Jordan Belfort - White Collar Criminal

it's the 9th of December 2013 and journalists photographers and fans are gathered on the Shawn Solis say they're all trying to attract the attention of movie star Leonardo DiCaprio he's attending the premiere of his latest film the wolf of Wall Street in it he plays one of his most memorable roles it's the extraordinary story of a trader who was worth millions at the age of only 27 but what people don't know is that it's the story of a real man he's in his 50s a handsome man and his name is Jordan Belfort he's the real hero of the film he inspired this incredible success story that you just couldn't invent [Music] and the craziest part is that it's all true we found this footage previously unseen in France in it you can see all the traitors excesses at the age of 28 he owned this yard a helicopter and he threw the most incredible parties work work work play play play in the 1990s Jordan Belfort was the incarnation of American success with all its successes sex drugs and daughters gone or I saw him they were always drugged up they were always on drugs I mean it was amazing the last time I saw Jordan his eyes were out here I mean they were always on drugs the incredible story of Jordan Belfort was that of a New Yorker from a modest background who was to make hundreds of millions of dollars without having any qualifications his only weapon was his remarkable charisma this man could sell ice to Eskimos that's a gift a talent he was born with Joran Belfort recounted his life in detail in his autobiography published in 2006 a fascinating book that billed the myth of the wolf of Wall Street but in his quest for power Jordan tends to forget that he built his empire on massive fraud Belfort was the right guy at the right place committing the right kind of crimes if you're a criminal we went to meet the people who knew him his former employees his lawyer the victims of his scams and the man who investigated him for years in order to arrest him they all talk about Jordan Belfort as a calculating man without morals or scruples a complex character who inspired as much admiration as hatred George Belfort is a lot of fun to be around I really like him I don't trust him I wouldn't give my money but I love hanging out with it in this program we profiled this symbol of the crazy 90s when money was king [Music] [Music] [Music] if jordan belfort is the perfect incarnation of the American Dream it's because this man who caused the New York Stock Exchange to quake was born here in the Bronx in 1963 at the time it was one of the poorest areas of New York riven by gang warfare and drug trafficking Jordan came from a modest family he was the second son of Leah and max Belfort and his parents profession no doubt had an effect on his life they were accountants so Jordan grew up hearing about the economy finance and profits his childhood was marked by the social deprivation in his neighborhood and the fear of not having enough money the 1970s were a period I think what Americans worried a lot about inflation and you know maybe that was part of New York City's problem too prices were rising and so everything costs more for the city and the revenues were not coming in fast enough to cover the city's costs to protect their children from the criminality in the Bronx the Belfort's decided to move they couldn't afford to go to the center of New York in Manhattan [Music] so they chose the less central but much quieter neighborhood of Queens they settled here in Bayside it's a small town beside the Atlantic Ocean we managed to find the place where the family lived it's an unglamorous apartment block typical of the American middle classes the parents names are still on the intercom here Jordan turned out to be a very unusual child he suffered terrible panic attacks and slept very little [Music] samih his mother would go into his room at night to check he was asleep and he'd be sitting up on his bed he wasn't asleep at all Jordan always had a complex about his roots he was Jewish and a bit ashamed of it because the people with the power here are middle-class Protestants the famous wasps who live in the smart areas of Manhattan even as a child he wanted to climb up the social ladder he had a need to turn the tables on his humble background [Music] he described himself as a little Jewish kid you get the feeling he wasn't comfortable he'd have liked to look more like the American ideal he'd have liked to be tall blond and slim whereas he was short and a bit plump he was a good-looking kid when you see him but he didn't necessarily think he was so he was uncomfortable both physically and socially he didn't like the fact that he was middle-class what he dreamt about were beautiful hugely expensive cars and tall blonde supermodel women men can talk more there as a teenager Jordan had expensive tastes but as he came from a modest family he had no choice if he wanted pocket money he had to work in the summer when he was 16 a heat wave hit New York Jordan brought two cool boxes and went to a park place to his home [Music] one summer was selling Isis on the beach but he was going like from blanket - blanket trying to sell the stuff and he was doing very well he is a natural orange salesman when we get going and then he was getting his friends to do it and even as a teenager he was able to get other people to do selling for him and make money on them [Music] at the end of the summer he tallied up the accounts Jordan had only invested about $10 at the start but after just two months he pocketed an incredible jackpot of $20,000 a businessman was born [Music] Jordan Belfort's saved the money to fund his university studies he left the family home and traveled to Baltimore three hours