The Wolf of Wall Street is Real, and I've Been Reporting on Him for Years
Disposable yachts, prison with Tommy Chong, and bilking the elderly. All of this stuff actually happened, or might still be happening
James Devaney/WireImage via Getty - Jordan Belfort is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorcese's adaptation of his memoir.
By Michael Maiello - December 23, 2013
Jordan Belfort and his partners, principally a guy named Danny Porush, bilked investors out of more than $200 million by tricking them into buying illiquid penny stocks that his firm was selling out of secret accounts. Belfort fancied himself “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which is the title of his memoir and of the Martin Scorsese-directed film, based on the book and starring Leonardo di Caprio as the Wall Street con man.
It’s all a fiction. Belfort didn’t work on Wall Street. His firm, Stratton Oakmont, named to sound like a venerable white shoe firm, started as a phone bank in the show room of an abandoned car lot in Queens. His scam, which amounts to “you bought, we sold” is among the oldest in the investment industry. It relies only on the persistence of fast talking salespeople, which Belfort and Porush assembled in abundance.
Belfort is not even the first financier to use the Wolf of Wall Streets obriquet. That honor goes to David Lamar, a con artist so bold that he once disguised himself as a U.S. Senator in an attempt to deliver a floor speech that would drive down steel prices while he shorted the commodity. Lamar never really worked on Wall Street either.
The first time I spoke to Belfort on the phone in 2008 he insisted, “It was not a pump and dump, it was stock manipulation.”
Belfort had been out of jail for almost six years at that point. Film rights to his memoir had been optioned by Scorcese. His book was a bestseller and a sequel was on the way. He did not like his crime compared to something that sounds like a colonic procedure. He insisted that he was a stock manipulator.
Eugene Fama just won the Nobel Prize for his work on efficient markets, the theory that, in its strongest form, says that the prices for stocks and other liquid securities reflect all available information at all times, rendering the markets immune to manipulation. Belfort claims for himself a kind of wizardry akin to controlling the weather.
This is Belfort’s new pitch. He used to sell worthless stocks, now he sells himself. The story is that he is sober since 1998, that he is a reformed criminal who helped the Feds (ratting out his partners earned him a light prison sentence) and that he is now on Earth as a cautionary tale to other would-be thieves and the regulators and compliance people who must stop them. Also, he has great stories about abusing Quaaludes and having sex with beer models, which is how he entertained cellmate Tommy Chong, the comedian and bongwright who did time in federal prison alongside Belfort for the comparatively inconsequential crime of manufacturing pot smoking devices. It was Chong who convinced Belfort to tell his story.
The book is peppered with necessary contrition, but Belfort remains enamored of his crimes, of what he got away with and the lifestyle he used to lead with multiple mansions, disposable helicopters (he crashed one into his own front lawn) and disposable yachts (he ordered the captain to steer his chartered pleasure boat into a storm, destroying the vessel but somehow not getting anybody killed). The film will justify its voyeurism as one that casts a critical and disapproving eye on the greed and excess that fueled the fraud at Stratton Oakmont. But the result is the creation of Jordan Belfort as something of a lovable rake, akin to the thieves and manipulators that pepper the films of Guy Ritchie or the fiction of the late Elmore Leonard.
Belfort and Porush are both still very wealthy– certainly in the top five percent of Americans by net worth (including real estate). Now, Belfort ratted out Porush, who ratted out some other people. It is said that the two no longer speak. Belfort served less than two years in prison. Porush served a bit less than four years. Porush still associates with the Stratton Oakmont crew. Belfort does not. Belfort now counts di Caprio and Chong among his friends. Belfort was the salesman. Porush maintains a lower profile. He is played by Jonah Hill in the movie but the character’s name is Danny Azog.
The Wolf of Wall Street movie is not the first Stratton Oakmont inspired film. Boiler Room, starring Vin Diesel, was released in 2000 while Belfort and Porush was still in jail. Boiler Room was a less glitzy affair from the last gasps of the small 90s indie era that owed more to Glengarry Glenn Ross than Casino. Scorcese is bringing the full carnival to screen.
