name of yacht in wolf of wall street

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How Jordan Belfort's 37m superyacht Nadine sank off the coast of Sardinia

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Coco Chanel was famously outspoken on many things, but yachting, in particular, attracted her ire. “As soon as you set foot on a yacht you belong to some man, not to yourself, and you die of boredom,” she was once quoted as saying.

Her solution was to buy her own yacht. A 37m with a steel hull, built by the Dutch yard Witsen & Vis of Alkmaar. The yacht passed through many hands, finally ending up belonging to the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort, on whose watch she foundered and sank in 1996.

The yacht was originally built for a Frenchman under the name Mathilde , but he backed out and she caught Chanel’s eye instead. With a narrow beam, a high bow and the long, low superstructure typical of Dutch yachts of her era, she was certainly a beautiful boat. But she was also well equipped, with five staterooms in dark teak panelling, magnificent dining facilities, room for big tenders and, later, a helipad. A frequent sight along the Florida coast, she caught the eye of a young skipper called Mark Elliott.

“In those days, she was the biggest yacht on the East Coast,” he remembers. “Nobody had ever seen anything like it. I needed a wrench once and went up to the boat - Captain Norm Dahl was really friendly.” He didn’t know it then, but Elliott was destined to become the skipper of the boat himself and was at the helm when the storm of the century took her to the bottom off Sardinia.

Coco Chanel died in 1971 and sometime thereafter the yacht was renamed Jan Pamela under the new ownership of Melvin Lane Powers. He was a flamboyant Houston real estate developer, fond of crocodile skin cowboy boots and acquitted of murder in a trial that gripped the nation.

Powers sent Jan Pamela to Merrill Stevens yard in Miami, where a mammoth seven-metre section was added amidships. “We made templates for the boat where we were going to cut her in half, then she went out for another charter season,” remembers Whit Kirtland, son of the yard owner. “When the boat came back in, we cut it just forward of the engine room, rolled the two sections apart and welded it in.”

He remembers how the sun’s heat made the bare and painted metal expand at different rates. “You had to weld during certain time periods – early in the morning or late at night,” says Kirtland.

The result of the extension was a huge new seven-metre full-beam master stateroom, an extra salon and one further cabin – pushing the charter capacity to seven staterooms. During this refit, the boat’s colour was also changed from white to taupe. “No one had really done it before and it was gorgeous,” says Elliott. By 1983, Powers was bankrupt and the yacht was sold on again. She next shows up named Edgewater .

Elliott’s chance came in 1989. He was working for the established yacht owner Bernie Little, who ran a hugely profitable distribution business for Bud brewer Anheuser-Busch. “Bernie Little had always wanted to own the boat,” Elliott says. “He loved it. He bought it sight unseen – and I started a huge restoration programme, including another extension to put three metres in the cockpit.”

It was a massive task, undertaken at Miami Ship. “We pulled out all the windows, re-chromed everything, repainted – brought it back to life,” says Elliott. They also cut out old twin diesels from GM and replaced them with bigger CAT engines, doubling her horsepower to 800. “Repowered, she could cruise at up to 20 knots. She was long and skinny, like a destroyer.”

A smart hydraulic feature was also brought to life for the first time. Under two of the sofas in the main stateroom were hidden 3.6m x 1.2m glass panels giving a view of the sea under the boat. At the push of a button, the sofas lifted up and mirrors above allowed you to gaze at the seabed – from the actual bed.

Now called Big Eagle , like all of Little’s boats, she was a charter hit and her top client was a certain New York financier named Jordan Belfort. He fell in love with her and begged Little to sell to him. But he needed to secure financing, and in 1995, Little agreed to hold a note on the boat for a year if Mark Elliott stayed on as skipper.

With the boat rechristened Nadine after his wife, Belfort set about another round of refit work, restyling the interior with vintage deco and lots of mirrors, extending the upper deck this time, and fitting a crane capable of raising and stowing the Turbine Seawind seaplane.

Nadine also carried a helicopter, a 10m Intrepid tender, two 6m dinghies on the bow, four motorbikes, six jetskis, state-of-the-art dive gear. “You pretty much needed an air traffic controller when all these things were in the water,” says Elliott.

Belfort’s partying was legendary and Elliott clearly saw eye-watering things on board, but as far as he was concerned, he was there to safeguard the boat. “When Jordan Belfort became the owner, he could do whatever he wanted. I was there to protect the note,” says Elliott. “He is a brilliant mind and a lovely person. It was just when he was in his party mode, he was out of control.”

Nadine and her huge cohort of toys and vehicles plied all the usual yachting haunts on both sides of the Atlantic. But Belfort’s love story was to be short-lived. Disaster struck with the boss and guests on board during an 85-mile crossing between Civitavecchia in Italy and Calle de Volpe on Sardinia.

What was forecast to be a 20-knot blow and moderate seas degenerated into a violent 70-knot storm with crests towering above 10.6m, according to Elliott. Wave after wave pounded the superstructure, stoving in hatches and windows so that water poured below and made the boat sluggish. By a miracle the engine room remained dry and they could maintain steerage way, motoring slowly through the black of the night as rescue attempt after rescue attempt was called off.

Nadine eventually sank at dawn in over 1000m of water just 20 miles from the coast of Sardinia. Everyone had been taken off by helicopter, and there was no loss of life. Captain Mark Elliott was roundly congratulated for his handling of the incident. “The insurance paid immediately because it was the storm of the century,” he says. “I took the whole crew but one with me to [Little’s next boat] Star Ship . That was my way to come back.”

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Jordan Belfort Yacht: The True Story and The Wolf of Wall Street Version

The true Jordan Belfort yacht story is as strange and unbelievable as the hit movie The Wolf of Wall Street depicts it to be. There are several insider stories behind the sinking of the mighty yacht that are not widely known but are quite interesting and different from the reel version in several ways.

What happened to the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine?

As the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street shows, the superyacht Nadine sank close to the coast of Sardinia in 1997 while battling what many calls “the storm of the century”. Jordan Belfort narrates the event in detail in the memoir describing his life in the 90s, which is what the Martin Scorsese movie is about.

Before getting into the details of the sinking, it is worth noting that the 37m yacht had a long and interesting history. She carried renowned celebrities like Coco Chanel before reaching Jordan Belfort (played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie) and was one of the largest yachts in the East Coast’s waters.

While the yacht was initially manufactured for a French native and given the name Matilda, he backed out of the deal. This led Coco Chanel to buy the beautiful yacht with the low superstructure that Dutch yachts are famous for.

You can learn more about our yacht charter services in Dubai

The yacht took on different names as it passed through famous hands, even those of the murder trial acquitted Melvin Lane Powers. Belfort named the yacht after his wife and renovated it with the capacity to carry a helicopter, 6 Jetskis, 4 motorbikes, and much more. Under Belfort’s ownership, the yacht witnessed a series of wild parties that were like unlimited glamour and fun in a package until disaster struck unexpectedly.

Did the yacht scene in The Wolf of Wall Street actually happen?

The Jordan Belfort yacht sinking scene in The Wolf of Wall Street was heavily inspired by a real-life event, though the movie did take some creative liberties. For one, the yacht was called Naomi in the reel version since the name of Belfort’s wife (played by Margot Robbie ) was changed in the movie. In reality, the yacht was named Nadine.

The movie further depicts Belfort’s helicopter getting thrown off the yacht by strong waves. In reality, the yacht’s crew went up to the deck and pushed off the helicopter so that Italian navy seals would have a space to land. The yacht’s itinerary was altered a bit by the movie’s director Martin Scorsese to add to the drama, though the power of the storm was scarily accurate.

Belfort admitted that the yacht’s captain Mark Elliot explicitly warned them not to sail to Sardinia on that fateful night. But according to the movie, there was a business opportunity in the city that Belfort could not bear to miss out on despite his wife’s protests.

Some sources claim that in reality, the passengers were simply eager to hit the golf course at Sardinia the next morning. They refused to pay heed to the captain’s warning and asked him to go through the storm, which eventually led to the famous Jordan Belfort yacht sinking incident. Therefore, unfortunately, if someone wants to have a yacht rental in Dubai or any other destination, they have missed their chance with this yacht.

Take a look on our Yacht Dubai Party

Interesting insights on the sinking as portrayed in the movie

The movie captures the fear and stress that each passenger felt when the yacht got caught up in the 70-knot storm. There is some hilarity when Belfort starts yelling for his drugs to avoid the horror of dying sober.

