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How Jordan Belfort's 37m superyacht Nadine sank off the coast of Sardinia

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Coco Chanel was famously outspoken on many things, but yachting, in particular, attracted her ire. “As soon as you set foot on a yacht you belong to some man, not to yourself, and you die of boredom,” she was once quoted as saying.

Her solution was to buy her own yacht. A 37m with a steel hull, built by the Dutch yard Witsen & Vis of Alkmaar. The yacht passed through many hands, finally ending up belonging to the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, on whose watch she foundered and sank in 1996.

The yacht was originally built for a Frenchman under the name Mathilde , but he backed out and she caught Chanel’s eye instead. With a narrow beam, a high bow and the long, low superstructure typical of Dutch yachts of her era, she was certainly a beautiful boat. But she was also well equipped, with five staterooms in dark teak panelling, magnificent dining facilities, room for big tenders and, later, a helipad. A frequent sight along the Florida coast, she caught the eye of a young skipper called Mark Elliott.

“In those days, she was the biggest yacht on the East Coast,” he remembers. “Nobody had ever seen anything like it. I needed a wrench once and went up to the boat - Captain Norm Dahl was really friendly.” He didn’t know it then, but Elliott was destined to become the skipper of the boat himself and was at the helm when the storm of the century took her to the bottom off Sardinia.

Coco Chanel died in 1971 and sometime thereafter the yacht was renamed Jan Pamela under the new ownership of Melvin Lane Powers. He was a flamboyant Houston real estate developer, fond of crocodile skin cowboy boots and acquitted of murder in a trial that gripped the nation.

Powers sent Jan Pamela to Merrill Stevens yard in Miami, where a mammoth seven-metre section was added amidships. “We made templates for the boat where we were going to cut her in half, then she went out for another charter season,” remembers Whit Kirtland, son of the yard owner. “When the boat came back in, we cut it just forward of the engine room, rolled the two sections apart and welded it in.”

He remembers how the sun’s heat made the bare and painted metal expand at different rates. “You had to weld during certain time periods – early in the morning or late at night,” says Kirtland.

The result of the extension was a huge new seven-metre full-beam master stateroom, an extra salon and one further cabin – pushing the charter capacity to seven staterooms. During this refit, the boat’s colour was also changed from white to taupe. “No one had really done it before and it was gorgeous,” says Elliott. By 1983, Powers was bankrupt and the yacht was sold on again. She next shows up named Edgewater .

Elliott’s chance came in 1989. He was working for the established yacht owner Bernie Little, who ran a hugely profitable distribution business for Bud brewer Anheuser-Busch. “Bernie Little had always wanted to own the boat,” Elliott says. “He loved it. He bought it sight unseen – and I started a huge restoration programme, including another extension to put three metres in the cockpit.”

It was a massive task, undertaken at Miami Ship. “We pulled out all the windows, re-chromed everything, repainted – brought it back to life,” says Elliott. They also cut out old twin diesels from GM and replaced them with bigger CAT engines, doubling her horsepower to 800. “Repowered, she could cruise at up to 20 knots. She was long and skinny, like a destroyer.”

A smart hydraulic feature was also brought to life for the first time. Under two of the sofas in the main stateroom were hidden 3.6m x 1.2m glass panels giving a view of the sea under the boat. At the push of a button, the sofas lifted up and mirrors above allowed you to gaze at the seabed – from the actual bed.

Now called Big Eagle , like all of Little’s boats, she was a charter hit and her top client was a certain New York financier named Jordan Belfort. He fell in love with her and begged Little to sell to him. But he needed to secure financing, and in 1995, Little agreed to hold a note on the boat for a year if Mark Elliott stayed on as skipper.

With the boat rechristened Nadine after his wife, Belfort set about another round of refit work, restyling the interior with vintage deco and lots of mirrors, extending the upper deck this time, and fitting a crane capable of raising and stowing the Turbine Seawind seaplane.

Nadine also carried a helicopter, a 10m Intrepid tender, two 6m dinghies on the bow, four motorbikes, six jetskis, state-of-the-art dive gear. “You pretty much needed an air traffic controller when all these things were in the water,” says Elliott.

Belfort’s partying was legendary and Elliott clearly saw eye-watering things on board, but as far as he was concerned, he was there to safeguard the boat. “When Jordan Belfort became the owner, he could do whatever he wanted. I was there to protect the note,” says Elliott. “He is a brilliant mind and a lovely person. It was just when he was in his party mode, he was out of control.”

Nadine and her huge cohort of toys and vehicles plied all the usual yachting haunts on both sides of the Atlantic. But Belfort’s love story was to be short-lived. Disaster struck with the boss and guests on board during an 85-mile crossing between Civitavecchia in Italy and Calle de Volpe on Sardinia.

What was forecast to be a 20-knot blow and moderate seas degenerated into a violent 70-knot storm with crests towering above 10.6m, according to Elliott. Wave after wave pounded the superstructure, stoving in hatches and windows so that water poured below and made the boat sluggish. By a miracle the engine room remained dry and they could maintain steerage way, motoring slowly through the black of the night as rescue attempt after rescue attempt was called off.

Nadine eventually sank at dawn in over 1000m of water just 20 miles from the coast of Sardinia. Everyone had been taken off by helicopter, and there was no loss of life. Captain Mark Elliott was roundly congratulated for his handling of the incident. “The insurance paid immediately because it was the storm of the century,” he says. “I took the whole crew but one with me to [Little’s next boat] Star Ship . That was my way to come back.”

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Jordan Belfort Yacht: The True Story and The Wolf of Wall Street Version

The true Jordan Belfort yacht story is as strange and unbelievable as the hit movie The Wolf of Wall Street depicts it to be. There are several insider stories behind the sinking of the mighty yacht that are not widely known but are quite interesting and different from the reel version in several ways.

What happened to the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine?

As the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street shows, the superyacht Nadine sank close to the coast of Sardinia in 1997 while battling what many calls “the storm of the century”. Jordan Belfort narrates the event in detail in the memoir describing his life in the 90s, which is what the Martin Scorsese movie is about.

Before getting into the details of the sinking, it is worth noting that the 37m yacht had a long and interesting history. She carried renowned celebrities like Coco Chanel before reaching Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) and was one of the largest yachts in the East Coast’s waters.

While the yacht was initially manufactured for a French native and given the name Matilda, he backed out of the deal. This led Coco Chanel to buy the beautiful yacht with the low superstructure that Dutch yachts are famous for.

You can learn more about our yacht charter services in Dubai

The yacht took on different names as it passed through famous hands, even those of the murder trial acquitted Melvin Lane Powers. Belfort named the yacht after his wife and renovated it with the capacity to carry a helicopter, 6 Jetskis, 4 motorbikes, and much more. Under Belfort’s ownership, the yacht witnessed a series of wild parties that were like unlimited glamour and fun in a package until disaster struck unexpectedly.

Did the yacht scene in The Wolf of Wall Street actually happen?

The Jordan Belfort yacht sinking scene in The Wolf of Wall Street was heavily inspired by a real-life event, though the movie did take some creative liberties. For one, the yacht was called Naomi in the reel version since the name of Belfort’s wife (played by Margot Robbie ) was changed in the movie. In reality, the yacht was named Nadine.

The movie further depicts Belfort’s helicopter getting thrown off the yacht by strong waves. In reality, the yacht’s crew went up to the deck and pushed off the helicopter so that Italian navy seals would have a space to land. The yacht’s itinerary was altered a bit by the movie’s director Martin Scorsese to add to the drama, though the power of the storm was scarily accurate.

Belfort admitted that the yacht’s captain Mark Elliot explicitly warned them not to sail to Sardinia on that fateful night. But according to the movie, there was a business opportunity in the city that Belfort could not bear to miss out on despite his wife’s protests.

Some sources claim that in reality, the passengers were simply eager to hit the golf course at Sardinia the next morning. They refused to pay heed to the captain’s warning and asked him to go through the storm, which eventually led to the famous Jordan Belfort yacht sinking incident. Therefore, unfortunately, if someone wants to have a yacht rental in Dubai or any other destination, they have missed their chance with this yacht.

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Interesting insights on the sinking as portrayed in the movie

The movie captures the fear and stress that each passenger felt when the yacht got caught up in the 70-knot storm. There is some hilarity when Belfort starts yelling for his drugs to avoid the horror of dying sober.

Several rescue attempts were made, but due to rising risks, each of them was called off. By some twist of luck, the yacht’s engine room remained mostly undamaged for a while, because of which they were able to make their way through the sea.

In the end, everyone survived the incident without any major injuries. At dawn, the Nadine made its way 1000m under the water only 20 miles away from Sardinia’s coast. Now, the movie’s audience gets to watch the Jordan Belfort yacht story unfold on the screen with a pinch of humor.

The Nadine’s captain Mark Elliot’s heroic actions did not go unnoticed. He was praised for leading all the passengers to safety, though he was able to get out of the yacht only 10 minutes before it sank. The captain also admitted that the insurance was granted immediately considering the ferocity of the storm. As for the yacht, many still wonder about the highly expensive equipment that had to be thrown into the water and is probably rusting away at the bottom of the sea.

The best features of the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine

The 167 ft Nadine, as its former passengers claim, was a beautiful yacht. When owned by Coco Chanel under the name Matilda, the yacht had five staterooms, large dining areas, and a helipad. The interiors were furnished with dark teak paneling. Each new owner customized the yacht’s name and interiors based on their tastes.

Belfort decorated the Nadine lavishly with a variety of mirrors and set a vintage deco theme. He renovated the upper deck to fit a crane that was able to stow his Turbine Seawind seaplane. The yacht carried the best dive gear available in the market plus a variety of Belfort’s ‘toys’ such as his motorbikes and jetskis.

Which model was portrayed as the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine in the movie?

Martin Scorsese got the yacht Lady M to represent Nadine onscreen. While Nadine actually had a luxuriously vintage charm to it, Lady M is a modern vessel with contemporary features. Lady M was manufactured in 2022 by Intermarine Savannah, while Nadine was built in 1961 by Witsen & Wis. The 147 ft Lady M is currently worth $12 million and is similar to Benetti yachts in its glamorous design.

Jordan Belfort’s life today

The entrepreneur and speaker Jordan Belfort’s shenanigans are well-known thanks to his detailed memoir and the hit movie based on some parts of his life. He spent 2 years in prison and now, at 59 years of age, has a practically negative net worth. Yet, his extraordinary motivational speaking skills continue to attract and inspire people even today.

It is easy for anyone watching the movie to wonder if many of the incidents are exaggerated. But considering Belfort’s eccentric life, even the Nadine sinking incident remains another regular anecdote shared in the movie.

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Jordan Belfort’s ex-wife tells the real story behind the yacht on The Wolf of Wall Street

The ex-wife of jordan belfort shed some light on the infamous scene.

Ben Thompson

Jordan Belfort's ex wife, Nadine Macaluso, has set the record straight about the scene in The Wolf Of Wall Street where Belfort splashes out and buys his wife a yacht on their wedding day.

I mean, when you have a lot of money , what better way to treat your new spouse after saying I do?

After their lavish wedding, Belford ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) covers Nadine's, or Naomi as she's known in the movie, eyes with a blindfold before revealing the huge yacht, which has been christened the 'Naomi'.

And Naomi (played by Margot Robbie ) cannot contain her excitement.

"Are you serious? A f***ing yacht?!" she exclaims.

However, it seems that the real Belfort wasn't very serious, as Macaluso revealed on TikTok that her ex-husband, who she was married to from 1991 to 2005, 'did not' actually buy her a boat on their wedding day.

She said: "Actually what happened I think we were married for a few years and we were always chartering yachts, because he loved to do that.

"And I had given birth to my beautiful daughter Chandler and he said 'I want to buy a yacht'."

However, this idea didn't sit well with Macaluso at the time.

She continued: "I said 'I don't think we should buy a yacht, we have a baby and I don't feel comfortable.

'She can't swim.'

"I had visions of her falling off the boat and I was actually terrified.

"I did not want to buy the yacht ironically. And he was like 'Nope, I'm buying a yacht and I'm calling it the Nadine'. And I was like 'Okay, here we go'.

"And you know how that went."

Macaluso's final line is a nod to a scene in the film, in which Belfort and Naomi need to be rescued from the yacht after it gets caught up in a storm.

This scene was indeed based on the real life sinking of the ship in June 1996, which resulted in a rescue by the Italian Navy Special forces.

The yacht was sunk after violent waves repeatedly hit it, but luckily everyone on board was able to escape the ship in time.

Macaluso has previously commented on the scene's accuracy , where she admitted in a TikTok video that the yacht sinking scene was 'totally true'.

Speaking of the memory, she said: "It was horrific, horrifying, we were in a squall for 12 to 18 hours and we lived, thank god, for my kids."

She even showed real life footage of her, Belford and their friends being rescued by the Navy.

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Jordan Belfort Yacht: The True Story and The Wolf of Wall Street Version

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The true Jordan Belfort yacht story is as strange and unbelievable as the hit movie The Wolf of Wall Street depicts it to be. There are several insider stories behind the sinking of the mighty yacht that are not widely known but are quite interesting and different from the reel version in several ways.

Nadine yacht model

What happened to the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine? As the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street shows, the superyacht Nadine sank close to the coast of Sardinia in 1997 while battling what many calls “the storm of the century”. Jordan Belfort narrates the event in detail in the memoir describing his life in the 90s, which is what the Martin Scorsese movie is about.

Jordan belfort yacht sailing

Did the yacht scene in The Wolf of Wall Street actually happen? The Jordan Belfort yacht sinking scene in The Wolf of Wall Street was heavily inspired by a real-life event, though the movie did take some creative liberties. For one, the yacht was called Naomi in the reel version since the name of Belfort’s wife (played by Margot Robbie) was changed in the movie. In reality, the yacht was named Nadine.

Interesting insights on the sinking as portrayed in the movie

The movie captured each passenger’s fear and stress when the yacht got caught up in the 70-knot storm. There is some hilarity when Belfort starts yelling for his drugs to avoid the horror of dying sober. Several rescue attempts were made, but each was called off due to rising risks. By some twist of luck, the yacht’s engine room remained undamaged primarily for a while, because of which they were able to make their way through the sea.

