Good Film, Extremely Bad Wolf
Martin Scorsese's new movie raises an important question: Will Jordan Belfort ever be forced to repay his victims?
Director Martin Scorsese has spent a sizable chunk of his career exploring the world of gangsters, from Mean Streets to Goodfellas to Casino to Gangs of New York to The Departed. And he has found the perfect man to extend his gangster chronicle in Jordan Belfort, the charismatic penny-stock swindler behind Stratton Oakmont and the central figure in Scorsese's new film, The Wolf of Wall Street. After a sizzling seven-year run, Stratton Oakmont imploded in the 1990s, costing investors more than $300 million.
Relentlessly profane and raucously funny, the characters in The Wolf of Wall Street, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort, consume drugs in quantities that would stun a charging rhino. And each scene seems to come with its own set of naked women and often public sex acts. It's exhausting, but dazzling.
Based on Belfort's memoir of the same title, the film shows a classic "pump-and-dump" operation, wherein brokers drive up the price of shares, then sell at the top and leave clients holding the bag. DiCaprio's Belfort is briefly portrayed as a straight arrow, until his financial career turns him into an overspending, drug-taking, hooker-hiring, client-bilking sociopath. "Whip their necks off, don't let 'em off the phone" was Belfort's motto, or so one former Stratton broker told a Forbes reporter back in the firm's heyday. That reporter is portrayed in the movie; the editor of her 1991 story is now an editor at Barron's.
As for what drew Scorsese to this material, one factor might be that the most outrageous incidents come straight from Belfort's mouth. Landing a helicopter on his lawn with one eye shut because he was high at the time? True. Persuading a female employee to shave her head by offering to pay for her breast implants? Belfort says he did that. Getting so loaded on maximum-strength Quaaludes that he wrecked his Ferrari without realizing it? That happened, too.
The movie begins with an ad for Stratton Oakmont that blatantly parodies Merrill Lynch's meandering-bull commercials: A male lion roams a trading floor, ready to eat everyone's lunch. After DiCaprio starts his voice-over with a tally of his possessions and drug intake—and that takes a while—there's a flashback to his sober young self being humiliated in his first Street job.
He's ambitious, but the system hasn't shown him yet how to be ruthless. In real life, Belfort was likely not so innocent. Before he sold rancid stocks, he sold meat and seafood, door-to-door, and ended up filing for bankruptcy at age 25 because, he once told a reporter, the margins in that business were too small. After signing on with a series of sleazy penny-stock operators, he started his own firm in a used-car dealership in Queens, N.Y.
IN THE FILM VERSION, Matthew McConaughey, who plays a senior broker at a white-shoe firm, takes Belfort to a fancy restaurant. The broker pounds his chest, advises the youngster to make some good old-fashioned cocaine a part of his daily routine, and tells him their profession is "fugazi"—fake: "Nobody knows if the stock is gonna go up, down, sideways, or in circles," he says.
Then Belfort runs headlong into an irresistible force: Black Monday, Oct. 19, 1987, when the market dropped 23% in a single day. Silence envelops the trading floor at the closing bell; there isn't another still moment in the film until Belfort himself bottoms out.
Having tried things the more-or-less straight way, a jobless Belfort discovers the world of penny stocks, where the broker's cut is 50%, not 1%. He founds what becomes Stratton Oakmont with a bunch of losers. Donnie Azoff, a composite character played by Jonah Hill, sidles up to Belfort at a restaurant and soon becomes his fawning partner. Belfort's actual partner, Daniel Porush, threatened to sue Paramount, the film's producer, if he was depicted in the film.
The firm becomes an amoral, bacchanalian cult. Prostitutes are an everyday presence; Belfort divides them into categories according to price and safe-sex requirements, dubbing the top-of-the-line hookers "blue chips" and the lowest-end ones "pink sheets." The male brokers' toxic attitude toward women is often hard to watch, and the scenes concerning "midget-tossing" contests are excruciating.
Belfort stages a gleefully crooked initial public offering for the shoe maker Steve Madden. He dumps his doe-eyed innocent wife (Cristin Milioti) for model Naomi, played by Australian Margot Robbie with a Brooklyn accent and a welcome amount of self-preserving common sense.
