Tag Archives: jordan belfort

Why Jordan Belfort’s ‘Sucker List’ Won’t Be Released to ‘Inside Edition’

The list of investors who got fleeced by convicted felon Jordan Belfort, aka “The Wolf of Wall Street,” would be gold in the hands of financial crooks, and that’s why a federal judge in Brooklyn told the producers of “Inside Edition” in June that he wouldn’t hand it over to them.

“It’s pretty well known in the fraud world that the best list to get is the list of people who have already been taken,” Doug Shadel, an expert on fraud schemes and the elderly at AARP, told me in an interview.

In my story for The New York Times DealBook last month, I looked at the ways that financial criminals find and fleece their victims. You can read the story here.

Wall Street Says It’s Classier Than “Wolf of Wall Street.” Really?

The depiction of stock brokers in that “Wolf of Wall Street” movie has the securities industry on the defensive. In my column today for Investopedia.com, I talk about how a faction that considers itself the “real” Wall Street is anxious to get the word out that it has no similarity to the thugs who appear in the movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Ask a pal at a Wall Street firm about the box-office hit The Wolf of Wall Street, and brace for one of those sour faces that suggests there’s a bad smell in the room. Those sex-obsessed, drug-taking thugs who ripped off investors in Martin Scorsese’s all-time, biggest-grossing film have nothing in common with the refined investment professionals who do business on real Wall Street, they will tell you.

But that’s not entirely true. The Wall Streeters who wear expensive suits and do business in Manhattan may not be tossing midgets around the trading room, as the perhaps less genteel Long Island brokers in the movie did. They aren’t above hurting investors, though.

“If people understood the similarities between Belfort and Wall Street, there would be a riot in this country,” says Dennis Kelleher, CEO of the investor advocacy group Better Markets Inc. Kelleher explains, for example, that Belfort’s operation dealt in barely-regulated penny stocks that came with either skimpy information or documents that twisted or obfuscated the facts. On conventional Wall Street, says Kelleher, firms bask in the convenience of the opaque, too, trading the kinds of over-the-counter derivatives that helped crash the economy in 2008.

Here’s a link to the story.

About that Reformed ‘Wolf’ of Wall Street

Jordan Belfort, who did jail time for fleecing investors at Stratton Oakmont, the Long Island brokerage firm he founded, has put himself out there as a reformed man. Indeed, he has been making money legitimately, giving speeches to audiences enthralled with the idea of spending an hour or so in the same room as a convicted felon who claims to have seen the light.

Belfort is, of course, the author of the 2007 book “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which was made into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio (playing Belfort) that was released last month. He’s taken to social media to inform the public that he’s a good guy who is giving all the movie proceeds back to the investors he defrauded. But the prosecutors who put him in jail say he’s not telling the story just right. I write about it in my story today in The New York Times.

 

 

Investors’ Story Left Out of Wall Street ‘Wolf’ Movie

You’ve seen the trailers.  A convicted stock fraudster played by Leonardo DiCaprio parties it up on his 170-foot yacht and entertains his office of crooked stock brokers with a half-naked marching band that celebrates the group’s  latest money haul from their clueless clients.

Paramount’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” is a 3-hour movie that opens Christmas Day. I saw a screening in New York on Wednesday night. The mostly 30-something crowd loved watching the hard-partying life that comes when you perfect a method to steal from the public.

My prediction: Young people will be wowed by DiCaprio’s character, Jordan Belfort, just as they were by Michael Douglas aka Gordon Gekko (remember “Greed is Good?”) in the movie “Wall Street.” Douglas said in this story that he was “shocked” that young people decided to work on Wall Street after watching him play a Wall Street bad guy.

Ask your college-aged kids what they think when they see the movie, and let me know.

It was sort of bothering me that amid all this hard partying and cocaine-snorting that nobody had bothered to mention that people actually got hurt by the funny brokers who throw midgets at a bullseye for fun. Thus, my story in today’s New York Times: “Investors’ Story Left Out of Wall Street ‘Wolf’ Movie. You can read it here.