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 yachting disaster is one of the most dramatic scenes in Martin Scorsese’s blockbuster The Wolf of Wall Street , and like many of the tales in the Leonardo DiCaprio flick, it’s based on a true story. In real life, predatory tycoon Jordan Belfort bought a yacht in 1993 called Big Eagle and renamed her Nadine , after his English-born second wife. The vessel had been built in 1961 by Witsen & Vis in Holland for fashion icon Coco Chanel, but had undergone many transformations by the time Belfort got his mitts on it. Originally 121 feet long, in the 1970s she was extended by nearly 15 feet, and in 1988 she was cut in half and had another 29-foot section grafted on, finally totaling 167 feet.
The luxury yacht used in Scorsese’s film actually bears little resemblance to the Nadine , being a far more modern vessel. The director hired the 148-foot Lady M , built by Intermarine Savannah in 2002 and refit in 2011, for filming. It features luxury accommodations for 10 guests, and a marble and granite interior with gold accents.
In Coco Chanel’s day the yacht was mainly used to cruise from Monaco to Deauville for the summer horse racing season. The real Nadine sank in 1997 during a storm off the east coast of Sardinia while crossing from Porto Cervo to Capri, much as the movie depicts. Belfort has said that his insistence on sailing in a storm caused the yacht to capsize. Luckily, everyone on board at the time was rescued by the Italian coast guard.
Jared Paul Stern, JustLuxe's Editor-at-Large, is the Executive Editor of Maxim magazine and has written for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the New York Times' T magazine, GQ, WWD, Vogue, New York magazine, Details, Hamptons magazine, Playboy, BlackBook, the New York Post, Man of the World, and Bergdorf Goodman magazine among others. The founding editor of the Page Six magazine, he has al... (Read More)
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Note: This transcript is automatically generated. There will be mistakes, so please don’t use them for quotes. It is provided for reference use to find things better in the audio.
The Wolf of Wall Street tells the story of Wall Street broker Jordan Belfort, who is played by Leonardo DiCaprio. We’re introduced to Leonardo DiCaprio’s version of Jordan as he explains a bit about his life:
His wife, Naomi, played by Margot Robbie. His 170-foot yacht. The fact that he has sex with hookers five or six times a week and does a ton of drugs.
After this rather stunning introduction that sets the pace of the film, we go back to learn about how Jordan broke into, well, the broker business. According to the movie, Jordan didn’t grow up with wealth, but at the age of 22, Jordan got a job at the investment firm L.F. Rothschild on Wall Street. That’s where he got hooked on money.
This background is mostly true, with the exception of his age.
Jordan was born in 1962 in New York City and, just like the movie says, both of his parents were accountants. After dropping out of dentistry school when the dean of the University of Maryland School of Dentistry told him dentistry is the wrong place to make a lot of money, Jordan moved to Long Island where he started selling meat and seafood. For a short while things were going well, but the business ended up forcing Jordan to file for bankruptcy at the age of 25.
So it was at the age of 25 that a family friend helped him get back on his feet by finding a job for him as a trainee stockbroker at L.F. Rothschild.
In the movie, it’s while at L.F. Rothschild that Jordan’s boss, Mark Hanna as played by Matthew McConaughey, that Jordan learns the real secret to Wall Street: Cocaine and hookers. Well, that and the stockbroker’s ability to convince their clients to re-invest any earnings they have into a new stock, along with a bit more. Each time, the client is getting rich on paper while the stockbroker makes bank on the commissions.
According to the real Jordan Belfort’s memoirs, this actually happened. Mark Hanna gave him advice early on about how to make money on Wall Street—and the drugs and hookers.
For a while this works. Then, just like in the movie, Black Monday hits. The movie glosses over this, but Black Monday was on October 19th, 1987. Stock markets around the world crashed. In the United States, the Dow Jones fell 508 points. Millions of dollars were lost overnight.
And again, according to the real Jordan, this was the catalyst for his getting canned at L.F. Rothschild. It wasn’t anything personal, a lot of people lost their jobs as a result of the market crash.
On the hunt for a job again, the next part of the movie is also correct. Jordan returned to Long Island where he started working for a company called Investor Center. What the movie doesn’t mention, though, is this little company was owned by a larger company called Stratton Securities. So while the movie does mention Jordan going off on his own to form Stratton Oakmont, it wasn’t quite the startup like the movie implies. Instead, after a year of working at Investor Center, Jordan earned enough to buy out Stratton Securities and that’s how Stratton Oakmont was formed.
Just like in the movie, Jordan hired a bunch of his friends to be his first stockbrokers. Although the whole “sell me this pen” stereotypical salesman technique wasn’t something Jordan did—that was added for the movie.
In the movie, one of those friends is Donnie Azoff, played by Jonah Hill. The two meet in a diner after Donnie noticed Jordan’s nice car and asks him how much money he makes. Donnie was so impressed by Jordan’s making $72,000 in the last month that he immediately quit his job and went to go to work for Jordan.
That didn’t happen. In fact, Donnie Azoff isn’t a real person. Donnie is a composite character, but the majority of his character in the film was based on Danny Porush. In real life Danny met Jordan through his wife.
Oh, but Danny’s wife was his cousin—just like Donnie’s wife in the movie.
Stratton Oakmont grew fast, just like the movie indicated. In the movie, there’s a moment where Forbes does a profile on Stratton Oakmont. Leo’s version of Jordan is upset that Forbes calls him “a twisted Robin Hood” and they come up with the nickname, “the wolf of Wall Street.”
Forbes did do a profile on Jordan. The Forbes article came out on October 14th, 1991. And Forbes staff writer Roula Khalaf did call him “twisted Robin Hood who takes from the rich and gives to himself and his merry band of brokers.” But the article didn’t come up with the wolf of Wall Street moniker. According to the Forbes article, Stratton, pushed dicey stocks on gullible investors.
Back in the movie, it’s about this point that Leo’s version of Jordan meets Naomi, played by Margot Robbie. And it’s about this point that Leo starts thinking of divorcing his then-wife, Teresa. In the movie Teresa is played by Cristin Milioti.
That’s true, although the names were different in the movie than real life. Jordan’s first wife was named Denise Lombardo, and Jordan was married to her from 1985 to 1991. Jordan divorced Denise after he met Nadine Caridi at a Stratton Oakmont party and that same year Jordan and Nadine were married.
In the movie, Jordan’s wedding present for Naomi is a 170-foot yacht named the Naomi after her. This is true, although since Jordan’s second wife was named Nadine the boat was also called The Nadine . But their marriage was far from a happy one. After the honeymoon phase, the movie shows Jordan’s typical morning ritual:
Fight with Naomi about whatever he did the night before. Go in the steam room to get the drugs out from the day before. Finally, assess the damage and seek to make up with Naomi.
These specifics were taken straight from the real Jordan’s book. The scene where Naomi spreads her legs open and tells Jordan he won’t be getting sex for a long time, only to find out she’s in full view of the security tape. So, according to Jordan at least, that’s true.
Back at the office in the movie, one of the craziest scenes for Donnie is when he eats the pet fish from the Silicon Valley guy. Thomas Middleditch. He plays Hooli’s founder Richard Hendricks in Silicon Valley. Okay, so The Wolf of Wall Street was released the year before Silicon Valley came out and in the movie Thomas obviously isn’t playing Richard Hendricks. In the movie he’s actually credited as “Stratton Broker in a Bowtie.” But he’ll always be the Silicon Valley guy to me.
Anyway, Jonah Hill’s version of Donnie swallows the Silicon Valley guy’s pet fish and then fires him. Amazingly, this is true. Well, at least Danny Porush claims it’s true. We don’t really have any other proof of this other than Danny’s word, so I guess we’ll have to take him for it. And considering how much drugs and alcohol was common in the Stratton Oakmont offices, it’s not surprising that some crazy things happened.