The best features of the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine

The 167 ft Nadine, as its former passengers claim, was beautiful. When owned by Coco Chanel under the name Matilda, the yacht had five staterooms, large dining areas, and a helipad. The interiors were furnished with dark teak paneling. Each new owner customized the yacht’s name and interiors based on their tastes.

Which model was portrayed as the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine in the movie?

Martin Scorsese got the yacht Lady M to represent Nadine onscreen. While Nadine had a luxuriously vintage charm, Lady M is a modern vessel with contemporary features. Lady M was manufactured in 2022 by Intermarine Savannah, while Nadine was built in 1961 by Witsen & Wis. The 147 ft Lady M is currently worth $12 million and is similar to Benetti yachts in its glamorous design.

Jordan Belfort’s life today

The entrepreneur and speaker Jordan Belfort’s shenanigans are well-known thanks to his detailed memoir and the hit movie based on some parts of his life. He spent 2 years in prison and now has practically negative net worth at 59 years of age. Yet, his extraordinary motivational speaking skills continue to attract and inspire people even today. It is easy for anyone watching the movie to wonder if many of the incidents are exaggerated. But considering Belfort’s eccentric life, even the Nadine sinking incident remains another regular anecdote shared in the movie.

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Everything The Wolf Of Wall Street Doesn't Tell You About The True Story

Martin Scorsese's film "The Wolf of Wall Street" is an over-the-top celebration of greed and excess, inspired by the memoir of the notorious stockbroker Jordan Belfort, who is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the film. It tell of the rise of Jordan Belfort from a low-level assistant at L. F. Rothschild to a Long Island penny stock pusher, as well as Belfort's dramatic fall from filthy rich CEO of Stratton Oakmont to a stint in federal prison for stock fraud and money laundering.

Despite being ostensibly based on a true story, many question the veracity of the film because of how absolutely outlandishness of Belfort's claims, and how outrageous the antics at Stratton Oakmont are. Scorsese obviously recognized Belfort is an unreliable narrator with a penchant for exaggeration. In the film, Belfort breaks the fourth wall, addressing the camera and the audience directly. This was a strategic choice by the screenwriter and director. Screenwriter Terence Winter told Esquire , "Jordan is talking directly to you. You are being sold the Jordan Belfort story by Jordan Belfort, and he is a very unreliable narrator. That's very much by design."

Despite how unlikely this story is, most of what transpires in the film actually happened. Winter added, "I assumed he must've been embellishing. But then I did some research, and I talked to the FBI agent who arrested him, who had been tracking Jordan for ten years. And he told me, 'It's all true. Every single thing in his memoir, every insane coincidence and over-the-top perk, it all happened.'" 

That said, this film is Belfort's truth, not necessarily the definitive truth. Keep reading if you want to learn everything "The Wolf of Wall Street" doesn't tell you about the true story of Jordan Belfort's meteoric rise and fall.

Belfort's wives' names were changed for the film

Although their real-life counterparts are obvious, the names of Jordan Belfort's ex-wives were changed in the film, giving the filmmaker creative license with the characters. Belfort's first-wife in the film is Teresa Petrillo (Cristin Milioti), but her real-life counterpart is Denise Lombardo. Denise met Belfort in high school, and the childhood sweethearts married in 1985 after Denise graduated from college. Belfort founded Stratton Oakmont while married to Denise, and they divorced after she found out about his affair in 1991 (per The U.S. Sun ). After their divorce, Denise led a low-profile life, staying out of the public eye.

Belfort's second-wife in the film is Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie). Naomi's real-life counterpart is Nadine Macaluso. Like Naomi, Nadine was a model and met Belfort at a party before they married in 1991. Nadine and Belfort had two children together and separated in 1998 as depicted in the film (per the U.S. Sun). Nadine got a Ph.D, becoming a marriage and family therapist. She lives in California with her second husband (per Daily Mail TV ).

Margot Robbie , who played Naomi in the film, met Nadine while preparing for her role. Robbie told IndieWire meeting Nadine helped her understand her character's motivations, saying, "I could do or say any horrible thing and know that my character's motivation was out of protection for her child. Whether or not the audience sees my side of events is another matter, but just to know my motivation can give me an authentic performance." She added how strong Nadine is, saying, "She's has to be, to have put up with Jordan and his shenanigans."

The original crew Belfort recruited from friends are composite characters

Although Belfort recruited the original crew for his Long Island brokerage firm from a group of friends; Alden "Sea Otter" Kupferberg (Henry Zebrowski), Robbie "Pinhead" Feinberg (Brian Sacca), Chester Ming (Kenneth Choi), and Nicky "Rugrat" Koskoff (PJ Byrne) are composite characters with fictitious names. These characters are an amalgamation of numerous people who worked at Stratton Oakmont and do not represent actual people.

This didn't stop Andrew Greene, a board member of Stratton Oakmont, from filing a defamation suit against the film's production company. He was offended by the depiction of "Rugrat" in the film, saying the character damaged his reputation. He called the character a "criminal, drug user, degenerate, depraved and devoid of any morals or ethics" (per The Guardian ).

In 2018, Greene lost his suit . In 2020, an appellate court threw the suit out, stating that the filmmakers, by creating composite characters and fictitious names, "took appropriate steps to ensure that no one would be defamed by the Film," (per the Hollywood Reporter ). The filmmaker included the hijinks of the employees at Stratton Oakmont in the film to illustrate the raucous corporate culture of the brokerage firm, rather than defame former employees.

Donnie Azoff doesn't exist, his real-life counterpart is Danny Porush

Jonah Hill 's character Donnie Azoff in "The Wolf of Wall Street" doesn't exist. He is a composite character created to avoid defaming anyone while making the film. To anyone who is familiar with Jordan Belfort and Stratton Oakmont's story, it's obvious Danny Porush is Azoff's real-life counterpart. Porush disputes the veracity of both Belfort's memoir and the film, telling Mother Jones , "The book ... is a distant relative of the truth, and the film is a distant relative of the book." Porush admits to swallowing the goldfish, but under different circumstances than depicted in the film.

As reported by Mother Jones, Porush was Belfort's friend and business partner between 1988 and 1996. Like Belfort, he cooperated with authorities, ultimately serving 39 months in prison for his securities and financial crimes at Stratton Oakmont. Porush disputes the throwing of dwarves, insists there were never animals in Stratton Oakmont — other than the goldfish he ate — but admits to the wild parties and taking part in the depravity and excesses encouraged at the brokerage firm, saying "Stratton was like a fraternity."

Porush told Mother Jones, "My main complaint [regarding the memoir] besides his inaccuracy was his using my real name," something that was remedied when the filmmakers created the composite character of Donnie Azoff. Ultimately, Porush doesn't seem to hold a grudge despite his grievances with the inaccuracies saying, "Hey, it's Hollywood ... I know they want to make a movie that sells. And Jordan wrote whatever he could to make the book sell."

Danny Porush's wife introduced Jordan Belfort to her husband

In "The Wolf of Wall Street," Donnie Azoff (Danny Porush's fictional counterpart) approaches Belfort at a restaurant about what he does for a living, after seeing Belfort's Jaguar in the parking lot. In reality, Belfort met his future business partner, Danny Porush, through Danny's wife Nancy.

Porush and Nancy lived in the same building in Queens where Belfort lived with his first wife Denise, as Nancy told Doree Lewak with The New York Post in 2013 shortly before "The Wolf of Wall Street" came out. Nancy explained how she took the same bus into the city for work as Belfort, saying, "the commute to the city each day was hard because I became pregnant right away. There was a nice boy from our building on the same bus who always gave up his seat for me. His name was Jordan Belfort, and he worked in finance ... I pushed Danny to talk to Jordan ... After just one conversation, Danny came back and announced he was taking the Series 7 exam to get his stockbroker's license."

In the New York Post article, Nancy detailed how her husband changed once he began working with Belfort and making serious cash, saying, "Up until then, Danny never seemed to care about money ... I saw him morph from a nice wholesome guy into showy narcissist whom I hardly recognized anymore." After being arrested for securities fraud, Porush left Nancy for another woman. They are now divorced, and he lives in Florida with his second wife. We can't help wondering if Nancy ever regrets introducing her ex-husband to Belfort.

Belfort's destroyed yacht once belonged to Coco Chanel

Jordan Belfort bought a yacht and named it after his second wife. In the film, the boat is named Naomi after the character played by Margot Robbie, but in real life the boat was called the Nadine . True to the film, Belfort insisted his boat's captain take the yacht into choppy waters, where the boat happened upon powerful but unpredictable mistrals, leading to the Nadine sinking into the Mediterranean Sea in an event known as Mayday In The Med . Belfort, his guests and crew, were rescued by the Italian coast guard.

What the film doesn't tell you is that Belfort's yacht had an interesting past. Belfort's vintage yacht once belonged to none other than the famous French fashion designer Coco Chanel. Chanel is known for her outspoken nature and is associated with quite a few fiercely female quotes. Chanel is quoted as saying , "As soon as you set foot on a yacht, you belong to some man, not to yourself, and you die of boredom." Rather than avoid luxury yachts all together, Chanel made the boss move of buying her own in 1961, naming her the Matilda (per Boss Hunting ).

As bizarre as this interlude of the film was, it actually happened, with one major difference. In an interview with The Room Live , Belfort explained how the group waiting to be rescued had to push the helicopter off of the boat to make room for a rescue team to lower down onto the yacht. In the film, the waves knock the helicopter off of the yacht. Belfort also explains that although his private jet also crashed, it was 10 days after the yacht sunk, not at the same time, as it was depicted in the film for dramatic effect.

Steve Madden spent time in prison for stock fraud

Although they don't talk about it in the movie, Steve Madden also went to prison for stock fraud and money laundering along with Jordan Belfort and Danny Porush. The New York Times reported in 2002 that Madden "was arrested in 2000 as a result of an investigation of a scheme to manipulate 23 initial public stock offerings underwritten by the companies Stratton Oakmont and Monroe Parker Securities ... It included the initial public stock offering of his own company in 1993."

True to the film, Danny Porush, Azoff's real-life counterpart, really was childhood friends with Steve Madden. Like Belfort and Porush, Madden loved debauchery and Quaaludes, so much so he didn't finish college because of how much he was partying. Although Madden wrote about his wild days in his memoir, his time partying with the Stratton Oakmont "fraternity" was not included in the film. Stratton Oakmont took Madden's company public, making him instantly rich ( per The New York Post ).

As reported by the New York Post, Madden wrote about this period of his life in his memoir "The Cobbler: How I Disrupted an Industry, Fell from Grace & Came Back Stronger Than Ever." In his book, Madden wrote, "Jordan was like no one else I have ever met before or since. He became one of the most influential people in my life ... I was pumping and dumping [stocks] right alongside them." Madden wound up serving 31 months for his financial crimes and his involvement with Stratton Oakmont's schemes. Unlike Porush and Belfort, Madden could continue working at his company after being released from prison.

Belfort was ordered to pay restitution to his victims

When Belfort was convicted of money laundering and stock fraud in 2003 for Stratton Oakmont's "pump and dump" schemes, he was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay over $110.4 million in restitution (per Crime Museum ). Belfort only served 22 months for his crimes and a judge ordered him to pay half of his income once he was released from prison.

In 2013, just after the film was released, CNN reported Belfort had only contributed a little over $11 million to the fund for victims, much obtained from confiscated possessions. At the time the film came out, Belfort allegedly stated he would hand over all of his royalties from the film and the book. But in 2018, Fortune Magazine reported government officials claimed Belfort still owed $97 million, meaning that over the previous 5 years, Belfort only contributed an additional $2 million dollars to the victims' fund. $2 million dollars is more than most of us will ever see, but Belfort is still making good money as a motivational speaker.

As reported by Fortune Magazine, there is a disagreement between Belfort's attorneys and prosecutors over what income can be garnished for restitution. Belfort reportedly earned around $9 million dollars between 2013 and 2015, but neglected to pay half of those earnings to the victims' fund. Although Belfort claims he will feel better after he has paid the money back, he doesn't seem to be fulfilling his end of the court order. Belfort obviously still enjoys a life of luxury and it is hard to reconcile his claims of being reformed with his reluctance to pay the restitution to his victims. In her New York Post article Nancy Porush reminded us, "Greed is not good — it's ugly."

Tommy Chong was Belfort's cellmate in prison

"The Wolf of Wall Street" ends with Jordan Belfort in a cushy white-collar prison with tennis courts, but the film didn't tell us who Belfort's cellmate was. Belfort and Tommy Chong of the comedy duo "Cheech & Chong" were cellmates before Chong was released. In 2014, Belfort spoke to Stephen Galloway with The Hollywood Reporter about his time in prison. He explained, "[Chong] was in the process of writing his book. We used to tell each other stories at night, and I had him rolling hysterically on the floor. The third night he goes, 'You've got to write a book.' So I started writing, and I knew it was bad. It was terrible. I was about to call it quits and then I went into the prison library and stumbled upon 'The Bonfire of the Vanities' by Tom Wolfe, and I was like, 'That's how I want to write!'"

In 2014 Chong spoke with Adrian Lee at Maclean's about how he met Belfort in prison and giving Belfort feed back on his pages, saying "After a while he showed me what he had written, and it was the only time I had critiqued someone really heavy — usually when someone writes something, you say, 'Oh yeah, that's great, keep going.' But I knew instinctively he had a lot more to offer than what he showed me ... I told him ... 'No, you've got to write those stories you've been telling me at night. Your real life is much more exciting than any kind of imaginary story you could come up with.'"

Stratton Oakmont was never on Wall Street

Although the memoir and film are titled "The Wolf of Wall Street," Jordan Belfort only worked on Wall Street for several months in 1987 at L. F. Rothschild. Black Monday put an end to his days at a Manhattan based brokerage firm. As we see in the film, it was on Long Island that Belfort got a job at the Investor's Center selling penny stocks from the pink sheets and found his calling: his get-rich-quick scheme, selling nearly worthless stocks for a 50 percent commission to people who couldn't afford to lose the money (per NY Times ).

Belfort soon went out on his own, founding Stratton Oakmont with Danny Porush, where they began targeting rich investors using a persuasive script and "pump and dump" tactics — making Belfort, Porush and their brokers rich, while leaving their clients broke. As reported by the Washington Post in 1996, Stratton Oakmont was disciplined for securities violations as early as 1989, and continued to be disciplined almost annually.

