of the U.S., smuggling it to Swiss bank accounts to be laundered. Eventually, however, the FBI agents (led by Greg Coleman and Joel Cohen) investigating Stratton and Belfort convinced witnesses to give them information about the move and were ultimately successful at also getting notoriously secretive Swiss banks to cooperate.
With solid evidence, both Belfort and Porush were arrested in September 1998 and convinced to collaborate with the investigation. Eventually, Belfort pleaded guilty, and after the case had taken years to come to trial, in 2004, he was convicted. However, Belfort ultimately served only 22 months of a four-year sentence at the Taft Correctional Institution in California in exchange for a plea deal with the FBI.
Jordan Belfort was ordered through his restitution agreement to pay 50% of his income until 2009 towards restitution to the 1,513 clients he had defrauded (totaling approximately $200 million in investor losses), with a total of $110 million in restitution further mandated. As late as 2013, complaints had been filed by federal prosecutors regarding his payments, leading to Belfort making a separate deal with federal authorities to complete the restitution payments.
During his time in prison, he shared a cell with comedian Tommy Chong, who encouraged him to tell the story of his experiences as a stockbroker. On his release in 2006, Belfort realized there was interest in his life story and so began pitching his manuscript, which eventually got picked up by Random House, who rewarded him with a $500,000 advance. “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the book that inspired the Jordan Belfort movie, was on bookshelves within a year of his release.
Chong and Belfort remained friends after their release from prison, with Belfort crediting him for his new career path as a motivational speaker and writer. Belfort commented on his wrong-doings in his memoir, stating:
“I got greedy. … Greed is not good. Ambition is good, passion is good. Passion prospers. My goal is to give more than I get, that’s a sustainable form of success. … Ninety-five percent of the business was legitimate. {…} It was all brokerage firm issues. It was all legitimate, nothing to do with liquidating stocks.”
Yet federal prosecutors and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officials involved in the case maintain : “Stratton Oakmont was not a real Wall Street firm, either literally or figuratively.”
Belfort published two memoirs: “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Catching the Wolf of Wall Street,” also issued in approximately 40 countries and translated into 18 languages. In 2017, Jordan Belfort released a self-help book, “Way of the Wolf.”
The former Federal prosecutor who led the investigation of Belfort has insisted that much in his memoirs is a fabrication embellished by aggrandization of his own persona and adoration by others and that “the real Jordan Belfort story still includes thousands of victims who lost hundreds of millions of dollars that they never will be repaid.”
Ultimately Belfort reinvented himself as a motivational speaker. When he first began speaking, he focused mainly on motivation and ethics in the financial world but then moved his focus to practical sales skills and entrepreneurship.
Recommended video: Jordan Belfort Reveals How To Sell Anything To Anyone At Anytime
The primary subject matter of his seminars is what he has referred to as the “Straight Line System,” a system of sales advice and persuasion skills, boldly stating : “You’re either a victim of circumstance or you’re a creator of circumstance.”
Let’s now briefly explain the various financial schemes, Jordan Belfort, together with Stratton Oakmont, partook in, including a boiler room and pump-and-dump operation, as well as money laundering.
A boiler room is an operation in which brokers apply high-pressure sales tactics to persuade investors to purchase securities with false or misleading premises. Most boiler room salespeople contact potential investors by cold calls. While this means the potential client has no reason to trust the caller, it also means they have no background information to refute their claims.
Part of the pressure sales approach includes making exaggerated assertions about the investment opportunity that the client cannot verify, encouraging the investor to buy the stock immediately. In addition, the salesperson might insist on immediate payment, including taking an aggressive approach and threatening the prospect to act, lest they “lose an opportunity of a lifetime.” In fact, promises of high returns and no risk are essential to pressuring clients to invest.
Boiler room scams typically sell fraudulent, speculative securities, typically penny stocks, i.e., small companies that trade for less than $5 per share. Penny stocks are too small for major stock exchanges and are only traded over-the-counter, meaning that a relatively small amount of buyers can cause a significant price rise.
In a typical penny stock scam, fraudsters would first accumulate a small-cap stock at a low price and then use boiler-room methods to gather buyers for an inflated price. In such a scam, victims may think they are buying on the open market when in reality, they are purchasing the shares directly from the scammers. The commission and the stock’s easy manipulation are the primary incentives for brokers to trade penny stocks.
Boiler room operations, if not illegal, unquestionably violate the rules of fair practice set forth by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD).
Much like a boiler room operation, a pump-and-dump is a manipulative scheme to boost the price of a security through false, misleading, or greatly exaggerated statements. In a typical pump-and-dump, fraudsters use cold-calling, message boards, or social media to reach potential investors and convince them to buy the asset, with promises of guaranteed profits. Then, as the price rises, the scammers sell their shares, leaving investors holding the bag.
These schemes generally target micro- and small-cap stocks on over-the-counter exchanges that are less regulated than traditional exchanges as well as easier to manipulate. The practice is illegal based on securities law and can lead to heavy fines.
Money laundering is the illegal process of concealing the origin of money obtained from illicit activities, i.e., making “dirty” money appear legitimate. The method of laundering money typically involves three steps:
For example, Belfort attempted a money laundering method known as “bulk cash smuggling,” based on moving “dirty” money, in its physical form, over the border to another country (in this case, Switzerland), where the bank secrecy laws are much more stringent.
Ronald L. Rubin, the SEC enforcement attorney assigned to put together the case against Steven Madden, got a first-hand account from Jordan Belfort and Porush as “cooperating witnesses,” in which they explained the finer points of how they used their brokerage firm to steal millions of dollars from investors.
Rubin breaks Belfort’s signature fraud technique into five steps:
“1. Create IPO Stock;
2. Line Up the Victims;
3. Bait and Switch;
4. Market Manipulation;
5. Sell High and Shut the Door”.
Let’s summarize his findings outlined in the WSJ article.
First, they needed a business to sell, and the definition of business, in this case, was very loose. What was required was not an actual business but rather a business entity with a story that could be transformed into publicly traded stock through a Stratton IPO.
Notably, the Stratton IPO stock was not actually sold to the public but to Stratton. To avoid securities laws that forbid underwriters from buying more than a small percentage of the IPO stock they issue, Stratton sold all of its IPO stock to friends (flippers), who immediately sold the stock back to Stratton for a small profit.
The IPO stock was typically issued to flippers at $4 per share and then sold back to Stratton for $4.25 per share – a lucrative deal for the flippers, who could pocket $50,000 from an IPO without risking a loss.
Stratton’s brokers would first gain investors’ confidence by letting them make a small profit on one or two Stratton IPOs. Then, once trust had been established, the Stratton salesmen would inform these customers of a new hot IPO with a $4 issue price and wait for them to take the bait.
Like all Stratton IPOs, the stock’s price was expected to skyrocket after its release. So, for example, an eager customer with $100,000 of savings allocates the Stratton broker to purchase 25,000 shares of that IPO stock (with a $4 issue price) and then transfers the $100,000 to his Stratton account, offering Jordan Belfort and his cronies an exact picture of how much buying power they have.
Shortly before an IPO, the Stratton broker would call these customers and inform them that the IPO was so desirable that they could offer only a few shares at the $4 IPO price. However, the promise was still that they create purchase orders to be executed as soon as the stock began trading on the market, resulting in many customers assuming that such orders would result in stock purchases near the issue price ($4).
The pressure put on these investors was immense, especially since they had already consented to buy the same stock at the issue price, so they agreed to whatever was being shoved at them.
The company could have made millions just by selling its customers penny stocks for $4 per share, but after a few such IPOs, investors and regulators would have grown suspicious. So instead, Jordan Belfort used the stock market to disguise his fraud.
Let’s imagine Stratton issued one million shares of the IPO stock, but its customers had already pledged to purchase $12 million of the stock in the aftermarket.
The goal was thus to have the stock price rise from $4 to $12 per share before selling it to them. Then, having repurchased all of the IPO stock from the flippers, Belfort and Porush could cause the stock to trade in the aftermarket at any value. The simplest way to achieve that would have been to trade shares between Stratton accounts at increasing prices, but that would have been too conspicuous.
So instead, they had their flippers buy small amounts of stock using “market orders,” which buy shares at the lowest price offered by any seller. Of course, the only seller was Stratton Oakmont.
Flippers began placing these small market orders right when aftermarket trading kicked off on IPO day. At the same time, Stratton would sell its stock using “limit orders,” which offer stock for sale only above a fixed minimum price. After each of these sales, the firm would place another limit order with a slightly raised minimum price, resulting in the market orders executing at a higher price.
The market recorded a steady progression of trades at $4.25, $4.50, and $4.75, up to the $12 target price (all accomplished in mere minutes). And since this was the typical first-day trading pattern for legitimate hot IPO stocks during the 1990s, the manipulation wasn’t blatant.
When the IPO share price reached the $12 target, Stratton executed its customers’ buy orders. Had investors holding the inflated stock attempted to resell it quickly on the market, they would have found almost no genuine buyers, the stock price having nosedived about as fast as it had risen.
However, such an early price crash was rare for legitimate IPO stocks and would have drawn regulatory scrutiny and scared away future Stratton customers. To combat this, Stratton sustained the high price, typically for a month, by purchasing any of its IPO stock for sale on the open market.
Still, letting customers sell their stock for $12 while Stratton Oakmont was almost the only buyer would defeat the purpose of the scheme. So, investors had to be discouraged from selling too soon. This was done by showering more hyperbole onto customers who called to place sell orders (Stratton operated before online brokers, which enable investors to place their own orders).
Most sinister of all, if customers couldn’t be persuaded into holding on to their stock, their sell orders would simply be lost and their phone calls ignored. Or, when the sell orders were finally executed, the lack of buyers would cause the stock to crash, resulting in the customers’ funds being totally wiped out. But, of course, by that time, Belfort had the following IPO ready and was lining up new prey for his schemes.
Based on Jordan Belfort’s memoir of the same name, “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013) is a biographical black comedy crime movie directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Terence Winter, recounting Belfort’s perspective on his career as a broker in New York City.
In 2007, Leonardo DiCaprio and Warner Bros. won a bidding war for the rights to Belfort’s memoir, with Belfort banking $1 million from the deal.
After trying out a few entry-level jobs on Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, still in his 20s, decides to establish his own firm, Stratton Oakmont. With his trusted right-hand man and a motley crew of brokers, Belfort and his brokerage make an immense fortune by defrauding investors out of millions. However, while Belfort and his cronies indulge in a hedonistic concoction of sex and drugs, the SEC and the FBI gather evidence for his eventual comeuppance.
Recommended video: “ The Wolf of Wall Street” trailer
All in all, Belfort’s infamy has proved lucrative. He has picked himself up from the ruins of his fraudulent empire and built a brand new one by utilizing the media’s glorification and obsession with him as the embodiment of Wall Street greed.
Disclaimer : The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing, your capital is at risk.
