The real Wolf of Wall Street tells all

The real Wolf of Wall Street tells all

Debauchery at its absolute worst.

At American stockbroking firm Stratton Oakmont, the routine was not about stocks and shares.

It was about snorting cocaine and consorting with prostitutes. Employees were also encouraged to have sex with each other in the company's glass-walled lift.

The owner of the firm was Mr Jordan Belfort, who was found guilty in 1999 of swindling investors of US$200 million (S$253 million) and sentenced to 22 months' jail.

His memoirs are now made into a Hollywood movie, The Wolf Of Wall Street, in which Leonardo DiCaprio (inset) plays Mr Belfort.

The Hollywood superstar likened his character's penchant for humiliating public spectacle and debauchery to that of Ancient Rome's most dissolute Emperor.

"He was like a modern-day Caligula," DiCaprio said. "He held nothing back. He was unapologetic about his lust for wealth and his mad consumption."

Indeed it was.

A typical day in his office went something like this: On a sales floor almost the size of a football pitch, a pretty young woman sits on a wooden stool wearing only a bikini, as she faces the collective scrutiny of hundreds of her colleagues. The men stand baying in their sharp suits and crisp shirts as they relish this latest in a long line of tasteless spectacles that punctuated their working lives.

The bikini-clad woman was having her long blonde hair shaved off in return for the cash she needed for a breast enlargement operation, Mail Online reported.

Anything went as long as it kept the hungry young sales staff selling the dodgy investments which made millions of dollars each day for Mr Belfort, himself only in his early 30s.

By the time he was arrested, he had lived a life of mind-blowing excesses.

Confessing that he had taken enough drugs "to sedate Guatemala", he once insisted on a sailing trip while high and wrote off both his 50m-long yacht and personal helicopter in one afternoon.

He boasted of having made love to his wife on a "mattress" made up of stacks of US$100 notes totalling US$3 million, and slept with hundreds of call girls in luxury hotel suites across the world.

Some were so "high-class" that they took only credit cards but what they charged didn't matter to Mr Belfort, who was raking in about US$50 million a year by his late 20s. Once, he made US$11 million in just three minutes.

Key to his success was realising that "young men and women who possess an intelligence quotient in the range of Forrest Gump on three hits of acid can be taught to sound like Wall Street wizards, as long as you write every last word down for them".

When he was in prison, he was inspired to write his story after reading Tom Wolfe's satirical novel The Bonfire Of The Vanities.

Now 50, he tours the world as a motivational speaker, advocating business techniques that will bring "massive wealth... without sacrificing integrity and ethics".

He insists that only someone who has made his mistakes can warn off others contemplating such a path of corruption.


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