Jimmy So with The Daily Beast, maintains, "The problem with 'The Wolf of Wall Street' is that the self-fashioned wolf was nowhere near the real Wall Street." The memoir and film made the brokerage firm seem like a much bigger deal than they really were, despite the financial ruin they left in their wake. Stratton Oakmont's offices were on Long Island, not Wall Street.

Jordan Belfort was never called 'The Wolf of Wall Street'

Scorsese's film makes it seem like Forbes gave Jordan Belfort the nickname, "The Wolf of Wall Street" when they published a takedown about Stratton Oakmont's questionable business practices. Forbes wrote an article about Stratton Oakmont's dirty deeds in 1991, but the article did not call Belfort "the wolf of wall street." In 2013, Forbes revisited Roula Khalaf's original article, where she called Belfort a "twisted Robin Hood who takes from the rich and gives to himself and his merry band of brokers." 

Danny Porush, Belfort's former partner and one-time friend, told Mother Jones  that nobody at the firm ever used the "wolf" moniker. As reported by CNN , Belfort came up with the nickname himself for his memoir. As Porush told Mother Jones, Belfort's "greatest gift was always that of a self-promoter." But as Joe Nocera with the NY Times said, "who would ever buy a ticket to a movie called 'The Wolf of Long Island'?"

Belfort had a head-on collision while driving under the influence of Quaaludes

When the real Jordan Belfort crashed his car while on Quaaludes, he was in a Mercedes Benz rather than a Lamborghini, and someone was actually injured. Belfort had a head-on collision while driving home from the country club where he used the pay phone, sending the woman he collided with to the hospital (per The Daily Beast ). None of Belfort's crimes are victimless.

This type of discrepancy is central to the complaints about both Belfort's memoir and the film. Although Belfort says he regrets his crimes, he is too busy boasting about the parties, the riches, the drugs, and the sex to sound like he regrets anything except getting caught. Belfort's memoir and the film it inspired might seem like a celebration of greed and excess, but they are also a depiction of the ostentatious behavior that eventually drew the attention of the authorities.

Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street" might not tell you everything about the true story, but what it does is reveal how audiences love watching someone else's destructive behavior. We get all the thrills and none of the consequences. As screenwriter Terence Winter told Esquire, "I'd much rather watch somebody who isn't responsible, who makes all the wrong decisions and hangs out with the wrong people. That's more satisfying. We may live like saints, but when it comes to our fantasy life, everybody's got a little larceny in their soul."

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Meet the Real Wolf of Wall Street Superyacht Built for Coco Chanel

The yachting disaster is one of the most dramatic scenes in Martin Scorsese’s blockbuster The Wolf of Wall Street , and like many of the tales in the Leonardo DiCaprio flick, it’s based on a true story. In real life, predatory tycoon Jordan Belfort bought a yacht in 1993 called Big Eagle and renamed her Nadine , after his English-born second wife. The vessel had been built in 1961 by Witsen & Vis in Holland for fashion icon Coco Chanel, but had undergone many transformations by the time Belfort got his mitts on it. Originally 121 feet long, in the 1970s she was extended by nearly 15 feet, and in 1988 she was cut in half and had another 29-foot section grafted on, finally totaling 167 feet.

The luxury yacht used in Scorsese’s film actually bears little resemblance to the  Nadine , being a far more modern vessel. The director hired the 148-foot  Lady M , built by Intermarine Savannah in 2002 and refit in 2011, for filming. It features luxury accommodations for 10 guests, and a marble and granite interior with gold accents.

In Coco Chanel’s day the yacht was mainly used to cruise from Monaco to Deauville for the summer horse racing season. The real  Nadine  sank in 1997 during a storm off the east coast of Sardinia while crossing from Porto Cervo to Capri, much as the movie depicts. Belfort has said that his insistence on sailing in a storm caused the yacht to capsize. Luckily, everyone on board at the time was rescued by the Italian coast guard. 

Jared Paul Stern

Jared Paul Stern, JustLuxe's Editor-at-Large, is the Executive Editor of Maxim magazine and has written for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the New York Times' T magazine, GQ, WWD, Vogue, New York magazine, Details, Hamptons magazine, Playboy, BlackBook, the New York Post, Man of the World, and Bergdorf Goodman magazine among others. The founding editor of the Page Six magazine, he has al... (Read More)

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The true story of Wolf Of Wall Street’s yacht ‘Nadine’

Jordan Belfort’s antics are so legendary that sinking a multi-million dollar yacht is just another act of depravity that Martin Scorsese manages to weave among The The wolf of Wall Street grotesque film adaptation. Those who know the wolf of Wall Street book will have read Belfort’s account about it in more detail, but the backstory of the superyacht Nadine is a lesser-known tale with unexpected twists.

Despite Jordan’s notoriety for unbridled bacchanalia, Nadine was sunk by natural forces far greater than even the fiercest drinking bout he could muster. In the middle of a pedestrianized Mediterranean cruise, a storm unexpectedly turned into a raging storm with high winds and huge swells to send the pride and joy of the wolf into Davey Jones’ locker.

In fact, this type of storm is so specific that it has its own name. The mistrals get their name from the winds that blow from the French Alps into the Mediterranean. This convection cycle is caused by warm air rising from African deserts and colder air from the Alps rushing through the void for sustained round trips of 12 to 40 hours. Nothing like a strong relentless wind to generate a dangerous swell. And the kicker? Mistrals are difficult to predict.

RELATED: Asymmetric superyacht hits market for $ 47 million

En route from Riva de Travino to the island of Sardinia, off the west coast of Italy, what should have been a routine race (which usually takes around 7 hours) ended in the fiasco that International Yachts described as ‘Mayday in the Med.’

“When we set off,†said Captain Mark Elliot, “the forecast told us to expect wind and choppy but small seas. Knowing that this wouldn’t be an ideal crossing, the captain asked if the guests wanted to delay until the next morning. The answer was a definite ‘no’ as they were all eager to head to Sardinia for a round of golf the next morning. So, they cast off and set sail for another corner of paradise.

Hours later, the guests were enjoying the sunny afternoon weather of another dream day in the Mediterranean… when a rogue wave reached the bow and wheelhouse, inundating a hostess from head to toe. Immediately after this warning sign made contact, a transmission was received via radio warning of unexpected gale force winds in the area. The mistral had announced. The swell heights doubled, the winds intensified, and the shit became real.

However, before Belfort throws next-level parties aboard his elegant ship and charters it across the Mediterranean to Sardinia on that fateful day, Nadine had already lived many lives. In truth, the luxury yacht seen in The Wolf of Wall Street movie bears no resemblance to the period ship owned by Jordan Belfort. Scorsese hired a yacht called Lady M for these stages, which was originally built by Intermarine Savannah in 2002.

On the other hand, the real one Nadine (Where Mathilde as it was originally called), was built in 1961 and delivered by the Dutch shipyard Witsen & Vis for none other than fashion mogul Coco Chanel. At the time, Mathilde had five dark teak cabins, exceptional dining rooms and a helipad.

“At that time, it was the largest yacht on the East Coast,†recalls Captain Mark Elliot. “No one had ever seen anything like it.”

After Coco’s death in 1971 the yacht was renamed Jan Pamela by its new owner, Melvin Lane Powers. While not as decorated as his predecessor, Powers was a notorious and ostentatious Houston real estate developer known for wearing crocodile skin boots and driving a golden Cadillac after being acquitted of the murder of her lover’s husband. The New York Times described his 1966 trial as “one of the most spectacular homicide trials of all time.”

Powers ordered a huge refit and extension of the ship, but in 1983 it hit rock bottom and Jan Pamela was sold before being renamed Waterside . In 1989, it was Bernie Little’s luck, and he bought her sight without seeing her. She then underwent another refit, before becoming Great eagle under the command of Mark Elliot once again. In this form, she caught the attention of Jordan Belfort, who took possession of it in 1995. Of course, he had to undertake his own additions and renovations, before renaming the ship after his second wife, Nadine .

However, the reincarnation of this historic yacht as Nadine was to be short lived. After 35 years of leisure, sailing on the most beautiful coasts and welcoming the great names of the time, Mother Nature would have the last word.

Back in the Mediterranean, hours later, roaring gusts ripped the $ 100,000 tender from its tow lines. Captain Mark Elliot calls to abandon yacht, as turning point Nadine against the crashing waves would have courted disaster. Abandoning the course to try to outrun the mistral was out of the question for the same reasons. They are there now – every captain’s nightmare – with seventy knot winds and 35 foot ridges to negotiate.

Then, Nadine’s The moment of “perfect storm” pointed its formidable head. The huge wave crashes all over the ship, tearing off the hatches and deck fittings, triggering a death knell that can only end with a day of disaster. The remaining supply crashes into the dining room window, causing it to collapse wave after wave flooding the living room.

“I knew at that time that Nadine had received a fatal blow. Once I assessed the damage, I walked over to the deck and used the satellite phone to contact the Italian Coast Guard known as “Gruppo Marine Italian,†says Captain Elliot.

First aid stations. Guests are gathered in a secure central location and escorted one by one to their cabins to collect passports and any valuables that can fit in a small bag.

Half an hour later, a rescue helicopter attempts to bring down a diver to pick up guests. However, the gusts of wind turned out to be too violent, and after almost losing the said diver, the helicopter aborted. Imagine the heartbreaking feeling of those on board Nadine , as the Coast Guard abandon ship, defeated by the rampaging elements, and return to the safety of the coast as the sun sets below the horizon and night sets in.

Hurricane-force winds, severe flooding and a 15-meter-high sea are now pounding Italy’s shores in what will be known as the storm of the century. The situation is so tumultuous that when a large merchant ship attempts another rescue attempt a few hours later, it almost crashes in Nadine , before setting off again and again, abandoning the crew and the frenzied guests.

The liferafts are deployed as a precaution… until the roaring wind also tears them from the sea, leaving the crew completely stranded on board.

Below deck, the flooded kitchen has become an electrified death trap, and the chef and engineer receive jolts from the current before pulling the ass out of there to the (relative) safety above. It should be noted that this is probably around the time when a deranged and drenched Leo shouts at Jonah Hill with the unforgettable line: “Get the ludes downstairs!” I will not die sober! To have. The. Whore. Ludes! ”

Times of crisis. With no options left, Captain Elliot calls to throw the helicopter off the bridge to free up space for another rescue attempt. He unhooks the tie-downs and rolls the ship twenty degrees, throwing the expensive equipment overboard and into the Mediterranean, where its rusty skeleton undoubtedly lies to this day.

At around 5 a.m., the Coast Guard returned and began to hoist the guests, then the crew to safety in the reassuring light of dawn. The weather calmed down as the winds and waves calmed down, but the damage was done. The last to leave the ship he commanded for so many years, Mark Elliot takes stock of the wreck before finally accepting his loss, closing the engine room controls and seizing the buoy rescue package handed to him by the coast guard.

Nadine is swallowed up by the sea, just ten minutes after Captain Elliot left his decks.

While all the guests and the crew of 11 survive, the prestigious motor yacht and its collection of toys (including eight jet skis, four motorcycles, snorkeling gear, a helicopter and a seaplane) sink into the deep end. at the bottom of the Mediterranean, over 1000 m deep. the water.

“The insurance paid off immediately because it was the storm of the century,†said Captain Elliot.

Back on dry land, Mark Elliot was hailed as a hero after showing courage and leadership in such a dire situation. He was then offered command of Bernie Little’s famous yacht Vessel , and today works as a broker in Miami as one of the most experienced and capable men in the business.

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The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Did jordan belfort really meet his future business partner in a restaurant.

What was the name of Belfort's brokerage house?

The Wolf of Wall Street true story confirms that, like in the movie, Stratton Oakmont was the name of the real Jordan Belfort's Long Island, New York brokerage house. Belfort and co-founder Danny Porush (played by Jonah Hill in the movie) chose the name because it sounded prestigious ( NYTimes.com ). The firm would later be accused of manipulating the IPOs of at least 34 companies, including Steve Madden Ltd. (their biggest deal), Dualstar Technologies, Paramount Financial, D.V.I. Financial, M. H. Meyerson & Co., Czech Industries, M.V.S.I. Technology, Questron Technologies, and Etel Communications.

What exactly did Jordan Belfort do that was illegal?

Belfort's Stratton Oakmont brokerage firm ran a classic "pump and dump" operation. Belfort and several of his executives would buy up a particular company's stock and then have an army of brokers (following a script he had prepared) sell it to unsuspecting investors. This would cause the stock to rise, pretty much guaranteeing Belfort and his associates a substantial profit. Soon, the stock would fall back to reality, with the investors bearing a significant loss. -NYTimes.com

How many employees worked for Jordan Belfort's brokerage firm?

At its peak in the 1990s, Stratton Oakmont, Belfort's firm that he co-founded with Danny Porush, employed more than 1,000 brokers. -TheDailyBeast.com

Danny Porush says the movie's dwarf-tossing scene (above) never happened. Even Belfort's book only discusses it as a possibility. Did Jordan Belfort really host an in-office dwarf-tossing competition?

No. "We never abused [or threw] the midgets in the office; we were friendly to them," Danny Porush (the real Donnie Azoff) says. "There was no physical abuse." Porush does admit that the firm hired little people to attend at least one party. Jordan Belfort's memoir The Wolf of Wall Street only discusses the tossing of little people as a possibility, not something that actually happened. -MotherJones.com

During what years did the events in the movie take place?

The events in The Wolf of Wall Street movie took place during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Jordan Belfort and Danny Porush founded the brokerage firm of Stratton Oakmont in the late 1980s. The securities fraud and money laundering charges brought against the firm involved companies that Stratton Oakmont helped raise money for in public stock offerings from 1990 through 1997. In 1996, Stratton Oakmont was banned from the brokerage industry, which eventually forced the company to close its doors. -NYTimes.com

Was Jordan Belfort really known as the "wolf" of Wall Street?

No, at least not according to the former co-founder and president of the Stratton Oakmont brokerage firm, Danny Porush (portrayed by Jonah Hill in the movie). The real Porush says that he is not aware of anyone at the firm calling Jordan the "wolf." Porush says that it's just one of a number of exaggerations and inventions in both Belfort's book and the movie. -MotherJones.com

Is Matthew McConaughey's character, Mark Hanna, based on a real person?