Several rescue attempts were made, but due to rising risks, each of them was called off. By some twist of luck, the yacht’s engine room remained mostly undamaged for a while, because of which they were able to make their way through the sea.

In the end, everyone survived the incident without any major injuries. At dawn, the Nadine made its way 1000m under the water only 20 miles away from Sardinia’s coast. Now, the movie’s audience gets to watch the Jordan Belfort yacht story unfold on the screen with a pinch of humor.

The Nadine’s captain Mark Elliot’s heroic actions did not go unnoticed. He was praised for leading all the passengers to safety, though he was able to get out of the yacht only 10 minutes before it sank. The captain also admitted that the insurance was granted immediately considering the ferocity of the storm. As for the yacht, many still wonder about the highly expensive equipment that had to be thrown into the water and is probably rusting away at the bottom of the sea.

The best features of the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine

The 167 ft Nadine, as its former passengers claim, was a beautiful yacht. When owned by Coco Chanel under the name Matilda, the yacht had five staterooms, large dining areas, and a helipad. The interiors were furnished with dark teak paneling. Each new owner customized the yacht’s name and interiors based on their tastes.

Belfort decorated the Nadine lavishly with a variety of mirrors and set a vintage deco theme. He renovated the upper deck to fit a crane that was able to stow his Turbine Seawind seaplane. The yacht carried the best dive gear available in the market plus a variety of Belfort’s ‘toys’ such as his motorbikes and jetskis.

Which model was portrayed as the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine in the movie?

Martin Scorsese got the yacht Lady M to represent Nadine onscreen. While Nadine actually had a luxuriously vintage charm to it, Lady M is a modern vessel with contemporary features. Lady M was manufactured in 2022 by Intermarine Savannah, while Nadine was built in 1961 by Witsen & Wis. The 147 ft Lady M is currently worth $12 million and is similar to Benetti yachts in its glamorous design.

Jordan Belfort’s life today

The entrepreneur and speaker Jordan Belfort’s shenanigans are well-known thanks to his detailed memoir and the hit movie based on some parts of his life. He spent 2 years in prison and now, at 59 years of age, has a practically negative net worth. Yet, his extraordinary motivational speaking skills continue to attract and inspire people even today.

It is easy for anyone watching the movie to wonder if many of the incidents are exaggerated. But considering Belfort’s eccentric life, even the Nadine sinking incident remains another regular anecdote shared in the movie.

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The Real Story Behind the Yacht in The Wolf of Wall Street

Based on the eponymous memoir, the 2013 hit The Wolf of Wall Street told the story of Jordan Belfort, a former stockbroker who was convicted of securities fraud and money laundering. Directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the movie was a smashing success through and through. Amongst its many impressionable scenes, one of the most memorable ones was the yacht party, where Belfort and his colleagues indulged in lavish excess. However, Belfort’s ex-wife, Nadine Caridi, has now spoken out about the real story behind the yacht.

Nadine Caridi, the Ex-Wife

Caridi, who was portrayed in the movie by Margot Robbie, gave an interview in which she revealed that the yacht scene was not entirely accurate. According to Caridi, the yacht that was shown in the movie was not the one that Belfort actually owned. Instead, it was rented for the filming of the scene. In reality, Belfort owned a different yacht called Nadine. Caridi claims that the yacht was named after her and that she played a significant role in its design and decoration. She says that the yacht was much smaller than the one shown in the movie, but it was still luxurious and served as a symbol of Belfort’s wealth.

The Sinking of the Nadine Yacht

Nadine Caridi recently spoke about the sinking of the yacht in June 1996, an event that inspired a scene in the movie. The yacht’s sinking during a storm off the coast of Italy was a terrifying experience for everyone on board. The waves were violent and relentless, hitting the yacht repeatedly. Rescue services had to be called in to rescue the passengers and crew, including Belfort and Caridi. In a recent TikTok video, Caridi shared real-life footage of the rescue, showing the fear and chaos that ensued during the storm, while expressing gratitude that everyone survived.

Can a Circle of Salt Paralyze a Self-Driving Car?

Autonomous vehicles are truly within the grasp of humankind. But the brain of a sci-fi geek can wonder whether it’ll bring an apocalyptic scene, where a troop of autonomous cars is pursuing human prey across a desolate landscape. Well, of course, it’s not going to happen, but luckily, if it did, there’s a strangely simple solution for that. And it involves nothing but salt!

The Salt Trap

Back in 2017, artist James Bridle demonstrated how an understanding of road markings using salt could paralyze a self-driving car midway by delivering confusing messages. You need to draw two circles of salt, one in a block line and the other in broken stripes. When the car comes to the middle of it, the markings will direct it to go right ahead and also not to cross, simultaneously. The result is the fabulous “Autonomous Trap 001.” Future models may be able to overcome this fun technological quirk, but it has surely raised a valid question about the possibility of the success of the trick. It’s astonishing to find out that there may be a simple way to manipulate the environment to disrupt the self-driving capacity of an autonomous car.

The Response

This salt circle trap has caught the attention of none other than Elon Musk, the Tesla boss and newly-appointed CEO of Twitter. As an avid enthusiast, Musk is known for dabbling in autonomous vehicles. Responding to the demonstration, he explained that the salt circle trick will probably be able to trap a Tesla car with the production Autopilot build. But he suspected that it won’t work its magic on the FSD models or the cars with Full Self-Driving capabilities. Musk further suggested that making a ring of traffic cones would be effective on the FSD cars. So, if you ever find yourself facing a murderous fleet of autonomous cars, all you need to do is just take your salt bags and traffic cones out! Easy-peasy, right?

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Jordan Belfort’s ex-wife tells the real story behind the yacht on The Wolf of Wall Street

The ex-wife of jordan belfort shed some light on the infamous scene.

Ben Thompson

Jordan Belfort's ex wife, Nadine Macaluso, has set the record straight about the scene in The Wolf Of Wall Street where Belfort splashes out and buys his wife a yacht on their wedding day.

I mean, when you have a lot of money , what better way to treat your new spouse after saying I do?

After their lavish wedding, Belford ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) covers Nadine's, or Naomi as she's known in the movie, eyes with a blindfold before revealing the huge yacht, which has been christened the 'Naomi'.

And Naomi (played by Margot Robbie ) cannot contain her excitement.

"Are you serious? A f***ing yacht?!" she exclaims.

However, it seems that the real Belfort wasn't very serious, as Macaluso revealed on TikTok that her ex-husband, who she was married to from 1991 to 2005, 'did not' actually buy her a boat on their wedding day.

She said: "Actually what happened I think we were married for a few years and we were always chartering yachts, because he loved to do that.

"And I had given birth to my beautiful daughter Chandler and he said 'I want to buy a yacht'."

However, this idea didn't sit well with Macaluso at the time.

She continued: "I said 'I don't think we should buy a yacht, we have a baby and I don't feel comfortable.

'She can't swim.'

"I had visions of her falling off the boat and I was actually terrified.

"I did not want to buy the yacht ironically. And he was like 'Nope, I'm buying a yacht and I'm calling it the Nadine'. And I was like 'Okay, here we go'.

"And you know how that went."

Macaluso's final line is a nod to a scene in the film, in which Belfort and Naomi need to be rescued from the yacht after it gets caught up in a storm.

This scene was indeed based on the real life sinking of the ship in June 1996, which resulted in a rescue by the Italian Navy Special forces.

The yacht was sunk after violent waves repeatedly hit it, but luckily everyone on board was able to escape the ship in time.

Macaluso has previously commented on the scene's accuracy , where she admitted in a TikTok video that the yacht sinking scene was 'totally true'.

Speaking of the memory, she said: "It was horrific, horrifying, we were in a squall for 12 to 18 hours and we lived, thank god, for my kids."

She even showed real life footage of her, Belford and their friends being rescued by the Navy.

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Jordan Belfort Yacht: The True Story and The Wolf of Wall Street Version

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The true Jordan Belfort yacht story is as strange and unbelievable as the hit movie The Wolf of Wall Street depicts it to be. There are several insider stories behind the sinking of the mighty yacht that are not widely known but are quite interesting and different from the reel version in several ways.

