Jordan Belfort In five years, he has paid back $14 million of the $110 million he owes.
JORDAN BELFORT (b. 1962) was the CEO of of brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont. He served 22 months in federal prison for a "Pump and Dump" scheme. As part of the scheme, falsely purportedly profitable stocks were sold to investors at inflated prices. He is now an author of the 2007 book The Wolf of Wall Street, which details the havoc wreaked upon both others and himself as he fell under the influence of his addictions.
Belfort made at least $50 million from Stratton Oakmont, and acquired a beautiful motor yacht originally built and named for Coco Chanel. Belfort sank the yacht, "complete with seaplane and helicopter, after overruling the captain and taking it into a Mediterranean storm."
Belfort's story may be adapted into film. Martin Scorsese is possibly looking to direct Leonardo DiCaprio in the film adaptation the The Wolf of Wall Street book for Warner Bros. Pictures, with The Sopranos scribe Terence Winters possibly aboard to write. (Wikipedia)
The Wolf of Wall Street The book's main topic is the vast amount of sex, drugs and risky physical behavior Belfort managed to survive. As might be expected in the autobiography of a veteran con man with movie rights already sold, it's hard to know how much to believe. The story is told mostly in dialogue, with allegedly contemporaneous mental asides by the author, reported verbatim. But it reports only surface events, never revealing what motivates Belfort or any of the other characters.
CNBC Interview...crossing over the line of right & wrong in tiny, imperceptible steps until one day you turn around & you're so far over the line everything seems normal.
CNN Interview
Every average street kid's dream is to be a Gordon Gekko.
Confessions
A pioneer in promoting office bonding activities, Belfort thought it would improve morale if staff were encouraged to have sex with each other whenever they could, even under the desks. There were mid-afternoon "coffee breaks" with a troupe of hookers in the office car park. One office junior agreed to have her hair shaved off on the trading floor in return for $5,000 for a breast job.
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Bringing Down the House
The story is told through the eyes of the author, who met one of the students at a party and was so intrigued by his outrageous tale that he was compelled to put it into a book.
This is a story of a group of math whizzes, most of Asian descent, who used the art of card counting, worked as teams, and legally won as much as 4 million dollars during the few years they spent their weekends in the Vegas casinos, living the high life.
Rigged
From the author who brought you the massive New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House, this is the startling rags-to-riches story of an Italian-American kid from the streets of Brooklyn who claws his way into the wild, frenetic world of the oil exchange.
After conquering the hallowed halls of Harvard Business School, he enters the testosterone-laced warrens of the Merc Exchange, the asylumlike oil exchange located in lower Manhattan. A place where billions of dollars trade hands every week, the Merc is like a casino on crack, where former garbagemen become millionaires overnight and where fistfights break out on the trading floor.
Ugly Americans
Ugly Americans documents the "Wild East" of the mid-1990s, where young, brilliant, and hypercompetitive traders became "hedge fund cowboys," manipulating loopholes in an outdated and inefficient Asian financial system to rake in millions. Using a concept called arbitrage, they made their fortunes mainly on minute shifts in stocks being sold on the Nikkei, the Japanese stock market, collapsing banks and nearly bankrupting the Japanese economy in the process.
Liar's Poker
Probably the best way to look at this book is like a travel book - you're not visiting a country, you're visiting a world. Great travel books are not word-perfect descriptions of a place, they are representations of what the author felt like when he was there, and they give the reader a feeling of what it was like to be there. If you read this book, you will understand what it feels like to work inside a big bank, and you'll enjoy the ride, even if you have no interest in actually working there.
Den of Thieves
Den of Thieves is a snapshot of human nature showing its seemy side. Stewart's book has a cast of characters you couldn't believe if it were a work of fiction.
The most brilliant thing about "Den of Thieves" is the range of villians in the book; no two come to their law-breaking in the same manner or embrace it to the same degree. All of them find temptation (usually in the form of large heaps of easy money) too hard to resist.
