Who Is The Wolf Of Wall Street? The Jordan Belfort Story

The NYSE investigated and took action against Belfort and some of his colleagues for insider trading. Investors lost a lot of money due to this fraud, and the authorities caught on swiftly. Contrary to popular belief, I found out that Belfort’s home in The Wolf of Wall Street film wasn’t the actual mansion he owned.

His extravagant lifestyle, fueled by his ill-gotten wealth, became legendary. However, these activities ultimately caught up with him, and in 1999, he pleaded guilty to securities fraud and money laundering. He served 22 months of a four-year prison sentence, during which time he began writing his memoirs. These memoirs became the basis for the best-selling book, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” later adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort. The firm was targeted by law enforcement officials throughout nearly its entire history, and its notoriety inspired the film Boiler Room (2000),[22] as well as the biopic The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).

Jordan Belfort Early Business Success

He blames his actions on a combination of bad luck and a desire for instant gratification. In another interview with the Daily Mail, he explained, “I’m a wolf who became a more benevolent character.”[25] He has recently developed the “Straight Line Persuasion System” that teaches people the art of persuasion. He claims that the system is so powerful that it can be used to manipulate people, as he did prior to his arrest. On the sales website for the program he says that he used the same tactics for the wrong reasons, and claims to have straightened up his act. Jordan Belfort was initially paid $940K for the film rights of The Wolf of Wall Street.

• Additionally, Belfort and his traders engaged in trading on insider information.
• In the summer months between high school and college, Belfort and his partner earned a whopping $20,000.
• His speaking ranges from questions of ethics and motivation in the financial world to practical demonstrations of sales skills.
• 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.
• Eventually, Belfort pleaded guilty, and after the case had taken years to come to trial, in 2004, he was convicted.

9 News Australia called the training program a scam and the certification program a “Tick Flick”[49] in its 60 Minutes segment. This comes after he was told to pay back after he was convicted of defrauding investors. Jordan Belfort is an author and public speaker who became known as The Wolf of Wall Street during his life as a stockbroker. JORDAN Belfort is known for being the former stockbroker had his bizarre and wild life turned into the smash hit film The Wolf Of Wall Street.

Life After Prison

The movie by Martin Scorsese is historically accurate and is based off Jordan Belfort’s memoir, The Wolf of Wall Street. Belfort continues to write and lecture about his life on Wall Street and serves as a cautionary tale for investors. A documentary by Hollywood producer, Stephen Wexler, titled Inside the World of Insider Trading, is released. Belfort is introduced to the “dark side” of Wall Street and becomes a master of insider trading. The higher authorities tasked FBI agents with investigating the case and apprehending all those guilty of insider trading.

While Belfort was not indicted until 1998, by 1994 Stratton Oakmont made headlines with a fraud settlement of 2.5 Million dollars[22]. While this case was settled, recently elected Alabama Securities Commissioner, Joseph Borg, had begun leading a multi-state task force with the sole objective of prosecuting Belfort and Stratton Oakmont. The unsustainable nature of this business shows that greed alone did not drive the unethical behavior. The Wolf of Wall Street made Jordan Belfort a celebrity in both a positive and negative light. On Facebook he has almost 100,000 doting fans who absorb posts of his lavish lifestyle, videos of his motivational speeches, and advertisements for the Wolf of Wall Street books and movie. The SEC investigated Jordan Belfort and his firm, Stratton Oakmont, for illegally selling unregistered securities.

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. Jordan Belfort was born in 1962 in the Bronx, New York City, to Jewish parents, who were both accountants.