drive from New York he enrolled at a college that he thought would fulfill his dreams of wealth the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery the things didn't go as planned there his mother wanted and went to dental school the first day he was told by whoever was up there standing in front of class you know the glory days of making money and dentistry you're over so he said what the hell am I doing here he's lever he got up and left the class and never went back to dental school much to his mother's despair but he quickly landed on his feet that was 1983 Jordan Belfort was 20 years old and had no qualifications he'd hoped to get back at the wasps through the prestigious profession of dentistry it hadn't worked out so he went back to what he'd always been good at buying and selling he started working as a salesman in New York he drove around the city in a truck selling meat and frozen seafood Jordan joined the company became a Salesman and quickly broke all the sales records he was the best in the company so that of course gave him an idea he asked a friend to leave with him to set up their own company selling meat and frozen products daughter doll after a few months Jordan resigned and set up his own company in competition he was sure he didn't need any help and that money would pour in for the first few months he was right at first they had just one truck and soon afterwards they had 26 trucks he realized that when you set up a business and buy from wholesalers you can pay them after you've sold the stock he identified a potentially profitable form of financial leverage the awkward and anxious teenager had turned into a successful entrepreneur with money pouring in he'd found the way to beat his inferiority complex Jordan had caught his revenge and he wanted people to know about it at the age of just 21 he bought himself a red Porsche but he liked to drive around the streets of Bayside [Music] but behind this show of success there was a major problem Jordan only thought about money he didn't care about the law he left invoices unpaid his bankers Harris him he had to file for bankruptcy foreign for him the worst thing was when the bailiffs came and seized his Porsche it was his first Porsche and to him it was the symbol of his social emancipation his social rise he shed a tear but that was it you could tell that he would do anything to avoid making that kind of mistake again the young man started again from scratch a neighbor advised him to look for work in this street in lower Manhattan Wall Street it's the historical business center of the city the symbol of America's financial power back then in the 80s Wall Street was bubbling all New Yorkers believed that the stock exchange had saved the city from bankruptcy Jordan was immediately smitten he could see the guarantee of an easy job and the promise of making lots of money in addition there was a film out back then about the world of finance that was Wall Street by Oliver Stone starring Michael Douglas the story revealed the financial misdeeds of Gordon Gekko an unscrupulous trader it made an impression on Jordan and gave him a vocation by the wall something big is going down I want you to fill out the missing picture Wall Street well-dressed young men we're making a lot of money they were calling themselves masters of the universe they were doing deals I think the movie called Wall Street which was in that late 1980s captured the spirit of the place there were people making a lot of money there the aim of Gordon Gekko was to make as much money as possible his famous line was to become Jordans man-traps mankind and greed is good it was in 1987 when Jordan was 24 but he got on a bus wearing his newly pressed suit with his CV in his hand he was determined to conquer Wall Street this was when the course of his life changed forever Jordan's appointment was on the 23rd floor of a skyscraper on the famous 5th Avenue in Manhattan he was applying to be a trainee trader with NF Rothschild [Music] Oh a frost yield was a what we call an investment bank the securities companies the brokerage houses built big trading floors and hired more people using computer systems to trade securities and online trading came in where people could use their computer to buy and sell stocks you know that really became big in the 1980s and 90s even in his job interview Jordan impressed his audience [Music] I'm appearing his employer said give me a reason why I should employ you he replied what you want me to do and he said make me want to buy something he picked a stock from the index at random he knew nothing about it and he started her sing the praises of this stock he said it's going to perform well profits are guaranteed and the employer said what you just did is totally illegal because we never guarantee profits but I'll still give you a job the next day Jordan entered a legendary place the boiler room it was packed with traders glued to their phones [Music] it was a visual shock but he described at length in his book it was a sound I'd never forget like the roar of a mob a sound that would change my life forever it was the sound of young men engulfed by greed and ambition pitching their hearts and souls out to wealthy business owners across America it's sort of an exciting thing because you're making big decisions and split-seconds you know you're buying in one place and selling in another and if you make a good deal you yell hooray and if you have a bad deal you say oh no and utter some profanity or something like that oh yeah he couldn't believe it he was very surprised as someone from the middle class in Queens to be entering this sort of temple of Finance with such a prestigious name for six months the trainee learned the