Jordan Belfort is a former Wall Street stockbroker who, in 1999, was indicted for fraud and money laundering concerning his firm Stratton Oakmont’s market manipulation schemes that evaporated millions of investor dollars. Following his prison stint, Belfort transformed his image, becoming an acclaimed author and motivational speaker. His most notable work, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” chronicled his experiences and was subsequently adapted into a film by Martin Scorsese, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role.
Stratton Oakmount ran a boiler room to pump the value of penny stocks. Belfort’s brokers were trained to pressure inexperienced retail investors to buy shares of companies that Belfort owned, artificially inflating those stock prices and allowing Belfort to sell his shares at a high profit.
A pump-and-dump is an illegal market manipulation scheme in which scammers artificially raise the price of their own shares to sell them at a profit. In a typical pump-and-dump, fraudsters use cold-calling, message boards, or social media to reach potential investors and convince them to buy the asset, with promises of guaranteed profits. Then, as the price rises, the fraudsters put in sell orders, leaving investors scrambling.
A boiler room is an operation in which brokers apply high-pressure sales tactics to persuade customers to purchase securities. Most boiler room salespeople contact potential investors by cold calls. Notable boiler room tactics include making extravagant unverifiable claims on the stock, demanding immediate payment, or threatening non-compliance.
There are various films that are both entertaining and educational that depict the greed and excess of Wall Street, such as:
Jordan Belfort got rich by starting an over-the-counter brokerage called Stratton Oakmont. The company earned money by functioning as a boiler room (a business where brokers apply high-pressure sales tactics to persuade investors to buy securities), selling and marketing worthless penny stocks, and defrauding investors via pump-and-dump schemes.
Jordan Belfort was in jail for nearly two years – a total of 22 months, despite pleading guilty and being sentenced to 4 years. Belfort and his associate Danny Porush were arrested in 1999 for money laundering and securities fraud.
Yes, Wolf of Wall Street is based on a true story inspired by the real-life events of Jordan Belfort, who used to work as a stockbroker on Wall Street in the 1990s. Jordan Belfort defrauded thousands of investors of millions through his company Stratton Oakmont and was sentenced to jail for money laundering and market manipulation schemes.
Jordan Belfort’s net worth is between $100 and $134 million.
Jordan Belfort has been married four times. His first wife was Denise Lombardo, followed by Nadine Caridi (played by Margot Robbie in “The Wolf of Wall Street”), whom he married in the 1990s. He then tied the knot with Anne Koppe in 2008. Most recently, in 2021, he married Cristina Invernizzi, who remains his wife to this day.
Jordan Belfort has transitioned from his controversial past to become a motivational speaker, author, and sales trainer. He’s penned memoirs such as “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Catching the Wolf of Wall Street,” with the former adapted into a hit movie by Martin Scorsese. Belfort’s recent endeavors center on delivering seminars and online courses where he teaches sales techniques and emphasizes ethical business practices. Drawing from his personal missteps, he often speaks about the importance of integrity in business.
Yes, as of December 2023, Jordan Belfort is still alive.
Some of Jordan Belfort’s most famous quotes include, “The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.” Another notable quote is, “There’s no nobility in poverty,” reflecting his controversial perspective on wealth and success. Belfort’s quotes often combine elements of ambition, the psychology of success, and a no-nonsense approach to achieving one’s goals, despite his notorious past.
The current state of the relationship between Jordan Belfort and Danny Porush is not publicly known. After their release from prison, both have attempted to rebuild their lives separately. Belfort has become a motivational speaker and author, while Porush has kept a lower profile, staying away from the public eye. Since their conviction and release, they have not publicly acknowledged each other’s presence. While they had a close partnership during their careers, it is unclear whether this relationship has continued or not after their legal troubles and subsequent life changes.
Yes, Jordan Belfort is a real person. He is a former stockbroker and motivational speaker, best known for his involvement in financial crimes in the 1990s and for his memoir “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which was later adapted into a film.
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Samantha bergeson.
Martin Scorsese was determined that “ The Wolf of Wall Street ” would have a sinking ship onscreen.
The blockbuster, Oscar-nominated 2013 film which starred Leonardo DiCaprio as real-life disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort, was originally a whopping four hours long. While the film was eventually trimmed down to 180 minutes, screenwriter Terence Winter revealed that Scorsese refused to cut an expensive yacht sequence.
“Because [the script] was so long, you know, the fear was there were going be things that we were gonna have to cut — like the sequence where the boat sinks and they get rescued at sea,” Winter told The Hollywood Reporter . “It was on the chopping block for the longest time because it was so wild and so expensive. To his credit, Marty just kept fighting and said, ‘We have to have that. I have to have that.'”
The scene involves Belfort (DiCaprio) and his wife Naomi ( Margot Robbie ) having to be rescued by helicopter when sailing from Italy to Monaco in a desperate attempt to stop federal investigators from accessing bank accounts.
“There was actually a four-hour cut of that movie initially and it was just a lot more insanity — if you can believe there was room for any,” Emmy winner Winter continued. “But I was absolutely thrilled that everything got in there. Every possible thing… including the kitchen sink… is in that movie. I could not have been more happy with it.”
Acclaimed editor and longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker previously told IndieWire that the four-hour cut is beloved by those who had seen it, and Scorsese even considered releasing it in two parts. “Well, we thought about it,” Schoonmaker said. “But the film doesn’t work split in half. It has to have a certain arc.”
Actress Robbie recently revealed that the overnight success of “The Wolf of Wall Street” was overwhelming at times, saying, “Something was happening in those early stages and it was all pretty awful. I remember saying to my mom, ‘I don’t think I want to do this.’ And she just looked at me, completely straight-faced, and was like, ‘Darling, I think it’s too late not to.’ That’s when I realized the only way was forward.”
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The lobster-throwing boat scene didn't happen. But "Wolf of Wall Street" Jordan Belfort sinking his yacht in the Mediterranean during a storm did.
Those were some of the stories former FBI Agent Gregory Coleman — who spent six years investigating Belfort — told Friday to members of the Central Bucks Chamber Chamber of Commerce.
"I spent hundreds of hours tracking down (Belfort's) plane, the boat, getting the financial documents," said Coleman, who retired in January after more than 25 years with the FBI. "I'm ready to have parties on that boat with the FBI. But it's gone. It's at the bottom of the ocean."
Coleman, now a speaker and consultant on financial crimes, spent more than an hour Friday regaling about 100 business leaders gathered at Spring Mill Manor in Northampton with tales of the Belfort investigation, which was made into the 2013 Martin Scorsese film starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
"Truth is stranger than fiction, anything you can make up," Coleman said. "We go into Belfort's home, we arrest him, I have the agents take him away. I do my pitch to (Belfort's wife) Nadine, 'get on board the train that's leaving the station.' She agrees to speak with me. But first, [she says], 'I have to go put my PJs on.' We're putting her husband in handcuffs, and she goes up and puts her PJs on."
Coleman said the investigation into Belfort's crimes — using a system of "flippers" and "ratholes" to manipulate supply and demand for stocks, then pocketing the profits in cash — took six years of poring through financial records and working through a tight-knit group of brokers who were loyal to their boss.
"One of the biggest problems I had in cracking the case was getting through the loyalties of his employees," Coleman said. "Once I got them, it was a domino effect."
Eventually, the FBI would arrest such high-level players as Belfort's partner, Danny Porush, portrayed in the movie by Jonah Hill with the character name Donnie Azoff.
Belfort was smart, Coleman said. He targeted wealthy small-business owners who were less likely to complain about their losses. He adapted to changes in regulations to avoid detection. He spent millions in cash to create a false "perception of success" that would impress would-be investors.
"Belfort did not sell stocks," Coleman said. "He sold a story. If he told a good story, you would buy the stocks."
The scheme cost victims of Belfort's brokerage, Stratton Oakmont, $110 million. Today, Belfort is a motivational speaker.
Coleman was portrayed in the movie by Kyle Chandler, whose character's name was changed to Agent Patrick Denham.
"I had no idea who Kyle Chandler was," Coleman said. "I knew I would be OK, though. The ladies would come up to me in the office and say, 'Who's playing you in the movie?' 'Kyle Chandler.' And they'd go, 'Ooooh.'"
Some scenes, Coleman said, are purely fictional, such as the bribery scene on the boat. Others are a mix of truth and fiction, such as the arrest of Belfort's drug dealer, Brad Bodnick [portrayed by Jon Bernthal]. While based on a real person, Todd Garret, the arrest itself was because of money laundering, not drugs, Coleman said.
"Part of what they portrayed was absolutely correct and real," Coleman said. "On the other side of the spectrum, it was completely false. It was made up in Hollywood. They threw it in to spice it up. In the middle you have this mixture of truth."
The FBI never did get to seize Belfort's 175-foot yacht. But the agency did seize a beach house in tony Southampton, New York, which Belfort purchased with insurance money.
"The nice thing about money laundering," Coleman said, "is once it's tainted, it's always tainted."
Crissa Shoemaker DeBree: 215-345-3186; email: [email protected]; Twitter: @CrissaShoemaker
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The courts at the tennis club in Manhattan Beach are full, and the pool is overflowing with bikinis. It’s a brilliant summer afternoon, and over at the juice bar, drenched in sweat after hitting for an hour or so, Jordan Belfort and I are parked on stools and talking about his Big Problem. It’s plagued him since he was a child. Even in prison, he couldn’t make it stop.
“I can’t sleep,” he tells me as the waitress arrives to take our order.
“Oh my God!” she says with a gasp. “You look just like Jordan Belfort!”
Belfort looks confused. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s never been recognized like this before.
“Actually,” the waitress goes on, “we just looked you up on the Internet. You are Jordan Belfort!”
Then the gushing starts. She tells him what big fans she and her friends are of his books, that she follows his motivational-speaking career on the web. Juice Bar Woman is a bona fide Jordan Belfort groupie.
“Can I get a picture?” she asks, and soon her smartphone camera is clicking.
The spotting is incredible for many reasons. The city of Los Angeles and its satellite communities like Manhattan Beach make up the celebrity mecca of the universe, and among all the hot stars and not-so-hot ones who can be spotted around here, the name does not quite register. Jordan Belfort? And Jordan Belfort is also a convict, one of a particularly loathed class — a white-collar crook who duped innocent investors to finance an insatiable greed. Belfort was convicted of scamming more than $100 million throughout the nineties to finance a hedonistic paradise. Stratton Oakmont, the firm he started, became a kind of cult. “It should have been Sodom and Gomorrah,” Belfort would later write. “After all, it wasn’t every firm that sported hookers in the basement, drug dealers in the parking lot, exotic animals in the boardroom, and midget-tossing competitions on Fridays.”
Belfort’s background in finance was limited. After dropping out of dental school, he sold frozen lobsters and steaks door-to-door; one of his first experiences in sales came from hawking ices as a kid. He proved to be a great talker and fearless mimic, modeling himself after his hero, Gordon Gekko, the ruthless corporate raider in Wall Street, a favorite film, and assumed what he called “a devilish alter ego.”