This fish-eating moment happened on, according to Leo’s version of Jordan, the biggest day in Stratton’s history. They’re launching Steve Madden’s IPO. In the movie Steve Madden is played by Jake Hoffman.
Just like in the movie, the real Stratton Oakmont was the firm who launched Steve Madden, Inc.’s initial public offering for his women’s shoe company. And just like in the movie, Steve was a childhood friend of Danny Porush, the guy who Jonah Hill’s character was primarily based on. The movie doesn’t really mention this, but the real Steve Madden was tangled up in Stratton Oakmont’s scheme. In 2002, he was convicted of stock manipulation, money and securities fraud. Before he went to prison, though, Steve resigned as CEO of Steve Madden, Ltd., and then accepted a position at Steve Madden, Ltd., as a creative consultant for a handsome salary of $700,000 a year. He was sentenced to 31 months, and still drew that salary while he was in prison.
But that’s after the events in the movie.
Back in the movie’s timeline, after the IPO of Steve Madden’s company, the FBI is starting to put things together. Agent Denham, played by Kyle Chandler, starts to catch on to the illegal behavior going on at Stratton Oakmont. He even meets with Leo’s version of Jordan on his yacht, the Naomi .
That didn’t happen, and as you can probably guess Agent Patrick Denham is another fake name. In truth the agent at the FBI who was tracking Jordan Belfort was FBI Special Agent Gregory Coleman.
Knowing the FBI is investigating him, in the movie Jordan decides to start hiding his money. He’s going to do this by moving it to a Swiss bank account. To get the cash to Switzerland, he needs someone with a European passport. And he finds someone in Naomi’s Aunt Emma, who is played by Joanna Lumley. But there’s way too much cash for one person to take. So they go with Jordan’s drug dealer’s wife, Chantalle, a stripper born in Switzerland.
The drug dealer’s name is Brad, and he’s played by Jon Bernthal and Chantalle is played by Katarina Cas.
The names are changed, for example Brad is based on the real Todd Garret, a drug dealer who provided Jordan with Quaaludes. But the basic gist of this is pretty accurate. Aunt Emma was actually named Patricia, but this is how the real Jordan moved his money to Switzerland. And while the details of the argument in the exchange are fictionalized, just like in the movie, Jordan’s drug-dealer friend, Brad in the movie, botched a money hand-off with Danny Porush.
The FBI was getting closer.
As a quick side note, the private investigator in the movie, Bo Dietl, is actually playing himself. That’s the real P.I. that the real Jordan Belfort hired to try to find out what the FBI was investigating.
In the movie, Bo warns Jordan that his home is tapped and after taking an obscene amount of Lemmon 714 pills, he drives his Lamborghini Countach from a country club to his home. Then Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill proceed to have the slowest fight in movie history. It’s pretty funny to see.
And again, the details weren’t quite that way but the basic gist of this was true. For example, according to the real Jordan Belfort it wasn’t a Lamborghini but a Mercedes that he drove while high on expired Quaaludes.
Oh, and if you’re like me and you’re not familiar with what Quaaludes are, that’s a brand name of the methaqualone drug. It’s a sedative drug that’s used to treat anxiety. It’s also incredibly addictive. While not related to this at all, in 2015 comedian Bill Cosby admitted to drugging women he wanted to have sex with using Quaaludes.
Leo’s version of Jordan in the movie is shocked when he sees the banged up Lamborghini. He’s amazed he didn’t get hurt. He’s amazed he didn’t hurt anyone else.
That’s not true. He did hurt someone else. While the real Jordan couldn’t recall this happening because he was so high, while he was driving his Mercedes he caused a head-on collision that sent the driver of the other car to the hospital. Fortunately, she ended up being okay.
In the movie, while Leo’s version of Jordan has taken the yacht to Italy they find out Aunt Emma has passed away. Naomi is grief-stricken, and you can tell Jordan is also sad—but for a different reason. What about the $20 million Aunt Emma has in her Swiss bank accounts for him?
This actually happened. Patricia passed away while Jordan’s money was still in her name in Swiss banks. And just like in the movie, the real Jordan convinced the boat’s captain to go through a storm in the Mediterranean Sea. And again, just like in the movie, the storm won. The Nadine sank off the coast of Italy and the passengers and crew had to be rescued by an Italian Navy helicopter.
According to the real Jordan Belfort, there was one thing the movie got wrong here, though. The helicopter on the yacht didn’t fall off on its own. They had to push it off to make room for the Italian Navy chopper to lower a commando to come rescue them.
Why was it an Italian Navy commando rescuing them? Jordan didn’t ever say.
In the movie, things started to fall apart for Jordan when he gets arrested while filming an infomercial. That didn’t really happen. Well, not during the filming of an infomercial. But Jordan did get arrested. It was FBI Special Agent Gregory Coleman who had been tracking Jordan for over six years before he finally made his move. While the movie made it seem like Jordan had met FBI Agent Denham, in truth Jordan didn’t meet the FBI agent after him until Agent Coleman showed up at Jordan’s home to arrest him.
Faced with decades in prison, Jordan is offered the chance to cooperate in the movie. And in real life, he agreed to cooperate.
In the movie, when Jordan tells Naomi he’s agreed to cooperate with the FBI in exchange for a reduced sentence, she says, “I’m happy for you.” They have sex and then she tells Jordan that’s the last time—she wants a divorce. Enraged, Jordan punches Naomi in the gut and runs to grab his daughter, Skylar, and rushes out to the car. With Naomi yelling at him, Jordan backs the car through the garage door and wrecks it.
This happened. Jordan, while high, crashed his car into a six-foot pillar at the edge of his driveway. He never admitting to gut-punching Nadine, though. But he did admit to kicking her down the stairs while he was holding their daughter. Oh, and Nadine and Jordan didn’t have just the one child. They had two children together and the couple divorced in 2005. That’s years after Jordan was indicted in 1998.
Back at the office, there’s a moment where Leo’s Jordan is wearing a wire and he walks into the office with Donnie.
While they’re chatting, Jordan passes Donnie a note that says, “Don’t incriminate yourself. I’m wearing a wire.”
In truth, Jordan passed that note for another of his friends, Dave Beall, not the character Jonah Hill’s version of Donnie was based on—Danny Porush. According to the movie, thanks to his cooperation in helping bring down some of his friends, Jordan was sentenced to 36 months, or three years, in prison and fined $110 million.
That’s true, although the movie doesn’t mention how much of that he actually served. In truth, Jordan Belfort served 22 months. As for the $110 million, that was supposed to go to the victims of his scams. And just like Jordan didn’t serve the full 36 months, he also apparently hasn’t paid the money he owes. According to a report by Brooklyn federal prosecutors that was released just before the 2013 movie hit theaters, Jordan had only paid about $11.6 million of the $110 million he was ordered to pay to the 1,513 victims identified in his 2003 court case. And $10.4 million of that was money from court-ordered property forfeiture.
Oh, and the same report indicated Jordan had made over $700,000 from the book deal for The Wolf of Wall Street , the book that the movie was based on. He wrote the book while he was in prison and after his cellmate, the comedian Tommy Chong, encouraged him to write about his crazy stories. Then he made another $125,000 from the movie producers for rights to turn the book into a movie.
But according to Jordan’s lawyers, he’s “made repeated efforts over the last two-plus years to pay 100% of the profits of the movie and the two books.” The last two years being the two years before the report came out in 2013.
So, I don’t know how Jordan’s been trying to pay but maybe the payment system for the government wasn’t working? This is a perfect example of a story where it’s one side saying one thing and another saying something else. The tricky part here is you have the government on one side and Jordan Belfort on the other. Neither one of them are known for being very honest.