tricks of the trade as he was new he was only a connector his task was to call potential buyers on the phone and then to pass them to the trader to conclude the deal [Music] in this new environment Jordan was continually humiliated and insulted by his superiors but he swallowed his pride after several months he obtained the Holy Grail at trade his license it was September 1987 and Jordan was getting ready to start his rise in the spheres of finance when suddenly an unforeseeable event brought it all to an abrupt halt on October 19th 1987 the stock market fell like 22% in one day its biggest one-day drop ever stocks lost like 22% of their value in one day the sky fell in he found out that LF Rothschild the temple of finance was going under and he lost his job there was no question of promotion or even of working at LF Rothschild anymore it was hard for him he was very scared of having to start all over again [Music] there was no more work in Wall Street so Jordan looked in the papers for a new job that would make his fortune one ad caught his eye a brokers job in a company some distance away from Manhattan the investors Center was a company that was doing well out of some somewhat unusual stocks [Music] they're called penny stocks sometimes even sent stocks their stocks with a very low price these stocks aren't listed on the market so there's no regulation anything goes prices can be manipulated at will here they specialized in selling packages of stocks to credulous pensioners or to somewhat gullible savers they thought they'd hit the jackpot by betting on small companies that were meant to skyrocket in a few months in reality the person who made money was Jordan in his first month working at the Investor Center he made $38,000 the next month he made 70,000 so the trend was definitely upwards in the first year he made $500,000 in total so he didn't lose out thanks to these stocks that he sold for a few cents Jordan finally became rich he took a perverse pleasure in strutting about outside the local Country Club the exclusive reserve of the protestant bourgeoisie the Jewish boy from the rough part of New York would never be allowed to join that Club [Music] even when he was at the top he wanted to prove that he was better than all these wasps to crush them ridicule them and extract money from them Jordan was now 26 his sales technique was fearsome he decided to go into business for himself with a friend and colleague Danny porush together they set up a company called Stratton Oakmont and the name was deliberately chosen to give them an air of respectability that was already the start of the fraud the two associates moved into a former garage on Long Island similar to the investors center Stratton Oakmont sold stocks in small companies with low stock prices but this time Jordan had a brilliant idea they would approach big players businessman able to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars [Music] to do that he took on about a dozen friends that he knew from his childhood in Bayside guys who were not very bright and knew nothing about the world of finance cycles it started like any small slightly half-baked company things were a bit haphazard the start was lackluster so Jordan worked more on his sales technique after a few months he gave his employees a sort of handbook of hard selling named the straight-line persuasion system it anticipated the responses of potential clients he gave them a sheet of prepared dialogue which his employees just had to learn by heart in order to be even more persuasive there Shas we tracked down Jordan Belfort's lawyer and he well remembers the patter the fledgling traders learned by heart potential investors this stock is going to double in price it's going to triple in price we have inside information we're very close to management we know things that others don't know this is a great opportunity I've got 5,000 shares left it's going very quickly and then if they had pushback from individuals who said well I need to talk to my wife the broker would say what do you mean you have to talk to your wife don't you make the decisions in the house what are you afraid this is an opportunity your wife will love you for this the success was remarkable after only one year Stratton Oakmont moved to much larger brand new premises this is 1979 Marcus Avenue it was behind these windows that Jordan Belfort's legend was written after just a few years he had over a thousand people working here and he made several million dollars with his particularly effective methods [Music] the choice of this location away from Wall Street was not by chance according to Joel Cohen the prosecutor who investigated Stratton Oakmont over a long period I suspect they opened it in Long Island in this warehouse building because it was inexpensive and because they were able to recruit large numbers of relatively uneducated but very eager and hungry young brokers in Long Island who thought this was the greatest job in the world they didn't have a chance in Manhattan to recruit the same kinds of people among the young wolves attracted by the easy money was Roman and sorry who is agreed to give us his exclusive inside story on this unusual company one of the young kids Walter's not gonna disclose the name Trudeau and he was wearing a presidential Willis and I looked at the watch and asked what do you do and he says stop and my question was do you make a lot of money he says I made more or less fewer than you're gonna make ever in your life my question was how do I get gave me this card and he said you wanna make money Peter said [Music] the next day Roman went to Long Island he was amazed by what he saw in the Stratton Oakmont parking lot I don't remember any cars there