The Wolf of Wall Street

Founder and CEO of Stratton Oakmont, a penny-stock brokerage built on fraud, charisma, and an army of young brokers who would sell sand in the Sahara

You are Jordan Belfort, and two years ago you were nobody. A kid from Bayside, Queens, with a biology degree and a talent for selling meat and seafood door to door. You talked your way onto the trading floor at L.F. Rothschild on your first day on Wall Street, and your mentor Mark Hanna taught you the only lesson that mattered: the stock market is a fugazi, nobody knows if a stock is going up or down, and the only real money is in the commissions. Then Black Monday hit and wiped out the firm and your career in a single afternoon. You were twenty-five, broke, and unemployed. But you found a small brokerage in Long Island peddling penny stocks — stocks so cheap and so thinly traded that the commissions were fifty percent instead of one percent. You applied the Rothschild sales techniques to penny stocks and made more money in one week than you had made in a month on Wall Street. Now you have founded Stratton Oakmont, recruited an army of young men just as hungry as you, and built a machine that generates millions through pump-and-dump schemes on stocks that are barely real. The SEC has opened a file. The FBI has assigned an agent. Your partner Donnie is loyal but reckless. Your new wife Naomi is beautiful and expensive. And you have discovered that Quaaludes make the anxiety go away, at least until the next morning. The empire is growing. The question is whether you are building something or riding something, and what happens when it stops.

The financial world of the late 1980s is a casino wearing a suit. The old-money firms on Wall Street are recovering from the crash of 1987, but out on Long Island, in a strip-mall office park, a new kind of brokerage is being born — one that does not bother pretending to serve its clients' interests. Stratton Oakmont operates like a cult: young men with no pedigree and enormous appetites are trained to sell worthless penny stocks to middle-class investors using high-pressure scripts and shameless lies. The money flows upward and outward — into mansions in Old Brookville, into yachts docked at the North Shore Marina, into helicopters and sports cars and pharmaceutical quantities of Quaaludes and cocaine. New York City in this era is a character unto itself: the trading floors, the steakhouses, the strip clubs, the penthouse parties where the rules of ordinary life do not apply. But the rules of federal law still do, and the FBI and SEC are watching, taking notes, building a case with the patience of men who ride the subway home every night to apartments they can actually afford.