In the meantime, while Jordan and the U.S. Government can’t agree on whatever it is they’re arguing over these days, the victims of Jordan’s scams aren’t seeing any of what they’ve lost while Jordan lives a life of comfort.
Jordan has replied to the accusation that he hasn’t paid his debts. In an article on the New York Daily News website, Jordan is quoted as saying, “When I saw the deadbeat accusation, I almost started crying. I can’t believe something like this is happening in America.”
Today, Jordan Belfort runs a motivational speaking company just like you see at the end of the movie. In fact, the guy who introduces Leo’s version of Jordan at the very end? That’s the real Jordan Belfort. Leonardo DiCaprio has a video testimonial in which he says, “Jordan stands as a shining example of the transformative qualities of ambition and hard work, and in that regard, he is a true motivator.”
In the end, The Wolf of Wall Street was incredibly accurate to Jordan’s book of the same name. A lot of what was said we can only rely on the word of those who were there, people like Jordan and Danny. And since those people made their millions by lying, it’s hard to know if they’re telling the truth. Or are they just stretching the truth to get a better story and, by extension, sell more books?
Perhaps our most convincing piece of evidence comes from an interview with FBI Special Agent Gregory Coleman who told The New York Times , “I tracked this guy for ten years, and everything he wrote is true.”
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Even before Hollywood came calling, the real-life Jordan Belfort was equating himself to movie villains. Once a stockbroker, then a convict, then a motivational speaker, Belfort wrote of his experiences in his bestselling 2007 memoir , "The Wolf of Wall Street." It contains the line, "I had lots of nicknames. Gordon Gekko, Don Corleone, Keyser Soze; they even called me the King. But my favorite was the Wolf of Wall Street."
Cross-reference those first three alleged nicknames with the films "Wall Street," "The Godfather," and "The Usual Suspects." It soon becomes clear that Belfort, the born salesman, was all too ready to peddle himself as someone who belonged in the pantheon of great movie villains. Luckily for him (less so for the unseen victims of his financial crimes), director Martin Scorsese was happy to oblige him with a star-studded movie adaptation.
Belfort's memoir is filled with many wild stories, but some have questioned the veracity of its self-serving claims. By the time Scorsese came along and turned it into an Oscar-nominated 2013 film , audiences would be one more layer removed from the truth of what happened. The book cover reads, "I partied like a rock star, lived like a king," and inside its pages, Belfort, the "former member of the middle class," speaks in passing of "chaos capitalism."
"The Wolf of Wall Street," the movie, makes good on that dubious vision with a three-hour ode to excess, wealth, and skullduggery that's all the more unbelievable because some of it really occurred.
Martin Scorsese, working for the fifth time with Leonardo DiCaprio as his leading man, broke his own Guinness World Record for cinematic use of the f-word with "The Wolf of Wall Street." His film "Casino" had previously set the record in 1995, but "The Wolf of Wall Street" eclipsed its 422 f-bombs with a whopping 506 of them.
That's just one interesting bit of trivia related to the movie. When you sift through all the swearing to get at the facts, though, just how much of "The Wolf of Wall Street" was true, and how much of it was embellishment — or straight fibs of the kind Keyser Soze might tell?
Jordan Belfort is not what you'd call a credible witness; in fact, the whole movie is arguably told from the perspective of a master of deceit, who scammed investors out of millions. Scorsese leveraged all his cinematic powers in service of what DiCaprio called "a modern-day Caligula" story, but he was also adapting a criminal's autobiography. That's a little different than what he did with "Goodfellas" and the aforementioned "Casino," both adapted from a nonfiction book where the gangster's tale came filtered through author Nicholas Pileggi.
"The Irishman," too, was based on a Charles Brandt book about the life of mob enforcer Frank Sheeran, whose confession was later discredited . In "The Wolf of Wall Street," the bad guy tells his own story, sometimes giving the camera a suitably wolfish grin as he does so.
Terence Winter handled the screenwriting chores for "The Wolf of Wall Street," and he and Martin Scorsese framed an entire HBO series, "Boardwalk Empire," around another gangster named Nucky Thompson. Actor Bobby Cannavale – who won an Emmy Award for "Boardwalk Empire" the same year "The Wolf of Wall Street" hit theaters — narrated the original, abridged audiobook version of Jordan Belfort's memoir.
In the book, Jonah Hill's character, Donnie Azoff, is referred to by the name Danny Porush. Donnie was loosely based on the real Danny, who was Belfort's business partner and the co-founder of Stratton Oakmont, the Long Island brokerage house that becomes a circus of sex, drugs, dwarf-tossing, and pump-and-dump fraud in "The Wolf of Wall Street."
Though Porush has called Belfort's book "a distant relative of the truth," he himself married a not-so-distant relative: his own first cousin. In the movie, Belfort broaches the subject of these "rumors" over beers at a bar, eliciting Donnie's bug-eyed, toothy admission, "Yeah, my wife is my cousin or whatever." That part of Porush's personal background is true, according to Time , though he and his cousin are now divorced.
Unlike Belfort, Porush was not involved in the making of "The Wolf of Wall Street." Changing his character's name helped remove any liability the filmmakers might face for damaging his reputation. Porush reportedly threatened to sue them beforehand, so the name change was a practical decision meant to cover their bases.
On the testosterone-filled office floor in "The Wolf of Wall Street," Jordan Belfort psyches up his stockbrokers with the words, "This right here is the land of opportunity. Stratton Oakmont is America!" It's true he used to give speeches to his employees with a microphone, which prepared him for his later life of motivational speaking. Substitute "country" for "company" in his movie speeches, and it lays bare the cultural subtext of "The Wolf of Wall Street."
In Belfort's America, money can buy anything and everyone. Sex workers were indeed charged to the company credit card, his book indicates, and Danny Porush says it's true they paid an employee $10,000 to shave her head. The movie makes a spectacle out of her doing it to get breast implants, with Belfort shouting, "This is the greatest country company in the world!"
It's not long before a half-dressed band comes marching in, followed by champagne waiters and strippers. Martin Scorsese dials everything up to 11, combining Belfort's book description of multiple parties into one hedonistic scene.
In an interview with Mother Jones (by way of History vs. Hollywood ), Porush disputed that the office ever brought in a chimpanzee on roller skates or did any dwarf-tossing at its parties. Little people are said to have attended one party, but Belfort's memoir only depicts the meeting where he and his associates discuss the hypothetical specifics of tossing them. Porush admitted, however, that the part where he/Donnie swallows a broker's pet goldfish was true.
In "The Wolf of Wall Street," there's a scene where a journalist for Forbes magazine visits the offices of Stratton Oakmont. She's doing a profile on Jordan Belfort, which winds up being "a total f***ing hatchet job" in his eyes. The article appears onscreen with Leonardo DiCaprio in his tan-faced movie poster pose below the headline "The Wolf of Wall Street." All the while, Belfort rails against the journalist labeling him that, as if she was the one who coined his nickname and the movie's title.
You can read the real 1991 article on the official Forbes site (and see a larger scanned image of it here ). The headline was actually "Steaks, Stocks — What's The Difference?" This is one of the more interesting "Wolf of Wall Street" artifacts out there, showing how the movie partially overlaps with reality. It's a "prop" anyone can access online, and it offers a real view of how someone other than Jordan Belfort viewed Jordan Belfort.
The true journalist was Roula Khalaf, not Aliyah Farran (the fictitious byline shown in the movie), though her article does contain the highlighted movie phrase "pushing dicey stocks." It also contains a line that DiCaprio performs almost verbatim about Belfort "sounding like a kind of twisted Robin Hood, who takes from the rich and gives to himself and his merry band of brokers." Yet if it wasn't Forbes that coined the "Wolf of Wall Street" nickname, that immediately opens up the question of who did.