were like sheep inside the atmosphere was supercharged even at 6:30 in the morning [Music] it was Roman wasn't that unusual jordan belfort recruited his employees straight out of school when they were 18 or 20 that way he could train them in his unusual sales techniques some were college graduates many were high school graduates there they are required still today in the United States to pass a license was called a series 7 Broker Dealer license it's it's a not a very difficult exam many of them had failed it several times and in fact we came to discover when we began to try to to arrest or use as cooperating witnesses some of the brokers that many of them had hired people to take the test for them in their name every morning Jordan Belfort stood on a platform and gave an impassioned speech to his Strato nians as he liked to call them these moments of jubilation were crucial to the management of the company the 28 year old boss promised the young traders lavish lifestyles hungry for money and adrenaline they literally gulped down his words devastated Paducah mystic he had an extraordinary ability to fire up his teams with these big speeches he was an excellent orator he was a guru satirist who he was their cult leader he even admitted he was like a cult leader today he would get up there he would tell him how they were gonna make a lot of money they were gonna own it they were gonna be like him and they were gonna party really hard and they did to keep up with the hellish pace the traders gave in to the temptation of alcohol and drugs that made them elated and hypersensitive cocaine and Mandrax a drug that gets you high all these substances were in common you said Stratton Oakmont dealers even delivered direct to employees in their offices when you live in a fast-paced life you need a getaway and because you can't get away away I think you don't have the money but because you don't have the time just give you a temper again they vacate your mind it puts you in a different world Aldon Cass is a psychologist he's helped many Wall Street traders to escape from the grip of drugs a lot of the brokers who were using drugs were doing it to kill the pain and the guilt and their conscience for having you know misleading investors Jordan himself was completely addicted he took dozens of pills every day when I arrived on Wall Street I knew nothing about drugs I never took them but after a while it seemed completely normal it's like getting into a hot bath at first you dip your toe in and take it out straight away because it's too hot five minutes later you're right in it and you feel great whenever I saw him they were always drugged up they were always on drugs I mean it was amazing the last time I saw Jordan his eyes were out here I mean they were always on drugs the young traders treated Stratton Oakmont like a huge playground there was an incredible atmosphere of debauchery rarely seen in trading rooms even Jordan was slightly taken aback by what went on one day he saw two employees a woman and a man the woman was a 17 year old assistant and she was giving the man a blow job in the office elevator it was a glass elevator so everyone could see he told me when I saw that I was very shocked but when I realized that no one complained people who saw it didn't complain and neither did the assistant who done it I left them to it and if people are having fun that's fine he did send a memo around the company telling employees not to have sex between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. and the memo had a picture of a couple having sex doggystyle in a circle with a line through it like a sort of stop sign but the rule wasn't obeyed jordan belfort wasn't even the first to break it when he organized ever crazier challenges to motivate his stratton oakmont troops we used to have a opportunity you have two people sitting on each side of the table there's a little table density what people have to close a sale whoever encloses the Silvestre is reward jordan belfort would have no hesitation in spending tens of thousands of dollars on parties to celebrate a stock market launch or a contract the parties were incredibly divulged [Music] we found this footage which has never previously been broadcast in France it shows coach loads of Stratton Oakmont employees arriving at parties given by their boss [Applause] [Music] if you lifestyle Wall Street guys that's all gold [Applause] Jordan Belfort pampered his employees with lots of boozy parties they wanted to give the impression of a company where anything goes and where you have to live for the present [Music] [Music] [Applause] Jordan collected gleaming new cars traveled around by helicopter and even bought himself a 50 meter yacht the height of luxury Jordan Belfort's rise in society was all about owning things and showing them off today we'd say it was all about the blame in being it the final piece to complete his image as the perfect millionaire was his wife Nadine a beautiful British model that he'd noticed in a TV advertisement his hold over her was money and her hold over him was love or sex all at any rate the illusion of having a perfect marriage Jordan lived at 200 miles an hour he finally had his social vengeance and as if to validate his power he bought this house which we visited in Long Island it was previously owned by the former president of the New York Stock Exchange and it's in Brookville the super smart neighborhood of Long Island he said to me you know nothing was ever enough for me even when I bought this house I thought driveways not long enough I'm gonna have to put it in longer driveway that was the kind of guy he was it was never enough he reminds me kind of like that little brother that people want to ignore