It was a truly epic scam, in which he used his powers of persuasion to screw investors and then train a small army to do the screwing for him. But eventually, Belfort sank his own empire. He spent some of his fortune on megamansions, only to have the government seize them. He purchased his own helicopter, only to almost crash it on his front lawn while flying it stoned. He owned a 166-foot yacht built for Coco Chanel, only to tell the captain to steer it into a storm and nearly kill himself, his friends, and his crew before the ship sank in the Mediterranean. Even with the hundreds of prostitutes he claimed to have hired, Belfort struggled to perform. He was taking so many drugs that his penis, as he writes, had taken the form of a “No. 2 pencil eraser.”
It was in prison that Belfort discovered his talents were transferable. His cube mate, or “cubie” (at his facility, there were no cells), was Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong fame. Chong laughed so hard at Belfort’s stories he pushed Belfort to write them down and get them published. Employing the same zeal that made him a financial-industry tycoon, Belfort set out to become a writer. In prison, he studied Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities , taking notes on character development, dialogue, tone. He then applied the Wolfean techniques to his own tales, writing two memoirs that detail his quest for fortune and approval.
And, now as then, people cannot get enough of Jordan Belfort. He’s using the same skills, working the same stories, only this time, the gig is entirely legal. His ruthless rise and self-destructive fall was ripe for a big Hollywood production. Leonardo DiCaprio signed on to play Belfort, with Martin Scorsese directing. After many snags in production, The Wolf of Wall Street was finally released on Christmas Day, just in time for Oscar season.
Back at the tennis-club juice bar, Belfort still can’t believe it: Leonardo DiCaprio playing him? During production, Belfort even coached DiCaprio personally on the stages of a ’lude high (“tingle,” “slur,” “drool,” “amnesia,” and on), with Belfort rolling around in DiCaprio’s living room. He laughs about it now, but before he went to prison, Belfort had become a kind of neurotic, Long Island version of Scarface. “I was in the midst of a cocaine-induced paranoia that was so deep I’d actually taken a few potshots at the milkman with a twelve-gauge shotgun,” he writes in his first book. After that, he nearly killed himself. “It looked beautiful, a purple pyramid,” he writes of morphine pills piled up in his hand. “I threw them back and started chewing.” The drugs. The greed. That always empty feeling. The Big Problem.
“From the time he was born, he never really slept,” Leah Belfort, Jordan’s mother, tells me in the kitchen of their two-bedroom apartment in Bayside.
“He can’t sit still,” Max Belfort, his father, says.
“We’d come into the room, and he’d be watching his fingers,” Leah says about Jordan’s infant years. “I’d say to Max, ‘He’s not sleeping. He must be dumb. What kind of dummy are we raising?’ ”
In the kitchen, the appliances look plucked from a fifties time capsule, and framed recipes for gefilte fish and matzo-ball soup hang above us on the wall. The product of Bronx tenements and night-school master’s programs, Belfort’s parents represent the immigrant dream of hard work and ambition. Max and Leah are both accountants, but Leah decided to choose another profession after retirement. She went to law school in her sixties, graduated from St. John’s University, and still does pro bono legal work. With a home that appears so steady, part of the Belfort mystery is how a nice Jewish boy like him could destroy himself with such gusto.
Consider the following list of ingredients he packed inside “a brown leather Louis Vuitton shower bag” on a trip to Czechoslovakia, according to his memoir: “a half-ounce of sinsemilla, 60 pharmaceutical Quaaludes, some bootleg uppers, some bootleg downers, a sandwich bag full of cocaine, a dozen hits of ecstasy, and then the safe stuff: a vial of Xanax, a vial of morphine, some Valiums and Restorils and Somas and Vicodins, and some Ambiens and Ativans and Klonopins, as well as a half-consumed pack of Heineken and a mostly consumed bottle of Macallan’s to wash things down.”
In his memoirs, Belfort describes his parents as pushy and overbearing. He calls his dad “Mad Max” and fears his chain-smoking, vodka-drinking fury; Leah appears as a Jewish mother on steroids, demanding he start studying for medical school from the cradle. Both Max and Leah have read most of their son’s memoirs. Max and Leah are at least proud that he didn’t let the misery go to waste: Teaching himself to write and turning his gonzo tales into page-turning books, they believe, are great accomplishments.
“It’s an enigma, really,” Max says about his son.
“I wanted to deny he was my child,” Leah says.
“That time we found him growing pot in the closet,” Max says. “Very, very entrepreneurial. He said it was a school project, right?”
“He said, ‘I’m going to get an A.’ He was trying to buy me off with the grade,” Leah says. “I said to him, ‘I’ve been manipulated by better than you!’ Then Max came home, and you gave it to him.”
“A lot of lectures,” Max says, shaking his head again.
Leah says, “He always wanted to be part of the older kids, and all the big boys were taller. Much taller than he. And all the girls were much taller. He tried to build himself up with a bodybuilder, but that didn’t make him taller!”
“Yeah, all those girls were taller than him.”
“Maybe that’s one of the reasons he tried to compensate,” Leah says.
“Like Mayor Bloomberg, right?” Max says.
“Or Napoleon!” Leah says.
“My chief insecurity is that I was a late bloomer,” Belfort tells me. “I didn’t go through puberty until later in the curve. I didn’t feel confident in high school. Ninety percent of my focus was hot girls. I thought if you got rich, you’d get the girls. A lot of guys think that. And it’s true — it worked for me. It worked really well. When I really hit it, I had all these gorgeous women throw themselves at me. But the problem with that stuff is, it doesn’t really change you.”
Belfort has the salesman’s look: a flash of white teeth, tan skin, all of which radiate a youthfulness that’s impressive considering his age (he turned 51 this summer) and former drug habit. “A testament to the regenerative qualities of the human liver,” he likes to say of himself, with a heavy Long Island brogue.
It’s another tennis morning for us, and this time we play at the private court of Jeff Tarango, his personal tennis guru. Tarango is not any tennis instructor. The former pro and commentator has been rated one of the top over-40 players in the world.
“Obsessive-compulsive talent,” Tarango says of Belfort. “He’s not autistic, but he could be. He just can go into that tunnel.” Belfort is so committed to improving his tennis strokes that he and Tarango play together every morning. Belfort wanted to play on weekends, too. His sessions are tutorials. Behind the baseline, Belfort props up his smartphone to videotape himself in action; later, at night, he’ll study his technique in bed with his fiancée, Anne Koppe. His intensity can be overwhelming, but it’s all part of his recipe for success, a life philosophy he’s now hit the road with in his new incarnation as motivational speaker for hire. “I believe in total immersion,” one of his creeds goes. “If you want to be rich, you have to program your mind to be rich. You have to unlearn all the thoughts that were making you poor and replace them with new thoughts — rich thoughts.”
After hitting balls, I trail him back to his home. He drives a Mercedes SL convertible and lives in an oceanfront mini-mansion on Manhattan Beach. I follow him through the garage and up the spiral steps into an expansive living room where the doors and windows are open to the view of the Pacific and the warm breeze comes and goes just so.
“Making money is so easy,” Belfort tells me. “It really is. It’s not hard to do.”
Belfort’s actual net worth is something of a mystery. He earned more than $2 million for the books and film rights (“I thought they were fucking crazy,” he says about actually getting published), five figures for speeches he gives, along with income from investments he’s made in Australia.
“I did really well with the mining industry,” he says. “I made some hits. Iron. Ore. Stuff like that.”
But he can’t keep it all. According to a judge’s order, half of everything Belfort earns must go to the $110 million he is obligated to pay back to the more than 1,500 investors he fleeced. It’s a hefty order to fill, and according to the government Belfort has been negligent in his payments. Belfort denies he’s hiding money from the government — a skill he once perfected on Wall Street — and currently the parties are working toward a resolution. Belfort says he’s not making a nickel off his story and has signed over all proceeds and profits to the government.
“I wanted to be above reproach with the whole thing,” he tells me. “I didn’t want people to think, Oh, he’s making money on the movie, on his crime. Like, ‘I don’t want the fucking money! Keep the fricking money!’ ”
“They never even call me,” he says, sounding insulted.
Waiting for Belfort in his living room are two assistants, both of whom seem to possess his requirements for employment.
“Let’s just say Jordan has a type,” one says.
Belfort’s lair here is like a high temple of the Shiksa Goddess. He laughs off his propensity for long blonde hair, blue eyes, and buoyant bosoms.
“I’m not going to lie,” he says as we make our way onto the deck. The water is sparkling on the crashing surf in front of us, and errant sounds of a volleyball game pass in the breeze. One assistant brings out a pair of cold beers, sandwiches, and chips.
Belfort spreads out on a lounger, his sunglasses shielding his eyes.
“I always felt if I had more, then I’d feel good,” he says. “I think the more I had, the worse I felt. We all have these holes, right? The problem is, there’s some ways we plug those holes that are sustainable. Going out and fucking twenty whores every night — it was fun when I did it, but that’s not really sustainable.”
Toward the end of his first book, Belfort describes his need for validation: how he and a friend are swimming in a pool, but the friend never comes up for air. Belfort pulls the friend out of the pool and proceeds to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Finally, the friend shows signs of life — by vomiting the hamburgers they were eating into Belfort’s mouth. When the medics arrive, one tells Belfort, “You’re a hero.”
“What a delicious ring those three words had,” Belfort writes. “I desperately needed to hear them again, so I said, ‘I’m sorry, I missed what you said. Could you please repeat that?’” Belfort then approaches his second wife (“with her loamy loins and brand-new breasts”) and “tried to find just the right words that would inspire her to call me a hero.”
“Unfucking believable!” he writes. “She didn’t call me a hero!”
Belfort’s business model itself seemed based around ego-boosting. Instead of hiring seasoned stockbrokers or anyone with experience, he recruited naïve twentysomethings who would adhere to his ruthless sales creed: Buy or die. To motivate these young and wealth-hungry aspirants, Belfort would arrive to work in the same white Ferrari Testarossa that Don Johnson used to drive in Miami Vice and deliver not one but two boardroom speeches to them each day.
“From a moral perspective, he was a reprehensible human being,” says Greg Coleman, the FBI special agent who made the case against Belfort. A specialist in financial frauds and money laundering, Coleman has been an agent with the Bureau for more than twenty years. “Admiration would be the wrong word, but from the perspective of manipulating the market, he’s one of the best there is,” Coleman says of Belfort. Coleman also specializes in the behavioral sciences, giving talks inside the FBI on the psychology and interior motives of criminals.
“In a single word, it’s attention, a craving for attention,” Coleman says. “I think it’s the issues that cause the insomnia, not the insomnia that causes the issues.”