According to CNN , Jordan Belfort himself came up with the "Wolf of Wall Street" name. Before Martin Scorsese's film premiered, Danny Porush disputed that anyone at Stratton Oakmont ever called Belfort that. In 2013, a prosecutor in the Belfort case, former assistant U.S. attorney Joel M. Cohen, likewise told The New York Times , "In all the years that we investigated him, the hundreds of hours I spent with him and his cohorts, I never heard anyone call him 'The Wolf of Wall Street.'"
Circling back to Belfort's sketchy book claim that "Gordon Gekko, Don Corleone, Keyser Soze" were among his many nicknames, he had already lumped himself together with several cinematic bad boys. By linking his name to famous movie villains, it's as if Belfort aimed to set himself up as a sort of prepackaged Hollywood deal. "I was the ultimate wolf in sheep's clothing," he writes.
There's a part in the book where Belfort's apoplectic father, played by Rob Reiner in the movie, rattles off a whole paragraph of dialogue, which begins with, "And you, the so-called Wolf of Wall Street — the demented young Wolf!" Unless he was running a tape recorder in his office back in the 1990s, it seems unlikely Belfort would have been able to perfectly recollect such dialogue. It would appear that, rather than being incensed at his lupine nickname, Belfort anointed himself the Wolf of Wall Street as a bit of self-promotion.
"The Wolf of Wall Street" begins with Jordan Belfort already relishing a rich and famous lifestyle. It then flashes back to him at 22, getting off the bus on Wall Street, "the one place on earth that befit [his] high-minded ambitions."
The truth is, Wall Street came a little later for Belfort. In the movie, he mentions being "raised by two accountants." Yet there's no mention of him dropping out of dentistry school (per The Independent ) or selling meat and seafood door-to-door. The latter is what prompted the wordplay in the Forbes headline, "Steaks, Stocks — What's The Difference?" Belfort's beefy business soon went under, leaving him a failed businessman at 25. It was only then that he became a stockbroker-in-training at the firm L.F. Rothschild.
Matthew McConaughey's character, Mark Hanna, was a real senior broker at L.F. Rothschild who did advise masturbation and cocaine as keys to success, according to Belfort's memoir. In a video on his verified Twitter account, McConaughey said that the character's chest-thumping chant was born of a warm-up ritual that he himself did before every take, just to get in the zone as an actor.
Biography.com reveals that Belfort started selling stocks in 1987. That was the same year future president Donald Trump published his memoir, "The Art of the Deal," while Oliver Stone's aforementioned "Wall Street," with its famous movie quote, "Greed is good," hit theaters nationwide.
Actor Jake Hoffman, who also appears in "The Irishman" and is Dustin Hoffman's son, plays designer Steve Madden in "The Wolf of Wall Street." Madden and Danny Porush were childhood friends, just as the movie depicts. The company Madden founded (and continues to design for) is still a leading name in women's shoes. In the 2021 fiscal year, its revenue jumped up to $1.9 billion.
The real-life Madden thought Hoffman's portrayal of him was "too nerdy." Though the movie implies he stabbed Jordan Belfort in the back by unloading shares after Stratton Oakmont took his company public, Madden told Page Six , "He ratted me out to save himself."
Madden wouldn't cooperate with the FBI as Belfort did, and wound up serving a longer 41-month sentence in prison (compared to Belfort's 22-month stretch). However, his life rebounded, and he's called "The Wolf of Wall Street" "a great movie." In his autobiography, "The Cobbler," Madden wrote , "The movie also raised our brand awareness with young men and increased our name recognition."
When Jordan Belfort is touting Steve Madden's once-in-a-decade genius in "The Wolf of Wall Street," he compares him to other well-known fashion designers. Coco Chanel's name is sandwiched between Gianni Versace and Yves St. Laurent without further comment, but Belfort had a greater real-life connection to Chanel, as he was the last person to own her yacht.
Between the publication and filming of "The Wolf of Wall Street," Chanel's image was tarnished by revelations that she was a Nazi agent . This may be why her previous ownership of the yacht was left out, despite being included in Belfort's memoir. As seen in the movie, he did sink the yacht in a storm, and he did sink his marriage by hitting his wife and driving his car through the garage door with his 3-year-old child in front.
The yacht was named the Nadine, not the Naomi, and the same goes for Belfort's wife. Margot Robbie landed the Naomi part by going off-script and slapping DiCaprio in her improvised audition . She regretted filming their love scene on a cash bed because of all the paper cuts it left her.
The real Nadine, who went on to become a Ph.D. and TikTok-powered therapist after their divorce, said it's not true Belfort bought her the yacht as a wedding present. His abuse of her and his rough helicopter landing on their front lawn was partially fueled by a real drug problem.
After Jordan Belfort is caught and becomes the Rat of Wall Street, the movie portrays him heroically tipping off Donnie Azoff about him wearing a wire via a napkin message. Belfort never tipped off Danny Porush, but in his sequel book, "Catching the Wolf of Wall Street," he related a similar incident involving another friend.
By likening Belfort to Caligula, Leonardo DiCaprio somewhat aligns "The Wolf of Wall Street" with the idea that America is the new Roman Empire. His decline and fall is its decline and fall. FBI agent Patrick Denham, seen on Belfort's yacht with the American flag almost flowing out of his head, can only try and plug the dam. Kyle Chandler's all-American image as Eric Taylor in "Friday Night Lights" thus underpins Denham's character, who was based on agent Gregory Lockwood.
Former Stratton Oakmont exec Andrew Greene, the inspiration for the toupee-wearing character "Wigwam" in the book and "Rugrat" (P.J. Byrne) in the movie, unsuccessfully sued the studios behind "The Wolf of Wall Street" for libel, losing in part because of the credits disclaimer:
"While this story is based on actual events, certain characters, characterizations, incidents, locations and dialogue were fictionalized or invented for purposes of dramatization. With respect to such fictionalization or invention, any similarity to the name or to the actual character or history of any person, living or dead, or any product or entity or actual incident, is entirely for dramatic purpose and not intended to reflect on an actual character, history, product or entity."
Tommy Chong has dozens of movie and TV credits to his name, some through his collaboration with Cheech Marin in the stoner comedy duo Cheech & Chong. He had a recurring role on "That '70s Show" and has also done activism for marijuana legalization.
As chance would have it, a nine-month sentence for selling bongs online landed Chong in the same federal prison as Jordan Belfort. The prison was so nice that it didn't even have cells, but the two men apparently shared a cubicle. New York Magazine reports that they were "cube mates" or "cubies."
In 2014, Yahoo News further reported that Chong — as Belfort's cube mate — was instrumental in convincing him to turn his life story into a memoir. At the time, Chong was writing his own book, and though Belfort would regale him with stories of his stockbroker misadventures, he had been wiling away his days in prison by playing tennis.
The movie shows Belfort on the tennis court at the end, where he brags about how being rich and living in a country "where everything was for sale" helped soften the blow when he eventually had to face the consequences of his actions.
In prison, Chong gave Belfort some writing advice after the fictionalized first draft of "The Wolf of Wall Street" read like a John Grisham knockoff. "I told him a few tricks of the trade, how to articulate the story," Chong said.
While Belfort was on parole, 50% of his income went toward restitution for his victims. That ended in 2009, but for the rest of his life, Jordan Belfort has to continue paying at least $10,000 a month into a $110 million restitution fund. In 2018, a judge made a ruling to garnish more of his funds since Belfort had only paid a "fraction" of what he owed. He, therefore, has a deep incentive to continue making money.
In the film, Belfort boasts of "selling garbage to garbage men." A pivotal moment comes when his first wife, Leah (Christine Ebersole), suggests that he rethink his penny stock scheme, marketing it to "rich people who can, like, afford to lose a lot of money."