Yes. In exploring The Wolf of Wall Street true story, we learned that Jordan Belfort claims to have met Matthew McConaughey's character's real-life counterpart, Mark Hanna, in 1987 when he was working at the old-money trading firm of L.F. Rothschild. His new acquaintance was an uproarious senior broker at the firm and introduced Belfort to the excess and debauchery that Belfort would later make a daily staple at Stratton Oakmont. Like in the movie, the real Mark Hanna behind McConaughey's character told Belfort that the key to success was masturbation, cocaine and hookers, in addition to making your customers reinvest their winnings so you can collect the commissions. -TheDailyBeast.com

Did Jordan Belfort really abuse cocaine and other drugs?

Yes. In The Wolf of Wall Street movie, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) is shown snorting cocaine off a prostitute's backside and nearly crashing his private helicopter while high on a cocktail of prescription drugs, including Quaaludes, morphine and Xanax. In researching The Wolf of Wall Street true story, it quickly became clear that Belfort used drugs heavily in real life too. In his memoir, he states that at times he had enough "running through my circulatory system to sedate Guatemala."

Jordan Belfort did give speeches like DiCaprio in the movie (left). Right: The real Belfort speaks at a 1994 Stratton Oakmont Christmas party (right). Did Belfort really stand in front of his employees and give riling speeches with a microphone?

Yes. Belfort was known to stir his troops into action by belting out words of motivation through a microphone. However, his speeches were often filled with more self-adulation than DiCaprio's speeches in the movie.

Did a female employee really let them shave her head for $10,000 to pay for breast implants?

The real Jordan Belfort claims this is true in his memoir. The female employee let them shave off her blonde hair for $10,000, which she used to pay for D-cup breast implants. Co-founder Danny Porush also says that the shaving took place, "...the worst we ever did was shave somebody's head and then pay 'em ten grand for it," says Porush. -MotherJones.com

Was Jordan Belfort's Quaalude dealer in the movie, Brad Bodnick (Jon Bernthal), based on a real person?

Yes. The character in the movie, Brad Bodnick, who has a goatee and is portrayed by The Walking Dead 's Jon Bernthal, is based on Jordan Belfort's real-life Quaalude supplier, Todd Garret. In his memoir, the real Jordan Belfort claims that Garret sold him approximately 10,000 Quaaludes.

Was there ever a chimpanzee in the office?

No. According to co-founder Danny Porush (played by Jonah Hill in the movie), the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio's character pals around with a chimp is pure monkey business. "There was never a chimpanzee in the office," says Porush. "There were no animals in the office...I would also never abuse an animal in any way" (though he does admit to eating the goldfish, see below). -MotherJones.com

Did he really almost crash his helicopter in his yard?

Did Danny Porush really marry his own first cousin?

Yes. According to Jordan Belfort's memoir, the real Donnie Azoff (whose actual name is Danny Porush) did marry his first cousin Nancy "because she was a real piece of ass." After twelve years of marriage, the couple divorced in 1998 after Danny told Nancy that he was in love with another woman ( NYPost.com ). Danny and his ex-wife share three children together.

Did Belfort and his colleagues really have drug-addled nights and sexcapades with prostitutes on a near daily basis?

Though the movie and Belfort's memoir might seem like gross exaggerations of the truth, depicting heavy drug use and sexcapades in the office during trading hours, they're not exaggerations at all says the F.B.I. agent who finally took Belfort into custody, "I tracked this guy for ten years, and everything he wrote is true." Kyle Chandler portrays the agent in the Martin Scorsese movie. -NYTimes.com

Was Belfort really arrested for crashing his Lamborghini while high on expired Quaaludes?

Yes, but according to Belfort the car wasn't a Lamborghini like in the movie, it was a Mercedes. He was so high in a drug daze that he couldn't remember causing several different accidents as he tried to make his way home. In real life, one of the accidents was a head-on collision that actually sent a woman to the hospital. -TheDailyBeast.com

The real Donnie Azoff, Daniel Porush, says that he really did swallow a goldfish like Jonah Hill (pictured). Did Danny Porush really swallow a goldfish?

Yes. According to the real Donnie Azoff, whose actual name is Danny Porush, the scene where Jonah Hill's character eats a goldfish is based on a true story. "I said to one of the brokers, 'If you don't do more business, I'm gonna eat your goldfish!'" Porush recalls. "So I did." -MotherJones.com

Did they really tape money to a woman's body?

In one scene of The Wolf of Wall Street movie, bricks of cash are taped to a Swiss woman's body. "[I] never taped money to boobs," the real Danny Porush says (played by Jonah Hill in the movie). According to Jordan Belfort's memoir, the event did happen but his partner Porush wasn't there. -MotherJones.com

Was footwear mogul Steve Madden really involved in Belfort's scheme?

Yes. As shown in The Wolf of Wall Street movie, Steve Madden had been a childhood friend of Belfort's partner Danny Porush (renamed Donnie Azoff in the movie and portrayed by actor Jonah Hill). Their fondness for drugs and alcohol reunited the two of them. During the initial public offering of his footwear company, Steve Madden Ltd., Madden acquired a large number of shares of his company, which were actually being controlled by Belfort and his firm, Stratton Oakmont. Once shares became available to the public, Stratton Oakmont got down to the business of selling them to unsuspecting suckers. Billing Madden's company as the hottest issue on Wall Street, Belfort's brokers in turn drove up the price. Eventually, Steve Madden was to sell off his shares when the hype was at its peak, just before the stock began its inevitable decline. Similar to what is seen in the movie, Belfort still maintains that Steve Madden tried to steal his Steve Madden shares from him. However, Jordan Belfort did make approximately $23 million in two hours as part of the deal with Steve Madden, who would later be charged as an accomplice to Belfort's scheme. -NYTimes.com For his part, Steve Madden was sentenced to 41 months in prison and was forced to resign as CEO of Steve Madden Ltd. He also resigned from the company's board of directors. However, he did not leave the company entirely. He kept his foot (or shoe) in the door by giving himself the title of creative consultant, for which he was well-compensated even while he was in prison. -Slate.com

Did Jordan Belfort really name his yacht after his wife?

Did Belfort's yacht really sink in a Mediterranean storm?

Yes. In real life, Belfort's 167-foot yacht, which was originally owned by Coco Chanel, sunk off the coast of Italy when Belfort, who was high on drugs at the time, insisted that the captain take the boat through a storm ( TheDailyBeast.com ). Listen to Belfort tell the story during The Room Live 's Jordan Belfort interview . As he states in the interview, his helicopter didn't fall off the boat during the storm like in the movie. Instead, they had to push the helicopter off of the top deck of the boat to make room for the rescue chopper to drop down an Italian Navy commando.

How long did FBI agent Gregory Coleman spend tracking Jordan Belfort and his firm?

FBI agent Gregory Coleman, renamed Patrick Denham for the film and portrayed by actor Kyle Chandler, made tracking Belfort and his firm, Stratton Oakmont, a top priority for six years. In an interview ( watch here ), Coleman says that the factors that drew his attention to the firm were "the flashiness, the brashness of their activities, the blatantness of the way they were soliciting people and cold calling people, and the number of victims that were complaining on a daily basis." -CNBC

Did Jordan really strike his wife?

Yes. The Wolf of Wall Street movie shows Jordan (Leonardo DiCaprio) hitting his wife (Margot Robbie) with his hand and fist. According to his memoir, he actually kicked his wife Nadine down the stairs while he was holding his daughter. She landed on her right side with "tremendous force."

Did Belfort really endanger his 3-year-old daughter's life by crashing his car through the garage door?

Yes. In real life, he put his daughter Chandler in the front seat of the car without a seat belt on, before crashing it through the garage door and then driving full speed into a six-foot-high limestone pillar at the edge of the driveway. Like in the movie, he was high at the time.

Tommy Chong was Jordan Belfort's cellmate in prison and encouraged him to write the book. What was Jordan Belfort's punishment?

When he was finally arrested in 1998 for money laundering and securities fraud, Jordan Belfort was sentenced to four years in prison. This was after agreeing to wear a wire and provide the FBI with information to help prosecute various friends and associates. In the end, the true story reveals that he served only 22 months in a California federal prison. His cellmate in prison was Tommy Chong of "Cheech and Chong" fame, who was serving a nine month sentence for selling bongs. -TheDailyBeast.com

What inspired Jordan Belfort to write his memoir?

It wasn't so much a what as it was a who. Tommy Chong (one half of "Cheech and Chong") was Jordan Belfort's cellmate in prison. After laughing at some of Belfort's stories from his days running the firm, Chong encouraged him to write a book. -TheDailyBeast.com

Why is Jordan Belfort's memoir filled with so many exclamations?

Jordan Belfort attempted to model his writing after Hunter S. Thompson ( Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ), who was known for using plenty of exclamation points.

What happened to Belfort's partner, Danny Porush, portrayed by Jonah Hill in the movie?

Danny Porush, renamed Donnie Azoff for the movie and played by actor Jonah Hill, served 39 months in prison for his part in the corrupt dealings of Stratton Oakmont, the firm that he co-founded with Jordan Belfort. Porush currently runs a medical supply business in Florida, where he lives with his second wife Lisa in a $4 million mansion. A 2008 Forbes article pointed out his company's fraudulent tactics, which included trying to persuade people to order diabetic supplies and getting them to provide information about their physicians that could be used to bill Medicare. A number of complaints surfaced accusing Porush's company of sending unsolicited packages that were accompanied by unexpected Medicare charges. Back in 2001, Porush was arrested in connection to a fraud scheme surrounding Noble & Perrault Collectibles, a company that sold commemorative coins over the phone. Victims saw their credit cards charged repeatedly, at times for thousands of dollars, while often never receiving any merchandise for purchases that were largely unauthorized to begin with. -Sun Sentinel Enjoying a well-to-do life in Florida, Daniel Porush and his wife drive matching Rolls-Royce Corniche convertibles. With regard to The Wolf of Wall Street movie, Porush said, "I really have no comment other than to say I would never try to profit from a crime I'm so remorseful for." -NYPost.com

I heard that Jordan Belfort is a motivational speaker, is that true?

How much did Jordan Belfort earn from his books and the movie?

Catching the Wolf of Wall Street includes more of Belfort's outrageous stories that were not included in his first book. As we investigated The Wolf of Wall Street true story, we discovered that Jordan's books, The Wolf of Wall Street and Catching the Wolf of Wall Street , netted him a $1 million advance from Random House. He also earned $1 million for the film rights to his story ( TheDailyBeast.com ). In a response to criticism over these profits and future profits from the movie, Jordan Belfort said the following via his Facebook page, "I am not turning over 50% of the profits of the books and the movie, which was what the government had wanted me to do. Instead, I insisted on turning over 100% of the profits of both books and the movie, which is to say, I am not making a single dime on any of this." According to Jordan, the money is being used to pay back the millions still owed to those who were scammed by his brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont.

Does Jordan Belfort have a cameo in The Wolf of Wall Street movie?

Yes, the real Jordan Belfort appears at the end of the movie as the person who introduces Leonardo DiCaprio's character before he takes the stage at his Straight Line seminar.

Have any other movies been based on Jordan Belfort's story?

Yes, but only loosely. The brokerage firm in the movie Boiler Room , released in 2000, was inspired by the illegal practices of Jordan Belfort's Stratton Oakmont firm. In the movie, actor Ben Affleck portrays Jim Young, the Belfort-esque co-founder of the firm, who, like Jordan Belfort, trains his brokers in the "pump and dump" scheme. -NYTimes.com

Watch The Wolf of Wall Street movie trailer. Also, view Jordan Belfort interviews and home video footage of him speaking at a Stratton Oakmont party in the 1990s.

• Jordan Belfort's Website
• Danny Porush's Website (played by Jonah Hill)
• Mark Hanna's Website (played by Matthew McConaughey)
• The Wolf of Wall Street Official Paramount Movie Site

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Martin Scorsese ‘Kept Fighting’ for ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Yacht Scene to Be in Final Cut

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Martin Scorsese was determined that “ The Wolf of Wall Street ” would have a sinking ship onscreen.

The blockbuster, Oscar-nominated 2013 film which starred Leonardo DiCaprio as real-life disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort, was originally a whopping four hours long. While the film was eventually trimmed down to 180 minutes, screenwriter Terence Winter revealed that Scorsese refused to cut an expensive yacht sequence.

“Because [the script] was so long, you know, the fear was there were going be things that we were gonna have to cut — like the sequence where the boat sinks and they get rescued at sea,” Winter told The Hollywood Reporter . “It was on the chopping block for the longest time because it was so wild and so expensive. To his credit, Marty just kept fighting and said, ‘We have to have that. I have to have that.'”

The scene involves Belfort (DiCaprio) and his wife Naomi ( Margot Robbie ) having to be rescued by helicopter when sailing from Italy to Monaco in a desperate attempt to stop federal investigators from accessing bank accounts.

“There was actually a four-hour cut of that movie initially and it was just a lot more insanity — if you can believe there was room for any,” Emmy winner Winter continued. “But I was absolutely thrilled that everything got in there. Every possible thing… including the kitchen sink… is in that movie. I could not have been more happy with it.”

Acclaimed editor and longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker previously told IndieWire that the four-hour cut is beloved by those who had seen it, and Scorsese even considered releasing it in two parts. “Well, we thought about it,” Schoonmaker said. “But the film doesn’t work split in half. It has to have a certain arc.”

Actress Robbie recently revealed that the overnight success of “The Wolf of Wall Street” was overwhelming at times, saying, “Something was happening in those early stages and it was all pretty awful. I remember saying to my mom, ‘I don’t think I want to do this.’ And she just looked at me, completely straight-faced, and was like, ‘Darling, I think it’s too late not to.’ That’s when I realized the only way was forward.”

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“There Is No Limit”: The Oral History of the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Minions

Ten years ago, Martin Scorsese made a movie about the horrific excess of the finance world in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Leonardo DiCaprio was in the foreground, but what was going on in the background was just as wild. 

