Jordan Belfort

• 1. Introduction

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  Jordan Ross Belfort is an American former stockbroker who spent 22 months in prison for fraud. He is also the author of a memoir that became a major film. For years he ran a brokerage that defrauded its own customers. Then he helped the FBI by wearing a hidden wire against the people he had worked with. How does a man end up leading a notorious brokerage? What did the people who lost money actually get back? And how much of the story Belfort tells about himself can be trusted? Prosecutors have challenged some of his claims, and so have reviewers and reporters. The answers begin long before Wall Street.

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• 2. Before Wall Street

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  On the 9th of July 1962, Jordan Belfort was born in the Bronx, a borough of New York City. His parents, Max and Leah, were Jewish and both worked as accountants. He had an older brother named Robert. His paternal grandfather Jack, who lived from 1904 to 1970, had immigrated from Russia. Belfort grew up in Bayside, Queens.

  Between high school and college, Belfort and his close childhood friend Elliot Loewenstern made $20,000 selling scooped Italian ice from styrofoam coolers. Their customers were beachgoers at Jones Beach. Belfort then earned a biology degree from American University. He meant to pay for dental school with the Italian ice money, and he enrolled at the University of Maryland School of Dentistry.

  On the first day, the dean of the dental school gave a welcome speech that ended Belfort's plans. The dean told the new students, "The golden age of dentistry is over. If you're here simply because you're looking to make a lot of money, you're in the wrong place." Belfort chose not to attend the graduate program.

  Door-to-door meat and seafood sales on Long Island came next, by Belfort's own account. He says the business took off. By his telling, it employed several workers and moved 5000 lb of beef and fish each week. It failed anyway, and he filed for bankruptcy at 25.

  At L.F. Rothschild, Belfort became a trainee stockbroker, and he says a family friend helped him get the job. He reports being laid off when the firm ran into financial difficulties linked to the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987. His next venture would be a franchise of a firm called Stratton Securities.

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• 3. Stratton Oakmont

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  More than 1,000 stockbrokers eventually worked at Stratton Oakmont, the firm Belfort founded as a franchise of Stratton Securities. He later bought out the original founder. The firm was a boiler room, meaning a sales floor built to push stocks onto customers. Its specialty was penny stocks, which are shares of very small companies that trade at low prices. In a pump and dump, aggressive selling inflates a stock's price, and the sellers cash out before it falls. Stratton Oakmont defrauded investors this way.

  Methaqualone, sold to Belfort under the brand name "Quaalude," was his drug of choice during these years. It led to an addiction. Around it ran a life of lavish parties and intensive recreational drug use.

  Stock issues totaling more than $1 billion passed through Stratton Oakmont, including the initial public offering of the footwear company Steve Madden.

  Law enforcement officials targeted the firm for nearly its entire history. From 1989 onward, the National Association of Securities Dealers, now called the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, kept it under near-constant scrutiny. In December 1996, the association expelled Stratton Oakmont, which put it out of business. The firm's notoriety later inspired the 2000 film Boiler Room.

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• 4. Wire And Prison

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  In 1999, Belfort was indicted for securities fraud and money laundering. He pleaded guilty to fraud and related crimes tied to stock manipulation and the boiler room. As part of a deal with the FBI, he became an informant and wore a wire against numerous partners and associates. He later testified against many of them.

  On the 18th of July 2003, Belfort was sentenced to four years in prison. He served part of that term at the Taft Correctional Institution in Taft, California. The pump-and-dump schemes behind his plea had cost investors approximately $200 million.

  On the 19th of May 2014, Belfort gave a motivational talk in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He told the audience, "I got greedy," and, "Greed is not good." He also claimed that ninety-five per cent of his business was legitimate and had nothing to do with liquidating stocks.

  Federal prosecutors and officials of the Securities and Exchange Commission who worked the case disagreed. Their verdict was blunt: "Stratton Oakmont was not a real Wall Street firm, either literally or figuratively."

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• 5. The Restitution Fight

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  The sum of $110.4 million was what a court ordered Belfort to pay back to the people he defrauded. His restitution agreement required him to put 50% of his income toward repaying 1,513 clients until 2009. About $10 million of the money recovered for victims came from the sale of forfeited properties.

  During his parole, Belfort paid $382,910 in 2007, $148,799 in 2008 and $170,000 in 2009. In October 2013, federal prosecutors filed a complaint against him. Several days later, the government withdrew its motion to find him in default. His lawyers had argued that the 50% obligation ended in 2009. A judge agreed that he did not have to keep paying half his income after his parole ended. The final deal required him to pay at least $10,000 per month for life. Belfort says he also puts speaking profits and media royalties toward the debt.

  Prosecutors once told The Wall Street Journal that Belfort had fled to Australia to avoid taxes and hide his assets from victims. They later recanted the statement, apologized to him and asked the newspaper to print a retraction.

  In June 2014, spokesmen for the U.S. attorney challenged another claim. Belfort had said on his website and elsewhere that he would ask for "100% of the royalties" from his books and the film to go to victims. The spokesmen called that claim "not factual." They said he had received money from the initial sale of the film rights that did not all go to restitution. BusinessWeek reported that he had paid only $21,000 toward restitution from roughly $1.2 million paid to him in connection with the film. Belfort says the government refused his offer to put 100% of his book deal money toward the debt.