Nadine yacht model

What happened to the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine? As the movie, The Wolf of Wall Street shows, the superyacht Nadine sank close to the coast of Sardinia in 1997 while battling what many calls “the storm of the century”. Jordan Belfort narrates the event in detail in the memoir describing his life in the 90s, which is what the Martin Scorsese movie is about.

Jordan belfort yacht sailing

Did the yacht scene in The Wolf of Wall Street actually happen? The Jordan Belfort yacht sinking scene in The Wolf of Wall Street was heavily inspired by a real-life event, though the movie did take some creative liberties. For one, the yacht was called Naomi in the reel version since the name of Belfort’s wife (played by Margot Robbie) was changed in the movie. In reality, the yacht was named Nadine.

Interesting insights on the sinking as portrayed in the movie

The movie captured each passenger’s fear and stress when the yacht got caught up in the 70-knot storm. There is some hilarity when Belfort starts yelling for his drugs to avoid the horror of dying sober. Several rescue attempts were made, but each was called off due to rising risks. By some twist of luck, the yacht’s engine room remained undamaged primarily for a while, because of which they were able to make their way through the sea.

The best features of the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine

The 167 ft Nadine, as its former passengers claim, was beautiful. When owned by Coco Chanel under the name Matilda, the yacht had five staterooms, large dining areas, and a helipad. The interiors were furnished with dark teak paneling. Each new owner customized the yacht’s name and interiors based on their tastes.

Which model was portrayed as the Jordan Belfort yacht Nadine in the movie?

Martin Scorsese got the yacht Lady M to represent Nadine onscreen. While Nadine had a luxuriously vintage charm, Lady M is a modern vessel with contemporary features. Lady M was manufactured in 2022 by Intermarine Savannah, while Nadine was built in 1961 by Witsen & Wis. The 147 ft Lady M is currently worth $12 million and is similar to Benetti yachts in its glamorous design.

Jordan Belfort’s life today

The entrepreneur and speaker Jordan Belfort’s shenanigans are well-known thanks to his detailed memoir and the hit movie based on some parts of his life. He spent 2 years in prison and now has practically negative net worth at 59 years of age. Yet, his extraordinary motivational speaking skills continue to attract and inspire people even today. It is easy for anyone watching the movie to wonder if many of the incidents are exaggerated. But considering Belfort’s eccentric life, even the Nadine sinking incident remains another regular anecdote shared in the movie.

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Charter Yacht 'LADY M' featured in new ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Film

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By Editorial Team   6 January 2014

The 45m/147’ charter yacht 'LADY M' is the setting for a number of scenes shot with Leonardo DiCaprio for his new Martin Scorcese-directed film ‘Wolf of Wall Street’.

Scenes on board motor yacht LADY M were filmed in North Cove Marina, New York for the highly-anticipated movie due out in cinemas later this month. ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ is based on the rise and fall of high-flying, fast-living real life stock broker Jordan Belfort, played by DiCaprio as he raked in more than $50 million a year on the stock market.

Belfort set up boiler room Stratton Oakmont in the 1990’s and enjoyed an outrageously excessive lifestyle of drugs, women, planes and of course superyachts before being imprisoned for 22 months corruption and fraud.  LADY M is used in the film to represent Belfort’s own superyacht ‘NADINE’, named after his second wife, which was a 41m luxury motor yacht originally built for Coco Chanel in 1961.

‘NADINE’ sank in July 1997 following an instruction from Belfort while he was high on drugs to the Captain to head into a storm on a cruise from Porto Cervo to Capri. The yacht was battered by 15m waves and sank along with a number of toys including a seaplane, helicopter and eight jet skis however all passengers were successfully rescued by the Italian Coast Guard.

Built in 2002 by Intermarine Savannah , LADY M made for a luxurious setting for the film with her classically elegant interior that offers accommodation for up to 10 guests in five staterooms comprising a master suite, VIP, two doubles and one twin cabin. She is offered for charter at weekly rates starting from $125,000, contact your yacht broker for more details. 

'Wolf of Wall Street’ yacht scenes were filmed on board LADY M in North Cove Marina, New York for the highly-anticipated movie due out in cinemas later this month.

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Martin Scorsese ‘Kept Fighting’ for ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Yacht Scene to Be in Final Cut

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Martin Scorsese was determined that “ The Wolf of Wall Street ” would have a sinking ship onscreen.

The blockbuster, Oscar-nominated 2013 film which starred Leonardo DiCaprio as real-life disgraced stockbroker Jordan Belfort, was originally a whopping four hours long. While the film was eventually trimmed down to 180 minutes, screenwriter Terence Winter revealed that Scorsese refused to cut an expensive yacht sequence.

“Because [the script] was so long, you know, the fear was there were going be things that we were gonna have to cut — like the sequence where the boat sinks and they get rescued at sea,” Winter told The Hollywood Reporter . “It was on the chopping block for the longest time because it was so wild and so expensive. To his credit, Marty just kept fighting and said, ‘We have to have that. I have to have that.'”

The scene involves Belfort (DiCaprio) and his wife Naomi ( Margot Robbie ) having to be rescued by helicopter when sailing from Italy to Monaco in a desperate attempt to stop federal investigators from accessing bank accounts.

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“There was actually a four-hour cut of that movie initially and it was just a lot more insanity — if you can believe there was room for any,” Emmy winner Winter continued. “But I was absolutely thrilled that everything got in there. Every possible thing… including the kitchen sink… is in that movie. I could not have been more happy with it.”

Acclaimed editor and longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker previously told IndieWire that the four-hour cut is beloved by those who had seen it, and Scorsese even considered releasing it in two parts. “Well, we thought about it,” Schoonmaker said. “But the film doesn’t work split in half. It has to have a certain arc.”

Actress Robbie recently revealed that the overnight success of “The Wolf of Wall Street” was overwhelming at times, saying, “Something was happening in those early stages and it was all pretty awful. I remember saying to my mom, ‘I don’t think I want to do this.’ And she just looked at me, completely straight-faced, and was like, ‘Darling, I think it’s too late not to.’ That’s when I realized the only way was forward.”

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The Fascinating True Story Behind The Wolf Of Wall Street

Even before Hollywood came calling, the real-life Jordan Belfort was equating himself to movie villains. Once a stockbroker, then a convict, then a motivational speaker, Belfort wrote of his experiences in his bestselling 2007 memoir , "The Wolf of Wall Street." It contains the line, "I had lots of nicknames. Gordon Gekko, Don Corleone, Keyser Soze; they even called me the King. But my favorite was the Wolf of Wall Street."

Cross-reference those first three alleged nicknames with the films "Wall Street," "The Godfather," and "The Usual Suspects." It soon becomes clear that Belfort, the born salesman, was all too ready to peddle himself as someone who belonged in the pantheon of great movie villains. Luckily for him (less so for the unseen victims of his financial crimes), director Martin Scorsese was happy to oblige him with a star-studded movie adaptation.

Belfort's memoir is filled with many wild stories, but some have questioned the veracity of its self-serving claims. By the time Scorsese came along and turned it into an Oscar-nominated 2013 film , audiences would be one more layer removed from the truth of what happened. The book cover reads, "I partied like a rock star, lived like a king," and inside its pages, Belfort, the "former member of the middle class," speaks in passing of "chaos capitalism."

"The Wolf of Wall Street," the movie, makes good on that dubious vision with a three-hour ode to excess, wealth, and skullduggery that's all the more unbelievable because some of it really occurred.

A conman's sworn (and swearing) testimony

Martin Scorsese, working for the fifth time with Leonardo DiCaprio as his leading man, broke his own Guinness World Record for cinematic use of the f-word with "The Wolf of Wall Street." His film "Casino" had previously set the record in 1995, but "The Wolf of Wall Street" eclipsed its 422 f-bombs with a whopping 506 of them.

That's just one interesting bit of trivia related to the movie. When you sift through all the swearing to get at the facts, though, just how much of "The Wolf of Wall Street" was true, and how much of it was embellishment — or straight fibs of the kind Keyser Soze might tell?

Jordan Belfort is not what you'd call a credible witness; in fact, the whole movie is arguably told from the perspective of a master of deceit, who scammed investors out of millions. Scorsese leveraged all his cinematic powers in service of what DiCaprio called "a modern-day Caligula" story, but he was also adapting a criminal's autobiography. That's a little different than what he did with "Goodfellas" and the aforementioned "Casino," both adapted from a nonfiction book where the gangster's tale came filtered through author Nicholas Pileggi.