And he attracts the attention of an FBI agent, played by Kyle Chandler. Belfort stashes his dough in Switzerland, and that's where his unraveling begins.
The movie buys into Belfort's self-aggrandizing view of his Wall Street status, with DiCaprio even telling his acolytes they're going after "the wealthiest 1%." Moviegoers who buy that plotline, however, are purchasing another Belfort bill of goods.
In reality, the victims were more like John Kilroy, a Pizza Hut franchisee in Maineville, Ohio. Kilroy, who lost an "upsetting" amount of money in Stratton Oakmont's crooked stocks, says he received only token restitution from the roughly $11 million seized from Belfort and Porush.
After pleading guilty to fraud and money laundering in 1999, Belfort was ordered to make restitution of $110.4 million—plus interest. (Porush was ordered to pay more than $200 million.) Indeed, the judgment required Belfort to pay half of his earnings into a restitution fund, which, prosecutors say, he hasn't done.
In addition to $10.4 million in assets that were seized from him personally, Belfort has coughed up only $1.2 million so far—and most of that involuntarily. For example, he forked over $702,000 in royalties from his two memoirs only after a restraining notice was served on his agent, according to prosecutors. The Wolf of Wall Street was followed by Catching the Wolf of Wall Street, in which he revels in ratting out his former friends in return for a reduction in prison time.
Having served 28 months of a 42-month sentence, Belfort now claims he is reformed. He says he has made repeated offers over the past two years to turn over the money he received for the movie rights to the government. But prosecutors say he paid only $21,000 in restitution in 2011, the same year he signed the $1.045 million movie deal and reported the receipt of $940,500.
Belfort didn't respond to Barron's requests for comment. His attorney, Nick De Feis, at the New York firm De Feis O'Connell & Rose, says: "The parties continue to be in discussion about the restitution obligation."
FOURTEEN YEARS AFTER his guilty plea, Belfort is basking in his renewed infamy. He lives in a mini-mansion overlooking the ocean in Manhattan Beach, Calif., drives a Mercedes SL, and earns five-figure sums for his motivational speeches, according to a recent magazine article. Given that, you'd think he could have done a little bit better by his victims—and that the U.S. Attorney for New York's Eastern District, Loretta Lynch, could have pursued him more vigorously. The U.S. Attorney's office had no comment.
Scorsese, however, is not a prosecutor, and he's using Belfort to riff on a theme that runs through many of his movies. He is the great American bard of addiction—to violence as well as drugs. In The Wolf of Wall Street, which is scheduled to open on Christmas Day, sex takes the place of violence, and the drug consumption may be the greatest in the history of American movies. You can follow the plot, or you can measure the coke. You'll never be able to do both. But sex and drugs are just the trappings.
The movie's addiction narrative is about money, and how it turns a middle-class kid into, well, Jordan Belfort. Money is a drug that corrupts and rushes in to fill a moral void. And while DiCaprio owns this movie—there's scarcely a shot that doesn't include either his face or his voice—most of the other characters are equally contemptible. It's showcase Scorsese, the most sardonic entry yet in his cinematic rogues' gallery.
In the film's closing scene, the real Belfort, looking smugger and sleazier than even DiCaprio's masterful skills can capture, introduces the taller, handsomer film version of himself to a credulous audience that has paid to attend his get-rich-quick seminar.
In a recent letter to the court, Belfort's fiancée, Anne Koppe, argues that her husband-to-be is being persecuted by the government, that "he is an exemplary contributor to the economy," and that "[o]ur business and our family rely on his reputation of being an honest and honorable man."
Even DiCaprio might have been taken in. In a promotional video for Belfort's motivational-speaking business, the actor says, "Jordan stands as a shining example of the transformative qualities of ambition and hard work."
Victims like John Kilroy, who are still waiting for a second round of restitution money, are less convinced of Belfort's redemption. "Hopefully, he'll make a few more movies, and I'll get a check every year," he says, "but I'm not going to hold my breath."