Coleman spent six years investigating Belfort. From the outset, what bothered Coleman most, he says, is that Belfort put so many of his friends and family members at criminal risk. When he started laundering money in Switzerland, for instance, Belfort cajoled his wife’s aunt, a retired schoolteacher in London, to be the front for bank accounts into which he illegally funneled millions to hide from other regulators chasing him. “There’s a difference between influence and manipulation,” Coleman says. “He’s a great motivational speaker, and he manipulated everyone around him with a Svengali-like trance.” After his arrest in the fall of 1998, Belfort, then 36, faced a sentence of more than two decades in prison. He did not protest the charges and take his case to trial. He did not keep his mouth shut and spare others.
“He cried like a baby,” Coleman says.
Wearing a wire, Belfort worked with Coleman and other federal officials to make cases against his partners and associates. By cutting a deal, Belfort hoped to persuade a judge to cut the lengthy sentence awaiting him and spare himself heavy prison time. Working with the government, Belfort also proved he’d mastered the art of being liked. Dan Alonso, a former federal prosecutor who handled Belfort’s case, was so impressed with Belfort’s speaking ability that he invited him to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, where Alonso is now a top official, to have Belfort give a speech to prosecutors. (“He’s a salesman,” Alonso tells me of Belfort’s performance, “and he sold himself well.”) Alonso and others lauded Belfort’s efforts during the investigation, and he only served two years and four months in prison. “A slap in the face,” Coleman says of Belfort’s punishment. Coleman was so upset with Belfort’s sentence he considered moving out of the unit that handles white-collar crime. “At the very least, he should have done a year for every year I investigated him,” Coleman says. That Belfort is now a celebrity, immortalized by his books and a performance from Leonardo DiCaprio, galls him.
“Crime pays,” Coleman says.
But Coleman can’t get enough of Belfort either. Agent and cooperating witness stay in touch, going out to dinner every so often when their schedules allow. “He tells a good story,” Coleman says of Belfort.
“He’d come back from playing tennis, and I’d crack up, man, because we’re in fucking jail,” Tommy Chong says.
“I was shocked,” Belfort says. “Everyone’s playing tennis and basketball. The Latins have their music blasting. I was like, Wow, this isn’t so bad.”
We’re at Chaya, the Asian-fusion restaurant in Venice, for a prison reunion. The dining room is roaring, and under the chandeliers and stagelike lighting, waiters pass plates of shishito peppers and soy-glazed black cod. Chong, then jammed up for selling bongs over the web, and Belfort, serving out his white-collar sentence, got close in prison. They shared their meals and stories, like the prison chef who cooked, in a microwave, delicacies that included fresh squirrels he’d trapped. “The Quaalude stories are my favorite,” Chong says.
Belfort recalls a night where he spent $1,000 on a rare Quaalude pill and vowed to savor the high. “I stick my finger down my throat. I wanted to get all the frickin’ food out of my stomach. Then I take a fuckin’ enema, shove it up my ass. I want to be completely clean, from top to fucking bottom.”
Across the table, Chong’s wife, Shelby, is cackling with laughter.
“He has to do everything the best,” she says. “Perfect. Number one.”
And the story goes on, just as Belfort tells it in the book: about learning that the Feds are following him while completely stoned, then driving out to use a pay phone at the local country club, only to fall backward and crash on the floor in his ’lude binge.
“I’m lying on my back and see the ceiling has cracks in it,” Belfort says. “I’m like, Why are the Wasps not paying for their ceiling? What a troubling thought that they don’t fix the ceiling in this Wasp heaven — maybe they’re running out of money. I try to stand. I can’t stand! I curl myself into a little barrel and fucking roll myself down the steps. I do the prayer to Jesus. Even an old Jew. Jesus, please God, just get me home one last time.”
“I love this!” Shelby says. The more Belfort reveals, the more laughs he gets. Especially in the story’s dénouement: totaling seven cars at one mile an hour.
“Banging into a car! Banging into a car!” Shelby howls. “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
“Was he the gold mine?” Tommy Chong asks. “Was he the gold-mine writer?”
“You do such a good setup,” Shelby says.
“You learned that from the early selling,” Chong says. “How to sell.”
Finally the conversation lands on his lack of sleep. Belfort tells us he’s seeing a psychologist now, trying to come up with a cure for his insomnia.
“Why can’t you sleep?” Shelby asks him.
“I hated going to sleep as a kid,” Belfort says. “I almost trained myself to fight sleep, and it eventually became a pattern.”
Shelby is confused.
“You make your real life so scary,” she says. “How could sleep be scary?”
The night is warm and clear. After dinner, I drive with Belfort back toward Manhattan Beach in the Mercedes. Top down, we pass the tattoo and taco shops on Lincoln Boulevard in silence. Finally, he breaks it.
“Did you like the stories?” he asks.
The stories were great, I tell him. He’d told them so well. It was the truth. Once he got rolling, all the laughing was infectious. He truly was a talent.
Belfort smiles to himself. For a minute, the compliment has perked him up, but the feeling soon fades. As the stoplights on Lincoln Boulevard pass by, I look back at him. He looks pale and deflated.
“Honestly, it’s just so exhausting,” he says.
This article originally appeared in the December 2, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.
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We sort out what’s fact and what’s fiction in Martin Scorsese's glitzy new film about a real-life scammer
Drugs, prostitutes, crashed helicopters — the debauchery in The Wolf of Wall Street is so outlandish that audiences might leave the theater thinking director Martin Scorsese took plenty of creative license in telling the story of Jordan Belfort, a New York stock broker who conned his way to earning hundreds of millions in the 1990s. But Scorsese’s film closely follows Belfort’s own memoir , also titled The Wolf of Wall Street .
That said, Belfort glorifies his vulgar antics in his book, so how much of his account is truly real is up for debate. After all, Belfort was a scam artist — he made a living by lying. Scorsese, knowing this, portrays Belfort ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) as an unreliable narrator in the film (see: the changing color of the car in the first scene and the driving while high on Quaaludes episode).
TIME fact-checks the movie against Belfort’s books (he also wrote a sequel entitled Catching the Wolf of Wall Street ) and a series of Forbes articles that have followed Belfort’s scheming.
Belfort’s first boss told him the keys to success were masturbation, cocaine and hookers. Ruling: Fact
According to the book, a broker named Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) gave him this advice early on in his career.
Belfort and his partner owned shares of a risky stock and had their brokers at Stratton Oakmont brokerage aggressively sell the stock to inflate the price. They then sold the stock themselves to turn a profit. Ruling: Fact
Belfort and Danny Porush (called Donnie Azoff in the film and portrayed by Jonah Hill) utilized this age-old pump-and-dump scheme to get rich quick after graduating from scamming middle-class people into buying worthless penny stocks at a 50 percent commission.
Forbes magazine exposed Belfort, calling him a “twisted Robin Hood.” Ruling: Fact
Though Belfort wasn’t on the cover, Forbes did run a profile of him in which they called him “a twisted version of Robin Hood, who robs from the rich and gives to himself and his merry band of brokers.” Though it was a scathing portrait, the promise of quick $100,000 commissions brought job applicants to Stratton Oakmont in droves.
Stratton Oakmont took Steve Madden public. Ruling: Fact
Steve Madden did give a speech the day of the IPO, to which the Stratton Oakmont brokers responded with jeers. Madden, Belfort and Porush owned most of the stock and drove up the price. Belfort, Porush and Madden all went to jail for their scheme.
Belfort laundered his money into Swiss banks using his in-laws. Ruling: Fact
His wife’s mother and aunt both helped smuggle the money into Switzerland .
Now for the really ridiculous stuff…
Danny Porush (Donnie Azoff) was married to his cousin. Ruling: Fact
They’re now divorced.
The driving on Quaaludes scene. Ruling: Mostly fact
It was a Mercedes, not a Lamborghini. But the rest is true to Belfort’s memoir.
The office parties included a “midget-tossing competition.” Ruling: Fact
…According to Belfort.
The company billed prostitutes to the corporate card. Ruling: Fact
…And wrote them off in their taxes.
He crashed a helicopter in his front yard while high. Ruling: Fact
On a related note, he also did at least attempt to sober up in real life.
He sunk a yacht in Italy. Ruling: Fact
And the yacht used to belong to Coco Chanel.
He called his trophy wife “duchess.” Ruling: Fact
Though her name was Nadine, not Naomi.
He served a reduced prison sentence after ratting on his friends. Ruling: Fact
Turns out Belfort was even more of a jerk than they show in the movie. In the film version, Belfort tries to save his partner from incriminating himself. In reality, Belfort ratted out his partner Porush, among others, for a reduced sentence (the two reportedly no longer speak). Belfort spent only two years in prison and had Tommy Chong (of Cheech and Chong) as his cellmate. Chong convinced Belfort to write a memoir.
He scammed only the rich. Ruling: Fiction
Some writers have criticized Scorsese for portraying Belfort’s lifestyle as glamorous without showing the victims of his scam. Though Belfort claims in his book and in the film that he only took from the wealthy, the New York Times reports that many small business owners are still trying to recover financially from Belfort’s scheme. (The government claims Belfort has failed to pay his restitution, and reports suggest that Porush is still running get-rich-quick schemes.)
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Martin Scorsese ’s The Wolf of Wall Street is a darkly comedic portrayal of unrestrained Wall Street hedonism and greed that ranks among the maestro’s greatest works of the last decade. Scorsese clearly excels at translating true stories into film, as seen with his newest release, Killers of the Flower Moon . Like all narrative films based on true stories, The Wolf of Wall Street takes a few liberties with Jordan Belfort’s life and crimes, such as using Jonah Hill ’s Donnie Azoff character as a stand-in for multiple real-life friends of Belfort’s.
Overall, though, the film is remarkably accurate and certainly conveys the underlying truths of Belfort’s 2007 memoir, which was the primary source material for the film . Although the film is three hours long , some details and interesting subplots were unable to make the final cut. As we explore the real-life stories of some of the film’s principal characters, we’ll see where Scorsese’s film diverted from the truth, and we’ll understand the additional context that helps add complexity to this remarkable, hilarious, and tragic story.
Based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, from his rise to a wealthy stock-broker living the high life to his fall involving crime, corruption and the federal government.
The overall story of Jordan Belfort ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) and his brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont, as presented in Scorsese’s film , is true to life. Belfort was violating probably hundreds of laws at any given time, most of which involved defrauding his shareholders and manipulating the stock of dozens of companies. He recruited young, mostly working-class kids from Long Island to work at Stratton and indoctrinated them into what he repeatedly calls, in his 2007 memoir, a “cult.” They were taught to worship at the altar of money and to con their clients into buying worthless stock. While all this was happening in his professional life, Belfort’s personal life was plagued by addictions to numerous illegal substances, primarily cocaine and Quaaludes. He cheated on his first wife with a woman nicknamed “The Duchess of Bay Ridge,” played by Margot Robbie in the film . He later married the Duchess, and they had a tumultuous relationship filled with deceit and abuse that ended in divorce. Eventually, Belfort was caught by the FBI and after serving 22 months in federal prison , became a writer and motivational speaker. His first memoir, The Wolf of Wall Street , was published in 2007.