"The Irishman," too, was based on a Charles Brandt book about the life of mob enforcer Frank Sheeran, whose confession was later discredited . In "The Wolf of Wall Street," the bad guy tells his own story, sometimes giving the camera a suitably wolfish grin as he does so.

Jonah Hill's character was based on Danny Porush

Terence Winter handled the screenwriting chores for "The Wolf of Wall Street," and he and Martin Scorsese framed an entire HBO series, "Boardwalk Empire," around another gangster named Nucky Thompson. Actor Bobby Cannavale – who won an Emmy Award for "Boardwalk Empire" the same year "The Wolf of Wall Street" hit theaters — narrated the original, abridged audiobook version of Jordan Belfort's memoir.

In the book, Jonah Hill's character, Donnie Azoff, is referred to by the name Danny Porush. Donnie was loosely based on the real Danny, who was Belfort's business partner and the co-founder of Stratton Oakmont, the Long Island brokerage house that becomes a circus of sex, drugs, dwarf-tossing, and pump-and-dump fraud in "The Wolf of Wall Street."

Though Porush has called Belfort's book "a distant relative of the truth," he himself married a not-so-distant relative: his own first cousin. In the movie, Belfort broaches the subject of these "rumors" over beers at a bar, eliciting Donnie's bug-eyed, toothy admission, "Yeah, my wife is my cousin or whatever." That part of Porush's personal background is true, according to Time , though he and his cousin are now divorced.

Unlike Belfort, Porush was not involved in the making of "The Wolf of Wall Street." Changing his character's name helped remove any liability the filmmakers might face for damaging his reputation. Porush reportedly threatened to sue them beforehand, so the name change was a practical decision meant to cover their bases.

What really happened at the office?

On the testosterone-filled office floor in "The Wolf of Wall Street," Jordan Belfort psyches up his stockbrokers with the words, "This right here is the land of opportunity. Stratton Oakmont is America!" It's true he used to give speeches to his employees with a microphone, which prepared him for his later life of motivational speaking. Substitute "country" for "company" in his movie speeches, and it lays bare the cultural subtext of "The Wolf of Wall Street."

In Belfort's America, money can buy anything and everyone. Sex workers were indeed charged to the company credit card, his book indicates, and Danny Porush says it's true they paid an employee $10,000 to shave her head. The movie makes a spectacle out of her doing it to get breast implants, with Belfort shouting, "This is the greatest country company in the world!"

It's not long before a half-dressed band comes marching in, followed by champagne waiters and strippers. Martin Scorsese dials everything up to 11, combining Belfort's book description of multiple parties into one hedonistic scene.

In an interview with Mother Jones (by way of History vs. Hollywood ), Porush disputed that the office ever brought in a chimpanzee on roller skates or did any dwarf-tossing at its parties. Little people are said to have attended one party, but Belfort's memoir only depicts the meeting where he and his associates discuss the hypothetical specifics of tossing them. Porush admitted, however, that the part where he/Donnie swallows a broker's pet goldfish was true.

Forbes really did profile Belfort

In "The Wolf of Wall Street," there's a scene where a journalist for Forbes magazine visits the offices of Stratton Oakmont. She's doing a profile on Jordan Belfort, which winds up being "a total f***ing hatchet job" in his eyes. The article appears onscreen with Leonardo DiCaprio in his tan-faced movie poster pose below the headline "The Wolf of Wall Street." All the while, Belfort rails against the journalist labeling him that, as if she was the one who coined his nickname and the movie's title.

You can read the real 1991 article on the official Forbes site (and see a larger scanned image of it here ). The headline was actually "Steaks, Stocks — What's The Difference?" This is one of the more interesting "Wolf of Wall Street" artifacts out there, showing how the movie partially overlaps with reality. It's a "prop" anyone can access online, and it offers a real view of how someone other than Jordan Belfort viewed Jordan Belfort.

The true journalist was Roula Khalaf, not Aliyah Farran (the fictitious byline shown in the movie), though her article does contain the highlighted movie phrase "pushing dicey stocks." It also contains a line that DiCaprio performs almost verbatim about Belfort "sounding like a kind of twisted Robin Hood, who takes from the rich and gives to himself and his merry band of brokers." Yet if it wasn't Forbes that coined the "Wolf of Wall Street" nickname, that immediately opens up the question of who did.

Was Belfort ever actually called The Wolf of Wall Street?

According to CNN , Jordan Belfort himself came up with the "Wolf of Wall Street" name. Before Martin Scorsese's film premiered, Danny Porush disputed that anyone at Stratton Oakmont ever called Belfort that. In 2013, a prosecutor in the Belfort case, former assistant U.S. attorney Joel M. Cohen, likewise told The New York Times , "In all the years that we investigated him, the hundreds of hours I spent with him and his cohorts, I never heard anyone call him 'The Wolf of Wall Street.'"

Circling back to Belfort's sketchy book claim that "Gordon Gekko, Don Corleone, Keyser Soze" were among his many nicknames, he had already lumped himself together with several cinematic bad boys. By linking his name to famous movie villains, it's as if Belfort aimed to set himself up as a sort of prepackaged Hollywood deal. "I was the ultimate wolf in sheep's clothing," he writes.

There's a part in the book where Belfort's apoplectic father, played by Rob Reiner in the movie, rattles off a whole paragraph of dialogue, which begins with, "And you, the so-called Wolf of Wall Street — the demented young Wolf!" Unless he was running a tape recorder in his office back in the 1990s, it seems unlikely Belfort would have been able to perfectly recollect such dialogue. It would appear that, rather than being incensed at his lupine nickname, Belfort anointed himself the Wolf of Wall Street as a bit of self-promotion.

What Belfort did before becoming a stockbroker

"The Wolf of Wall Street" begins with Jordan Belfort already relishing a rich and famous lifestyle. It then flashes back to him at 22, getting off the bus on Wall Street, "the one place on earth that befit [his] high-minded ambitions."

The truth is, Wall Street came a little later for Belfort. In the movie, he mentions being "raised by two accountants." Yet there's no mention of him dropping out of dentistry school (per The Independent ) or selling meat and seafood door-to-door. The latter is what prompted the wordplay in the  Forbes headline, "Steaks, Stocks — What's The Difference?" Belfort's beefy business soon went under, leaving him a failed businessman at 25. It was only then that he became a stockbroker-in-training at the firm L.F. Rothschild.

Matthew McConaughey's character, Mark Hanna, was a real senior broker at L.F. Rothschild who did advise masturbation and cocaine as keys to success, according to Belfort's memoir. In a video on his verified Twitter account, McConaughey said that the character's chest-thumping chant was born of a warm-up ritual that he himself did before every take, just to get in the zone as an actor.

Biography.com reveals that Belfort started selling stocks in 1987. That was the same year future president Donald Trump published his memoir, "The Art of the Deal," while Oliver Stone's aforementioned "Wall Street," with its famous movie quote, "Greed is good," hit theaters nationwide.

Fashion designer Steve Madden was involved

Actor Jake Hoffman, who also appears in "The Irishman" and is Dustin Hoffman's son, plays designer Steve Madden in "The Wolf of Wall Street." Madden and Danny Porush were childhood friends, just as the movie depicts. The company Madden founded (and continues to design for) is still a leading name in women's shoes. In the 2021 fiscal year, its revenue jumped up to $1.9 billion.  

The real-life Madden thought Hoffman's portrayal of him was "too nerdy." Though the movie implies he stabbed Jordan Belfort in the back by unloading shares after Stratton Oakmont took his company public, Madden told Page Six , "He ratted me out to save himself."

Madden wouldn't cooperate with the FBI as Belfort did, and wound up serving a longer 41-month sentence in prison (compared to Belfort's 22-month stretch). However, his life rebounded, and he's called "The Wolf of Wall Street" "a great movie." In his autobiography, "The Cobbler," Madden  wrote , "The movie also raised our brand awareness with young men and increased our name recognition."

Coco Chanel's yacht went down with Belfort's marriage

When Jordan Belfort is touting Steve Madden's once-in-a-decade genius in "The Wolf of Wall Street," he compares him to other well-known fashion designers. Coco Chanel's name is sandwiched between Gianni Versace and Yves St. Laurent without further comment, but Belfort had a greater real-life connection to Chanel, as he was the last person to own her yacht.

