He is played by Jonah Hill in the movie but the character's name is Danny Azog. Belfort now counts DiCaprio and Chong among his friends. Porush still associates with the Stratton Oakmont crew. Porush served a bit less than four years. Belfort served less than two years in prison. Now, Belfort ratted out Porush, who ratted out some other people. 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.īelfort and Porush are both still very wealthy – certainly in the top five percent of Americans by net worth (including real estate). 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. 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). It was Chong who convinced Belfort to tell his story. 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. 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. He used to sell worthless stocks, now he sells himself. Belfort claims for himself a kind of wizardry akin to controlling the weather. He insisted that he was a stock manipulator.Įugene 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. He did not like his crime compared to something that sounds like a colonic procedure. His book was a bestseller and a sequel was on the way. Film rights to his memoir had been optioned by Scorsese. 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."īelfort had been out of jail for almost six years at that point. Lamar never really worked on Wall Street either. Senator in an attempt to deliver a floor speech that would drive down steel prices while he shorted the commodity. That honor goes to David Lamar, a con artist so bold that he once disguised himself as a U.S. It relies only on the persistence of fast talking salespeople, which Belfort and Porush assembled in abundance.īelfort is not even the first financier to use the Wolf of Wall Street sobriquet. His scam, which amounts to "you bought, we sold" is among the oldest in the investment industry.
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. 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 DiCaprio as the Wall Street con man. 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.