and refuses to be ignored and he's gonna show you one day and jordan went out to show everybody surprisingly this excessive lifestyle of crazy spending was also a well thought out strategy to control his Strato nians to drive them to sacrifice themselves at work in order to imitate his lifestyle in spite of all the money they earn they're all as broke as each other they spent every cent they have trying to imitate my lifestyle so they end up having trouble making ends meet when they earn a million a year what I mean is it's easier to control them if they're broke that's kind of what makes them tick they're very calculating and manipulative individuals that manipulate others to gain attention they are masters at playing off of human psychology of others and really trying to get people to want to be you know with them and then they want to be in a power position of power and control where other people are coming to them all the time makes them feel better about themselves but this whole world of decadence where millions of dollars rained down every day was in reality built on massive fraud in 1991 Forbes the most important magazine in the financial world ran a profile of Jordan Belfort it was a killer blow the journalist highlighted the dubious dealings at Stratton Oakmont the article was quite negative the title was steaks stocks what's the difference it was a play on words between steaks and stocks referring to his past as a meat salesman so the title was quite ironic the article described Jordan as a person whose only ambition whether he was selling steak all stocks was to make himself lots of money the article stated in black and white that Stratton Oakmont was selling stocks too gullible investors who were completely taken in so even at the time the somewhat dubious actions of Stratton Oakmont were common knowledge we tracked down one of the victims of Jordans company Robert Sharon was contacted by Stratton Oakmont in 1992 at the time he was a young textiles entrepreneur and wanted to invest his savings I got a call from one of his brokers name Paul Grecco and Paul says my name is Paul Grecco I'm with Stratton Oakmont and I was referred to you by I can't remember the fellows name but it was one of my classmates at Harvard Business School and he said I made him a lot of money he gave me your name said that you were a player that you were aggressive that you were smart that that you'd be interested in me making you a lot of money too and that kind of opened the dialogue it's weighted by the caller's unstoppable patter Robert Sharon allowed himself to be tempted in by the promise of quick profits first of all he invested $11,000 in some stocks that proved to be very lucrative [Music] he let me make a little money out of it made a couple of thousand out of that so am I here to saying how you know 20 percent and you know a month that's terrific and of course then he said okay now let's get more aggressive and so I was ready to jump in and I did the entrepreneur bought several hundred thousand dollars worth of stocks through Stratton Oakmont like him the other victims of this fraud were carefully targeted they were individuals living outside the state of New York easily influenced people without connections to the world of Wall Street it was impossible for them to check the fine words of the traders there's always some incredible story behind them the difference between today and then in 1992 there wasn't an Internet where you could quickly get on an internet and verify the story they would say oh this is the greatest stock ever we've got this new company it's going public it's going to sell water in supermarkets in big jars and nobody's ever thought of this before and people are gonna want to come to the supermarket and refill these these these recyclable jars and it's going to be a huge winner and you're gonna get in first the company is just a vacant storefront in New York there's not even a company there it's just a storefront with a name but Jordan wasn't satisfied with this kind of deception he always wanted more like a compulsive gambler so he then perfected another kind of scam called pump and dump [Music] pump-and-dump is where you pump the price of the stock up and then you dump your holdings at the inflated price there was a famous phrase they use okay let's get on the phones now and put some lipstick on this pig you know in other words it was a bad thing they were selling but they were going to put lipstick on it perfume maybe and make people think it was good the best example is the Steve Madden case in 1993 Jordan personally wanted to stake $500,000 in the fashionable Footwear brand [Music] Jordan wanted to own 50% of the company's capital and he had a valuable piece of knowledge he knew that the brand was soon going to launch on the stock exchange in reality Stratton Oakmont wasn't allowed to own such a large proportion of the company so Jordan resorted to an illegal tactic he set up front companies run by his friends it has escaped the attention of the SEC the Securities and Exchange Commission is the watchdog of the American Stock Exchange the day Steve Madden was launched on the stock exchange Stratton Oakmont bought large quantities of stocks from the front companies at $5 everyone in the market was surprised at this action and thought they'd better do the same so they bought Madden the stock price shot up Jordan had succeeded in making it rise artificially to $18 and then he told all his traders to sell he made a huge profit in ten minutes jordan belfort pocketed twenty million dollars and he repeated this illegal operation more than once Stratton Oakmont took public around 34 35 companies most of them were companies were the fundamental idea behind