Real 'Wolf of Wall Street': How I Became Corrupted

jordan uh just bring people up to date on what it is you're doing so um for the last about six years i've been traveling the world and doing uh speaking some you know i guess motivational speaking is part of a lot of it's more about strategy for entrepreneurship sales venture capital uh things like that and now i'm in as you said i'm embarking on a really massive us tour about 50 or 60 cities over the next 24 months and i'm giving all the profits back to investors who lost money in 20 years ago um so that's the story i'm really excited about that because it's a lot of work and it makes it even that more exciting to do it so kerry so a lot of the discussion that we've been having today is why over the last several years there's been no criminal prosecutions of the top ceos on wall street that were really held you know what people think are held responsible for the financial crisis now you went to jail for financial crimes and obviously paid the price for that what's your take on that banks are paying huge fines multi-billion dollar fines on these things but we're still not seeing uh criminal prosecution so where do you see that i think that the problem is a lot of the laws that were broken are in the gray and difficult to prove so what happened basically is there was you know this incestuous relation between the government and wall street where people that were in wall street went to the public sector they changed the rules and allowed these loopholes which then people on wall street jumped through so while there was certainly some illegal acts a lot of what happened was really more about taking advantage of loopholes so it's in the gray you know there was some crimes committed for sure but very difficult to prove so i think the government you know in rightfully so has to sort of pick their spots and they they don't want to fight losing cases um and they're probably doing the best they can could they do better yeah um should some people go to jail i'm sure but um again a lot of those cases they're very difficult to prove on a criminal level and the burden of proof on a civil case is much easier so what you see is the bias towards bringing these civil cases with large fines versus wasting resources on criminal cases you mentioned going to jail you spent 22 months in prison right for your actions you have spoken about reform for yourself i'm wondering if you can just give us some thoughts as to what that was like and what did you decide was a good way to reform yourself my path was different than most because what happened was she saw the movie or read the book she had this massive drug addiction and i wouldn't say the drugs caused the activities that happened on wall street that was really the scent slowly step by step fueled by greed and so forth where i started off doing things right and then started breaking the law with stock manipulation when i got sober i looked back and was kind of freaked out at some of the things i'd done because now i started getting perspective and then i got invited a year later um when i went to jail that was certainly you know a point where you get to examine your past but then i started writing a book and when you write it's almost like this advanced form of hypertherapy where you get to re-examine your actions from above and you peel back the layers and look at your motivations and what was driving you and the good the bad the ugly the insecurities and i was able to get a wholly different perspective on myself and i when i left jail emerged from jail and was right and finishing writing this book uh you know i was already the point where i knew i would never ever do anything again that was even in the gray that was i knew in my heart i was raised by a great family uh i didn't go out into the world to commit any crimes or fraud it was sort of a kind of a left turn in albuquerque so it was easy for me to come back to the person that i originally was was there a tipping point because as you said you didn't start out wanting to commit fraud but then was there a point that you can recall that was that left turn to albuquerque there was it started with one gigantic rationalization that it was okay to take a bag of cash for someone to hide a trade that didn't make sense on paper and they were saying oh everyone on wall street does it was an older person who was around for many years and i think you know in my heart it's many years like 28 years ago i knew it was wrong and i shouldn't have done it but i said you know what i'll never do it again but once you take that first step over the ethical line what happens is your ethical line moves and then you're doing things right again but next time you step over you step a bit further still because you've become desensitized the next time further still further stone before you know it through these tiny almost imperceptible steps you're doing things you thought you'd never do you're a socio people you never thought you'd associate with and it all seems okay so that was that first point and then there was a point where i was like i realized that things had spiraled so far out of control and at that point almost it got away from me the firm was massive it was thousands of people i was you know the movie's fictionalized i left the firm in 90 the end of 93 and i lost control of it and um doesn't mean i'm not responsible i'm the first person to take responsibility but you get in this and you get so deep in something sometimes that the abnormal seems normal and the normal seems like a distant memory that's really what happened

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 2,078,406

Rating: 4.845983 out of 5

Keywords: Bloomberg, The Wolf Of Wall Street (Award-Winning Work), wall street, drugs, penny stocks, Leonardo DiCaprio (Celebrity), Martin Scorsese (Film Director), financial crisis, Jordan Belfort

Id: lssxyiCwh_8

Length: 5min 5sec (305 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 22 2014