Between the publication and filming of "The Wolf of Wall Street," Chanel's image was tarnished by revelations that she was a Nazi agent . This may be why her previous ownership of the yacht was left out, despite being included in Belfort's memoir. As seen in the movie, he did sink the yacht in a storm, and he did sink his marriage by hitting his wife and driving his car through the garage door with his 3-year-old child in front.

The yacht was named the Nadine, not the Naomi, and the same goes for Belfort's wife. Margot Robbie landed the Naomi part by going off-script and slapping DiCaprio in her improvised audition . She regretted filming their love scene on a cash bed because of all the paper cuts it left her.

The real Nadine, who went on to become a Ph.D. and TikTok-powered therapist after their divorce, said it's not true Belfort bought her the yacht as a wedding present. His abuse of her and his rough helicopter landing on their front lawn was partially fueled by a real drug problem.

Fall of the new Rome

After Jordan Belfort is caught and becomes the Rat of Wall Street, the movie portrays him heroically tipping off Donnie Azoff about him wearing a wire via a napkin message. Belfort never tipped off Danny Porush, but in his sequel book, "Catching the Wolf of Wall Street," he related a similar incident involving another friend.

By likening Belfort to Caligula, Leonardo DiCaprio somewhat aligns "The Wolf of Wall Street" with the idea that America is the new Roman Empire. His decline and fall is its decline and fall. FBI agent Patrick Denham, seen on Belfort's yacht with the American flag almost flowing out of his head, can only try and plug the dam. Kyle Chandler's all-American image as Eric Taylor in "Friday Night Lights" thus underpins Denham's character, who was based on agent Gregory Lockwood.

Former Stratton Oakmont exec Andrew Greene, the inspiration for the toupee-wearing character "Wigwam" in the book and "Rugrat" (P.J. Byrne) in the movie, unsuccessfully sued the studios behind "The Wolf of Wall Street" for libel, losing in part because of the credits disclaimer:

"While this story is based on actual events, certain characters, characterizations, incidents, locations and dialogue were fictionalized or invented for purposes of dramatization. With respect to such fictionalization or invention, any similarity to the name or to the actual character or history of any person, living or dead, or any product or entity or actual incident, is entirely for dramatic purpose and not intended to reflect on an actual character, history, product or entity."

Tommy Chong was Belfort's 'cube mate'

Tommy Chong has dozens of movie and TV credits to his name, some through his collaboration with Cheech Marin in the stoner comedy duo Cheech & Chong. He had a recurring role on "That '70s Show" and has also done activism for marijuana legalization.

As chance would have it, a nine-month sentence for selling bongs online landed Chong in the same federal prison as Jordan Belfort. The prison was so nice that it didn't even have cells, but the two men apparently shared a cubicle. New York Magazine reports that they were "cube mates" or "cubies."

In 2014, Yahoo News further reported that Chong — as Belfort's cube mate — was instrumental in convincing him to turn his life story into a memoir. At the time, Chong was writing his own book, and though Belfort would regale him with stories of his stockbroker misadventures, he had been wiling away his days in prison by playing tennis.

The movie shows Belfort on the tennis court at the end, where he brags about how being rich and living in a country "where everything was for sale" helped soften the blow when he eventually had to face the consequences of his actions.

In prison, Chong gave Belfort some writing advice after the fictionalized first draft of "The Wolf of Wall Street" read like a John Grisham knockoff. "I told him a few tricks of the trade, how to articulate the story," Chong said.

Belfort was ordered to pay restitution to his victims

While Belfort was on parole, 50% of his income went toward restitution for his victims. That ended in 2009, but for the rest of his life, Jordan Belfort has to continue paying at least $10,000 a month into a $110 million restitution fund. In 2018, a judge made a ruling to garnish more of his funds since Belfort had only paid a "fraction" of what he owed. He, therefore, has a deep incentive to continue making money.

In the film, Belfort boasts of "selling garbage to garbage men." A pivotal moment comes when his first wife, Leah (Christine Ebersole), suggests that he rethink his penny stock scheme, marketing it to "rich people who can, like, afford to lose a lot of money."

From there, Belfort's off to the races, but among his real-world victims were retirees and small-business owners, not just fabulously wealthy individuals. Some people he duped lost their life savings or the money for their children's college tuition.

What's Jordan Belfort up to today?

In 2022, The New York Times reported that Jordan Belfort was investing in NFT start-ups and other ventures, while offering his services as a consultant, sales coach, and cryptocurrency guru. For the price of one $40,000 Bitcoin, guests could attend a workshop at his luxurious Miami Beach home.

The image that emerges in the Times via words and photos is one of Belfort drinking a morning Red Bull and lounging on his couch, surrounded by blockchain disciples — all men — whose bible for the day would be Belfort's 2017 sales manual, "The Way of the Wolf." One of the guests confessed to having already stolen a copy of "The Wolf of Wall Street" from the library.

Despite his continuing prosperity, 2021 saw Belfort himself become the victim of a crypto hacker, who robbed him of $300,000 in Ohm tokens. In 2020, Belfort also made headlines for filing a $300 million lawsuit against Red Granite Pictures, one of the production companies behind the "Wolf of Wall Street" film. The suit alleged that Red Granite and its CEO had co-financed the movie with a Belfort-like bundle of dirty money , stolen from the Malaysian government.

Belfort seemed to acknowledge that his own ill-gotten gains were the result of misdirected energy, and he could have profited better off legitimate business pursuits. "I missed the internet boom," he lamented. "I would've made 100x more money."

A Lamborghini of lies mixed with the truth

At the beginning of the "Wolf of Wall Street" movie, there's a moment where Jordan Belfort is speeding down the freeway in his red Ferrari as Naomi performs fellatio on him. Through voiceover narration, he offers a quick correction: "My Ferrari was white, like Don Johnson's in 'Miami Vice,' not red." The car then spontaneously changes colors onscreen, as if to illustrate the mutability of memory and malleability of the truth.

Later, during the infamous Quaaludes scene, Belfort drives his white Lamborghini under the influence and believes he's "made it home alive, not a scratch on me or the car." Two cops subsequently drag him outside, where he sees that the car is, in fact, wrecked.

In his drug-fueled state, he had misremembered the details. The irony is, in real life (per Time ), it was a Mercedes that Belfort drove home that night, not a Lamborghini.

If cars are interchangeable in "The Wolf of Wall Street," it leaves the viewer to wonder what other facts might have been changed for artistic purposes. For some things, all we have to go on is a game of he-said, he-said between Belfort and Danny Porush.

These are the same two men whose film analogs, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, are shown smoking crack together. In 2014, Porush denied moments like that or Donnie's impromptu public masturbation ever happened, telling The Sun , "I never smoked crack and I never pulled out my penis at a party."

Are you buying it?

As a filmmaker, Martin Scorsese took creative license with Jordan Belfort's book, just as Belfort may have taken license with some of the facts of his own biography. In "The Wolf of Wall Street," Belfort self-mythologizes. It's even possible there are things he believes happened that didn't, like how we see the movie Lamborghini making it home undamaged.

As he cold-calls strangers, reads from his script on how to fleece them, and coaches Stratton Oakmont trainees on how to do the same, the film version of Belfort puts one of his victims on speakerphone. With the guys around him snickering like hyenas, Belfort pantomimes reeling in a fish before flicking off the voice on the other end of the line. He openly mocks and shows his contempt for this sucker, who we never see, because we're always in Belfort's perspective. The other person's not important to him.

By the end, Belfort has reinvented himself as a respectable citizen, someone people will pay to see and learn sales psychology from at business seminars. For the final image, Scorsese points the camera at Belfort's audience, which includes the people onscreen and the ones watching the movie.

The real Belfort cameos as the host who introduces DiCaprio onstage. The Wolf is in Auckland now, asking guys with Kiwi accents to sell him a pen, but it's the same self-reflexive pitch-me pitch that he gave his "hometown boys" earlier in the movie.

The question is, are you buying what he's selling?

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The true story of Wolf Of Wall Street’s yacht ‘Nadine’

Jordan Belfort’s antics are so legendary that sinking a multi-million dollar yacht is just another act of depravity that Martin Scorsese manages to weave among The The wolf of Wall Street grotesque film adaptation. Those who know the wolf of Wall Street book will have read Belfort’s account about it in more detail, but the backstory of the superyacht Nadine is a lesser-known tale with unexpected twists.