Steven Spielberg’s set visit lasted longer than expected!
Perhaps the biggest surprise to be found in Belfort’s memoir is that most of what is depicted in the film is true, at least according to Belfort’s best recollection. The copious amounts of drugs, the proliferation of sex workers, and rampant criminality are all depicted pretty accurately . Many of the more outrageous scenes in the film, such as when a female employee has her head shaved for $10,000, are true. Stratton Oakmont was notoriously depraved, but much of that depravity was inspired by existing financial institutions, some of them prestigious, others far less so. In other words, Belfort didn’t invent the practice of defrauding shareholders while snorting countless lines of cocaine, but he did engage in these illegal activities more frequently and ostentatiously than most.
One aspect of the film that accurately conveys Belfort’s mindset and perspective is its frequent use of fourth-wall-breaking narrations , in which Belfort speaks directly to the camera/audience . In his book, Belfort writes, “It was as if my life was a stage, and the Wolf of Wall Street was performing for the benefit of some imaginary audience.” Of course, that audience turned out to be real. Perhaps it was this idea of playing a character that led Belfort to dub himself the “Wolf of Wall Street.” There is scant evidence that anyone referred to him by that moniker until after the publication of his book. Belfort makes it seem throughout his memoir that people constantly called him “The Wolf” but that appears to be, at best, a creative embellishment.
In an effort to perhaps make Belfort seem a bit less crazed than his on-screen persona, it should be mentioned that despite the film citing “back pain” in air quotes as a reason for his drug habit, Belfort really did have constant back issues that required multiple surgeries. He would often use his health problems as a partial excuse for abusing various substances, but the film downplays his reliance on pharmaceuticals to alleviate his chronic pain . Belfort also wasn’t reckless or dumb enough to attempt to bribe an FBI agent, as depicted in the film. Belfort never even interacted with the FBI agent pursuing him until he was arrested.
One especially dramatic moment in Scorsese's unhinged biopic that is only partially true is when Belfort gives a speech to his employees, informing them that he is stepping down as leader and handing over the reins to Jonah Hill’s character Donnie. Then, mid-speech, he decides to reverse course and screams “ I’m not fucking leaving!” to rapturous applause. In reality, Belfort did step down but heavily implied in his speech that he would still be running Stratton from the sidelines by giving “advice” to Donnie’s real-life counterpart. Of course, once Belfort relinquished control, Stratton went on a downward spiral from which it would never recover.
Donnie Azoff is based on a real person named Danny Porush, who was Belfort’s right-hand man at Stratton and apparently an out-of-control Quaalude addict. Porush was introduced to Belfort through his wife. He was not, as the film depicts, a children’s furniture salesman who quit his job to work for Belfort when he saw one of Belfort’s pay stubs. In an interview with Mother Jones , Porush denied that several events depicted in the film ever happened, including the infamous dwarf-tossing scene (an idea that was seemingly shot down by Belfort for being too outrageous). He also confirmed to Mother Jones that nobody at the firm ever actually referred to Belfort as “The Wolf” or “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
Although the film depicts Donnie as being resuscitated by Belfort after choking on food while under the influence of Quaaludes, it was actually another friend of Belfort’s whose life was saved when Belfort performed CPR on him. Porush similarly was not aboard Belfort’s yacht when it capsized and sank during a storm (that was another group of friends, all of whom were rescued by the Italian Coast Guard). Porush did, however, admit to eating an employee’s goldfish in order to send a message. Amazingly, it’s also true that Porush married his first cousin and brought Belfort to a crack den. He spent 20 months in prison after the FBI unraveled Stratton’s schemes .
Steve Madden ( Jake Hoffman ), the famous shoe designer, was childhood friends with Danny Porush and was roped into his old friend’s lawlessness ( Madden would end up being sentenced to 41 months in prison ). While Madden has a relatively quick cameo in the film, he looms much larger in Belfort’s memoir. Madden was actually personally and professionally closer to Belfort than he was to Porush. According to Belfort, Madden even offered to co-run his shoe company with Belfort , with Madden focusing on designing shoes and Belfort focusing on the manufacturing and distribution side of the business. After leaving Stratton, Belfort worked for Madden for a while until their relationship soured. Then the FBI took them both down. Madden ultimately was convicted of stock manipulation, money laundering, and securities fraud.
The merry band of misfits and former weed dealers that make up the core Stratton staff are mostly based on real people, but their exact work histories and relationships to Belfort are either simplified or omitted from the film. The Chester Ming ( Kenneth Choi ) character, for example, is based on a real person named Victor Wang , who had a much more interesting role to play in Belfort’s memoir than in the film . Victor wanted to start his own firm and was thus viewed with suspicion by Belfort. It turns out the suspicion was justified. Within days of forming his own business, Victor began spreading rumors that Stratton was on the verge of collapse. He later started poaching Stratton stockbrokers who preferred to work at Victor’s firm in Manhattan over Belfort’s firm on Long Island . Unbeknownst to Victor, Belfort was “waging a secret war” against him the whole time, which resulted in Victor’s new firm going belly up. It's also true that Victor assaulted Belfort’s butler and dangled him out of a window. Victor ended up being sentenced to eight years in prison.
Bo Dietl is a private investigator and former New York mayoral candidate with a long history of popping up in Scorsese’s films. Dietl appeared in Goodfellas as the detective who arrested Henry Hill and was cast in a memorable supporting role in The Irishman . Believe it or not, Dietl actually knew Belfort and berated him for plotting a scheme to bug the FBI. Dietl also introduced Belfort to an FBI agent, dug up some information about the FBI’s investigation into Stratton Oakmont, and helped keep alleged Mob members and other troublemakers from causing any problems at Belfort’s firm. Dietl ended up playing himself in The Wolf of Wall Street .
Perhaps the oddest fact concerning The Wolf of Wall Street is that Belfort’s cellmate in prison was none other than Tommy Chong , the legendary stoner and actor. In an interview with New York Magazine , Belfort credited Chong with inspiring him to write a memoir. Chong apparently found Belfort to be endlessly entertaining. “The Quaalude stories are my favorite,” Chong told New York Magazine .
The Wolf of Wall Street is available to stream on Paramount+ in the U.S.
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Ten years ago, Martin Scorsese made a movie about the horrific excess of the finance world in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Leonardo DiCaprio was in the foreground, but what was going on in the background was just as wild.
P.J. Byrne never liked making cold calls. While majoring in finance at Boston College in the early 1990s, he took a summer internship selling AAA-rated municipal bonds over the phone. At the time, he’d planned to be an investment banker on Wall Street, but after two weeks on the job, he realized dialing numbers wasn’t the path for him. “I was like, this just feels car salesman–y to me,” he says. “I wanted nothing to do with that.”
About 15 years later, after pivoting to drama school and pursuing an acting career, Byrne gave cold-calling a second chance. In a taped audition for The Wolf of Wall Street , the actor leaned into his brief boiler room experience, took a gamble, and improvised an outrageous sales call monologue in which he pretended to scam a former client’s widow out of $100,000. In a devastated voice, he built a sob story around her husband’s financial intentions. “I started pilfering information from this woman,” Byrne says. “But on the other side of the phone, she can’t see that I’m humping the desk and having a blast.” Without realizing it, Byrne had channeled Jordan Belfort—the movie’s craven, money-hungry, criminal protagonist—to a T.
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It wasn’t long before he got a callback to go to New York—along with several other green actors, including Brian Sacca, Henry Zebrowski, and Kenneth Choi—to convene inside a suite at Le Meridien Hotel, where they would perform the same monologues in front of Martin Scorsese and casting director Ellen Lewis. The group was, understandably, nervous as hell. “I thought it was going to be a serious audition,” Byrne says. After a few minutes, however, everyone quickly realized the director wanted them to channel the absurdity of their original auditions, use prop desks and phones, and take advantage of the unusual group setting. “And then,” Byrne adds, “you heard him cackling.”
“We were doing it almost like a scene,” Sacca says. “At one point, I said something on the phone: ‘If you buy these stocks, I will let you snort coke off of my tits.’ That got a big laugh from Marty and the other guys.”
Though The Wolf of Wall Street mostly chronicles Jordan Belfort’s real-life rise and fall as a corrupt CEO (dynamically portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio), the movie’s hedonistic heart belongs to his unquestioning, cultlike worshippers, tracing their evolution from blue-collar schemers to suit-and-tie heathens eager to debase themselves in the name of money and power. The “merry band of brokers,” as Forbes nicknamed them —Nicky, Robbie, Chester, Alden, and Toby (Ethan Suplee)—might not be in charge, but they double down on their penny-stock-peddling debauchery. “Those are the types of people you’re looking to recruit,” Wolf writer Terence Winter says. “A guy who is morally malleable and hungry and has half a brain.”
The three-hour comedy, released 10 years ago this week, ultimately becomes an American tragedy of unchecked testosterone, spiraling greed, and blind idolization. To pull off the corporate circus, everyone in the group—much like the characters they played—embraced excess and chased their id. Guided by Scorsese’s kinetic camera and Winter’s loyal adaptation of Belfort’s autobiography, the cast practiced slimy sales techniques, improvised office high jinks, snorted fake cocaine, simulated orgies, and lost their voices screaming at clients over the phone. Making it was a marathon of endurance, frat-like behavior, and pinch-me moments.
“I was astutely aware,” Sacca says, “that the things that were happening were the stories I was going to be telling forever.”
In 2007, when Winter first pored through Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street , he couldn’t wait to turn it into a Hollywood script. Belfort’s first-person account had plenty of cinematic moments—office sex parties, a quaalude trip, a sunken yacht—and followed a classic rise-and-fall narrative, but Winter mostly related to its ambitious protagonist. The pair were around the same age, had grown up in New York’s outer boroughs, and both dreamed of moving to Manhattan and becoming rich. In 1987, around the same time Belfort began his financial career at L.F. Rothschild, Winter had started as a legal assistant at Merrill Lynch. “I was literally working a quarter of a mile away from where Jordan was working on Wall Street,” Winter says.
In other words, he knew this guy. He knew what drove him. But perhaps more importantly, he knew exactly how Belfort built and scammed his way to the top with a bunch of low-level nobodies. “They reminded me of my own friends,” Winter laughs. “These are guys who don’t have the strongest moral compass. They’re not necessarily college educated. These aren’t guys who would go the more traditional route to work for a legitimate Wall Street firm.” Effectively, they were door-to-door salesmen ready to make a quick buck who would pledge loyalty to anyone who could make them money. “As long as Jordan looked like the pillar of success, that’s all he really needed,” Winter says. “If you’re rich, they don’t care how you got there.”
