Jordan, however, cannot bear to quit and talks himself into staying in the middle of his farewell speech. Fearing for his son, Jordan's father advises him to leave Stratton Oakmont and lie low while Jordan's lawyer negotiates a deal to keep him out of prison. Jordan learns from his private investigator that the FBI is wiretapping his phones. Brad does not say a word about Donnie or Jordan to the police. He uses the wife and in-laws of his friend Brad Bodnick, who have European passports, to smuggle the cash into Switzerland.ĭonnie and Brad get into a public brawl Donnie escapes, but Brad is arrested. To hide his money, Jordan opens a Swiss bank account with corrupt banker Jean-Jacques Saurel in the name of Naomi's Aunt Emma, who is a British national and thus outside the reach of American authorities. This brings him and his firm further to the attention of the FBI. In 1993, Jordan illegally makes $22 million in three hours upon securing the IPO of Steve Madden. Meanwhile, the SEC and the FBI begin investigating Stratton Oakmont. He has an affair with a woman named Naomi Lapaglia when his wife finds out, Jordan divorces her and marries Naomi in 1991. Jordan becomes immensely successful and slides into a decadent lifestyle of prostitutes and drugs. To cloak this, Jordan gives the firm the respectable-sounding name Stratton Oakmont in 1989.Īfter an exposé in Forbes, hundreds of ambitious young financiers flock to his company. When the perpetrators of the scheme sell their overvalued securities, the price drops immensely and those who were conned into buying at the inflated price are left with stock that is suddenly worth much less than what they paid. Jordan's tactics and salesmanship largely contribute to the success of his pump and dump scheme, which involves inflating the price of a stock through issuing misleading, positive statements in order to sell it at an artificially augmented price. They recruit several of Jordan's friends, whom Jordan trains in the art of the "hard sell". Jordan befriends his neighbor Donnie Azoff, and the two found their own company. Thanks to his aggressive pitching style and the high commissions, Jordan makes a small fortune. Jordan loses his job following Black Monday, the largest one-day stock market drop in history, and takes a job at a boiler room brokerage firm on Long Island that specializes in penny stocks. He is quickly enticed into the drug-fueled stockbroker culture and Hanna's belief that a broker's only goal is to make money for himself. In 1987, Jordan Belfort lands a job as a Wall Street stockbroker for L.F.
It was a major commercial success, grossing $392 million worldwide during its theatrical run, becoming Scorsese's highest-grossing film.
The film premiered in New York City on December 17, 2013, and was released in the United States on December 25, 2013, by Paramount Pictures, and was the first major American film to be released exclusively through digital distribution. Leonardo DiCaprio, who was also a producer on the film, stars as Belfort, with Jonah Hill as his business partner and friend, Donnie Azoff, Margot Robbie as his wife, Naomi Lapaglia, and Kyle Chandler as FBI agent Patrick Denham, who tries to bring Belfort down. It recounts Belfort's perspective on his career as a stockbroker in New York City and how his firm, Stratton Oakmont, engaged in rampant corruption and fraud on Wall Street, which ultimately led to his downfall. The Wolf of Wall Street is a 2013 American film directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Terence Winter, based on the 2007 memoir by Jordan Belfort.