Despite Jordan’s notoriety for unbridled bacchanalia, Nadine was sunk by natural forces far greater than even the fiercest drinking bout he could muster. In the middle of a pedestrianized Mediterranean cruise, a storm unexpectedly turned into a raging storm with high winds and huge swells to send the pride and joy of the wolf into Davey Jones’ locker.

In fact, this type of storm is so specific that it has its own name. The mistrals get their name from the winds that blow from the French Alps into the Mediterranean. This convection cycle is caused by warm air rising from African deserts and colder air from the Alps rushing through the void for sustained round trips of 12 to 40 hours. Nothing like a strong relentless wind to generate a dangerous swell. And the kicker? Mistrals are difficult to predict.

RELATED: Asymmetric superyacht hits market for $ 47 million

En route from Riva de Travino to the island of Sardinia, off the west coast of Italy, what should have been a routine race (which usually takes around 7 hours) ended in the fiasco that International Yachts described as ‘Mayday in the Med.’

“When we set off,†said Captain Mark Elliot, “the forecast told us to expect wind and choppy but small seas. Knowing that this wouldn’t be an ideal crossing, the captain asked if the guests wanted to delay until the next morning. The answer was a definite ‘no’ as they were all eager to head to Sardinia for a round of golf the next morning. So, they cast off and set sail for another corner of paradise.

Hours later, the guests were enjoying the sunny afternoon weather of another dream day in the Mediterranean… when a rogue wave reached the bow and wheelhouse, inundating a hostess from head to toe. Immediately after this warning sign made contact, a transmission was received via radio warning of unexpected gale force winds in the area. The mistral had announced. The swell heights doubled, the winds intensified, and the shit became real.

However, before Belfort throws next-level parties aboard his elegant ship and charters it across the Mediterranean to Sardinia on that fateful day, Nadine had already lived many lives. In truth, the luxury yacht seen in The Wolf of Wall Street movie bears no resemblance to the period ship owned by Jordan Belfort. Scorsese hired a yacht called Lady M for these stages, which was originally built by Intermarine Savannah in 2002.

On the other hand, the real one Nadine (Where Mathilde as it was originally called), was built in 1961 and delivered by the Dutch shipyard Witsen & Vis for none other than fashion mogul Coco Chanel. At the time, Mathilde had five dark teak cabins, exceptional dining rooms and a helipad.

“At that time, it was the largest yacht on the East Coast,†recalls Captain Mark Elliot. “No one had ever seen anything like it.”

After Coco’s death in 1971 the yacht was renamed Jan Pamela by its new owner, Melvin Lane Powers. While not as decorated as his predecessor, Powers was a notorious and ostentatious Houston real estate developer known for wearing crocodile skin boots and driving a golden Cadillac after being acquitted of the murder of her lover’s husband. The New York Times described his 1966 trial as “one of the most spectacular homicide trials of all time.”

Powers ordered a huge refit and extension of the ship, but in 1983 it hit rock bottom and Jan Pamela was sold before being renamed Waterside . In 1989, it was Bernie Little’s luck, and he bought her sight without seeing her. She then underwent another refit, before becoming Great eagle under the command of Mark Elliot once again. In this form, she caught the attention of Jordan Belfort, who took possession of it in 1995. Of course, he had to undertake his own additions and renovations, before renaming the ship after his second wife, Nadine .

However, the reincarnation of this historic yacht as Nadine was to be short lived. After 35 years of leisure, sailing on the most beautiful coasts and welcoming the great names of the time, Mother Nature would have the last word.

Back in the Mediterranean, hours later, roaring gusts ripped the $ 100,000 tender from its tow lines. Captain Mark Elliot calls to abandon yacht, as turning point Nadine against the crashing waves would have courted disaster. Abandoning the course to try to outrun the mistral was out of the question for the same reasons. They are there now – every captain’s nightmare – with seventy knot winds and 35 foot ridges to negotiate.

Then, Nadine’s The moment of “perfect storm” pointed its formidable head. The huge wave crashes all over the ship, tearing off the hatches and deck fittings, triggering a death knell that can only end with a day of disaster. The remaining supply crashes into the dining room window, causing it to collapse wave after wave flooding the living room.

“I knew at that time that Nadine had received a fatal blow. Once I assessed the damage, I walked over to the deck and used the satellite phone to contact the Italian Coast Guard known as “Gruppo Marine Italian,†says Captain Elliot.

First aid stations. Guests are gathered in a secure central location and escorted one by one to their cabins to collect passports and any valuables that can fit in a small bag.

Half an hour later, a rescue helicopter attempts to bring down a diver to pick up guests. However, the gusts of wind turned out to be too violent, and after almost losing the said diver, the helicopter aborted. Imagine the heartbreaking feeling of those on board Nadine , as the Coast Guard abandon ship, defeated by the rampaging elements, and return to the safety of the coast as the sun sets below the horizon and night sets in.

Hurricane-force winds, severe flooding and a 15-meter-high sea are now pounding Italy’s shores in what will be known as the storm of the century. The situation is so tumultuous that when a large merchant ship attempts another rescue attempt a few hours later, it almost crashes in Nadine , before setting off again and again, abandoning the crew and the frenzied guests.

The liferafts are deployed as a precaution… until the roaring wind also tears them from the sea, leaving the crew completely stranded on board.

Below deck, the flooded kitchen has become an electrified death trap, and the chef and engineer receive jolts from the current before pulling the ass out of there to the (relative) safety above. It should be noted that this is probably around the time when a deranged and drenched Leo shouts at Jonah Hill with the unforgettable line: “Get the ludes downstairs!” I will not die sober! To have. The. Whore. Ludes! ”

Times of crisis. With no options left, Captain Elliot calls to throw the helicopter off the bridge to free up space for another rescue attempt. He unhooks the tie-downs and rolls the ship twenty degrees, throwing the expensive equipment overboard and into the Mediterranean, where its rusty skeleton undoubtedly lies to this day.

At around 5 a.m., the Coast Guard returned and began to hoist the guests, then the crew to safety in the reassuring light of dawn. The weather calmed down as the winds and waves calmed down, but the damage was done. The last to leave the ship he commanded for so many years, Mark Elliot takes stock of the wreck before finally accepting his loss, closing the engine room controls and seizing the buoy rescue package handed to him by the coast guard.

Nadine is swallowed up by the sea, just ten minutes after Captain Elliot left his decks.

While all the guests and the crew of 11 survive, the prestigious motor yacht and its collection of toys (including eight jet skis, four motorcycles, snorkeling gear, a helicopter and a seaplane) sink into the deep end. at the bottom of the Mediterranean, over 1000 m deep. the water.

“The insurance paid off immediately because it was the storm of the century,†said Captain Elliot.

Back on dry land, Mark Elliot was hailed as a hero after showing courage and leadership in such a dire situation. He was then offered command of Bernie Little’s famous yacht Vessel , and today works as a broker in Miami as one of the most experienced and capable men in the business.

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Jordan Belfort: The real Wolf of Wall Street and the men who brought him down

Jordan belfort scammed investors out of $200m. as martin scorsese and leonardo dicaprio bring his outrageous life to the big screen, nick harding gets the real inside story, article bookmarked.

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The pitch could have been barked by any of the "motivational-training" snake-oil salesmen who ply their wares in the corporate sector. But the man behind this particular "sales and persuasion" one-day course in Australia last year thought himself special enough to demand a US$5,000 entrance fee.

The inflated price tag may have been something to do with the quality of the after-dinner anecdotes, as the man hosting the event was Jordan Belfort - a 51-year-old American ex-con who is among the most infamous crooked businessmen in recent history. In the 1990s, Belfort was reputed to have been worth £60m, earning £600,000 a week. He owned a sprawling estate in the Hamptons, a fleet of supercars and a 167ft yacht which once belonged to Coco Chanel and which he sank in the Mediterranean. He had a supermodel wife and a drug and alcohol habit. He employed an army of young salespeople who aggressively sold stocks in questionable companies to unwitting investors. His workers were rewarded with massive bonuses and parties where prostitutes and dwarf-throwing competitions were provided as entertainment.