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• 6. Memoir To Movie

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  Tommy Chong was Belfort's cellmate in prison, and he urged Belfort to write about his years as a stockbroker. The two stayed friends after their release. Belfort credits Chong with pointing him toward his new career as a speaker and writer. He had a false start during his sentence, when he wrote 130 pages and destroyed them.

  Belfort wrote his first book in the days after his release. Random House gave him a $500,000 advance, and a bidding war for the film rights began before publication. The Wolf of Wall Street appeared from Bantam in 2007. A second memoir, Catching the Wolf of Wall Street, followed in 2009. Together the two books have been published in approximately 40 countries and translated into 18 languages.

  The former federal prosecutor who led the criminal investigation said Belfort "invented much." He added that Belfort "aggrandized his importance and reverence for him by others at his firm." In his words, "The real Belfort story still includes thousands of victims who lost hundreds of millions of dollars that they never will be repaid."

  A book on sales technique, Way of the Wolf, arrived in 2017. It describes the method Belfort and his brokers used on Wall Street. In 2023 he released The Wolf of Investing, which he describes as his ultimate strategy for making money.

  Filming of Martin Scorsese's adaptation began in August 2012, and the movie opened on the 25th of December 2013. Terence Winter wrote the screenplay. Leonardo DiCaprio played Belfort, alongside Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie. DiCaprio won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Time magazine reported that many of the escapades matched Belfort's memoirs and what Forbes had written about him, though some of the Forbes-related material was embellished. Belfort himself appears in the closing scene, as an Auckland host for his own sales company.

  A television program, American Greed, also covered him in an episode of its ninth season called "The Real Wolf of Wall Street."

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• 7. The Speaking Circuit

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  Fees of about $30,000 to $75,000 per engagement made speaking a lucrative second career for Belfort. A sales seminar can cost $80,000 or more. His engagements run through a company called Global Motivation Inc. At one point he was spending three weeks of every month on the road.

  His early talks focused on motivation and ethics. Later he shifted toward sales skills and entrepreneurship. He teaches what he calls the Straight Line System, a method of sales advice, and he runs seminars under the name "Jordan Belfort's Straight Line Sales Psychology." A tour of live seminars in Australia was titled "The Truth Behind His Success." The main theme of his speeches is business ethics. He says he learned from his 1990s mistakes, such as believing he could skirt financial regulators' rules because many others did. In an interview on 60 Minutes, he said his "greatest regret is losing people's money." Some reviewers reacted negatively to the speeches, especially his retelling of stories from the 1990s.

  In Australia, an investigation by 7News and The Sunday Mail found links between Belfort and a company called Career Pathways Australia, run by Paul Conquest. Conquest also holds a majority stake in Face to Face Training. Both brands were heavily promoted at Belfort workshops at Brisbane's Eatons Hill Hotel. Belfort reportedly gave two sales workshops for the staff of Face to Face Training.

  Face to Face Training received $3.9 million from the state government in the 2014 fiscal year and $6.34 million in 2015 for training and assessment services. Most of that money was expected to go toward service training and certification, which did not happen. In a 60 Minutes segment, 9 News Australia called the training program a scam and described the certification as "tick and flick."

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• 8. Private Life And Politics

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  Belfort married his first wife, Denise Lombardo, in 1985. They divorced while he was running Stratton Oakmont. He later met Nadine Caridi at a party. She was a British-born model raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and the couple had two children. They separated after she made claims of domestic violence, during a period marked by his drug addiction and infidelity, and they divorced in 2005. Belfort is also an avid tennis player.

  In June 1996, a luxury yacht named Nadine sank off the east coast of Sardinia. Coco Chanel had originally had the boat built in 1961, and Belfort was its final owner. He renamed it after Caridi. Frogmen from the Italian Navy special forces unit COMSUBIN rescued everyone aboard. Belfort says he insisted on sailing in high winds against his captain's advice. Waves then smashed the foredeck hatch.

  In 2021, a hacker stole $300,000 in digital tokens from Belfort's cryptocurrency wallet. He had once been a skeptic, calling bitcoin "frickin' insanity" and "mass delusion." As he learned more and prices skyrocketed, he changed his mind. He has turned down offers to make Wolf-themed non-fungible tokens, though he says he "could easily make $10 million." He says he is "massively looking forward to regulation" of cryptocurrency. He invests in several cryptocurrency start-ups.

  In the 1990s, Belfort gave $100,000 to the Republican Party and $2,000 to Al D'Amato's reelection campaign in the 1992 United States Senate election in New York. He calls himself "a liberal at heart," yet before the 2016 presidential election he says he "became very pro-Trump." He voted for Donald Trump because he agreed with him on the size of government and on immigration policy. He has also acknowledged that Trump's rhetoric is divisive. During the 2020 Democratic primaries, he criticized Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Their proposals, he said, would "literally destroy the fabric of the country."

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