Turns out Belfort was even more of a jerk than they show in the movie. In the film version, Belfort tries to save his partner from incriminating himself. He served a reduced prison sentence after ratting on his friends. On a related note, he also did at least attempt to sober up in real life.Īnd the yacht used to belong to Coco Chanel. He crashed a helicopter in his front yard while high. The company billed prostitutes to the corporate card. The office parties included a “midget-tossing competition.” But the rest is true to Belfort’s memoir. His wife’s mother and aunt both helped smuggle the money into Switzerland.ĭanny Porush (Donnie Azoff) was married to his cousin. Belfort, Porush and Madden all went to jail for their scheme.īelfort laundered his money into Swiss banks using his in-laws. Madden, Belfort and Porush owned most of the stock and drove up the price. Steve Madden did give a speech the day of the IPO, to which the Stratton Oakmont brokers responded with jeers. Stratton Oakmont took Steve Madden public.
Though Belfort wasn’t on the cover, Forbes did run a profile of him in which they called him “a twisted version of Robin Hood, who robs from the rich and gives to himself and his merry band of brokers.” Though it was a scathing portrait, the promise of quick $100,000 commissions brought job applicants to Stratton Oakmont in droves. They then sold the stock themselves to turn a profit.īelfort and Danny Porush (called Donnie Azoff in the film and portrayed by Jonah Hill) utilized this age-old pump-and-dump scheme to get rich quick after graduating from scamming middle-class people into buying worthless penny stocks at a 50 percent commission.įorbes magazine exposed Belfort, calling him a “twisted Robin Hood.”
#The wolf of wall street movie#
TIME fact-checks the movie against Belfort’s books (he also wrote a sequel entitled Catching the Wolf of Wall Street) and a series of Forbes articles that have followed Belfort’s scheming.īelfort’s first boss told him the keys to success were masturbation, cocaine and hookers.Īccording to the book, a broker named Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey) gave him this advice early on in his career.īelfort and his partner owned shares of a risky stock and had their brokers at Stratton Oakmont brokerage aggressively sell the stock to inflate the price. Scorsese, knowing this, portrays Belfort ( Leonardo DiCaprio) as an unreliable narrator in the film (see: the changing color of the car in the first scene and the driving while high on Quaaludes episode). After all, Belfort was a scam artist - he made a living by lying. That said, Belfort glorifies his vulgar antics in his book, so how much of his account is truly real is up for debate. But Scorsese’s film closely follows Belfort’s own memoir, also titled The Wolf of Wall Street.
#The wolf of wall street license#
Drugs, prostitutes, crashed helicopters - the debauchery in The Wolf of Wall Street is so outlandish that audiences might leave the theater thinking director Martin Scorsese took plenty of creative license in telling the story of Jordan Belfort, a New York stock broker who conned his way to earning hundreds of millions in the 1990s.
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