Initially, Belfort set out to use legitimate means to grow the firm, through recruiting, cold-calling, and project perfecting the ‘hard sell’ technique to sell stocks to clients. With success came opulence for Belfort and those surrounding him, with annual salaries of his traders reaching six-figure figures and extravagant bonuses becoming commonplace. Putting an exact figure on Jordan Belfort’s current net worth isn’t easy as he has restitution to pay due to his fraudulent activities towards investors. A certain percentage of his income was to be set aside for restitution, and Belfort has said that he puts the profits from his public speaking and media royalties towards this fund too. I’m going to explore the ultimate failure of Stratton Oakmont later on (and I will also touch on some other business failures he had), but since being released from prison in 2000, Belfort has reinvented himself. He now works as a highly sought-after motivational speaker and has also published three books.

Who Is Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wall Street?

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. 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.

He was eventually arrested and convicted of money laundering, securities fraud, conspiracy, and other related charges. After his business practices at Stratton Oakmont, Jordan Belfort became the target of several criminal investigations. Multiple agencies targeted him, Belfort pleaded guilty to 10 counts of securities fraud and money laundering. The court sentenced him to four years in prison and an additional three years of supervised release. During his supervised release, Belfort agreed to cooperate with the government and pay restitution to his victims.

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 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.

• I have compiled together a few quotes that I think encapsulates how Jordan Belfort approached his life as a stockbroker.
• “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the book that inspired the Jordan Belfort movie, was on bookshelves within a year of his release.
• Notably, the Stratton IPO stock was not actually sold to the public but to Stratton.
• In addition, as the pump and dump becomes more successful, the scrutiny of the law increases.
• Belfort now lives in Los Angeles, California where he works as a motivational speaker and owns his own sales training company focusing on teaching people business strategies- legally.

Then, Belfort would give the order to dump the stock to his team of investors, earning him millions. A boiler room is an operation in which brokers apply high-pressure sales tactics to persuade customers to purchase securities. Notable boiler room tactics include making extravagant unverifiable claims on the stock, demanding immediate payment, or threatening non-compliance. Jordan Belfort has remarkably transitioned into a prominent motivational speaker and author. Following his release from prison, he has spent years sharing his experiences, focusing on ethics and personal transformation.

Sales Master

He cooperated with the authorities, and against his former colleagues, to have a reduced sentence of 22 months. Plus, he had to pay back $110 million, which might seem like a lot, but he faced up to 30 years in prison. Porush commonly smuggled drugs in his rectum when the team went on international trips, and legend goes that he even swallowed his employee’s pet goldfish as a punishment for being unproductive. He pumped up the value to about $20 a share through his boiler room operation, just after the opening. The value came from his minions spreading rumors and positive statements, only so he could dump the stocks fast. He worked in post-production for over a decade on projects for Showtime, TLC, Netflix, ESPN, Vice, The New York Times, and PBS, among others.

Porush did a lousy job, and the firm went bust when, in 1996, the NASD expelled Porush and the firm, rendering it unable to operate. In fact, after many attempts, the SEC finally managed to corner Belfort and charge him with illegal practices. He reached a settlement in which he had to sell all his shares of Stratton and Oakmont.

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. 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. His speaking engagements are run through his business Global Motivation Inc. and, as of 2014[update], Belfort was spending three weeks out of each month on the road for speaking engagements. Stratton Oakmont, Inc. was a Long Island, New York, “over-the-counter” brokerage house founded in 1989 by Jordan Belfort and Danny Porush.

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. 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 jordan belfort company 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. Belfort pleaded guilty to fraud for the pump-and-dump schemes which may have cost his investors as much as $200 million.

Jordan Belfort Bio Facts

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. 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. 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.

And most of them were under-educated, young men and women desperate for money. Jordan Belfort was born in Queens, New York, and he got into selling stuff from a young age. In his book, he tells how he and one of his childhood friends sold Italian Ice from Styrofoam coolers, managing to rake up to $20 000.

The firm’s motto was, “Don’t hang up until the client buys or dies.” These young “Strattonites” began making money and soon created a “cult-like” partying corporate culture filled with drugs, prostitutes, and gambling, which Belfort was a huge part of. As of 2023, he has an estimated net worth of $100 million, amassed primarily from his two books and podcast. 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).