Jordan Belfort, born in 1962 in the Bronx borough of New York City, to parents Lear and Max Belfort is better known to the world as The Wolf of Wall Street. He is recognized around the world for his former business, lifestyle, books and a recent Martin Scorsese movie based on his life.
Since his early days, Jordan was determined to become rich and famous. This desire and motivation drove him to found Stratton Oakmont, a boiler room company which has now earned the dubious fame of defrauding investors of over $200 million. This brokerage firm sold penny stocks to gullible investors, using a pump and dump scheme leaving the investors out in the cold once the stocks started to crash.
While running Stratton Oakmont, Belfort amassed over $1 billion, with over 1,000 loyal employees under his orders. These men were carefully trained and excelled at selling the penny stocks to investors. This effective and well elaborated scheme put Belfort and his team in life's fast lane, making millions, partying hard and abusing drugs.
But the party could only last for so long, as the FBI smelled foul and soon an investigation on the affairs of Stratton Oakmont got initiated. The investigation accused Belfort of securities fraud and money laundering, and he got convicted of white collar crime. Belfort effectively served 22 months in jail, and was forced to pay restitution to the people that he defrauded. His original sentence was to spend 4 years in jail, but they turned out to be only 22 months after collaborating with the authorities on his case.
While in jail he was housed with Tommy Chong who was serving 9 months for having sold drug paraphernalia online. After having heard Jordan's epic stories, Tommy inspired him to turn his life's story into a book. This led to the writing and publishing of two books: “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Catching the Wolf of Wall Street“. Together, these books have earned him millions of dollars. Recently, his first book, “The Wolf of Wall Street” has been adapted to the big screen starring Hollywood stars Leonardo Dicaprio and Matthew McConaughey.
Clearly, Jordan Belfort had the brains, determination and the will to make money and spend it as he wished. Unfortunately, his unethical tactics landed him in jail. Today, as a reconstructed entrepreneur and businessman who has learned from his mistakes, he travels around the world offering motivational talks to young business people about sales strategies and ethics in business. Each talk earns him around $30,000, which isn't much compared to the amounts that he used to make at Stratton Oakmon. However, he's doing good by teaching people ethical ways to make money instead of focusing merely upon getting the money by any means possible. He hopes that this will help to keep people from getting into trouble like he did years ago.
While Jordan Belfort was able to amass incredible amounts of money easily in the 1990s through his fraudulent stock brokerage firm, he has paid dearly for his mistakes. He served 22 months in jail and paid more than $110 million in restitution to the defrauded investors. All of these things have helped to teach him some very valuable lessons. These are of such importance to him that he is now traveling around the world teaching these very same lessons to other people. It is now his goal to help people overcome these types of obstacles in their own lives by making ethical business decisions. He wishes to save people from the suffering that his actions inflicted on others.
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