There aren’t many fresh angles left in the story Jordan Belfort. Once a guy has written two books about himself and been played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a Scorsese movie his narrative is all but etched in stone. People already have their minds made up about The Wolf of Wall Street. He got rich combining hustle, a magician’s gift for slinging BS and a toddler’s emotional development in regards to understanding the permanence of the harm he inflicted on clients.
If you like that kind of guy you’d love Jordan Belfort. That’s no small praise. A good broker is someone who doesn’t rip you off and shows you a good time every once in a while. Belfort clearly failed on the first front, he spent 22 months in prison for securities fraud, money laundering and various other offenses but clients must have loved the guy. He’d be a hell of a guy to help you plan a bachelor party as long as you didn’t expect to come in under budget.
Belfort is still living his gimmick as a master salesman, he’s just switched from working phones to wireless mics. Belfort is now a motivational speaker selling the virtues of what he calls the Straight Line Persuasion System of selling. As Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman explored last week, for anywhere from $75 to $599 attendees can spend a day with Belfort learning the techniques that helped him skim more than $100 million from unwitting clients before getting caught by the government and flipping on all of his former associates.
It’s easy to run with the Scorsese idea and suggest talking to Belfort is akin to interviewing Whitey Bulger, the Boston crime boss who served as the inspiration for the Nicholson character in The Departed. But that’s not quite right. Belfort didn’t murder anyone. As he insists in the clip, “95% of what I did was legal.” The other 5% was composed of violating laws Belfort doesn’t much believe in and scamming clients who were probably greedy anyway.
Belfort isn’t Nicholson in the Departed. He’s Frank Mackey, played by Tom Cruise in Magnolia. He’s a charismatic motivational speaker teaching self-selected fans how to seduce everyone, regardless of their gender or willingness to take part. Belfort’s conferences aren’t cautionary tales of excess. They aren’t corporate sales rallies. They are bro-rallies for those in search of the power to influence people. Belfort isn’t going to dilute his $600 power aid with a bunch of morality. “I try to frame the ideas first then I teach the lessons by citing various stories of my life.”
Belfort insists those stories don’t glamorize his criminal past. He went from nothing to making millions a week in income, most of which went towards paying for huge homes, buying mountains of drugs and sharing them with hundreds of naked women. If people want to focus on that rather than the tough lessons Belfort learned serving 22 months in minimum security prison, before moving to Manhattan Beach and giving a chunk of his income to victims for the rest of his life, well, it’s not for the Wolf to judge.
Speaking of judges, Belfort is still spending a good deal of time standing before them in court. In dispute is whether or not he’s really doing his best to repay the victims of his crime spree. In 2003 Belfort agreed to attempt to return more than $110 million to former clients and partners. Accounts vary but everyone seems to agree that the actual amount paid by Belfort to date is much less than $110 million.
Forbidden to discuss specifics, Belfort first says he spent years actually over-paying victims. “100% of the profits from this U.S. tour are going to go back to investors (who lost money),” Belfort insists “The book royalties are going back to investors, the movie royalties are going back to investors. I believe that living a good life and paying back don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”
Actually they sort of are mutually exclusive depending on how much living a good life costs. As of the start of this year Belfort was about $98.8 million short of payback, according the Hollywood Reporter and other sources. When Belfort says things like “100% of the profits from this U.S. tour,” it’s impossible not to immediately consider the number of ways a tour’s books can be cooked to stow away income. Belfort isn’t throwing a tattered knapsack into a beaten up station wagon to travel the country. He’s lecturing on success at up to $600 a head. Surely a man as facile with numbers and sales as Belfort has run some figures when he’ll be able to pay back people he stole from in the 90s?
Not exactly. The U.S. is a big place and he owes a lot of money and it’s not free to hold these conventions. To Belfort the debt is a bit more abstract than some would have you believe. His intentions are good in terms of restitution. That should count for something.
“I don’t look at it as a beginning date or an end date. It’s an intention that I have and it’s timeless. If (payback) doesn’t happen within two years I’ll just keep on trying.”
Jordan Belfort will travel first class, staying at five star hotels and living on the beach for the rest of his life if that’s what it takes to pay his debt to society. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but it’s probably not the one prosecutors were hoping to see come from all of this.