From there, Belfort's off to the races, but among his real-world victims were retirees and small-business owners, not just fabulously wealthy individuals. Some people he duped lost their life savings or the money for their children's college tuition.
In 2022, The New York Times reported that Jordan Belfort was investing in NFT start-ups and other ventures, while offering his services as a consultant, sales coach, and cryptocurrency guru. For the price of one $40,000 Bitcoin, guests could attend a workshop at his luxurious Miami Beach home.
The image that emerges in the Times via words and photos is one of Belfort drinking a morning Red Bull and lounging on his couch, surrounded by blockchain disciples — all men — whose bible for the day would be Belfort's 2017 sales manual, "The Way of the Wolf." One of the guests confessed to having already stolen a copy of "The Wolf of Wall Street" from the library.
Despite his continuing prosperity, 2021 saw Belfort himself become the victim of a crypto hacker, who robbed him of $300,000 in Ohm tokens. In 2020, Belfort also made headlines for filing a $300 million lawsuit against Red Granite Pictures, one of the production companies behind the "Wolf of Wall Street" film. The suit alleged that Red Granite and its CEO had co-financed the movie with a Belfort-like bundle of dirty money , stolen from the Malaysian government.
Belfort seemed to acknowledge that his own ill-gotten gains were the result of misdirected energy, and he could have profited better off legitimate business pursuits. "I missed the internet boom," he lamented. "I would've made 100x more money."
At the beginning of the "Wolf of Wall Street" movie, there's a moment where Jordan Belfort is speeding down the freeway in his red Ferrari as Naomi performs fellatio on him. Through voiceover narration, he offers a quick correction: "My Ferrari was white, like Don Johnson's in 'Miami Vice,' not red." The car then spontaneously changes colors onscreen, as if to illustrate the mutability of memory and malleability of the truth.
Later, during the infamous Quaaludes scene, Belfort drives his white Lamborghini under the influence and believes he's "made it home alive, not a scratch on me or the car." Two cops subsequently drag him outside, where he sees that the car is, in fact, wrecked.
In his drug-fueled state, he had misremembered the details. The irony is, in real life (per Time ), it was a Mercedes that Belfort drove home that night, not a Lamborghini.
If cars are interchangeable in "The Wolf of Wall Street," it leaves the viewer to wonder what other facts might have been changed for artistic purposes. For some things, all we have to go on is a game of he-said, he-said between Belfort and Danny Porush.
These are the same two men whose film analogs, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, are shown smoking crack together. In 2014, Porush denied moments like that or Donnie's impromptu public masturbation ever happened, telling The Sun , "I never smoked crack and I never pulled out my penis at a party."
As a filmmaker, Martin Scorsese took creative license with Jordan Belfort's book, just as Belfort may have taken license with some of the facts of his own biography. In "The Wolf of Wall Street," Belfort self-mythologizes. It's even possible there are things he believes happened that didn't, like how we see the movie Lamborghini making it home undamaged.
As he cold-calls strangers, reads from his script on how to fleece them, and coaches Stratton Oakmont trainees on how to do the same, the film version of Belfort puts one of his victims on speakerphone. With the guys around him snickering like hyenas, Belfort pantomimes reeling in a fish before flicking off the voice on the other end of the line. He openly mocks and shows his contempt for this sucker, who we never see, because we're always in Belfort's perspective. The other person's not important to him.
By the end, Belfort has reinvented himself as a respectable citizen, someone people will pay to see and learn sales psychology from at business seminars. For the final image, Scorsese points the camera at Belfort's audience, which includes the people onscreen and the ones watching the movie.
The real Belfort cameos as the host who introduces DiCaprio onstage. The Wolf is in Auckland now, asking guys with Kiwi accents to sell him a pen, but it's the same self-reflexive pitch-me pitch that he gave his "hometown boys" earlier in the movie.
The question is, are you buying what he's selling?
How accurate the wolf of wall street is to the true story.
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What happened to the real jordan belfort after the wolf of wall street, joe pantoliano reveals that will smith is responsible for his bad boys: ride or die return.
Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street is based on the true story of the infamous rise and fall of American stockbroker and criminal Jordan Belfort. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Belfort in the movie, exploring his outrageous lifestyle, the various figures in his life, and the crimes that led to his downfall. The dramatized version of events depicted in the movie rings mostly true to the 2007 memoir of the same name. However, there are a lot of criticisms of how Belfort depicts himself and the truth, including from people featured in The Wolf of Wall Street.
The real Jordan Belfort of The Wolf of Wall Street story has been called a manipulative conman by many, so it's plausible that his memories and anecdotes of the events depicted in the movie and book are flawed and exaggerated to suit his allegedly inflated self-image. A number of real-life sources have spoken out about the inaccurate depiction of events in Belfort's story, hinting that Belfort's fraudulent sensibilities might have fooled Hollywood as they did on Wall Street.
From voiceover narration to dark humor, The Wolf of Wall Street exhibits many of the stylistic trademarks of its director Martin Scorsese.
Various successes and failures depicted in the movie came from belfort's own admission.
There are several key details in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street that have been confirmed to be true based on Belfort's representation of himself and his brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont in his memoir. According to the memoir, Belfort actually had his in-laws smuggle money into Switzerland banks, and Stratton Oakmont really helped make the luxury shoe line Steve Madden go public. The depiction of Matthew McConaughey's The Wolf of Wall Street character Mark Hanna is also based on Belfort's description, including Hanna's crude philosophy that the key to success was masturbation, cocaine, and sex workers.
Other details in the movie that were accurate to Belfort's memoir include: Donnie Azoff (inspired by the real-life Danny Porush, played by Jonah Hill in the movie) did marry his cousin before later divorcing her, Belfort sunk a yacht in Italy that was once owned by Coco Chanel, and he did crash his helicopter trying to land while he was high. Most notably, Belfort truly did serve a reduced prison sentence after informing on his friends . He did not try to save Porush (Azoff) from incriminating himself, as is displayed in the film. He informed on Porush in real life.
Scenes in Accurate To Jordan Belfort's Memoir |
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Belfort's in-laws really smuggled money into Switzerland banks |
Stratton Oakmont really made luxury shoe line Steve Madden go public |
The depiction of Matthew McConaughey's character, Mark Hanna |
Donnie Azoff really married his cousin (he later divorced her) |
Belfort really sunk a yacht in Italy that was once owned by Coco Chanel |
Belfort really crashed his helicopter while high |
Belfort really served a reduce prison sentence for informing on his friends |
The depiction of belfort's crimes has become a controversial topic for the movie.
The Wolf of Wall Street has been criticized for how much it downplays the victims of Belfort's crimes, and it largely focuses on him ripping off the wealthy. According to the New York Times , Belfort targeted people from all types of financial backgrounds to buy his worthless stocks.
One California man used his home equity line of credit to invest with Belfort and has been impacted financially ever since (via New York Times ). The depiction of Belfort in Scorsese's movie as being some type of voice of an underprivileged class who was righteous in turning the system on its head and against itself has been debated since the film's 2013 release.
The real-life Donnie and Naomi also dispute a lot of what happens in both Jordan's memoir and Scorsese's movie. Nadine Macaluso, who is represented by the character Naomi, played by Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street , claimed that the movie was mostly accurate through Jordan's perspective, but not through an objective lens or with consideration to Nadine's point of view concerning their marriage. Nadine went on to get a Ph.D. and became an expert in relational trauma ( via The Independent ).
Danny Porush told Bustle that most of the film is completely fictitious, claiming that nobody in real life ever called Belfort the "Wolf" nor was there any throwing of little persons or chimpanzees that took place in the office.
As crazy as it seems, The Wolf of Wall Street was based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, who went on to deal with the consequences of his actions.
Does the movie glorify jordan belfort.