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P.J. Byrne never liked making cold calls. While majoring in finance at Boston College in the early 1990s, he took a summer internship selling AAA-rated municipal bonds over the phone. At the time, he’d planned to be an investment banker on Wall Street, but after two weeks on the job, he realized dialing numbers wasn’t the path for him. “I was like, this just feels car salesman–y to me,” he says. “I wanted nothing to do with that.”

About 15 years later, after pivoting to drama school and pursuing an acting career, Byrne gave cold-calling a second chance. In a taped audition for The Wolf of Wall Street , the actor leaned into his brief boiler room experience, took a gamble, and improvised an outrageous sales call monologue in which he pretended to scam a former client’s widow out of $100,000. In a devastated voice, he built a sob story around her husband’s financial intentions. “I started pilfering information from this woman,” Byrne says. “But on the other side of the phone, she can’t see that I’m humping the desk and having a blast.” Without realizing it, Byrne had channeled Jordan Belfort—the movie’s craven, money-hungry, criminal protagonist—to a T.

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It wasn’t long before he got a callback to go to New York—along with several other green actors, including Brian Sacca, Henry Zebrowski, and Kenneth Choi—to convene inside a suite at Le Meridien Hotel, where they would perform the same monologues in front of Martin Scorsese and casting director Ellen Lewis. The group was, understandably, nervous as hell. “I thought it was going to be a serious audition,” Byrne says. After a few minutes, however, everyone quickly realized the director wanted them to channel the absurdity of their original auditions, use prop desks and phones, and take advantage of the unusual group setting. “And then,” Byrne adds, “you heard him cackling.”

“We were doing it almost like a scene,” Sacca says. “At one point, I said something on the phone: ‘If you buy these stocks, I will let you snort coke off of my tits.’ That got a big laugh from Marty and the other guys.”

Though The Wolf of Wall Street mostly chronicles Jordan Belfort’s real-life rise and fall as a corrupt CEO (dynamically portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio), the movie’s hedonistic heart belongs to his unquestioning, cultlike worshippers, tracing their evolution from blue-collar schemers to suit-and-tie heathens eager to debase themselves in the name of money and power. The “merry band of brokers,” as Forbes nicknamed them —Nicky, Robbie, Chester, Alden, and Toby (Ethan Suplee)—might not be in charge, but they double down on their penny-stock-peddling debauchery. “Those are the types of people you’re looking to recruit,” Wolf writer Terence Winter says. “A guy who is morally malleable and hungry and has half a brain.”

The three-hour comedy, released 10 years ago this week, ultimately becomes an American tragedy of unchecked testosterone, spiraling greed, and blind idolization. To pull off the corporate circus, everyone in the group—much like the characters they played—embraced excess and chased their id. Guided by Scorsese’s kinetic camera and Winter’s loyal adaptation of Belfort’s autobiography, the cast practiced slimy sales techniques, improvised office high jinks, snorted fake cocaine, simulated orgies, and lost their voices screaming at clients over the phone. Making it was a marathon of endurance, frat-like behavior, and pinch-me moments.

“I was astutely aware,” Sacca says, “that the things that were happening were the stories I was going to be telling forever.”

In 2007, when Winter first pored through Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street , he couldn’t wait to turn it into a Hollywood script. Belfort’s first-person account had plenty of cinematic moments—office sex parties, a quaalude trip, a sunken yacht—and followed a classic rise-and-fall narrative, but Winter mostly related to its ambitious protagonist. The pair were around the same age, had grown up in New York’s outer boroughs, and both dreamed of moving to Manhattan and becoming rich. In 1987, around the same time Belfort began his financial career at L.F. Rothschild, Winter had started as a legal assistant at Merrill Lynch. “I was literally working a quarter of a mile away from where Jordan was working on Wall Street,” Winter says.

In other words, he knew this guy. He knew what drove him. But perhaps more importantly, he knew exactly how Belfort built and scammed his way to the top with a bunch of low-level nobodies. “They reminded me of my own friends,” Winter laughs. “These are guys who don’t have the strongest moral compass. They’re not necessarily college educated. These aren’t guys who would go the more traditional route to work for a legitimate Wall Street firm.” Effectively, they were door-to-door salesmen ready to make a quick buck who would pledge loyalty to anyone who could make them money. “As long as Jordan looked like the pillar of success, that’s all he really needed,” Winter says. “If you’re rich, they don’t care how you got there.”

After securing an initial option deal and commitments from Scorsese and DiCaprio, Winter began investigating more about Belfort’s life. He met with Belfort’s parents, his ex-wife, and his financial victims. He drove to Long Island, toured Belfort’s home, and visited his country club. Most shrewdly, Winter convinced Belfort to reenact one of his daily pump-up speeches at CAA’s headquarters, where Winter taped his old sales presentation for reference. Soon after, Winter structured his screenplay with voiceover narration, changing key names and crafting composite characters—like Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff, Stratton’s second-in-command—for legal reasons. But he never strayed from the real-life insanity of Belfort’s cult creation. “I wrote the whole script in 17 days,” Winter says. “It was maybe the most fun I’ve ever had writing a script.”

About five years later, the movie went into production, and the recently cast Belfort boys began their preparation with a sales crash course from the wolf himself, which clarified and informed the entire shoot. “It gave you a little glimpse,” Choi says. “When you have that killer shark energy, everybody else around you has to become a killer shark, or you get swallowed up and eaten.”

Henry Zebrowski (Alden “Sea Otter” Kupferberg): When we first came together, we went to Leo’s apartment. He had Jordan come in and give an example of his ramp-up training speech.

Kenneth Choi (Chester Ming): Sort of a mini sales pitch tutorial.

Zebrowski: We were talking with [Belfort], and he said, “Have you guys ever seen $25,000?” And he pulled out a bunch of money and threw it on the table, which he probably had to scoop up and put back into his pockets. Then they popped a bunch of bottles.

Terence Winter (writer): It’s really fascinating when you see somebody who understands the psychology behind how to set you up. It’s a whole series of questions and answers to the customer. It’s like a good cross-examination. I am going to move you into a corner where your only response can be the one I want.

Choi: He would say, “If you ever get lost, follow the script. The script is your bible. The script is gold. Memorize the script.” Even in that little training session, you could kind of see him step back in time. He got swept up in it.

Zebrowski: Jordan would say, “I just had this piece of paper come across my desk.” He was like, “You wave your hand across. I know it’s dumb, but this is how I talked to the dumb shits I worked with back in the day.”

P.J. Byrne (Nicky “Rugrat” Koskoff): I was like, this guy is a fucking con artist. Holy shit. This scared the fuck out of me.

Choi: I think it was valuable not just to hear how he would do it, but to see his energy and really feel it right in front of you. He was constantly teaching you how to divide and conquer.

Winter: He basically applied high-level skills to a low-level sales force, taking the skills of a Jedi and bringing them into a shitty boxing gym. The idea that this is a legitimate, Wall Street–trained broker and using the spiel you would get from L.F. Rothschild or Goldman Sachs on a mailman. … It was like taking candy from a baby.

Ethan Suplee (Toby Welch): We are playing blue-collar guys who couldn’t cut it as blue-collar guys. We suck at this. You’re not going to find a whole lot of legitimate guys who are willing to do that because there’s risk. You’re doing something completely immoral and unethical, but also illegal.

Zebrowski: The direction for my character was like, this is kind of a revenge against society. Because everybody always told me I was fat and dumb and I was never going to be a millionaire and I was never going to make it. Now, here I am. Jordan believes in me. He saw something in me. I’m just like him.

Suplee: Jordan was like the pied piper. He is the messiah of this industry of ripping people off.

Zebrowski: Intelligent, self-conscious people get pulled into cults all the time. It’s because there’s extreme comfort in letting someone else take the wheel.

Byrne: You’ve got to remember, these guys are all narcissists. And they all ruin the people closest to them. No one has a long-term relationship. If you get sucked into their orbit, you’re going to get chewed on and shit out. But while you’re there, it’s a fucking insane ride.

In an early, seminal montage, DiCaprio mimics Belfort’s presentation, teaching his friends how to reel in customers and shake them down with nefarious tactics. Throughout the scene—which functions as a shared monologue—they follow their scripts and reap the rewards, helping turn Stratton Oakmont from a garage facility into a full-blown office. Using variations of their monologue auditions, the group of actors leaned into their comedic roots to make every office call sizzle.

Zebrowski: It was like two weeks of rehearsal. Scorsese loved improv, but you better be very, very good. He doesn’t want time wasted.

Brian Sacca (Robbie “Pinhead” Feinberg): They hired us because we were guys who could improvise, who could be in the moment and come up with some shit. Some of my favorite moments were: “We need you to do something.”

Choi: We sit around a table, we have the script, and you would just throw everything against the wall. You’d react off someone’s bit, and then Leo and Jonah would react off it. I’d improvise one thing and you’d get the script back a couple days later and your stuff would be in there word for word.

Winter: Anything beyond the dialogue is great. And sometimes, that’s where the gold is, especially when you get an actor who’s really good at it.

Sacca: There were like six of us, including Ted Griffin, the on-set writer, finding how the Tetris of this sales monologue through that long montage is going to work up until an hour before we shot that.

Byrne: Marty knew it would get boring. And he’s like, “How do we keep it interesting?”

Sacca: There was one day of rehearsal where we’re all in a room around a table reading that monologue. And a debate happened between Scorsese and Leo: “Do we let the guys go free-form and improvise, or do we keep it contained and to the script? Finally, I just raised my hand: “Guys, you’re going to shoot this on a circle track, right?” And immediately, I’m like, “What the fuck am I saying? Am I going to get fired off this movie?”

Byrne: [Scorcese’s] like, “I was thinking you’re next to Kenny, and I was going to put a [circle] track around both of you, let’s just say this little part of the monologue.” We were only supposed to do a paragraph, and the monologue is like three pages. We kept passing it and passing it. The room’s quiet now and filled with hundreds of extras, but everyone’s now listening. You can feel the energy. I’m in the zone of zones. Kenny’s in the zone. We’re just making this magic.

Zebrowski: Everybody kind of got to just throw in on their character. And it allowed me to feel comfortable with these people. As we became masters of the universe, it was really important to kind of go from our dumb Queens clothes to the suits. You kind of see how that changes everything.

Choi: I specifically was asked to gain 20 pounds. This guy is about excess. He eats everything, he consumes as much cocaine and women and booze as he can. And that’s where some of my little moments like the doughnut scene came from. He’s just a slovenly pig.

Sacca: We all had our specific traits that we liked to play with. But we all had different levels of aggression. That kind of yes-men, doofus quality was a through line between a bunch of us.

Once Stratton Oakmont grew into a Wall Street middleweight, the office became littered with shocking and vulgar HR violations. As chronicled by Belfort, almost anything related to sex, drugs, and alcohol happened within the walls of the brokerage firm, which more often looked like a bacchanalian madhouse. But Winter wasn’t too surprised by the colorful revelations. During his own brief stint in Merrill Lynch’s law department, he’d seen firsthand the kinds of unholy shenanigans taking place at Stratton. “Somebody had a marching band and brought a monkey onto the trading floor,” Winter says. “When the market closed at 4 p.m., everybody went out and just partied all night. And you’d get guys coming in the next morning hungover and just coked out of their minds.”

Of course, the bigger firms couldn’t compete with Stratton’s no-holds-bar approach, something Scorsese and Winter became devoted to portraying and sometimes embellishing. Spitting in the face of discretion, the filmmaking team leaned into the company’s voracious and lustful appetite, depicting everything from stampeding strippers, to thrown-around little people, to impromptu animal stunts. Not to mention Belfort’s motivational speeches, which turned the office into a pep rally every afternoon. “The whole thing is about excess, and when is too much too much?” Winter says. “It just got crazier and bigger and out of control.”

In some ways, showing it all became a sort of PSA, especially when things come crashing down in the third hour. “That’s the power of comedy,” Byrne says. “You’re able to turn the mirror on yourself with society and go, this is wrong .” In order to capture the chaos, the production moved from Manhattan into a massive office stage in Westchester, where, for nearly two months, the Belfort boys—alongside hundreds of extras—lived inside an unethical bubble catering to their leader’s absurdist ideas.

Sacca: My voice was gone for a good six weeks because we were screaming so much.

Choi: I wasn’t very talkative because I had to gain so much weight that I always felt like taking a nap.

Sacca: I’ll shout out the AD and second AD, who had to wrangle 500 extras to get all of us to be screaming and then shut the fuck up in between takes. That was hard.

Choi: There’s so much importance put on AI in our SAG contract. There’s a reason for that. When you’re in a real space with 300 human beings who are in the background, the energy just swells and you can feel it. Everybody is going apeshit trying to “sell, sell, sell,” and that informs your performance because you feel that surge of energy come through you as an actor.

Suplee: There’s a lot of shit happening in the background of that movie that’s just as crazy as what’s happening in the foreground.

Zebrowski: It was just us bullshitting for 12 hours being animals. Scorsese used to come by and go, “Yeah, you pigs, you ready to get going, you pigs?” We’re like, “Yeah!”

Choi: There’s a scene where Leo walks through with a chimpanzee for no reason, which scared the shit out of me. The whole time I’m thinking, “This ape is going to fucking pounce on me.” I think I just bent down and did some fake lines of cocaine.

Sacca: We had to snort a lot of cocaine in this movie. At the beginning, it was very finely powdered vitamin B12. And man, did it fucking feel good. It was so nice.

Zebrowski: We could snort B12 forever. And we did. And we took every single opportunity we could because we were in a Scorsese movie, and we were animals.

Sacca: About three months into production, they switched it up—they put some dog shit in there. And we were like, “No, no, no, no. Where’s our B12? Bring back the good shit!” We had to sit down with the props master and be like, “Come on, man, we have to snort this shit all day long.”

Suplee: The other brokers and I were in our cast chairs reading books and playing chess, and they came and dragged me to this private set. Leo helped me get sober many years ago, and he was like, “Do you know how to [blow cocaine up someone’s butt]? I was like, “Yeah, I do know how to do this. Unfortunately, I am your technical drug adviser.” But I was happy to help. It was so funny to see them sitting on this closed set discussing amongst themselves, “How do we do this?”

Choi: The head-shaving scene was a huge fucking deal. I think it was a woman who was somehow friends with Leo, and she offered to do it.