the company was not very good or was horrible made no sense whatsoever and the idea of what the company would do didn't really matter much to fell for it because he his plan was not genuinely sell a company idea but to gauge and pumping down the people who suffer most in this sort of scam are those who buy stocks a few days after the artificial inflation of the stock price for them the stock price nosedives to below the initial buy-in level that's what happened to Robert Sheeran for months all he received from Stratton Oakmont was bad news when I finally kind of woke up and asked to get all the funds out that's when the real dogfight began I was in screaming matches with the with Greco's boss telling them sell whatever you got to sell it out I want my money out I'm done screaming the guy was on the other end of the phone just saying you're too freaking stupid to ever make any money you're an idiot you know just screaming at me twice they flipped it into another stock rather than sending me the money back they just took it flipped it to another one so it took an incredible amount of effort to get them to finally cash out the account and send me what was left in the end Robert Sheeran lost a large proportion of his savings a hundred and seventy thousand dollars and four others the situation was even worse many of his victims hundreds of them lost much or all of their life savings to his schemes many of them lost the ability to pay for their homes their retirement funds to pay for their children's college or university funds those are facts and when Belfort says they were all rich is if somehow that makes it different it's factually inaccurate and it's offensive [Music] on Wall Street people were starting to talk about this company that made millions and rewarded its traders with prostitutes after receiving many complaints the SEC the stock exchange watchdog was on the trail of Jordan Belfort in 1992 two agents moved into the offices of Stratton Oakmont they were looking for any documents that could indicate fraud [Music] for fashion the heating was turned off so they felt really cold the room was of course bugged in fact Jordans idea was to follow the saying keep your friends close and your enemies closer Jordan and Danny were huge risk takers they thought they could beat the SEC and quite frankly we were successful for a number of years in beating the SEC but the SEC failed to catch Jordan so one man swore that he would get the wolf of Wall Street that was Gregory Coleman an FBI agent he agreed to talk to us about the most important investigation of his life when it all started he was 30 a straightforward honest man with a modest lifestyle he was the opposite of Jordan Belfort and he particularly dislikes Jordans greed and profligacy one of the things we discovered was actually it was very difficult to make any progress in the beginning the reason being many of the brokers and many of the employees were making millions of dollars young guys in their early 20s mid 20s making millions in income and there was really no incentive to cooperate with the FBI or with regulators so it was very difficult for us to make sort of inroads into the fraud itself he's a very charismatic guy he's a very good motivational speaker and so I knew my job would be difficult it was a game of hide-and-seek with the FBI for which he had utter contempt so he loved it he was a crook and he knew it but as he had no scruples or remorse it wasn't about good and evil for him it was about who won and who lost so he was going to play with the FBI and show them just how hopeless they were and the first victory in the war went to the SEC after two years investigation it had managed to collect conclusive evidence of wrongdoing Jordan Belfort had to give up the leadership of his empire to pay a fine of two million dollars and the worst punishment of all to lose his traders license [Music] Jordan Belfort in particular was severely punished since he lost his traders status officially he wasn't allowed to do his job in the company anymore although he retained his unofficial status as the top dog in Stratton Oakmont he also continued to receive a comfortable income in reality to compensate him for his ouster Jordan continued to be paid an astronomical salary 1 million dollars a month far from diminishing his lifestyle became even more extravagant but then he made an error that was to prove fatal he arranged for a large proportion of his income to evade taxation in an extraordinary scheme he quietly sent money in cash to Switzerland he used couriers he did use a woman who was a Swiss citizen married to an American citizen it was a husband and wife duo the husband was actually a drug dealer the wife was a Swiss citizen so it was the perfect combination fearing nothing Jordan even came up with a totally crazy and terribly risky idea of taping cash to the bodies of his smugglers he took cash provided it to the couriers and in two or three different ways sometimes in their luggage sometimes on their person sometimes a combination of the two and they brought in other people as the fraud progressed they smuggled the cash out of the United States and deposited it into banks in Switzerland but in the shadows FBI agent Gregory Coleman and SEC agent joel coen combined forces to take down Jordan Belfort's Network they gained the trust of the Swiss authorities and finally received proof of money laundering and I remember the great breakthrough was when we did our third or fourth trip to Geneva we came back and in the post came this box and inside the box was the forum a and we opened up the forum a and it confirmed what we knew that it said that Jordan Belfort and some of his partners actually controlled these accounts a Jordan