But I want to get back to the part about Belfort and Porush both still being rich, after all that’s happened. Both were ordered to repay the $200 million bilked from investors. Belfort was ordered to devote half of his future earnings to that cause. The government seized and sold property from both men. Porush says that he’s paid more than $11 million in restitution. The government has claimed that Belfort has not made good, though that is now in negotiations between the two.
It is improbable that these two men, or that any two people, would have amassed such fortunes in the first place. They did it criminally. They both went to jail. Then, somehow, they did it again. How likely is that, particularly with both devoting massive proportions of their future earnings to gestation?
I first came across these guys when I was a reporter at Forbes. A few years before my time,Forbes exposed the Stratton Oakmont fraud (it took the government years more to catch up, which is understandable as the foundations of a criminal case must be far sturdier than those of an article). I knew how Belfort was when I received review galleys of The Wolf of Wall Street. I read it and assumed that some scrutiny would cause the book to break into A Million Little Pieces. I called people mentioned in the book. The big stuff checked out.
“It’s all true!” rasped Bo Dietl, the former NYPD officer turned celebrity detective and bodyguard who used to handle Belfort’s security. “I took him to Rao’s and he was so stoned he fell asleep in his fucking macaroni!”
It is a matter of public record that Belfort’s firm led the initial public offering of Steve Madden Shoes because Madden, Belfort and Porush were all childhood friends. Through a representative, Madden confirmed that on the day of the IPO he made a tender speech to Stratton’s stock brokers about the power of such a simple idea as the patent leather Mary Jane has over capital flows and the rise of America’s great companies. The assembled brokers hooted and hollered as Stratton Oakmont crossed the Rubicon to bring a company public for the first time.
Could a petty boiler room founded by a bunch of nobodies become an investment bank, like in the old days of Wall Street? The clue was in the reaction of the floor brokers to Madden’s speech. “Shut up, faggot!” those monkeys screeched and hollered. Turns out that the whole offering was just another pump and dump, one that wound up with Madden serving jail time, too.
I couldn’t debunk the book but I could, at least, give it a bad review.
Belfort trained himself as a writer by aping Tom Wolfe’s style. An unfortunate side effect of that is that, in borrowing from Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, Belfort decided that he should repeatedly refer to the “loins” of his beer model girlfriend as “loamy.” Loam is a type of soil made of silt, sand and organic matter. If that girl had loamy loins, she needed a pump and dump.
What really came through in the book was Belfort’s fascination with his own crimes. He recounts all of his adventures but says nothing about his victims except to claim at the beginning of the book that they were all wealthy, sophisticated and should have known better only to walk back the claim in the latter pages. In Belfort’s telling, Madden is the petty thief.
Because of the review, Nancy Porush, ex-wife (and cousin) to Danny Porush contacted me. She was working as a yoga instructor at a Long Island Equinox and suing Porush for child support payments that Porush said he couldn’t make because he was broke, having worked only as a truck driver since leaving prison. His new wife had all the money and was the source of their $2 million country club condo in Boca Raton as well as the his and hers Bentley coupes that they drove.
Nancy had two claims. One, impossible to verify, was that Belfort and Porush were in fact in touch and that they had secreted some of their money away in the Bahamas. Danny was directing some former Stratton Oakmont brokers in how to repatriate the money by setting up a fake export business in chicken parts. Overvalued chicken parts go to a restaurant in Turks & Caicos, laundered money comes in. Unverifiable, of course, though I tried. The continued wealth of Belfort and Porush suggests something.
The other is that Porush had a new business, also involving former Stratton brokers. He was selling diabetic supplies to old people and then billing Medicare for it. That business is still operating. There are multiple companies involved with Porush acting as a consultant. Indirectly, the white-collar criminal is billing taxpayers.
The story now is that the bad actors were caught, paid for their crimes, have reformed and look back with regret. It doesn’t pass the smell test. It looks like the bad guys are still getting away with it—one by selling himself, the other using sick people as a way to get government money and both, maybe, dipping into secret money from the old days.
The movie looks like fun, though.