Byrne: When we started shaving her head, it was shocking. I practiced with a razor on a fake scalp a lot because I was like, “I don’t want to ruin this moment for her.”

Choi: You have 350 people yelling at P.J. to shave her head. It was so overwhelming.

Byrne: You’re simultaneously going, “Holy fuck, this is crazy, I can’t believe this.” And then: “There’s the camera. Make sure you’re doing it perfectly for the camera.”

Choi: [P.J.’s] hairpiece should have got its own credit, that’s for sure.

Byrne: I still have the hairpiece. It was a thing having that on.

Sacca: One of the little people we threw was an employee of Stratton Oakmont, and he told stories that were fucked up. These weren’t stories like, “I can’t believe what they did to me.” These were stories of: “Let me tell you what I did.” We were like, “Oh man, don’t share those.”

Suplee: First of all, we couldn’t actually do it. It’s not like throwing a 50-pound weight. The guy weighed 150 pounds. That’s a lot to pick up and throw.

Byrne: [Our characters] are not nice people. When you watch that and you know they’re throwing little people, that’s fucking disturbing. And that’s what these fucking guys did.

Suplee: Terrifically uncomfortable. This is all the behavior of really abhorrent people. But sometimes as actors we have to lean into that discomfort. I also think that it’s important to show that.

Sacca: I think I would have been more uncomfortable if the two guys who were a part of it weren’t as excited. They were both thrilled to be part of it. And they were really cool dudes.

Zebrowski: My guesstimation is that 80 percent of it happened. And then the rest of it was mostly just having money and getting hammered with the same five guys and getting rejected at the club and going home to your wife.

Suplee: If I had gotten rewarded for being at my worst, what would that do to me? It probably wouldn’t have been good for my life. I probably wouldn’t be alive. At my worst, I would be dead for sure, and that was what I was thinking about: Turn the bad behavior up. It’s kind of like frat boy culture. Bad behavior just seems to breed more bad behavior. And I don’t know if it’s that business that attracts and breeds that personality. How much sushi can you stuff down your face? How much can you drink? How much coke can you do? How much money can you make? How many girls can you sleep with? It’s just all part of it.

Arguably the most obscene imagery of the movie comes from Belfort’s bachelor party, when the camera pans down the aisle of a plane that has been turned into a giant orgy. The scene, filmed on a soundstage in Queens for a day, lasts just a few seconds, but it became an instant memory for everyone involved.

Sacca: We’re in a metal tube, there’s some hot-ass lights, and there are 60 naked people at 8:30 in the morning.

Choi: It’s so fucking cramped. Everyone’s sweaty because everyone’s kind of in a rambunctious state. And you’re doing it over and over and over for this poor Steadicam guy who’s trying to get everything.

Zebrowski: It was a long day.

Suplee: This was my first experience with an intimacy coordinator. I suspect they invented that job for Wolf of Wall Street .

Sacca: We had a rehearsal where we met with the choreographer, and we were partnered with people who we were going to be interacting with. It never doesn’t get weird. I couldn’t help but think: My parents are going to see this.

Zebrowski: I was with a couple of Rockettes and a couple of professional dancers. You have a super awkward moment where you’re having fake sex with someone for an entire take and then you realize the camera wasn’t on you.

Byrne: The camera’s tracking. We’re going, boom, boom, boom. Where do I want to be? I know I have one second. What can we do in that one “boom” that no one else is doing?

Choi: In between takes everyone’s real respect, respect, respect . Robes come off. I just kept looking up in the air because you don’t want to be leering. Then you get in the mode of: “This is just about excess.”

Zebrowski : I remember having to psych myself up. I was sitting there in my chair, saying to myself, “You love strippers! You love cocaine! You love going nuts!” And I was like, “This is your favorite day. So you go in there and have your favorite day you’ve ever had.”

Byrne: I had a bachelor party, which was G-rated. But I remember my friends made me walk around in a meat bathing suit with a banana hammock. I’m like, if I’m doing that at mine, what are these despicable, wealthy 10-year-olds doing? At the time, I was walking past the Museum of Sex—like, there’s got to be something that’s going to trigger something disgusting for me. Remember those Pez bracelets that you could eat as a kid? They had that in an underwear version. I was like, that’s what I’m going to wear.

Choi: P.J.’s attitude was, they’re illicit stockbrokers, they do a bunch of drugs, consume all this booze. There is no limit. There is no top. Anything fucking goes.

Byrne: I went to Sandy Powell, the Oscar award–winning costume designer with jet-red hair. I’m like, “This is candy underwear that just covers my dingle-dangle junk.” She looked at me like I was a despicable, disgusting man. She paused for 10 seconds, but it felt like two days. She looks at me. She looks at that. She just goes, “OK.”

Suplee: I’ve lost a lot of weight, I’ve got loose skin. I’ve never once felt proud of my body. I have a lot of body issues. I don’t really ever want to do a sex scene. I have four daughters. And then you’ve got Henry Zebrowski, who has got no body shame and is willing to put himself out there.

Zebrowski: I have done naked improv for a long time. Nudity just becomes the scenery. You’re kind of like, “When’s this going to get over with?”

Suplee: I wound up pitching stuff that allowed me to keep my clothes on. What if we’re playing cards? What if I’m asleep? What if I’m playing solitaire?

Sacca: He’s my favorite moment because he’s just sitting there having a conversation with somebody. It made it better.

Suplee: I have not been to an orgy, but I imagine that’s what an orgy smells like. Like every private part coming into contact with a private part.

Zebrowski: It got very human in that room.

Sacca: That day was Scorsese’s 70th birthday. We had cake.

In the midst of shooting, actor and character began to blur. Every day that DiCaprio arrived to set, he greeted hundreds of screaming women and paparazzi, affirming his A-list stature, before going to work, where he’d receive even more admiration on the fake trading floor. It was an eye-opener for Zebrowski and the other young actors, who couldn’t believe the way their leader had to operate—and how that might affect someone’s identity. “It was weird how many mountains had to move for him to move,” Zebrowski says. “I will never say he’s trapped, but he can’t go anywhere.”

Leo’s celebrity—and his connections around the city—further accented Zebrowski’s similarities to his own character. “I’m from a working-class family. This is my first time seeing any of this shit,” he says. “I went to the back door of 1 Oak, and you could see the models register. I’m not supposed to be there.” There was a similar vibe once the cameras began rolling. “All these friends and stockbrokers wanted to do was please Jordan,” Choi says. “Everyone on set, all they wanted to do was please Leo and Marty and Jonah. You would have given everything in the scene to make sure that they got what they needed.”

Unlike Belfort, however, who wanted his employees leveraged and desperate, DiCaprio came to set open-minded and generous, wanting to nail every scene with his collaborators. Ahead of speeches and group scenes, his dedication to preparation became an infectious trait and inspired the cast to deliver unblemished, gonzo performances. “When you have 500 people worshipping this guy, you can feel how energizing and exciting that would be,” Sacca says.

Suplee: When Leo’s giving those speeches, you almost feel like a fistfight could break out. He’s sending people off to war. He’s the general, and we’re going to go die for him.

Zebrowski: Chills still go up my spine when I think about it sometimes.

Sacca: He would come in with these 15-minute monologues, word perfect, accent perfect, still being able to improvise on top of it, coming up with ideas in the moment.

Zebrowski: He could do it one way, they’d give him a note, he’d do it a completely different way. They’d give him a note, he’d go back to the old way, mixed with the second way.

Sacca: I was enthralled with it, but it wasn’t necessarily the personality of Leonardo DiCaprio or Jordan Belfort’s words, it was this fucking performance that was like, “Holy shit, I don’t think I can do that.” I can’t crank out these monologues and do a gazillion takes of them and then be like, “All right, let’s do another one.”

Suplee: I’ve never seen a crack in Leo’s professionalism. They knock on his door to tell him they’re ready on set, and he is exploding from his chair. He is always prepared.

Zebrowski: For a bunch of green dudes who weren’t movie stars, he was extremely generous. That’s where the Belfort comparison doesn’t work, because that dude would have never shown up and done the dirty work himself.

Choi: It’s Hurricane Sandy. Everybody got sick over a three-week period. At some point, Leo got so sick that they shut down shooting for a day. We come back, and it’s the “I’m not leaving” scene.

Winter: I was writing it with Leo in mind. I had taped some of what Jordan said and then added my own embellishment to make it flow a little clearer or better if it needed it. A lot of times, it didn’t. Some of his stuff was just pure gold.

Byrne: We stayed up all night because the days moved. And I was like, “How the fuck is he going to do this?”

Choi: I happened to be outside smoking a cigarette, and I watched him in front of his trailer. I was like, “Oh, this guy’s rehearsing.” He would go through his motions. You’d see him kind of shake his head, turn around, go back to his starting mark in the parking lot, and do it again and again and again. He’s a craftsman. He’s pumped up with meds, he comes in, he does one rehearsal, and I’ll never forget, I could see in his head he missed a line. So he took one step back, remembered the line, and carried through with it. After that, he didn’t flub once, and he did it over and over with so much energy.

Sacca: It’s like a preacher, like Jim Jones speaking into a microphone to his disciples.

Choi: He was walking down the aisle bashing this microphone on his head. The prop guy came and showed us. It was caved in because he was smashing it on his skull.

Byrne: He’s a baller, dude. And honestly, that’s the world that I like to work in and live in. All day we’re here to kill. When we’re on set, we’re not coming back here again. Let’s make sure we fucking get it.

Zebrowski: [In that moment], Jordan’s not a bad guy. He’s not a fucking criminal. He’s helping all of us. You just don’t understand that what he’s doing is including you in his crime.

Byrne: When you see me get crazy at the end, it’s like, I don’t want my “god” to leave. I don’t want this meal ticket to end.

Choi: In the wedding scene where we’re all dancing and stuff, [Leo] had this huge case of 5-Hour Energy drinks. He came in right before like, “Everyone take one! Everyone take one!” And then we slammed it, and then we went into the scene.

Zebrowski: They’re putting us all in a circle, and they just have the music going.

Choi: We actually were talking about the Kid ’n Play dance. I go out there and do my dance move, and I knew to throw it right to him so he’d come out pop-locking. I was shocked that he was so fucking good with the pop-locking.

Zebrowski: I guess he’d been doing it for forever on his own.

Byrne: How fucking insane a dancer is Kenny? And then Leo saw that. He’s like, let’s fucking go. And then everybody had their moment to be who they were.

Choi: He looked at me and went, “Come here, come here, come here,” so that we could do the Kid ’n Play dance. That’s why he’s amazing. There’s some actors out there who don’t want you to steal the light.

When The Wolf of Wall Street premiered on Christmas Day, many critics lauded Scorsese’s return to bombastic filmmaking and comedic storytelling. But a vocal contingent couldn’t get past the movie’s inflated running time and excessive antics, believing they celebrated Belfort’s unethical behavior. As David Edelstein argued in his Vulture review , the movie is “three hours of horrible people doing horrible things and admitting to being horrible,” later calling it “thumpingly insipid.” Later, in an open letter to LA Weekly , a woman connected to Belfort accused the movie’s characters of “exacerbating our national obsession with wealth and status and glorifying greed and psychopathic behavior.”

The critique resembled the conversations surrounding Goodfellas , despite the fact that both movies highlight their protagonists’ calamitous, unglamorous falls. “When you see Ray Liotta getting chased by helicopters and he’s fucking high out of his mind on cocaine, at no point do you look at that and say, ‘God, being a gangster is pretty cool,’” Suplee says. Wolf ’s length and its punishing scenes of depravity, he adds, only helped illustrate the fatiguing and ruinous state that Belfort inspired and embodied. “It was the same experience I had with drugs, which is: You get high, and then you’re just chasing that experience over and over again and you never get it. You always get some muted version of it.”

Ten years removed, it’s perhaps easier to see the movie as a warning signal, an example of how scammy, magnanimous figures can organize a cultlike following and engender loyal defenders based on flashy facades and mostly empty promises. The examples of the last decade—the fanaticism around Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and so many more—feel akin to Belfort’s own crew hyping up their public con man. “It’s all about selling dreams,” Byrne says. “They are so good at selling you to make you buy in on believing it. And they create this world around them that you’ve now been absorbed into.”

Byrne, of course, might as well have been referencing the movie’s own world. For each of the Belfort boys, The Wolf of Wall Street remains the most memorable experience of their careers, a testament to the camaraderie they found together and Scorsese’s commitment to capturing everything as it looked. “Not just because it’s Martin, not just because it’s Leo,” Choi says. “It was the scope of it. You have everything there for you. And the more stuff you have that’s real, the more it informs the performance.” It made them itch to go deeper and wilder.

As Sacca notes, “I couldn’t wait to get off set and call my wife and say, ‘Let me tell you what fucking happened today.’”

Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times .

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The Wolf of Wall Street, review: Scorsese's film on rogue trader Jordan Belfort is on the money

The film is one of scorsese's bawdiest and most enjoyable efforts, article bookmarked.

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Early on in Martin Scorsese 's new film, Jordan Belfort ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) gleefully describes making money as being like "mainlining adrenaline." Belfort, the real-life rogue trader who set up "pump-and-dump" Long Island stockbroking firm Stratton Oakmont, is portrayed here as a reckless hedonist with an appetite for cocaine and hookers.

In theory, Belfort represents the most destructive and obnoxious side of late-20th century American capitalism. His antics in the early 1990s helped to pave the way for the financial crisis of 2008. As his mentor, Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), tells him, "We don't create shit, we don't build anything." Belfort is determinedly sexist. He organises dwarf-throwing contests to keep his staff amused. If he has any pity for the investors he rips off, he doesn't show it.

Jordan Belfort: The real wolf of Wall Street and the men who took him down

Nonetheless, as portrayed by DiCaprio , he is a very likable scoundrel. We can't help but root for him. He speaks direct to camera, as if confiding in us. He is witty and self-deprecating. That is what makes Scorsese 's raucously enjoyable film so problematic. Its claims as satire are undermined by its obvious sympathy for its protagonist. Belfort is far more charismatic than the dogged, dour FBI agent (Kyle Chandler) on his tail.

Everything about The Wolf of Wall Street is excessive. Its absurdly long three-hour length is in keeping with the indulgences of its characters. After all, this is no David Lean-like epic. It's a drama about the misdeeds of some sleazy Long Island telephone salesmen that could have been told in half the time.