After securing an initial option deal and commitments from Scorsese and DiCaprio, Winter began investigating more about Belfort’s life. He met with Belfort’s parents, his ex-wife, and his financial victims. He drove to Long Island, toured Belfort’s home, and visited his country club. Most shrewdly, Winter convinced Belfort to reenact one of his daily pump-up speeches at CAA’s headquarters, where Winter taped his old sales presentation for reference. Soon after, Winter structured his screenplay with voiceover narration, changing key names and crafting composite characters—like Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff, Stratton’s second-in-command—for legal reasons. But he never strayed from the real-life insanity of Belfort’s cult creation. “I wrote the whole script in 17 days,” Winter says. “It was maybe the most fun I’ve ever had writing a script.”
About five years later, the movie went into production, and the recently cast Belfort boys began their preparation with a sales crash course from the wolf himself, which clarified and informed the entire shoot. “It gave you a little glimpse,” Choi says. “When you have that killer shark energy, everybody else around you has to become a killer shark, or you get swallowed up and eaten.”
Henry Zebrowski (Alden “Sea Otter” Kupferberg): When we first came together, we went to Leo’s apartment. He had Jordan come in and give an example of his ramp-up training speech.
Kenneth Choi (Chester Ming): Sort of a mini sales pitch tutorial.
Zebrowski: We were talking with [Belfort], and he said, “Have you guys ever seen $25,000?” And he pulled out a bunch of money and threw it on the table, which he probably had to scoop up and put back into his pockets. Then they popped a bunch of bottles.
Terence Winter (writer): It’s really fascinating when you see somebody who understands the psychology behind how to set you up. It’s a whole series of questions and answers to the customer. It’s like a good cross-examination. I am going to move you into a corner where your only response can be the one I want.
Choi: He would say, “If you ever get lost, follow the script. The script is your bible. The script is gold. Memorize the script.” Even in that little training session, you could kind of see him step back in time. He got swept up in it.
Zebrowski: Jordan would say, “I just had this piece of paper come across my desk.” He was like, “You wave your hand across. I know it’s dumb, but this is how I talked to the dumb shits I worked with back in the day.”
P.J. Byrne (Nicky “Rugrat” Koskoff): I was like, this guy is a fucking con artist. Holy shit. This scared the fuck out of me.
Choi: I think it was valuable not just to hear how he would do it, but to see his energy and really feel it right in front of you. He was constantly teaching you how to divide and conquer.
Winter: He basically applied high-level skills to a low-level sales force, taking the skills of a Jedi and bringing them into a shitty boxing gym. The idea that this is a legitimate, Wall Street–trained broker and using the spiel you would get from L.F. Rothschild or Goldman Sachs on a mailman. … It was like taking candy from a baby.
Ethan Suplee (Toby Welch): We are playing blue-collar guys who couldn’t cut it as blue-collar guys. We suck at this. You’re not going to find a whole lot of legitimate guys who are willing to do that because there’s risk. You’re doing something completely immoral and unethical, but also illegal.
Zebrowski: The direction for my character was like, this is kind of a revenge against society. Because everybody always told me I was fat and dumb and I was never going to be a millionaire and I was never going to make it. Now, here I am. Jordan believes in me. He saw something in me. I’m just like him.
Suplee: Jordan was like the pied piper. He is the messiah of this industry of ripping people off.
Zebrowski: Intelligent, self-conscious people get pulled into cults all the time. It’s because there’s extreme comfort in letting someone else take the wheel.
Byrne: You’ve got to remember, these guys are all narcissists. And they all ruin the people closest to them. No one has a long-term relationship. If you get sucked into their orbit, you’re going to get chewed on and shit out. But while you’re there, it’s a fucking insane ride.
In an early, seminal montage, DiCaprio mimics Belfort’s presentation, teaching his friends how to reel in customers and shake them down with nefarious tactics. Throughout the scene—which functions as a shared monologue—they follow their scripts and reap the rewards, helping turn Stratton Oakmont from a garage facility into a full-blown office. Using variations of their monologue auditions, the group of actors leaned into their comedic roots to make every office call sizzle.
Zebrowski: It was like two weeks of rehearsal. Scorsese loved improv, but you better be very, very good. He doesn’t want time wasted.
Brian Sacca (Robbie “Pinhead” Feinberg): They hired us because we were guys who could improvise, who could be in the moment and come up with some shit. Some of my favorite moments were: “We need you to do something.”
Choi: We sit around a table, we have the script, and you would just throw everything against the wall. You’d react off someone’s bit, and then Leo and Jonah would react off it. I’d improvise one thing and you’d get the script back a couple days later and your stuff would be in there word for word.
Winter: Anything beyond the dialogue is great. And sometimes, that’s where the gold is, especially when you get an actor who’s really good at it.
Sacca: There were like six of us, including Ted Griffin, the on-set writer, finding how the Tetris of this sales monologue through that long montage is going to work up until an hour before we shot that.
Byrne: Marty knew it would get boring. And he’s like, “How do we keep it interesting?”
Sacca: There was one day of rehearsal where we’re all in a room around a table reading that monologue. And a debate happened between Scorsese and Leo: “Do we let the guys go free-form and improvise, or do we keep it contained and to the script? Finally, I just raised my hand: “Guys, you’re going to shoot this on a circle track, right?” And immediately, I’m like, “What the fuck am I saying? Am I going to get fired off this movie?”
Byrne: [Scorcese’s] like, “I was thinking you’re next to Kenny, and I was going to put a [circle] track around both of you, let’s just say this little part of the monologue.” We were only supposed to do a paragraph, and the monologue is like three pages. We kept passing it and passing it. The room’s quiet now and filled with hundreds of extras, but everyone’s now listening. You can feel the energy. I’m in the zone of zones. Kenny’s in the zone. We’re just making this magic.
Zebrowski: Everybody kind of got to just throw in on their character. And it allowed me to feel comfortable with these people. As we became masters of the universe, it was really important to kind of go from our dumb Queens clothes to the suits. You kind of see how that changes everything.
Choi: I specifically was asked to gain 20 pounds. This guy is about excess. He eats everything, he consumes as much cocaine and women and booze as he can. And that’s where some of my little moments like the doughnut scene came from. He’s just a slovenly pig.
Sacca: We all had our specific traits that we liked to play with. But we all had different levels of aggression. That kind of yes-men, doofus quality was a through line between a bunch of us.
Once Stratton Oakmont grew into a Wall Street middleweight, the office became littered with shocking and vulgar HR violations. As chronicled by Belfort, almost anything related to sex, drugs, and alcohol happened within the walls of the brokerage firm, which more often looked like a bacchanalian madhouse. But Winter wasn’t too surprised by the colorful revelations. During his own brief stint in Merrill Lynch’s law department, he’d seen firsthand the kinds of unholy shenanigans taking place at Stratton. “Somebody had a marching band and brought a monkey onto the trading floor,” Winter says. “When the market closed at 4 p.m., everybody went out and just partied all night. And you’d get guys coming in the next morning hungover and just coked out of their minds.”
Of course, the bigger firms couldn’t compete with Stratton’s no-holds-bar approach, something Scorsese and Winter became devoted to portraying and sometimes embellishing. Spitting in the face of discretion, the filmmaking team leaned into the company’s voracious and lustful appetite, depicting everything from stampeding strippers, to thrown-around little people, to impromptu animal stunts. Not to mention Belfort’s motivational speeches, which turned the office into a pep rally every afternoon. “The whole thing is about excess, and when is too much too much?” Winter says. “It just got crazier and bigger and out of control.”
In some ways, showing it all became a sort of PSA, especially when things come crashing down in the third hour. “That’s the power of comedy,” Byrne says. “You’re able to turn the mirror on yourself with society and go, this is wrong .” In order to capture the chaos, the production moved from Manhattan into a massive office stage in Westchester, where, for nearly two months, the Belfort boys—alongside hundreds of extras—lived inside an unethical bubble catering to their leader’s absurdist ideas.
Sacca: My voice was gone for a good six weeks because we were screaming so much.
Choi: I wasn’t very talkative because I had to gain so much weight that I always felt like taking a nap.
Sacca: I’ll shout out the AD and second AD, who had to wrangle 500 extras to get all of us to be screaming and then shut the fuck up in between takes. That was hard.
Choi: There’s so much importance put on AI in our SAG contract. There’s a reason for that. When you’re in a real space with 300 human beings who are in the background, the energy just swells and you can feel it. Everybody is going apeshit trying to “sell, sell, sell,” and that informs your performance because you feel that surge of energy come through you as an actor.
Suplee: There’s a lot of shit happening in the background of that movie that’s just as crazy as what’s happening in the foreground.
Zebrowski: It was just us bullshitting for 12 hours being animals. Scorsese used to come by and go, “Yeah, you pigs, you ready to get going, you pigs?” We’re like, “Yeah!”
Choi: There’s a scene where Leo walks through with a chimpanzee for no reason, which scared the shit out of me. The whole time I’m thinking, “This ape is going to fucking pounce on me.” I think I just bent down and did some fake lines of cocaine.
Sacca: We had to snort a lot of cocaine in this movie. At the beginning, it was very finely powdered vitamin B12. And man, did it fucking feel good. It was so nice.
Zebrowski: We could snort B12 forever. And we did. And we took every single opportunity we could because we were in a Scorsese movie, and we were animals.
Sacca: About three months into production, they switched it up—they put some dog shit in there. And we were like, “No, no, no, no. Where’s our B12? Bring back the good shit!” We had to sit down with the props master and be like, “Come on, man, we have to snort this shit all day long.”
Suplee: The other brokers and I were in our cast chairs reading books and playing chess, and they came and dragged me to this private set. Leo helped me get sober many years ago, and he was like, “Do you know how to [blow cocaine up someone’s butt]? I was like, “Yeah, I do know how to do this. Unfortunately, I am your technical drug adviser.” But I was happy to help. It was so funny to see them sitting on this closed set discussing amongst themselves, “How do we do this?”
Choi: The head-shaving scene was a huge fucking deal. I think it was a woman who was somehow friends with Leo, and she offered to do it.
Byrne: When we started shaving her head, it was shocking. I practiced with a razor on a fake scalp a lot because I was like, “I don’t want to ruin this moment for her.”
Choi: You have 350 people yelling at P.J. to shave her head. It was so overwhelming.
Byrne: You’re simultaneously going, “Holy fuck, this is crazy, I can’t believe this.” And then: “There’s the camera. Make sure you’re doing it perfectly for the camera.”
Choi: [P.J.’s] hairpiece should have got its own credit, that’s for sure.
Byrne: I still have the hairpiece. It was a thing having that on.
Sacca: One of the little people we threw was an employee of Stratton Oakmont, and he told stories that were fucked up. These weren’t stories like, “I can’t believe what they did to me.” These were stories of: “Let me tell you what I did.” We were like, “Oh man, don’t share those.”
Suplee: First of all, we couldn’t actually do it. It’s not like throwing a 50-pound weight. The guy weighed 150 pounds. That’s a lot to pick up and throw.
Byrne: [Our characters] are not nice people. When you watch that and you know they’re throwing little people, that’s fucking disturbing. And that’s what these fucking guys did.
Suplee: Terrifically uncomfortable. This is all the behavior of really abhorrent people. But sometimes as actors we have to lean into that discomfort. I also think that it’s important to show that.
