Lessons for fraudulent and corrupted criminals in Suriname
The Real Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort discusses his plan to repay victims of his investment scam and why Wall Street CEOs haven’t been prosecuted for crimes related to the financial crisis. He speaks on “Taking Stock.”
Catching the Wolf of Wallstreet
In the go-go nineties, Jordan Belfort proved that you didn’t need to be on Wall Street to make a fortune in the stock market. His company was good at separating wealthy investors from their cash and spending it as fast as it came in—on hookers, yachts, and drugs. But when Jordan’s empire crashed, the man who had become legend was cornered into a five-year stint cooperating with the feds.
In this astounding account, Belfort tells the true story of his spectacular flameout and imprisonment for stock fraud. Wall Street’s notorious bad boy leads us through a drama worthy of The Sopranos, from his early rise to power to the FBI raid on his estate to his deal with a bloodthirsty prosecutor to rat out his oldest friends and colleagues. With his kingdom in ruin, not to mention his marriage, the Wolf faced his greatest challenge yet: how to salvage his self-respect.
Catch ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ (Movie Review)
Real life can be a funny thing, mainly because it happens differently to everyone and all you can really do is react to the different stories you here. I haven’t read the memoir by Jordan Belfort, but the movie based upon it features a lot craziness that can seemingly only be matched by Roman orgies. Here is a story that is based on reality and can really only be accepted as truth, because the events that take place are just way too wild to have come from anywhere but reality. The Wolf of Wall Street is a Martin Scorsese film that is impeccably made, despite the long runtime, and features enough lunacy to fill in the requirements for another trilogy of Hangover movies. All of this and the film still features some of the finest acting work from its star Leonardo DiCaprio, who was hell-bent on getting this film made.
Jordan Belfort about his motivation
Jordan Belfort: I believe in total immersion, if you want to be rich, you have to program your mind to be rich. You have to unlearn all the thoughts that were making you poor and replace them with new thoughts – rich thoughts.
The film is based around the life of Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) and his rise from a naïve New York stockbroker to drug-fueled madman, where sex, money, and Quaaludes have essentially replaced his breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Of course, one has to start at the bottom, before they get to the top and that is what The Wolf of Wall Street does. It is of little surprise that the film follows a formula so close to other stories of the “rise and fall” of some famous or infamous person, but it makes little difference, as there is so much to tell about Belfort’s life along the way.
It is interesting to see what pushes Belfort in the directions he goes. Early on in the film, a portion is devoted to the first big Wall Street job that he had. This is where the few scenes with Matthew McConaughey come into play, as McConaughey plays Belfort’s first boss, Mark Hanna. Scorsese is really just giving us a taste of what is to come, as the drugs and the sense of coming corruption ooze out of this character and Jordan does little to back away from the freedom that comes with having so much power (i.e. money), aside from just order water, because he is still thinking that the world he is in can be handled by acting sociable at 10AM. As things progress, there will be next to nothing that holds Jordan Belfort back from doing what Jordan Belfort wants.