All Scorsese fans know that the great American director initially intended to become a priest. There are some biblical elements here. Early on, in one of the few scenes actually set on Wall Street, we see Belfort as a young trader having a booze-filled lunch with Hanna. They're in a sleek restaurant high above the city. Hanna (played with sly comic relish by McConaughey) is clearly intended as the devil-like figure, telling his young acolyte what rewards might be his if he follows the paths of corruption. The scene is echoed later on, when Belfort tries to bribe the FBI officer, contrasting the luxuries he enjoys on his yacht with the underpaid drudgery of the officer's life.

One of the pleasures of the film (albeit probably a dubious one) is its lack of moralising. There is no hypocrisy about Belfort. He doesn't use his vast wealth to invest in the arts or charity and makes no attempts to cast himself as an upstanding citizen.

Telling his story has clearly energised Scorsese . The director is now in his early 70s, but The Wolf of Wall Street seems like a much younger man's film. It has a tremendous Goodfellas -style voice-over. Rodrigo Prieto's roaming cinematography also rekindles memories of the director's earlier gangster movies. The screenplay by Terence Winter (with whom Scorsese collaborated on Boardwalk Empire ) is full of profanity and very witty. Scorsese has enriched the film with bluesy music (including songs by Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker). He has also given his actors a license to play their roles in a broad, flamboyant fashion.

The plot ostensibly hinges on Belfort's attempts to smuggle money to Europe, where it will be hidden on his behalf by a suave Swiss banker (Jean Dujardin, The Artist ). What really drives the film, though, are the characters and the set-pieces.

On one level, this is also a buddy story. Belfort's second-in-command, Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill in a role you could imagine John Belushi playing in an earlier era), features far more prominently than his trophy wife, Naomi (Margot Robbie). Both are equally addicted to Quaaludes. Both are capable of extreme and infantile behaviour. (At one stage, Donnie swallows an errant worker's goldfish.)

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In the film's strangest, boldest scene, they pop pills which deprive them of the power of movement and speech. We see Belfort in what he calls his "cerebral palsy" phase, crawling down the stairs of the country club and driving his car home in erratic fashion. The sequence has a warped, cartoonish feel.

The Wolf of Wall Street: Most outrageous quotes

The sheer zest of the storytelling style and of DiCaprio's performance blinds us to how squalid much of The Wolf of Wall Street actually is. A female office worker has her head shaved as part of a bet (she wants to pay for breast implants). There is voyeurism (Robbie being watched through a "teddy bear cam" by her bodyguards) and violence (the gay butler beaten up and hung by his ankles from the roof of a building).

Belfort's memoir, on which the film is based, has a Walter Mitty-like aspect. As a master salesman, he makes an utterly unreliable narrator. We half guess that he is a fabulist, exaggerating wildly for effect and trying to live up to the image of Gordon Gekko and other "masters of the universe" he wants to emulate. In fact, he ran a relatively small-time "boiler room" brokerage in Long Island; he had a bad back, wrote off his yacht and soon received his comeuppance. He is too buffoonish to serve as a convincing symbol of corporate greed and evil.

In films from Taxi Driver to Goodfellas and The Aviator , Scorsese has portrayed every kind of American anti-hero, factual and fictional, from the lone vigilante to the reclusive tycoon. Given his eminence, it is tempting to see The Wolf of Wall Street as a morality tale about the debasing of the American Dream. In fact, it is far more superficial than that. This is Scorsese in National Lampoon mode – but in its own high-adrenaline, infantile way, it is one of his bawdiest and most enjoyable efforts.

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Jordan Belfort: The real wolf of Wall Street and the men who brought him down

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Iconic Scenes: The Wolf of Wall Street – The Yacht Bribe

I love The Wolf of Wall Street . I think it is a spectacular film that seems to grow more relevant as time passes. I also think that the central character and narrator, Jordan Belfort, is not the most important or key character – that is Agent Denham. So I’m looking at the brilliant scene where Belfort and Denham first meet.

What Happens

Multi-millionaire and thoroughly corrupt stockbroker Jordan Belfort invites two FBI agents to his luxury yacht after he learns that they are investigating him. Agent Denham, and a virtually silent partner, arrive for what starts as a very friendly meeting. Belfort hands over some of the information the FBI has been trying to get while constantly trying to impress them with his wealth and insisting he’s done nothing wrong. Belfort draws Denham into a conversation and it seems the FBI agent is not happy at being given the case and would be willing to play ball with Belfort. At which point, Belfort tries to bribe Denham, and then the tone changes. It’s immediately obvious that Denham is not willing to play ball and is determined to bring Belfort down. The conversation gets increasingly acrimonious and ends with Belfort literally throwing lobsters and handfuls of cash at the departing FBI agents.

When you sail on a yacht fit for a Bond villain, sometimes you gotta act the part

DiCaprio is sensational in this scene. Despite getting very good advice not to contact the FBI and try some scheming, this is exactly what Belfort does. They meet on his insanely luxurious yacht, where Belfort has beautiful women lounging on chairs, he is dressed in bright white “yacht clothes” and constantly turning on his beaming smile. He offers them lobsters and drinks. It does not seem to occur to Belfort that showing off his immense, and ill-gotten wealth, might not be the best idea when you’re being investigated for crimes in the stock market.

Belfort’s attempt at bribery is fantastic. Basically detailing a story where he advised someone in need of money in what stocks to invest in and that person making a fortune and how Belfort “would be willing to do that for anyone”. When challenged about this being a bribe Belfort reveals he researched what legally constitutes a bribe and that wouldn’t count. Again, it’s a little suspicious for someone to be able to recite the criminal code of a crime if they’re not a lawyer.

Good for you, Little Man

Oh, Agent Denham, you film stealing hero. Denham is played by Kyle Chandler who, and this is important for the Denham role, is your go-to guy for American decency (if you need someone younger than Tom Hanks), he is probably best known for his role in Friday Night Lights where he played an honourable, upstanding and inspirational football coach. Denham’s casual chatting with Belfort seems to suggest he is not interested in the case and possibly dissatisfied with his job, the attempted bribe being when he flips to his real character.

As Belfort becomes more aggressive Denham responds in kind and leads to one of the all-time best deliveries, “Good for you, little man,” when sarcastically congratulating Belfort on becoming a Wall Street douchebag without any help from anyone else. Belfort is stunned by this comment but mainly in that he can’t understand it…he’s rich, really rich, how can he be a “little man”, he’s a giant. A colossus. The embodiment of the American Dream. The thing is, of course, Denham is right.

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A lot of this scene is purely about status. Of all the places Belfort could have met with the FBI agents he chooses his insanely expensive yacht. He is obsessed with money and how much the FBI agents make, originally pretending to be sympathetic but quickly changing to just mocking them. Belfort assumes that because Denham works for the FBI for what to him is an insignificant amount of money he is a loser. The idea that Denham might believe in what he’s doing is either inconceivable or at best a pitiable weakness. To me, this is the best and most interesting scene in the whole film – not the drug-filled hedonistic parties, not the cult-like team talks Belfort gives his employees, not the incredibly charismatic phone calls Belfort makes when selling stocks but this scene where Denham sizes up Belfort and sees right through him.

Years ago David Cross and Bob Odenkirk made a sketch show called Mr. Show , which contained a sketch based on the premise “someone who makes more money than you is better than you”, so Van Gogh, Einstein and Galileo are actually pretty unsuccessful people. This is Jordan Belfort’s philosophy – he is better than just about everyone he meets because he is richer.

The Hero I’m Going To Be Back At The Office, When The Bureau seizes this boat!

All Belfort manages to do in this scene is upset the FBI and probably convince them that yes, he is absolutely breaking the law. It’s an interesting look at the dynamic of power in America (and indeed the whole world) – who is the more powerful person? Belfort with his huge personal wealth or Denham as a federal officer, a representative of the most powerful country on Earth. There was a lot of discussion at the time about if people actually saw Belfort as the hero of this film, that people liked him and wanted him to win. I saw this as Goodfellas but for white-collar crime. In this scene Belfort helps further his own downfall, antagonising the FBI. In the final moments of this scene, Belfort has just finished throwing money at Denham and his arrogance and deluded grandeur fade as he realises he has just made a terrible mistake.

Also Read: Iconic Scenes: American Psycho – Business Card Scene

Richard Norton

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The Wolf of Wall Street

Based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, from his rise to a wealthy stock-broker living the high life to his fall involving crime, corruption and the federal government. Based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, from his rise to a wealthy stock-broker living the high life to his fall involving crime, corruption and the federal government. Based on the true story of Jordan Belfort, from his rise to a wealthy stock-broker living the high life to his fall involving crime, corruption and the federal government.

• Martin Scorsese
• Terence Winter
• Jordan Belfort
• Leonardo DiCaprio
• Margot Robbie
• 1.8K User reviews
• 438 Critic reviews
• 75 Metascore
• 37 wins & 179 nominations total

• Donnie Azoff

• Naomi Lapaglia

• Agent Patrick Denham

• Max Belfort

• Manny Riskin

• Jean Jacques Saurel

• Teresa Petrillo

• Leah Belfort

• Captain Ted Beecham

• Nicky Koskoff ('Rugrat')

• Chester Ming

• Robbie Feinberg ('Pinhead')

• Alden Kupferberg ('Sea Otter')
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Matthew McConaughey 's scenes were shot on the second week of filming. The chest beating and humming performed by him was improvised and a warm-up rite that he performs before acting. When Leonardo DiCaprio saw it while filming, the brief shot of him looking away uneasily from the camera was him looking at Martin Scorsese for approval. DiCaprio encouraged them to include it in their scene and later claimed it "set the tone" for the rest of the film.
• Goofs During the Black Monday crash of 1987 all of the digital tickers in the background are green - which means the market is going up.

Max Belfort : What kind of hooker takes credit cards?

Donnie Azoff : A rich one!

• Crazy credits The film opens with a Stratton Oakmont advertisement hosted by Jordan Belfort. The film title appears only at the ending.
• Alternate versions News reports in local media have said the version of the movie showing in Abu Dhabi cinemas removes 45 minutes of content. Aside from nudity and sexual situations, most of the edits come from the film's 600+ curse words. Time Out Abu Dhabi reported offensive language was removed by "either by muting the audio temporarily or chopping chunks from scenes mid sentence, which produces a jarring effect for viewers."
• Connections Featured in The Daily Show: Jonah Hill (2013)
• Soundtracks Stratton Oakmont Composed by Theodore Shapiro

User reviews 1.8K

• Jun 18, 2014

The Movies of Martin Scorsese

• How long is The Wolf of Wall Street? Powered by Alexa
• Why was Bo Dietl confused about what Jordan said on the phone when we know Jordan was speaking clearly up to that point?
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• December 25, 2013 (United States)
• United States
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• Portofino, Genoa, Liguria, Italy (when Jordan and Naomi receive news of death of aunt Emma)
• Red Granite Pictures
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• $100,000,000 (estimated)
• $116,900,694
• $18,361,578
• Dec 29, 2013
• $407,039,432

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• Runtime 3 hours
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Surround 7.1

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15 Wild Facts You Didn't Know About Jordan Belfort, The Wolf Of Wall Street

Talk about bad behavior.

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Jordan Belfort’s memoir, The Wolf of Wall Street , may seem like a wild tale of excess wealth and bad behavior. And, uh, it is. But that doesn’t mean everything in it is true, or the whole story. If you watched The Wolf of Wall Street and thought, “This would never happen in real life,” buckle up, because these facts about Jordan Belfort are something else.

At times, the film makes The Hangover look like nothing more than a high school party. Between cocaine-fueled parties in the office and international financial crime, the movie does not give a single f*ck (of which, by the way, there are a lot in the dialogue itself ) about being sympathetic or moral.

But in Jordan Belfort’s memoir, titled — of course — The Wolf of Wall Street, things are even more wild, not to mention detailed. As a successful stockbroker con-artist in the 1990s, Belfort’s memoirs display the “profit-over-all” culture of Wall Street, portraying the lifestyle in all of its “depraved glory.” And Belfort didn’t hold back on the debauchery and bad behavior of his time drugged out and taking money. In fact, he revels in sharing things like how a friend electrocuted himself to save drugs from a sinking ship, or details of all the sex that happened in his office.

Of course, he also starts the memoir by admitting that it’s all based on his “best recollections” — which, considering a lot of the book is about how he was stoned out of his mind, means we should probably take some things with a grain of salt. But if you want to believe, I can’t blame you. For your reading pleasure, here are 15 wild facts about Jordan Belfort’s actual life and career, all according to his memoir.

1. Belfort once generated a $700,000 hotel bill.

According to his memoir, aka the book the movie is based on , he ran up the giant bill in Italy after being rescued when his yacht went down. (In his own words, “It wasn’t as bad as it seemed, though, because the bill included a $300,000 gold bangle studded with rubies and emeralds.”

2. One office junior agreed to have her hair shaved off on the trading floor in return for $10,000.

In his memoir, Belfort says the woman put on a bikini and let them shave her whole head in a “win-win” that let her pay off the debt for her boob job.

3. Belfort’s drug of choice was Quaaludes.

But if you saw the movie — did you really need someone to tell you that?

4. He confessed to making love to his wife on $3 million in $10,000 stacks of notes.

5. he once landed his helicopter on his back lawn, flying with just one eye open because he was so stoned he had double vision., 6. he sank his 167-foot motor yacht, complete with seaplane and helicopter, after overruling the captain and taking it into a mediterranean storm..

This was right before he ran up that $700,000 hotel bill.

7. He used his wife's sweet old aunt as a mule, helping him smuggle money out of the United States.

The real Jordan Belfort, aka the Wolf of Wall Street

8. He used his first Wall Street million to buy a white Ferrari because Don Johnson had one.

9. he woke up his secretary at 4 a.m. because he was in london and ran out of drugs. an emergency supply was immediately sent out on a concorde jet., 10. he kicked his wife down a set of stairs in front of their young daughter, and then drove his car through his garage door with the little girl unbuckled in the front seat when she tried to stop him driving off., 11. he claims to have ingested enough drugs to "sedate guatemala.".

And was flying his helicopter during it.