Sacca: I think I would have been more uncomfortable if the two guys who were a part of it weren’t as excited. They were both thrilled to be part of it. And they were really cool dudes.
Zebrowski: My guesstimation is that 80 percent of it happened. And then the rest of it was mostly just having money and getting hammered with the same five guys and getting rejected at the club and going home to your wife.
Suplee: If I had gotten rewarded for being at my worst, what would that do to me? It probably wouldn’t have been good for my life. I probably wouldn’t be alive. At my worst, I would be dead for sure, and that was what I was thinking about: Turn the bad behavior up. It’s kind of like frat boy culture. Bad behavior just seems to breed more bad behavior. And I don’t know if it’s that business that attracts and breeds that personality. How much sushi can you stuff down your face? How much can you drink? How much coke can you do? How much money can you make? How many girls can you sleep with? It’s just all part of it.
Arguably the most obscene imagery of the movie comes from Belfort’s bachelor party, when the camera pans down the aisle of a plane that has been turned into a giant orgy. The scene, filmed on a soundstage in Queens for a day, lasts just a few seconds, but it became an instant memory for everyone involved.
Sacca: We’re in a metal tube, there’s some hot-ass lights, and there are 60 naked people at 8:30 in the morning.
Choi: It’s so fucking cramped. Everyone’s sweaty because everyone’s kind of in a rambunctious state. And you’re doing it over and over and over for this poor Steadicam guy who’s trying to get everything.
Zebrowski: It was a long day.
Suplee: This was my first experience with an intimacy coordinator. I suspect they invented that job for Wolf of Wall Street .
Sacca: We had a rehearsal where we met with the choreographer, and we were partnered with people who we were going to be interacting with. It never doesn’t get weird. I couldn’t help but think: My parents are going to see this.
Zebrowski: I was with a couple of Rockettes and a couple of professional dancers. You have a super awkward moment where you’re having fake sex with someone for an entire take and then you realize the camera wasn’t on you.
Byrne: The camera’s tracking. We’re going, boom, boom, boom. Where do I want to be? I know I have one second. What can we do in that one “boom” that no one else is doing?
Choi: In between takes everyone’s real respect, respect, respect . Robes come off. I just kept looking up in the air because you don’t want to be leering. Then you get in the mode of: “This is just about excess.”
Zebrowski : I remember having to psych myself up. I was sitting there in my chair, saying to myself, “You love strippers! You love cocaine! You love going nuts!” And I was like, “This is your favorite day. So you go in there and have your favorite day you’ve ever had.”
Byrne: I had a bachelor party, which was G-rated. But I remember my friends made me walk around in a meat bathing suit with a banana hammock. I’m like, if I’m doing that at mine, what are these despicable, wealthy 10-year-olds doing? At the time, I was walking past the Museum of Sex—like, there’s got to be something that’s going to trigger something disgusting for me. Remember those Pez bracelets that you could eat as a kid? They had that in an underwear version. I was like, that’s what I’m going to wear.
Choi: P.J.’s attitude was, they’re illicit stockbrokers, they do a bunch of drugs, consume all this booze. There is no limit. There is no top. Anything fucking goes.
Byrne: I went to Sandy Powell, the Oscar award–winning costume designer with jet-red hair. I’m like, “This is candy underwear that just covers my dingle-dangle junk.” She looked at me like I was a despicable, disgusting man. She paused for 10 seconds, but it felt like two days. She looks at me. She looks at that. She just goes, “OK.”
Suplee: I’ve lost a lot of weight, I’ve got loose skin. I’ve never once felt proud of my body. I have a lot of body issues. I don’t really ever want to do a sex scene. I have four daughters. And then you’ve got Henry Zebrowski, who has got no body shame and is willing to put himself out there.
Zebrowski: I have done naked improv for a long time. Nudity just becomes the scenery. You’re kind of like, “When’s this going to get over with?”
Suplee: I wound up pitching stuff that allowed me to keep my clothes on. What if we’re playing cards? What if I’m asleep? What if I’m playing solitaire?
Sacca: He’s my favorite moment because he’s just sitting there having a conversation with somebody. It made it better.
Suplee: I have not been to an orgy, but I imagine that’s what an orgy smells like. Like every private part coming into contact with a private part.
Zebrowski: It got very human in that room.
Sacca: That day was Scorsese’s 70th birthday. We had cake.
In the midst of shooting, actor and character began to blur. Every day that DiCaprio arrived to set, he greeted hundreds of screaming women and paparazzi, affirming his A-list stature, before going to work, where he’d receive even more admiration on the fake trading floor. It was an eye-opener for Zebrowski and the other young actors, who couldn’t believe the way their leader had to operate—and how that might affect someone’s identity. “It was weird how many mountains had to move for him to move,” Zebrowski says. “I will never say he’s trapped, but he can’t go anywhere.”
Leo’s celebrity—and his connections around the city—further accented Zebrowski’s similarities to his own character. “I’m from a working-class family. This is my first time seeing any of this shit,” he says. “I went to the back door of 1 Oak, and you could see the models register. I’m not supposed to be there.” There was a similar vibe once the cameras began rolling. “All these friends and stockbrokers wanted to do was please Jordan,” Choi says. “Everyone on set, all they wanted to do was please Leo and Marty and Jonah. You would have given everything in the scene to make sure that they got what they needed.”
Unlike Belfort, however, who wanted his employees leveraged and desperate, DiCaprio came to set open-minded and generous, wanting to nail every scene with his collaborators. Ahead of speeches and group scenes, his dedication to preparation became an infectious trait and inspired the cast to deliver unblemished, gonzo performances. “When you have 500 people worshipping this guy, you can feel how energizing and exciting that would be,” Sacca says.
Suplee: When Leo’s giving those speeches, you almost feel like a fistfight could break out. He’s sending people off to war. He’s the general, and we’re going to go die for him.
Zebrowski: Chills still go up my spine when I think about it sometimes.
Sacca: He would come in with these 15-minute monologues, word perfect, accent perfect, still being able to improvise on top of it, coming up with ideas in the moment.
Zebrowski: He could do it one way, they’d give him a note, he’d do it a completely different way. They’d give him a note, he’d go back to the old way, mixed with the second way.
Sacca: I was enthralled with it, but it wasn’t necessarily the personality of Leonardo DiCaprio or Jordan Belfort’s words, it was this fucking performance that was like, “Holy shit, I don’t think I can do that.” I can’t crank out these monologues and do a gazillion takes of them and then be like, “All right, let’s do another one.”
Suplee: I’ve never seen a crack in Leo’s professionalism. They knock on his door to tell him they’re ready on set, and he is exploding from his chair. He is always prepared.
Zebrowski: For a bunch of green dudes who weren’t movie stars, he was extremely generous. That’s where the Belfort comparison doesn’t work, because that dude would have never shown up and done the dirty work himself.
Choi: It’s Hurricane Sandy. Everybody got sick over a three-week period. At some point, Leo got so sick that they shut down shooting for a day. We come back, and it’s the “I’m not leaving” scene.
Winter: I was writing it with Leo in mind. I had taped some of what Jordan said and then added my own embellishment to make it flow a little clearer or better if it needed it. A lot of times, it didn’t. Some of his stuff was just pure gold.
Byrne: We stayed up all night because the days moved. And I was like, “How the fuck is he going to do this?”
Choi: I happened to be outside smoking a cigarette, and I watched him in front of his trailer. I was like, “Oh, this guy’s rehearsing.” He would go through his motions. You’d see him kind of shake his head, turn around, go back to his starting mark in the parking lot, and do it again and again and again. He’s a craftsman. He’s pumped up with meds, he comes in, he does one rehearsal, and I’ll never forget, I could see in his head he missed a line. So he took one step back, remembered the line, and carried through with it. After that, he didn’t flub once, and he did it over and over with so much energy.
Sacca: It’s like a preacher, like Jim Jones speaking into a microphone to his disciples.
Choi: He was walking down the aisle bashing this microphone on his head. The prop guy came and showed us. It was caved in because he was smashing it on his skull.
Byrne: He’s a baller, dude. And honestly, that’s the world that I like to work in and live in. All day we’re here to kill. When we’re on set, we’re not coming back here again. Let’s make sure we fucking get it.
Zebrowski: [In that moment], Jordan’s not a bad guy. He’s not a fucking criminal. He’s helping all of us. You just don’t understand that what he’s doing is including you in his crime.
Byrne: When you see me get crazy at the end, it’s like, I don’t want my “god” to leave. I don’t want this meal ticket to end.
Choi: In the wedding scene where we’re all dancing and stuff, [Leo] had this huge case of 5-Hour Energy drinks. He came in right before like, “Everyone take one! Everyone take one!” And then we slammed it, and then we went into the scene.
Zebrowski: They’re putting us all in a circle, and they just have the music going.
Choi: We actually were talking about the Kid ’n Play dance. I go out there and do my dance move, and I knew to throw it right to him so he’d come out pop-locking. I was shocked that he was so fucking good with the pop-locking.
Zebrowski: I guess he’d been doing it for forever on his own.
Byrne: How fucking insane a dancer is Kenny? And then Leo saw that. He’s like, let’s fucking go. And then everybody had their moment to be who they were.
Choi: He looked at me and went, “Come here, come here, come here,” so that we could do the Kid ’n Play dance. That’s why he’s amazing. There’s some actors out there who don’t want you to steal the light.
When The Wolf of Wall Street premiered on Christmas Day, many critics lauded Scorsese’s return to bombastic filmmaking and comedic storytelling. But a vocal contingent couldn’t get past the movie’s inflated running time and excessive antics, believing they celebrated Belfort’s unethical behavior. As David Edelstein argued in his Vulture review , the movie is “three hours of horrible people doing horrible things and admitting to being horrible,” later calling it “thumpingly insipid.” Later, in an open letter to LA Weekly , a woman connected to Belfort accused the movie’s characters of “exacerbating our national obsession with wealth and status and glorifying greed and psychopathic behavior.”
The critique resembled the conversations surrounding Goodfellas , despite the fact that both movies highlight their protagonists’ calamitous, unglamorous falls. “When you see Ray Liotta getting chased by helicopters and he’s fucking high out of his mind on cocaine, at no point do you look at that and say, ‘God, being a gangster is pretty cool,’” Suplee says. Wolf ’s length and its punishing scenes of depravity, he adds, only helped illustrate the fatiguing and ruinous state that Belfort inspired and embodied. “It was the same experience I had with drugs, which is: You get high, and then you’re just chasing that experience over and over again and you never get it. You always get some muted version of it.”
Ten years removed, it’s perhaps easier to see the movie as a warning signal, an example of how scammy, magnanimous figures can organize a cultlike following and engender loyal defenders based on flashy facades and mostly empty promises. The examples of the last decade—the fanaticism around Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and so many more—feel akin to Belfort’s own crew hyping up their public con man. “It’s all about selling dreams,” Byrne says. “They are so good at selling you to make you buy in on believing it. And they create this world around them that you’ve now been absorbed into.”