Belfort there was no escape route he was surrounded on all sides in 1998 he was arrested and charged with fraud and money laundering he knew I was chasing him for six years he was tired at that point and I think in some respects he was happy that it was over the end of the day he pled guilty to every all of the deals that he had had manipulated back to the beginning the guilty man was facing a hefty prison sentence the ones again Jordan found a way to save himself the American justice system can show clemency to people who cooperate so Jordan handed everything over he gave them the list of all his accomplices Belfort had not decided to cooperate if he had not decided to work with the government to take a guilty plea and work with the government it would be mandatory that he be sentenced to 21 to 27 years if he was convicted in the end Jordan Belfort came out of it well he was sentenced to just four years in prison but all his assets were seized his properties his helicopter and his bank accounts I took everything I could find every dollar he made almost virtually every dollar he made from the beginning was proceeds of criminal activity and therefore it was subject to seizure and forfeiture at his sentencing Belfort was required by the judge to pay back up to one hundred and ten million dollars over the course of his life to his victims and the judge did something inventive he instructed that Belfort could keep 50% of the money that he made through the course of his life and would have to pay the other 50% to the victims until he satisfied the hundred and ten million amount because he understood that Belfort had the capacity to earn money but if if the court took a hundred percent of his money Belfort would never make any money and no victims would get money back after many court hearings Jordan was incarcerated in a federal prison in early 2002 because of his good behavior he only served 22 months and he even met someone interesting all these crazy things happened to him and then he ends up spending 22 months in prison being sent across the country into the hottest driest most miserable part of California and his cellmate is Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong now all the federal inmates in the system your cellmate is somebody who's famous and well-known Jordan was 40 years old and his American dream ended here in prison but once again he bounced back [Music] he used his time in prison to write down his incredible story his modest childhood is craving for money the prodigious drug taking and his slow descent into hell tommy said you know you ought to write a book well he didn't know anything about writing a book so he said he started reading Tom Wolfe bonfire of the vanities and he began crafting a book sort of in that style as soon as he was released in 2004 Jordan published his autobiography it went straight into that year's bestseller list the wolf of Wall Street was to be the starting point of his return to grace he's come out smelling like a rose you know in some ways this enhances his reputation so he spent 22 months end up with kind of a bigger-than-life reputation in the book Jordan Belfort describes all his excesses in detail from the 22 drugs he tried to the innumerable escort girls he neatly glosses over his fraudulent actions and drops in a few notions of remorse above all he built up a legend of a sales genius and even presents himself as a victim of capitalism he admits to a single error that of being blinded by easy money when he was too young Jordan Belfort was no victim on system Jordan Belfort took advantage of the system [Music] [Music] it was just one more amazing thing who else would end up having Leonardo DiCaprio play him on the big screen except Jordan Belfort it's like what could possibly be next for that guy president he'll be President Belfort says in the media that he's paying back all the money to the victims what one just needs to go to the court file - no that's not true he isn't he hasn't for years he still owes over a hundred million dollars in restitution to the federal government which is supposed to go to the victims I'm still waiting from a check from Jordan I'm sure it's in the mail [Music] [Music] one of the greatest myths I've seen this myself in person is that you really shouldn't ask for the order more than two maybe three times let me tell you something most times it's on actually the fifth or sixth time that you actually ask someone to take action that they do take action I think a lot of young men in particular go because they want to see the guy who was in the movie and even though the guy ended up breaking the law and going to prison gosh you got a lot of women who did a lot of drugs he had a lot of toys and maybe they kind of want to be like you know America sometimes said to be the land of second and third chances and so I think in some other countries you would be ashamed to go out and tell about the bad things you did but in America there's a market for hearing about people telling the story of bad things they did and you do wrong go to prison Leonardo DiCaprio plays you on the big screen and now you're making money as we selling tickets to couples it's to see you now this is what we do with this country [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Best Documentary

Views: 458,855

Keywords: documentary, full, movie, english, hd, fraud, money, scam, sales, wolf of wall street, crime, criminal, jordan belfort, bankrupt, finance, documentaries, English, greed is good, greed, wall street, wall st, boiler room, investor, penny stock, stockbroker, financial manipulation, stock market, criminal 2.0

Id: DEO1yHFg-vI

Length: 58min 37sec (3517 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021