The glorification of the debauchery surrounding Belfort's lifestyle and business practices is suitable to the mystique around whether or not the film depicts real events. This disparity in what is actually true in the movie and memoir versus what other real-life parties have to say about fabrications is part of its reckless and dysfunctional appeal.
Even Scorsese himself came under fire for celebrating the corrupt actions of the bonafide con artist in his film, which is meant to be seen as an overarching satire of capitalism rather than a stamp of approval for Belfort . Regardless of its degree of accuracy, The Wolf of Wall Street is a wildly entertaining exercise on limitless greed.
Belfort has become more famous thanks to scorsese's movie.
While Jordan Belfort and his past crimes helped him make a name for himself after his time in prison, Martin Scorsese’s movie has further raised the man's profile. In the years following the release of The Wolf of Wall Street , Belfort has become more well-known as a pop culture figure and he continues to parlay the success of the movie into his own personal success .
Jordan Belfort’s net worth in 2024 might be significantly less than what he was making at the peak of his criminal activity, but he is still amassing a fortune thanks largely to his career attending speaking engagements. Much like with the movie itself, it has been debated whether Belfort’s speeches were taking responsibility for his crimes or celebrating the debaucherous lifestyle he participated in. Since the release of the movie, Belfort has released two books, 2017’s Way of the Wolf: Straight Line Selling: Master the Art of Persuasion, Influence, and Success and 2023’s The Wolf of Investing.
In 2020, Belfort sued producers of The Wolf of Wall Street for fraud, asking for $300 million in compensation. Belfort maintained that the producers of the company Red Granite were involved in a multi-million-dollar embezzlement scheme and used stolen money to buy the movie rights to his story. As of the filing of the lawsuit in 2020, there has been no news on the case.
Source: The New York Times , Time , The Independent , Bustle
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Directed by Martin Scorcese, The Wolf of Wall Street tells the true story of stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), based on his memoir of the same name. It chronicles the rise of Belfort and the subsequent corruption of his firm as he engages in a wide assortment of criminal acts while amassing a staggering fortune. Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, and Kyle Chandler also star alongside DiCaprio.
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.)
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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Nadine macaluso, 54, was married to belfort from 1991 to 2005.
Jordan Belfort's ex-wife has confirmed a memorable scene from The Wolf of Wall Street, which really happened , and has sadly called it the 'most traumatic day of her life'.
Nadine Macaluso, 54, was married to Belfort from 1991 to 2005.
In her new book - A Therapist's Guide For Healing from Traumatic Love - she has opened up on the experience.
Dr. Nae, who was in her early twenties at the time, wrote: "Jordan was a severe drug addict.
"In addition to the seventy quaaludes a week he ingested, he had an arsenal of eighteen prescription pill bottles, from morphine to Lamietal, that filled up my whole shoe bag when we traveled. (I now know that Lamietal, even 25 years ago, was a seizure medicine that treats bi polar disorder.)
"He never told me that: he lied. Yet ironically, he didn't know all I wanted was transparency.
"If he had been honest and vulnerable with me, I might be telling a different story."
She claims: "The most traumatic day of my life was made into one of the most iconic and infamous scenes in the movie . The Wolf of Wall Street . High on coke.
"Jordan kicks me down the stairs with our four-year-old daughter Chandler in his arms, tries to take her from our home, puts her into his Mercedes and drives me, him and her into a wall.
"That day sea haunts me, and I cry and I cry as I write this now twenty-two years later.
"Marissa, the housekeeper who saved my daughter's life, is deceased and she needs to be remembered.
"I could no longer ignore that no matter how hard I'd tried to be the perfect wife and mother, to hold everything together, it was all falling apart.
"Three days after that Jordan went off to rehab, as I told him he could not come home unless he was sober.
"Rehab was Jordan's time to learn about himself, his choices, and his attachment patterns, except the time away did more wonders for me than it did for him.
"All that quiet. All the space. I was beginning to differentiate myself from him and from the world I had occupied for eight years. But I still wasn't ready to leave him. I lived day by day.
"When he returned. I certainly was happy that he was sober and I stayed with him to honour my end of the bargain, the whole reason he agreed to get sober was to come home to Channy, Carter and me.
"Choosing to stay was yet another way I abandoned myself. I took on that familiar saintly demeanour, yet I had PTED, post-traumatic embitterment disorder."
LADbible has contacted Jordan Belfort's representatives for comment.
Topics: TV and Film , Celebrity
Anish has an MA in Multimedia Journalism and is passionate about delivering sarcastic/mildly amusing content. After studying business at undergrad, Anish realised that he’d much prefer getting paid to rant about a topic, rather than to find a solution to it. Apart from that, he loves the ‘Four F’s’, as he calls it - family, friends, football and food. Email: [email protected]
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Could it be you who next clutches a microphone and hosts events.
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Home » Blog » Entrepreneurs » Jordan Belfort: Net Worth, Wife, Yacht, Kids, House, Book, Naomi
Source of Wealth: | Businessman |
Age: | 57 |
Born: | July 9 1962 |
Country of Origin: | United States of America |
Birth Name: | Jordan Ross Belfort |
Height: | 5 ft 7 in (1.70m) |
Last Updated: | 2020 |
The spoils of a life of wealth are tantalizing – enormous homes, luxurious excursions, a private jet, yacht or helicopter, sports cars – possessions of the highest quality. Most people want to be rich. But no fantasy is without a price tag.
Such limitless decadence begs the question – what would you do to live like the top one percent of people? Many of those driven to break into the world’s exclusive society choose a career in the business world, and thrive on the thrill of trying to make a million dollars. Jordan Belfort is one of these people.
Consider this article your go-to resource on The Wolf of Wall Street.
Here, we’ll explore Jordan’s life story. It is one of a devotion to a life of decadence, a story of a rise and fall. Belfort would never give up on his quest to make money – even after 22 months in jail – getting back on his feet as a motivational speaker, to inspire millions of people to live a more meaningful life.
Table of Contents
As of 2020, Jordan Belfort’s net worth is estimated at between 100 million and 110 million dollars.
Keep reading this post to discover how Jordan Belfort’s net worth grew so much despite serving 22 months in prison for securities fraud and money laundering.
Jordan Belfort was born into a Jewish family on July 9 1962, in New York City in the United States. He remained in the area for most of his early life, growing up in Queens New York before later moving to Long Island.
His father was an accountant. Perhaps this explains why, even in his early life in The Bronx, the future “Wolf of Wall Street” had a strong inclination to hustle and earn money on his own. Perhaps Belfort was born to be a success at making money in the stock market.
Before enrolling in college, in his high school days, Belfort and one family friend sold Italian water ice on the beach at grossly inflated prices, claiming to have made sums of money worth over $20,000 together.
Belfort left New York after high school and went on to receive a degree in biology from American University and had plans to use his water ice spoils to pay his way through dental school. He even went as far as enrolling in the University of Maryland’s dental school program.
Belfort dropped out before long, deciding to reorient his path towards a career which would see him make over 100 million dollars and leave his high school days in Long Island and Queens New York far behind him.
With no shortage of confidence, Jordan Belfort came to believe that through his own labor and intellect he could manifest his dreams of wealth. Belfort put one money making theory to the test in New York, as a door-to-door salesman of meat and seafood in Long Island .
With a team of several people moving thousands of pounds of product, Belfort laid the foundation for his strategical expertise, honing his selling skills over the course of several years at the helm of his own operation.
By the time Belfort was 25 however, his efforts began to crumble and the money dried up – he filed for bankruptcy. But Belfort did still want to be rich and would never give up on his dream.
With making as much money as possible and building a large net worth now his central motivation, Jordan Belfort turned his attention towards the stock market and sought to capitalize on the bull market and loose regulations of the 1980s.