Byrne, of course, might as well have been referencing the movie’s own world. For each of the Belfort boys, The Wolf of Wall Street remains the most memorable experience of their careers, a testament to the camaraderie they found together and Scorsese’s commitment to capturing everything as it looked. “Not just because it’s Martin, not just because it’s Leo,” Choi says. “It was the scope of it. You have everything there for you. And the more stuff you have that’s real, the more it informs the performance.” It made them itch to go deeper and wilder.
As Sacca notes, “I couldn’t wait to get off set and call my wife and say, ‘Let me tell you what fucking happened today.’”
Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times .
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The anti-hero of martin scorsese’s new film seems like a grotesque caricature of the ‘greed is good’ mantra. but he’s real. nikhil kumar tells jordan belfort’s story, article bookmarked.
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In 1984, a New York native called Jordan Belfort got his undergraduate degree and headed to dental college. His mother had always wanted him to become a doctor but he overslept for his medical school entrance exams and told her that dentistry was his true calling.
But when, on his first day at the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, the dean told his students them that they could expect their training to be rewarded with “a life of reasonable comfort”, young Jordan began to have doubts. According to his memoirs, his fears were confirmed when the dean said: “The golden age of dentistry is over. If you’re here simply because you’re looking to make a lot money, you’re in the wrong place.”
The warning would mark the end of Belfort’s nascent career. Instead, he would charge down a road of white-collar crime that would eventually land him in prison. Along the way, millions of dollars would be swindled from hapless investors and Belfort would consume enough drugs to, as he puts it, “sedate Guatemala”.
“I had lots of nicknames: Gordon Gekko, Don Corleone, Kaiser Soze; they even called me the King. But my favourite was the Wolf of Wall Street,” he wrote in the best-selling first instalment of his memoirs, named after his favourite moniker.
A second book called Catching the Wolf of Wall Street followed in 2009, and this Christmas, Belfort’s life story will appear on the big screen in the United States, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the lead role. The movie is due be released in the UK early next year. Directed by Martin Scorsese, the film follows Belfort’s story as he morphs from a rookie Wall Street stockbroker without a job after markets crashed in 1987 to a brazen financial swindler whose firm, Stratton Oakmont, trained its young brokers in applying high-pressure tactics to trick unwitting investors into paying inflated prices for worthless stocks that the brokerage would have initially bought for a song. In a pattern that made them millions, Stratton’s finest would bank the profits and swagger off, while the investors would end up shouldering losses when reality caught up with the shares and their prices collapsed.
With the cash flooding in, Stratton’s employees were expected to live what Belfort, who declined to be interviewed for this article, called “the Life”: “driving the fanciest car, eating at the hottest restaurant, giving the biggest tips, wearing the finest clothes, and residing in a mansion in Long Island’s fabulous Gold Coast”.
In retrospect, he says the business should have been called Sodom and Gomorrah. “After all,” he wrote in 2009, “it wasn’t every firm that sported hookers in the basement, drug dealers in the parking lot, exotic animals in the boardroom, and midget-tossing competitions on Fridays.”
The boss made sure to set an example. The trailer shows Belfort’s character at wild parties and hanging out on a yacht – and in one scene, tossing crumpled-up $100-bills into a waste-paper basket. “The year I turned 26 I made $49m, which really pissed me off because it was three shy of a million a week,” DiCaprio adds in a voiceover.
After leaving dental school, Belfort became a meat and seafood salesman, working for a distributor before branching out on his own. Business wasn’t doing too well, though, and things took a turn for the worse when he ran into an old acquaintance from his neighbourhood who’d gone to work on Wall Street. Described as “an erstwhile loser”, he was being paid well enough to charter yachts off the Bahamas and drive a Ferrari. If the loser could succeed, Belfort was convinced he would flourish.
“I was the most talented salesman in the world,” he wrote in his second book. “My mistake was that I’d picked the wrong product to sell.”
A family friend got Belfort started at the merchant bankers LF Rothschild. But that didn’t last either: Belfort had just finished training when, on his first day as a licensed stockbroker, world markets tanked. It was 19 October 1987 – Black Monday – when the Dow crashed by over 500 points. Among the victims was LF Rothschild, which folded.
Technically, that was the end of Belfort’s Wall Street career. But his involvement with the seamier side of finance was just beginning: he landed at a Long Island-based penny-stock outfit before setting out on his own. To speed things up, instead of starting a firm from scratch, he struck a deal with a struggling Wall Street brokerage called Stratton Securities to commence operations as its branch in Long Island. Soon, though, Belfort was in control.
A handful of years on, Stratton was occupying a sprawling glass office building in Long Island. Millions were pouring in and the wild life chronicled in the upcoming movie was in full swing. Until the Feds arrived, that is.
In 1999, after a federal investigation, Belfort pleaded guilty to securities fraud and money laundering charges. Facing up to three decades behind bars, he became a government witness, supplying authorities with information about other defendants. He eventually ended up serving 22 months in prison and was ordered to pay victims of his fraud $110m in restitution. He was barred from the industry, and Stratton was shuttered.
Today, as the world prepares to watch his story, Belfort says he’s a changed man. In place of stocks and shares and dodgy dealing, he is a motivational speaker and sales trainer.
“Fraud is not something you want to be good at,” he told the Associated Press in a recent interview. “I was always taking great efforts to cover my tracks. It was unbelievably exhausting, keeping track of all the lies... I think that’s why I lived so recklessly. You’re doing things that you know can’t go on indefinitely. It fuels that insane lifestyle.”
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How Jordan Belfort's 37m superyacht Nadine sank off the coast of Sardinia. Coco Chanel was famously outspoken on many things, but yachting, in particular, attracted her ire. "As soon as you set foot on a yacht you belong to some man, not to yourself, and you die of boredom," she was once quoted as saying. Her solution was to buy her own yacht.
Jordan Belfort's ex wife, Nadine Macaluso, has set the record straight about the scene in The Wolf Of Wall Street where Belfort splashes out and buys his wife a yacht on their wedding day.
However, before Belfort threw next-level parties aboard his elegant vessel and chartered her across the Mediterranean to Sardinia on that fateful day, Nadine had already lived many lives. In truth, the luxury yacht seen in The Wolf of Wall Street film is nothing like the vintage vessel Jordan Belfort owned.Scorsese hired a yacht called Lady M for these scenes, which was originally built by ...
The Jordan Belfort yacht sinking scene in The Wolf of Wall Street was heavily inspired by a real-life event, though the movie did take some creative liberties. For one, the yacht was called Naomi in the reel version since the name of Belfort's wife (played by Margot Robbie) was changed in the movie. In reality, the yacht was named Nadine.
Jordan Belfort bought a yacht and named it after his second wife. In the film, the boat is named Naomi after the character played by Margot Robbie, but in real life the boat was called the Nadine .
Dec 10, 2021. It turns out that the preposterous scene in The Wolf of Wall Street where Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Jordan Belfort, and his co-horts are caught in a ferocious storm and nearly meet their makers, is true. According to an article by Brad Hutchins on bosshunting.com, the real Jordan Belfort was on a luxury yacht called the ...
The Jordan Belfort yacht sinking scene in The Wolf of Wall Street was heavily inspired by a real-life event, though the movie did take some creative liberties. For one, the yacht was called Naomi in the reel version since the name of Belfort's wife (played by Margot Robbie) was changed in the movie. In reality, the yacht was named Nadine.
How Accurate The Wolf Of Wall Street Is To The True Story. The Wolf of Wall Street is based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, a con artist who became famous for his fraudulent actions. The movie features memorable moments from Belfort's memoir, such as smuggling money into Swiss banks and sinking a yacht. However, several real-life figures ...
Inside The Shocking True Story Behind 'The Wolf Of Wall Street' And The Real-Life Jordan Belfort. By Austin Harvey | Edited By Cara Johnson. Published July 17, 2024. Updated July 19, 2024. ... Indeed, Jordan Belfort's yacht really did sink off the coast of Sicily, just like in the film. However, Danny Porush was not on board at the time ...
The real story of the sinking of the Wolf of Wall Street's yacht. In 2000, Doug Hoogs interviewed Capt. Mark Elliott about the sinking of the motoryacht Nadine.Elliott was in command of Nadine on the fateful day in 1996 when she encountered a powerful mistral in the Mediterranean between the Italian mainland and Sardinia. All guests and crew survived, but the real story of the sinking, which ...
To be fair, The Wolf of Wall Street, hitting theaters in November, stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, and Jonah Hill. But to those of us in yachting, the megayacht in The Wolf of Wall Street movie is the real star. She's Lady M, and she plays the role of a well-known yacht from the 1990s, Nadine.. Nadine belonged to Jordan Belfort, a Wall Street stockbroker with a penchant for ...
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No. In the movie, Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) first encounters Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) at a diner after noticing Belfort's Jaguar in the parking lot. He tells Belfort that if he show's him a pay stub with $72,000 on it, he will quit his job immediately and start working for him.
And then Belfort forgets he had a huge bag of ludes in his cabin so he gets his friend to go down and get them, but the cabin is flooded and now the water is electrocuted from the helicopter. So the guy, on cocaine, walks through the water and comes back with 3rd degree burns on his feet.
Jordan Belfort's yacht was named after his second wife Nadine (or Naomi in the "Wolf of Wall Street" movie), which was previously built for Coco Chanel in 1961. ... he was later let go after the company experienced financial difficulties due to the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987. Stratton Oakmont. Jordan Belfort eventually ended ...
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But "Wolf of Wall Street" Jordan Belfort sinking his yacht in the Mediterranean during a storm did. Those were some of the stories former FBI Agent Gregory Coleman — who spent six years investigating Belfort — told Friday to members of the Central Bucks Chamber Chamber of Commerce. "I spent hundreds of hours tracking down (Belfort's) plane ...
The greed. That always empty feeling. The Big Problem. "From the time he was born, he never really slept," Leah Belfort, Jordan's mother, tells me in the kitchen of their two-bedroom ...
Mary Cybulski / Paramount. Drugs, prostitutes, crashed helicopters — the debauchery in The Wolf of Wall Street is so outlandish that audiences might leave the theater thinking director Martin Scorsese took plenty of creative license in telling the story of Jordan Belfort, a New York stock broker who conned his way to earning hundreds of millions in the 1990s.
Like all narrative films based on true stories, The Wolf of Wall Street takes a few liberties with Jordan Belfort's life and crimes, such as using Jonah Hill's Donnie Azoff character as a ...
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Jordan Belfort: The real Wolf of Wall Street. ... The trailer shows Belfort's character at wild parties and hanging out on a yacht - and in one scene, tossing crumpled-up $100-bills into a ...
The INSANE True Story of Jordan Belfort (Wolf of Wall Street) https://youtu.be/cbyUKx_INCYPls Subscribe :) https://bit.ly/3JSExDeIn this video, we take a l...