Today, the disgraced swindler (a term Belfort hates) has reinvented himself as a reputable businessman, with clients such as Delta and Virgin Airlines. Much to his delight, he's also being played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's new film, The Wolf of Wall Street, which portrays the lavish, drug-fuelled and illegal antics at Belfort's now-defunct East Coast stocks and shares brokerage Stratton Oakmont.

But, says Belfort, he's not letting all that glitz go to his head - he is a new man since his 2004 conviction for defrauding clients of more than $200m. "We are not the mistakes of our past," he recently said. "We're the resources and capabilities that we glean from our past. It chokes me up a little when I think about it. I was a bad guy. And it wasn't like I started that way. You can get desensitised to your own actions, it's easy on Wall Street... I shouldn't really care what people think of me. I know I'm good. But of course I do care."

Former Assistant US Attorney Joel Cohen, who helped put Belfort behind bars, couldn't agree less. "If he is trying to create the impression that he is basically an honest guy who stepped over the line a bit, that is dead wrong. This is a guy who woke up every day, seven days a week for many years, and said, What crimes can I commit today? He was looking to rip people off on a daily basis."

The yacht, the cars, the supermodel wife and the fortune have all gone. The father of three now lives in a modest three-bedroom house in a relatively inexpensive LA suburb. At his seminars, attendees are taught a technique he calls "Straight Line" selling; a set of pre-determined steps from first contact to closing a deal. It is, he has said, roughly the same system he taught his employees to use when pressuring people to buy shares in the useless firms he once promoted. He's paid around $30,000 an hour for his wisdom.

He makes a very good living, then - but his income is a fraction of the vast wealth he enjoyed, and a court order requires him to pay 50 per cent of his earnings into a compensation fund for his thousands of victims. Nevertheless, the sale of the film rights to Belfort's two memoirs, The Wolf of Wall Street and Catching the Wolf of Wall Street, are estimated to have earnt him $2m. The film is up for a Golden Globe (Best Comedy) tonight and there is talk of several Oscar nominations when they are announced on Thursday.

Over the festive period, American film-goers flocked to see DiCaprio as Belfort marching hookers on to the office floor, receiving the attentions of a young lady at the wheel of his Ferrari and tearing up a sofa to find a stash of cocaine. Predictably, there has been outrage that the film glorifies these exploits. All of which, one imagines, gave Belfort his best Christmas in years - as he wrote on his blog at the end of last month: "Visit the theater and watch DiCaprio portray me as I was and remember the man I have become."

And what has Belfort, whose representatives did not answer our request for comments, become in the seven years since his release?

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By all accounts a natural raconteur, Belfort delights in recounting stories of drug-fuelled excess, and distances himself from other disgraced businessmen. He describes Bernie Madoff, the US financier convicted in 2009 of defrauding investors of $65bn, as a "complete crook who took people’s money", and defends his own actions by claiming 95 per cent of his business dealings "were totally legit".

The Wolf of Wall Street: Most outrageous quotes

Belfort also gives the impression that he was seduced by the financial environment of the time. The market of the early 1990s made a lot of people a lot of money and, by Belfort's reckoning, his endeavours cost no one more than they could afford. "I don’t like to come off like what I did was not wrong. But I wasn't dealing with poor people. I was dealing with very rich people. No one lost their life savings," he argues.

This revisionism, however, is not the account Belfort gave to court when he pleaded guilty to charges of international securities fraud and money-laundering in 1999. Facing 20 to 30 years in jail, he agreed to gather evidence against his friends and colleagues in a year-long undercover operation in exchange for a lighter sentence.

It is also not an account that the two key investigators behind his downfall recognise.

FBI Special Agent Greg Coleman began investigating Belfort in 1992. "I have run into individuals who were bad people doing bad things and I've run into ones who were basically good people who made a mistake and will never do it again," says Coleman. "Belfort was really bad. And while there is some attempt on his part to clean up and change, I think he is still a work in progress. There were a lot of victims who could ill afford to lose that kind of money."

Joel Cohen concurs. "My sense is that he is only half-repentant, for whatever reason - whether he thinks it sells books and movies better. He says he is sorry to his victims but on the same token he tells the world that only 5 per cent of his behaviour was criminal."

Both have mixed feelings about the movie. Says Cohen, "It's not going to be about his prosecution. It will be about his rise and dwarves being thrown out of cannons. I fear it is being marketed as a general comment of all that ails society, when in fact it is a sordid story about bad people who do not represent society at all."

While the debauchery depicted in the film is true, plenty of the Belfort story is myth. His supposed links to the mafia have never been proven and Stratton Oakmont - a name chosen as it k sounded British and reputable - was never a Wall Street firm: the Wolf of Wall Street operated from a shopping mall in suburban Long Island.

Stratton Oakmont was a so-called "boiler room"; ostensibly a call centre where young workers rang investors and random names from the telephone directory, pushing them to buy shares in companies it financed and floated on the stock exchange (in a process called Initial Public Offerings or IPOs). Stratton Oakmont practised a technique called "pump and dump": investors were first hooked with the promise of shares in stable companies and then persuaded to invest in Stratton’s IPOs. The greater the number of people who invested, the higher the share prices rose. Illegally, Belfort and a group of insiders he tipped off also bought shares in these businesses. When the prices peaked, Belfort tipped off his cohorts to sell. They all made fortunes while the share prices plummeted, leaving everyone else with worthless stocks.

Belfort says he "exited the womb an entrepreneur". At 16, he sold ice lollies, bagels and trinkets on the beach at Long Island and with the money he made he put himself through college. He enrolled in dental school, but walked out on the first day when the Dean told the new intake that they were in the wrong profession if they wanted to make money. Instead, he began selling meat off the back of lorries. He started his own firm, but it went bankrupt, owing $24,000, when he was 24. Desperate for a job, Belfort started at the bottom in a Wall Street trading firm working as a connector, making calls to potential investors whom he would patch through to the brokers. "I was pond scum."

When he finally passed his traders' exams, he began his stockbroking career on 19 October 1987: Black Wednesday, when the market plummeted 508 points in a day. The company he worked for closed, but the setback only fuelled his desire. In 1989, he set up Stratton Oakmont.

When Cohen and Coleman started investigating the firm in 1992, the brokerage was already the subject of a civil fraud lawsuit brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As a result, the company was ordered to pay a $2.5m fine and Belfort and his partners, Daniel Porush (played by Jonah Hill in the film) and Kenneth Greene agreed to $100,000 fines apiece. None of the three admitted or denied the SEC's allegations and the penalty was peanuts compared to what the firm and its employees and bosses were earning.

Coleman and Cohen spent the following years gradually digging away to collect evidence - but the loyalty Belfort engendered in his well-paid staff made it an almost impossible task.

The breakthrough came when Belfort became desperate and began smuggling money out of the country. The funds ended up in Swiss bank accounts, where it was laundered - and money-laundering was Coleman's area of expertise.

"The crowbar we used to open them up was the tax evasion," he explains. "We were able to get some witnesses who were helping them smuggle the money to provide information about that. We used that to go to the Swiss authorities to get them to provide information about the bankers Belfort was using in Geneva. It took time because bank secrecy in Switzerland was still very robust and we had to convince the authorities that this sort of behaviour was something they should provide information to us about. Eventually we got Belfort’s Swiss banker to co-operate."

With concrete evidence, both Belfort and Porush were arrested in September 1998 and persuaded to work with the investigation. Belfort was required to post $10m security as a condition of his bail. (The security took the form of jewels which he had delivered to the courthouse in an armoured car accompanied by armed guards.) The skills that made Belfort such a good conman also made him an effective government mole: the evidence he collected was used in scores of other prosecutions.

Belfort eventually pleaded guilty. The case took years to come to trial and in 2004 he was convicted, sentenced to four years, and jailed, serving 22 months in all. He reported to a federal prison camp in California, where he shared a cell with the comedian Tommy Chong, of Cheech and Chong fame, who was serving a nine-month sentence for selling drug paraphernalia.

Chong was working on a book; after hearing Belfort's outlandish tales, he persuaded his cell-mate to put pen to paper as well. On his release in 2006, Belfort realised there was an appetite for his life story and started pitching his manuscript. Publisher Random House gave him a $1m advance. Within a year of his release, The Wolf of Wall Street was on sale.

