Jordan Belfort

Jordan Ross Belfort, born July 9, 1962, in the Bronx, New York, is an American former stockbroker, criminal, and businessman. He grew up in Bayside, Queens, in a Jewish family; his parents, Maxwell “Max” Belfort and Leah Markowitz Belfort, were both accountants. Before college, he and his close childhood friend Elliot Loewenstern earned $20,000 selling scooped Italian ice from styrofoam coolers at Jones Beach, an early sign of the sales drive that would follow him into adulthood.

Belfort graduated from American University with a degree in biology and briefly planned to attend the University of Maryland School of Dentistry. On the first day, he heard the dean tell students that the “golden age of dentistry is over” and that anyone there simply to make a lot of money was “in the wrong place.” Belfort chose not to continue. He later worked as a door-to-door meat and seafood salesman on Long Island, claiming the business at first grew to several workers and 5,000 pounds of beef and fish sold each week. It failed, and he filed for bankruptcy at 25.

According to his memoirs and interviews, a family friend helped Belfort get a job as a trainee stockbroker at L.F. Rothschild. He said he was laid off after the firm faced financial trouble connected to the Black Monday stock market crash of 1987. Belfort then founded Stratton Oakmont as a franchise of Stratton Securities and later bought out the original founder. Stratton Oakmont became known as a boiler room that marketed penny stocks and defrauded investors through “pump and dump” stock sales.

During the Stratton years, Belfort led a life of lavish parties and heavy recreational drug use, especially methaqualone, sold to him as Quaalude, which resulted in addiction. Stratton Oakmont at one point employed more than 1,000 stock brokers and was involved in stock issues totaling more than $1 billion, including the initial public offering for Steve Madden. The firm was under near-constant scrutiny from the National Association of Securities Dealers from 1989 onward. In December 1996, the NASD expelled Stratton Oakmont, putting it out of business. Belfort was indicted for securities fraud and money laundering in 1999.

Belfort pleaded guilty to fraud and related crimes and became an informant for the FBI, wearing a wire and testifying against numerous partners and associates. On July 18, 2003, he was sentenced to four years in prison and served 22 months at Taft Correctional Institution in California as part of his plea deal. He was ordered to pay back $110.4 million to stock buyers he had swindled. While in prison, he shared a cell with Tommy Chong, who encouraged him to write about his experiences as a stockbroker. Belfort later credited Chong with helping point him toward work as a motivational speaker and writer.

Belfort published his memoir The Wolf of Wall Street in 2007. It was adapted into Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film of the same name, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Belfort. His story remains tied to ambition, persuasion, excess, punishment, and public retelling. That is why a line such as “The only thing standing between you and your goal is the story you keep telling yourself” lands with a complicated force: in Belfort’s life, stories could sell, inspire, mislead, and, later, explain the cost of wanting too much.