12. He helped take Steve Madden, one of today's most iconic fashion companies, public.

13 he woke up from a drug-filled bender with the police at his door — they arrested him for causing seven different traffic accidents that he had no recollection of., 14. facing up to three decades in prison for securities fraud, he snitched — becoming a government witness supplying information against his co-workers., 15. perhaps the reason belfort still seems to have such fond memories of the days he was flying high and mighty with other people’s money is that he only had to serve 22 months in jail, and was ordered to pay back $110 million..

Of course, since his arrest and conviction on charges relating to securities fraud, Belfort seems to have… calmed down. As of 2021, he was marketing himself as a motivational speaker and sales trainer. If you want to keep up with him these days, he’s on Twitter — where his handle is, yes, @WolfofWallSt .

This article was originally published on 12.26.13

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Wolf of Wall Street's Jordan Belfort: 'The lessons of the crash have been forgotten'

The convicted fraudster who inspired Martin Scorsese’s film of Wall Street excess is back with a new book and a warning that a big market correction is on the way

T he Wolf of Wall Street forgives but he never forgets. Ten years ago when I last met Jordan Belfort, convicted criminal, aspiring author and shortly to be a man at the center of a fierce bidding war for his biography, I suggested his hair was “the sort of dark brown that only passes for natural in LA”. Also his skin was a little too taut and maybe he wore lifts.

A decade on the 55-year-old still looks 10 years younger than his age. And his hair is still a rich mahogany. But he’s keen to point out it’s all natural. “I swear to God,” he says. “Do I dye my hair?” he asks Anne Koppe, his partner, as they sit in their Manhattan hotel suite.

Koppe – the sort of blonde who probably gets described as “willowy” and spends part of the interview curled round Belfort like a cat – points at his chest hair, peaking out from his polo shirt. That’s definitely brown. “It’s all an expensive dye job,” I say. The couple laugh. “You’re killing me,” he says.

Back in his native New York for a family visit Belfort seems very happy. It’s over 11 years since he was released from jail having served four years for running a “pump and dump” share selling scheme at his broker, Stratton Oakmont, that prosecutors said led to losses of approximately $200m. Life has moved on for him, and how.

His drug-fueled crime spree, in which he crashed a helicopter (while high on quaaludes), sank a yacht and arranged midget-tossing in his office, was turned into a film by Martin Scorsese starring Leonardo DiCaprio , that became an international box office hit.

He remains friends with DiCaprio. He taught the actor, who has never done drugs, how to act when he was portraying the scenes of Belfort out of his mind on his usual cocktails of narcotics. It was: “Valium for breakfast, marijuana for lunch and quaaludes for dinner,” one of his associates said.

Now he has another book out, Way of the Wolf , that promises to teach anyone how to be an ace – and ethical – salesman, and is in the early stages of turning his life story into a Broadway musical. Crime does pay!

Belfort, 20 years sober, lives a charmed life. It took almost seven years for the film to be made after it was optioned and even that delay worked in his favor. The script originally ended with Belfort in jail. By the time it was made, Belfort had rebuilt his business, giving seminars about his “straight line” sales techniques and the film ended with him giving one of those talks. It was “amazing” he says. “In a way the fact it was so late really worked.”

Now living in Los Angeles, Belfort says he leads a quiet life. “We are very boring,” he says. “All these delivery services, Doordash, Grubhub. They make it too easy to stay home and have bed picnics. That’s our favorite thing to do.”

But the bizarro world of the Wolf continues. The US government now owns the TV rights to his story (but not the Broadway ones) after the film’s producers, Red Granite Pictures, reached an agreement with federal prosecutors looking to recoup some of the billions they claim were stolen from the Malaysian government and used, in part, to finance the film.

Belfort says he had a strange feeling about those investors from the start. “The way they spent money, I have never seen anything like it,” he says. The Malaysian investors flew Kanye West out for the film’s launch party. When you steal money, he says, you just want to spend it. “It’s like a weird compulsion,” says a man who should know.

For his own part, Belfort says the high-spending days are over. He wants to pay back Stratton’s investors (he’s already paid about $20m) and get on with his life. But his celebrity – and his past – do get in the way.

All the harping on the past can be a bit annoying. “The movie came out a few years back but it depicts events from my life almost 30 years ago. I’m not the same Jordan Belfort. I continue to pay back money and I am hopeful that I will pay back all the money. It’s frustrating because you want to reinvent yourself and you feel you have. And he knows your past is always there.”

The book, he says smoothly moving into sales pitch mode, is about that. “It’s really about a strategy for coming back from failure,” he says.

“I should have written this book a long time ago,” he says. The problem is he hates writing. Anne shows me a video of him typing away in bed (they clearly spend a lot of time there). He holds the laptop in one hand and types one finger at a time. “Even better,” he says out loud in the video. “Better yet. Better though.” He pauses. “Once you’ve been. Once you HAVE been …” It goes on and on and looks excruciating. Anne says it helped him sleep. A lot.

But the result is fun, with more insights from the world of Stratton Oakmont and allusions to The Italian Job and Forrest Gump. It’s the sort of easy read that will no doubt fly off the bookshelves at airports around the world. It’s not just for sales people, he says. Everyone is always selling themselves. “There are so many people out there who are brilliant, hardworking and industrious but lack the art of persuasion,” he says. “And because of that they end up dying with their music on their lips. It’s crazy.”

If he wants to make the switch from villain to hero, there are others to take his place. In the pantheon of Wall Street villains Belfort has been eclipsed by Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro” who hiked the price of a lifesaving drug 5,000% and is now in jail after calling on his Facebook fans to steal a lock of Hillary Clinton’s hair . “There has got to be something wrong with that guy,” says Belfort. “Is he crazy?”

But it’s not the players, it’s the bigger picture on Wall Street that worries him these days. He says bitcoin is a bubble waiting to burst. “It’s artificially created scarcity,” he says. “The problem I have with bitcoin right now is that it’s very much like at the tail end of of 2007, 2008 right before the mortgage market blew up. You’d be getting your haircut and he’d be like: ‘Oh yeah I also do mortgages on the side.’ Everybody was a broker. Everyone’s flipping houses. Now everyone’s buying bitcoin. I promise you the end is near.”

He also thinks that the stock markets – which seem to reach record highs on a daily basis – are in for a fall. “I think the lessons of the crash have been forgotten,” he says. “It feels like we are going back into a cycle of irrational exuberance. Like with Trump. How can the country be that unsure of him, how can we be that unsure of him and the markets be so high? If there is that much uncertainty then there is risk,” he says. “The market itself might not be linked to reality any more,” he says. “It’s the ‘greater fool theory’. If there is a greater fool that will buy it from me at a greater price then I did good.”

Something is off and there is going to be a big correction, he says. “There is North Korea and yet … What are they going to do with the national debt? Something is going to happen.” Whatever it is, you get the feeling it’s going to work out just fine for the Wolf of Wall Street.

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The wolf of wall street – style break down (about that watch) | #151.

There’s not a moment that this movie slows down for a second. It’s redlining the entire time.

– John Shanahan.

Click to watch our chat on YouTube

The Wolf of Wall Street

Directed by Martin Scorsese (2013) based on the book by Jordan Belfort (2007)

Costume designer: Sandy Powell whose filmography includes The Irishman, Shutter Island, The Departed. 

On the podcast

Listen to the style discussion with Kyle Barbeau & Jon Shanahan on the podcast (available to listen on iTunes,   Stitcher  or  Spotify  or in the player below). You can also catch our chat on YouTube.

From the Book:

When he first started out Jordan Belfort talks about his time as a young broker making his way in the world with his cheap Clodhopper shoes and cheap blue suit. I wasn’t familiar with the term Clodhopper but have since learned it’s an ugly, unfashionable boot/shoe used mainly for heavy duty use. See more of the origin story on the Word Detective site . Jordan also wore a Timex watch that he purchased at JC Penny’s for 14 bucks.

When Jordan made money he spoke fondly about his hand made black cowboy boots. Each boot was cut from a single crocodile skin and was worth 2400 dollars. This he never compromised on, but his wive ‘The Duchess’ insisted that he got a different watch to the one he owned. An 18 thousand dollar gold Bvlgari watch which he described as ‘thin and understated’. Instead he got a solid gold Rolex; thick and chunky.

Who made the suits?

Jordan names Anthony Gilberto as the firm’s tailor. He is played in The Wolf of Wall Street by Leonard Logsdail and his son. Leonard made a lot of the suits for Leonardo Di Caprio and Jonah Hill, and you can read my interview with Leonard about this in a previous article here .

In the book Jordan describes Gilberto,

All day long he’d go from desk to desk of young Strattonites taking orders. Custom made suits 2000 dollars a pop. The dress code for men at Stratton Oakmont would be a custom made suit, white dress shirt, silk neck tie, solid gold wrist watch. For the women; go to hell skirts, push up bras and plunging necklines. 

Leonard Logsdail measuring a suit for a Strattonite

About the watch

In the film that Di Caprio throws during a speech, Kyle Barbeau has some intel on this,

So in the film, because Leonardo DiCaprio is a brand ambassador for TAG HEUER. He’s wearing TAG watches, not Rolexes and even though the real Jordan Belfort threw a solid gold Rolex watch, the one that Leo throws is a gold plated TAG. It’s because of Leo’s professional relationship with TAG but it’s it’s better for the film, because it’s not solid gold. It’s gold plated, it’s everything on the surface looks shiny and beautiful, but really underneath its base metal, which is Jordan Belfort which is Stratton Oakmont.

About that Yacht outfit Jon Shanahan says,

Yeah, that yacht outfit is the iconic look from this film. I mean that is the one that everybody remembers. It looks great. The white polo I mean, that’s just a classic, white polo that anybody can pull off. It’s, I think the way that he wears it there looks good in the film, but also would look great today. The pleated khaki, like trousers that he wears, too. The braided belt and everything. I think that’s a killer style. You can customize the size of the Polo logo on their website . So you can get the white polo. And then you can say if you want micro size, medium size, large size, etc.

God bless America

Shopping List

Next on my reading list is the Ralph Lauren Polo book, available on Amazon . I was tempted to get this tee (below) for the show but it was too last minute. This is the best reviewed on Amazon.

Other useful links:

The Wolf of Wall Street: Glen Plaid Suit in London

The Wolf of Wall Street: Leo’s Floral Swimwear

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Did Jordan Belfort Sink Coco Chanel's Former Yacht?

Jordan Belfort insisted that they go through a storm in the Mediterranean Sea, which wasn't the best idea while using Coco Chanel's Luxury yacht.

Jordan Belfort was always an eccentric character, although he probably never intended to become a star associated with Hollywood as he is today. His memoir about the time he spent manipulating stocks in the '90s became the inspiration for the acclaimed Martin Scorsese film, The Wolf of Wall Street .

It has been a surreal rollercoaster ride for Belfort, who spent nearly two years in prison for his crimes, but later saw Leonardo DiCaprio earn at least $25 million to portray him in the film.

The 59-year-old's current net worth is in negative figures , mostly thanks to the debts he still owes the victims of his scam. However, he is still making a killing from his story, as he charges a pretty penny for his motivational speech seminars.

As with any other film based on a true story, there were elements that were purely historical in the Scorsese picture, and others that were fictional - for dramatic purposes. One of the iconic scenes depicted Belfort and his friends in a sinking yacht , which actually turns out to be one of the crazy things that did in fact happen in real life.

Jordan Belfort Insisted That They Go Through A Storm In The Mediterranean Sea

The Wolf of Wall Street had a stellar cast, but the yacht scene itself is quite a star-studded affair. DiCaprio was joined by Jonah Hill as Belfort's business associate Donnie Azoff. Margot Robbie played Belfort's wife Naomi Lapaglia, in what was the breakout role of her career .

Also, on the yacht were Shea Whigham as the captain of the boat and MacKenzie Meehan as Donnie Azoff's wife. While on the yacht, they receive news that Naomi's Aunt Emma - under whose name Belfort had been hiding money in a Swiss bank account - had died.

At the same time, the hustler receives a call for a business opportunity in Monaco, which prompts him to insist that they go through a storm somewhere off the coast of Italy. Despite the protestations of the women, the boat captain concedes and the yacht ends up sinking.

RELATED: The Truth About Jordan Belfort’s Massive Net Worth And How He Really Spends It

In 2010 - about three years before the movie came out - Belfort confirmed that the story was in fact based on real life events, and he even confirmed that he was high on drugs at the time.

Belfort Was High On Substances

Talking about his intoxication during an interview with The Room Live, Belfort said that he had been high on several substances.' The movie would come to repopularize the term ludes, a sedative that was largely abused in the '70s as a party drug when mixed with alcohol.

In the yacht-sinking sequence in the film, Belfort at one point shouts at Donnie to go and 'get the ludes downstairs,' humorously proclaiming, "I will not die sober, get those ludes!" Belfort had gone on to explain the potency of the said ludes in his 2010 interview.

"For those who don't know... for the benefit of your viewers who are normal and haven't been addicted to ludes - thank God for that," he explained, "one lude is enough to knock out a 220-pound navy seal for eight and a half hours. I was taking four a day and walking around."

RELATED: 'Wolf Of Wall Street' Legend Jordan Belfort Flirts With Tana Mongeau On Twitter

The passengers were eventually rescued by the Italian navy. This is where the movie embellished some details differently than what actually happened in real life.

Belfort's Yacht That Sank Was Once Owned By Coco Chanel

Belfort also had a chopper on the upper deck of the yacht, which was shown to have been knocked off by the waves in the movie. In the actual events back in 1997, however, they had to climb up to the deck where the helicopter was, and literally push it off in order to make space for the Italian navy seals to land.

The yacht that sank that day in the Mediterranean was once owned by French fashion icon and entrepreneur, Coco Chanel . When he bought it, Belfort decided to name it Nadine, after his then-wife Nadine Caridi. In the film, the character's name was changed to Naomi, which is what the boat was subsequently called.

While this scene was mostly scripted according to actual happenings, there were also a lot of innovation going on on set. DiCaprio for instance improvised one scene where his character was totally drunk and unable to get into his car.

Matthew McConaughey also played a character called Mark Hanna, who kept humming and pumping his chest as he spoke. The actor would later reveal that this was his own personal routine that was imported into the story.

NEXT: Here's How Much Jordan Belfort Gets Paid For His Motivational Speeches