Through the help of a family friend, Belfort was able to get an opportunity to work with the investment bank L.F. Rothschild in 1987 as a trainee stockbroker.
Unfortunately, his time at L.F. Rothschild was not a success – the company went bust just a year later, after a stock market crash. Belfort claims that his first day on the job was on “Black Monday”, which triggered the infamous stock market crash of 1987 .
It was then that Belfort used his Series 7 license and resume to land a job at The Investors Center , a small investment company where he felt like a shark in a pond.
For Jordan Belfort and his quest to make money, the opportunity to become a stockbroker trainee ended up being a blessing in disguise.
Belfort discovered that, when pitching potential stocks to current and prospective investors, he could make the most money – a lucrative 50% commission – on securities known as Penny Stocks.
Penny Stocks are highly speculative investments, meaning that they are very risky, and are not the sort of investment any financial advisor would recommend to people in good faith as a place to put a large amount of their money. Jordan Belfort, however, was not a financial advisor. He was a salesman.
His chief interest was not providing value to clients of his new investment company, but procuring value for himself. And Belfort really did want to be rich, so a little thing like penny stocks fraud was not going to stop him.
Over the next two years, Belfort became The Investor Center’s top salesman and honed his persuasive abilities and sales tactics, such as the “straight line” method he would later write about in his book Way of the Wolf . His early life in Long Island and Queens New York seemed a long way behind him.
In 1989, Jordan Belfort founded his own investment company in New York – the firm Stratton Oakmont – with his business partner Danny Porusch.
He believed that his success pushing penny stocks had more to do with his persistence and abilities to persuade people than anything else, and that Belfort could train other people to replicate his methods and thus exponentially increase his earnings.
Over the next seven years, Stratton Oakmont employed over 1,000 stock brokers and investment personnel in what is known as a “boiler room” operation. A boiler room is a call center, where staff will make outbound sales calls pushing highly questionable investments on people, so called because these operations are usually hidden away down in the basement or boiler room of a building.
The company purportedly managed between 1 billion and 1.3 billion dollars worth of assets, and took over 30 companies public with IPO offerings.
Over the course of the firm’s short lifespan, both the investment company and Jordan Belfort himself grew a reputation for being outlandish and drew the ire of federal investigators.
Jordan Belfort ‘s company focused much of its efforts on pushing large volumes of stock to investors by any means necessary. Effectively, the company functioned as a boiler room.
‘Strattonites,’ as employees of the firm Stratton Oakmont would come to be known as, spent the overwhelming majority of their time not managing portfolios of investors, but calling prospective investors, and trying to sell them whatever security the company was trying to push at the time and became warped by unethical practices.
With only the sale in mind, Strattonites often exaggerated the value of the security, withheld crucial information from people, or otherwise acted dishonestly when conversing with potential investors – any scheme to make money.
As a result, without much of a care for the actual value of any given stock they were selling, Strattonites were continually misinforming investors about the securities they were purchasing. Belfort was not only aware, but encouraging his people to do this.
To make their actions even more felonious, Stratton Oakmont would utilize the ‘pump and dump’ strategy to fill their coffers.
Over the course of the firm’s seven year lifespan, Stratton Oakmont took over thirty companies public.
The stocks of these companies were often the focus of Stratton Oakmont’s efforts to convince investors to purchase securities. By relentlessly pushing the stock, they dramatically increased it’s demand, and as a result, drove up it’s prices artificially – also known as a pump and dump scheme.
Once the stock price had been sufficiently inflated, Stratton Oakmont employees would then dump their own shares into the open stock market, and reap the benefit of their efforts to push the stock in the first place.
When Jordan Belfort and the employees of Stratton Oakmont would dump their shares, the price of the stock would decline or completely collapse as a result, and investors outside of the firm, who had been duped into buying the stock in the first place, lost substantial sums of money due to Stratton Oakmont’s pump and dump scheme.
At his investment company, Jordan Belfort sought to build an army in his own image. The wolf would source new recruits and lure the hungry young sales people to his firm with promises of $100,000 commissions, and indoctrinated them in his teachings and lifestyle.
A common doctrine at the company was that to be a success in sales, you “don’t hang up the phone until the customer buys or dies”. It’s not a stretch to say there was a ruthless devotion to making profits amongst the people who worked at the company, and that Belfort sought to compel them to be like that.
The vast majority of employees were implicated in the unethical practices Jordan Belfort had taught them to embrace, and it’s easy to look at the clear fraud taking place and wonder why most people failed to leave the firm or speak out against it.
The simple and most accurate explanation is the lifestyle their relentless pursuit of wealth afforded them. The “Wolf of Wall Street” knew this, and harnessed those raw desires and embedded the fruits of those fantasies into Stratton Oakmont’s way of life.
There are near endless stories of brash and obscene partying at the company. In the workplace, prostitution and the abuse of drugs became normalized, and the general horseplay and debauchery became severely intertwined with Stratton Oakmont’s identity.
At his peak, Belfort is believed to have made 50 million dollars in one single year and reportedly once banked 12.5 million in only three minutes. So it’s easy to see why his net worth is now estimated at between 100 million and 110 million dollars, even despite his troubles.
The Wolf of Wall Street and his followers scammed their way to living out their fantasies, all in the name of getting as rich as possible by any means necessary.
Stratton Oakmont, and particularly the name Jordan Belfort, was high on the agenda for United States federal law enforcement, for pretty much its entire existence. The SEC investigated their trading practices, which included stock market manipulation tactics like the pump and dump, and eventually unravelled the whole illegitimate money making operation.
They would net their first catch in 1994 when The Wolf of Wall Street’s company was ordered to pay $2.5 million in a civil securities fraud case that also ousted Belfort from the company.
Two years later, Stratton Oakmont closed its doors thanks to the efforts of the National Association of Securities Dealers. But prison for fraud was still a few years away for Belfort.
In 1999, Jordan Belfort was arrested by the FBI for securities fraud and money laundering. Initially sentenced to 4 years in prison, Belfort cooperated with law enforcement in a plea deal, agreeing to many of their conditions – including having to pay back money amounting to over $110 million to the fraud victims that he swindled – and ultimately served just under two years (22 months) in prison at the Taft Correctional Institution in California.
While in prison for money laundering, Belfort famously shared a cell with Tommy Chong, of Cheech & Chong fame. Belfort credits Chong with encouraging him to become a motivational speaker. The pair remain firm friends after bonding during that spell of 22 months together in jail.
While Jordan Belfort’s net worth is purportedly around $100 million, the accuracy of this estimate has been contested and considered to be inaccurate, due to the over $110 million Belfort was required to pay back to unfortunate investors and various other fines and penalties that ultimately affect his net worth negatively.
Some say Jordan Belfort has a negative net worth due to the fact that he has only paid back $11 million at the very most, of the restitution he was ordered to pay back at his sentencing, meaning he still owes around 100 million dollars.
Belfort the best-selling author.
It was in prison that Jordan Belfort hit the drawing board again, ever committed to raising his profile and his net worth. Belfort decided to write a tell all memoir of his experiences, eager to tell his life story as he saw it, and capitalize on his notoriety.
The book, one of several best-sellers written by Belfort, was unsurprisingly titled The Wolf of Wall Street .
“The Wolf of Wall Street” has been widely praised for both it’s storytelling chops and the unbelievable stories it reveals – of lavish purchases, insane parties, drug-and-sex-fuelled adventures (both in and out of the office) and of the fraudulent activity Belfort shamelessly engaged in and encouraged.
In the novel readers gain a clear picture of both how Jordan Belfort sees himself throughout his tumultuous journey.
Jordan Belfort’s second memoir was called Catching the Wolf of Wall Street and sought to capitalize on the success of his rising notoriety. Catching the Wolf of Wall Street continued to build the legend of Jordan Belfort, and also served as part of the inspiration for the movie based on his life.
After the success of Catching The Wolf, Belfort wrote a third best-selling book, titled Way of the Wolf: Become a Master Closer with Straight Line Selling . In Way of the Wolf, Belfort teaches people the art of a sales technique known as the “straight line system”. Belfort describes Way of the Wolf as a “self help” book, in keeping with his new image as a motivational speaker.
While much of Jordan Belfort’s net worth, currently estimated at between 100 million and 110 million dollars, is from the success of his books and the film based on his life, Belfort continues to work as a sales trainer and motivational speaker.
Belfort has offered his services as a motivational speaker in a variety of capacities since the release of his memoir, and is highly sought after for his selling skills.
On JordanBelfort.com, those interested can enroll in one of his training programs, watch video seminars, and even book him for in person motivational speaking appearances – if they can foot the bill.
The name Jordan Belfort is also familiar to YouTube viewers these days, as he now has a popular channel and podcast where he hosts popular entrepreneurs and investors, such as Grant Cardone and Tai Lopez .
The book served as the primary inspiration for the beloved Martin Scorcese movie of the same name , which starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort, Jonah Hill and Margot Robbie.
The film largely glorifies and exaggerates his experience at the helm of Stratton Oakmont and was a huge success. It went on to earn nearly 400 million dollars at the box office, earning Leonardo DiCaprio a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination.
In January of 2020, Jordan Belfort opened a lawsuit against the producers of The Wolf of Wall Street for $300 million , claiming that he has been locked out of reaping the full benefit the sharing of his life story has garnered those involved in the film. Thus far, the lawsuit has largely been dismissed as a publicity stunt for Belfort, presuambly designed to sell more books or to drum up further motivational speaking business, but it has yet to come to a conclusion.
This is not the first legal issue to come about as a result of the Wolf of Wall Street movie, either. In 2016, even Leonardo DiCaprio was summoned to case that saw one former employee of the Stratton Oakmont firm, Andrew Greene, sue for defamation over his portrayal in the movie.
Jordan Belfort divorced his first wife Denise Lombardo while at the helm of Stratton Oakmont. His marriage, already troubled by his lust for wealth, became increasingly unsustainable with the company’s rise.
Jordan Belfort not only encouraged the partying lifestyle of his company – he led it and embodied it. His exploits with drugs – particularly cocaine and quaaludes – began to develop into a full blown substance abuse and addiction, and his extramarital affairs became frequent and unabashed.
After splitting from Denise Lombardo, Belfort met and eventually married British-born actress and model Nadine Caridi, affectionately known as the ‘Duchess of Bay Ridge.’ The couple had two daughters together, and held together a troubled marriage for much of the time before Jordan Belfort went to prison. Together, they had two daughters – Chandler Belfort and Carter Belfort – and tried their best at having a happy marriage.
During their marriage, Jordan Belfort’s egregious behavior spiraled out of control.
He sunk his luxury yacht , formerly owned by one Coco Chanel, off the coast of Italy while under the influence of drugs in 1996 (unfortunately, one of many unbelievable stories) and shortly after became abusive.
Jordan Belfort’s wife Nadine Caridi took their children and separated soon after. The two were officially divorced in 2005, with substance abuse, infidelity and domestic violence being cited.
Today, Jordan Ross Belfort lives in Los Angeles, California in the United States, and it seems he has learned some life lessons, putting his time in prison for money laundering and stock market manipulation well behind him. That said, Belfort continues to seek to capitalize from his infamy and natural talents as a salesman and as a motivational speaker.
His current partner, Anne Koppe – a business woman whom Jordan has been with since 2008 – manages his motivational speaker career.
Jordan Ross Belfort made his first one million at the age of 26 but found himself in prison just ten years later, having been found guilty of securities fraud and money laundering.
A gifted, intelligent, and charismatic man, Belfort was born in New York on July 9 1962. He grew up around Queens and Long Island and earned a degree in biology from American University, but chose instead to use his selling skills to pursue wealth by any means necessary – including illegal pump and dump schemes – with little regard for the people around him or those he swindled along the way.
While his stories are endlessly entertaining, to the point of a box office hit movie being made about them, The “Wolf of Wall Street” earned himself a stay of 22 months in prison for his behavior. These days, his money laundering days are behind him and his net worth is on the road to recovery, earning money as a motivational speaker.
Jordan Belfort’s net worth is currently believed to be between 100 million and 110 million dollars.
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The 37m superyacht Nadine passed through many hands, finally ending up belonging to the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, on whose watch the yacht foundered and sank in 1996.
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.
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.
Brad Hutchins Jordan Belfort's seshes were so legendary that sinking a multi-million-dollar yacht was simply another act of depravity that Martin Scorsese could weave into The Wolf of Wall Street's preposterous film adaptation. Those familiar with The Wolf of Wall Street book will have read Belfort's account of this in closer detail, but the backstory of the superyacht Nadine is a lesser ...
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.
Take a look: Dr Nadine Caridi, currently known as Nadine Macaluso, is the ex-wife of Jordan Belfort and was depicted as Naomi Lapaglia - aka 'The Duchess' - by Robbie in Martin Scorcese's hit movie.
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.
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 ...
In the movie, the yacht bears the name "Naomi" after the character portrayed by Margot Robbie (Belfort's wife's name was changed for the film). In the movie (left), Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) surprises his wife (Margot Robbie) with a yacht that bears her name.
Nadine belonged to Jordan Belfort, a Wall Street stockbroker with a penchant for living life to excess. (Belfort once gave an interview in which he said one of his role models was the fictional character Gordon Gekko.) Belfort earned the nickname the "Wolf of Wall Street" and wrote a same-titled autobiography, the basis for the movie.
In real life, predatory tycoon Jordan Belfort bought a yacht in 1993 called Big Eagle and renamed her Nadine , after his English-born second wife.
The Wolf of Wall Street tells the story of Wall Street broker Jordan Belfort, who is played by Leonardo DiCaprio. We're introduced to Leonardo DiCaprio's version of Jordan as he explains a bit about his life: His wife, Naomi, played by Margot Robbie. His 170-foot yacht.
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.
At the beginning of the "Wolf of Wall Street" movie, there's a moment where Jordan Belfort is speeding down the freeway in his red Ferrari as Naomi performs fellatio on him. Through voiceover ...
Summary 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 have disputed the accuracy of the events depicted in the movie, suggesting that Belfort may have ...
Nadine Caridi, the ex-wife of Jordan Belfort - better known to movie audiences as the Wolf of Wall Street - has lifted the lid on how accurate the movie was when depicting their relationship.
The Wolf of Wall Street. : The True Story. 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 ...
The Wolf of Yacht Street - NAOMI's Little Sister If you've been to see The Wolf of Wall Street recently you'll have experienced the lavish lifestyle of Jordan Belfort. A fantastic film based on the true story of the American dream, the rise of a wealthy stockbroker who lives the high life and then falls into crime, corruption and dodgy deals. Like any millionaire Belfort, played by ...
How much do you know about Jordan Belfort? "The Wolf of Wall Street'' was part of the glitz of the Oscars this year, but who was the real man behind the Hollywood story?
The Wolf of Wall Street: The True Story We sort out what's fact and what's fiction in Martin Scorsese's glitzy new film about a real-life scammer entertainment.time.com Add a Comment Sort by: QuickStopRandal
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.
Jordan Belfort's ex-wife has confirmed a memorable scene from The Wolf of Wall Street, which really happened, and has sadly called it the 'most traumatic day of her life'.
As of 2020, Jordan Belfort's net worth is estimated at between 100 million and 110 million dollars. Keep reading this post to discover how Jordan Belfort's net worth grew so much despite serving 22 months in prison for securities fraud and money laundering.