Coleman still keeps in contact with his former prey "as a subtle reminder that I am still watching", and the FBI man admits he is curious about the film. Asked to consult on the plot, he's played by actor Kyle Chandler (who recently appeared in Argo and Zero Dark Thirty). "I want to see how I am portrayed," he says. "I hope it's done realistically, rather than the stereotypical FBI guy in a suit." As for Cohen, "I don’t think Jordan loves me. In his book, his caricature of me is unfair. He describes me as 'the bastard' about 100 times."

Belfort has realised that infamy can be lucrative. However, for the man who once boasted he made $13m in one day, crime will not necessarily pay in the end. According to a recent letter from prosecutors sent to the judge overseeing his compensation agreement, so far Belfort has paid $11.6m of the required $110.4m into the fund. The letter suggests he has been withholding payments and that he is in default of his agreement. Belfort disputes this and is currently in talks with the federal courts to resolve the situation. Whatever the outcome, the Wolf still has a long way to go before he pays his debt to society. 1

'The Wolf of Wall Street' (18) is out on Friday

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The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

Did jordan belfort really meet his future business partner in a restaurant.

What was the name of Belfort's brokerage house?

The Wolf of Wall Street true story confirms that, like in the movie, Stratton Oakmont was the name of the real Jordan Belfort's Long Island, New York brokerage house. Belfort and co-founder Danny Porush (played by Jonah Hill in the movie) chose the name because it sounded prestigious ( NYTimes.com ). The firm would later be accused of manipulating the IPOs of at least 34 companies, including Steve Madden Ltd. (their biggest deal), Dualstar Technologies, Paramount Financial, D.V.I. Financial, M. H. Meyerson & Co., Czech Industries, M.V.S.I. Technology, Questron Technologies, and Etel Communications.

What exactly did Jordan Belfort do that was illegal?

Belfort's Stratton Oakmont brokerage firm ran a classic "pump and dump" operation. Belfort and several of his executives would buy up a particular company's stock and then have an army of brokers (following a script he had prepared) sell it to unsuspecting investors. This would cause the stock to rise, pretty much guaranteeing Belfort and his associates a substantial profit. Soon, the stock would fall back to reality, with the investors bearing a significant loss. -NYTimes.com

How many employees worked for Jordan Belfort's brokerage firm?

At its peak in the 1990s, Stratton Oakmont, Belfort's firm that he co-founded with Danny Porush, employed more than 1,000 brokers. -TheDailyBeast.com

Danny Porush says the movie's dwarf-tossing scene (above) never happened. Even Belfort's book only discusses it as a possibility. Did Jordan Belfort really host an in-office dwarf-tossing competition?

No. "We never abused [or threw] the midgets in the office; we were friendly to them," Danny Porush (the real Donnie Azoff) says. "There was no physical abuse." Porush does admit that the firm hired little people to attend at least one party. Jordan Belfort's memoir The Wolf of Wall Street only discusses the tossing of little people as a possibility, not something that actually happened. -MotherJones.com

During what years did the events in the movie take place?

The events in The Wolf of Wall Street movie took place during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Jordan Belfort and Danny Porush founded the brokerage firm of Stratton Oakmont in the late 1980s. The securities fraud and money laundering charges brought against the firm involved companies that Stratton Oakmont helped raise money for in public stock offerings from 1990 through 1997. In 1996, Stratton Oakmont was banned from the brokerage industry, which eventually forced the company to close its doors. -NYTimes.com

Was Jordan Belfort really known as the "wolf" of Wall Street?

No, at least not according to the former co-founder and president of the Stratton Oakmont brokerage firm, Danny Porush (portrayed by Jonah Hill in the movie). The real Porush says that he is not aware of anyone at the firm calling Jordan the "wolf." Porush says that it's just one of a number of exaggerations and inventions in both Belfort's book and the movie. -MotherJones.com

Is Matthew McConaughey's character, Mark Hanna, based on a real person?

Yes. In exploring The Wolf of Wall Street true story, we learned that Jordan Belfort claims to have met Matthew McConaughey's character's real-life counterpart, Mark Hanna, in 1987 when he was working at the old-money trading firm of L.F. Rothschild. His new acquaintance was an uproarious senior broker at the firm and introduced Belfort to the excess and debauchery that Belfort would later make a daily staple at Stratton Oakmont. Like in the movie, the real Mark Hanna behind McConaughey's character told Belfort that the key to success was masturbation, cocaine and hookers, in addition to making your customers reinvest their winnings so you can collect the commissions. -TheDailyBeast.com

Did Jordan Belfort really abuse cocaine and other drugs?

Yes. In The Wolf of Wall Street movie, Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) is shown snorting cocaine off a prostitute's backside and nearly crashing his private helicopter while high on a cocktail of prescription drugs, including Quaaludes, morphine and Xanax. In researching The Wolf of Wall Street true story, it quickly became clear that Belfort used drugs heavily in real life too. In his memoir, he states that at times he had enough "running through my circulatory system to sedate Guatemala."

Jordan Belfort did give speeches like DiCaprio in the movie (left). Right: The real Belfort speaks at a 1994 Stratton Oakmont Christmas party (right). Did Belfort really stand in front of his employees and give riling speeches with a microphone?

Yes. Belfort was known to stir his troops into action by belting out words of motivation through a microphone. However, his speeches were often filled with more self-adulation than DiCaprio's speeches in the movie.

Did a female employee really let them shave her head for $10,000 to pay for breast implants?

The real Jordan Belfort claims this is true in his memoir. The female employee let them shave off her blonde hair for $10,000, which she used to pay for D-cup breast implants. Co-founder Danny Porush also says that the shaving took place, "...the worst we ever did was shave somebody's head and then pay 'em ten grand for it," says Porush. -MotherJones.com

Was Jordan Belfort's Quaalude dealer in the movie, Brad Bodnick (Jon Bernthal), based on a real person?

Yes. The character in the movie, Brad Bodnick, who has a goatee and is portrayed by The Walking Dead 's Jon Bernthal, is based on Jordan Belfort's real-life Quaalude supplier, Todd Garret. In his memoir, the real Jordan Belfort claims that Garret sold him approximately 10,000 Quaaludes.

Was there ever a chimpanzee in the office?

No. According to co-founder Danny Porush (played by Jonah Hill in the movie), the scene where Leonardo DiCaprio's character pals around with a chimp is pure monkey business. "There was never a chimpanzee in the office," says Porush. "There were no animals in the office...I would also never abuse an animal in any way" (though he does admit to eating the goldfish, see below). -MotherJones.com

Did he really almost crash his helicopter in his yard?

Did Danny Porush really marry his own first cousin?

Yes. According to Jordan Belfort's memoir, the real Donnie Azoff (whose actual name is Danny Porush) did marry his first cousin Nancy "because she was a real piece of ass." After twelve years of marriage, the couple divorced in 1998 after Danny told Nancy that he was in love with another woman ( NYPost.com ). Danny and his ex-wife share three children together.

Did Belfort and his colleagues really have drug-addled nights and sexcapades with prostitutes on a near daily basis?

Though the movie and Belfort's memoir might seem like gross exaggerations of the truth, depicting heavy drug use and sexcapades in the office during trading hours, they're not exaggerations at all says the F.B.I. agent who finally took Belfort into custody, "I tracked this guy for ten years, and everything he wrote is true." Kyle Chandler portrays the agent in the Martin Scorsese movie. -NYTimes.com

Was Belfort really arrested for crashing his Lamborghini while high on expired Quaaludes?

Yes, but according to Belfort the car wasn't a Lamborghini like in the movie, it was a Mercedes. He was so high in a drug daze that he couldn't remember causing several different accidents as he tried to make his way home. In real life, one of the accidents was a head-on collision that actually sent a woman to the hospital. -TheDailyBeast.com

The real Donnie Azoff, Daniel Porush, says that he really did swallow a goldfish like Jonah Hill (pictured). Did Danny Porush really swallow a goldfish?

Yes. According to the real Donnie Azoff, whose actual name is Danny Porush, the scene where Jonah Hill's character eats a goldfish is based on a true story. "I said to one of the brokers, 'If you don't do more business, I'm gonna eat your goldfish!'" Porush recalls. "So I did." -MotherJones.com

Did they really tape money to a woman's body?

In one scene of The Wolf of Wall Street movie, bricks of cash are taped to a Swiss woman's body. "[I] never taped money to boobs," the real Danny Porush says (played by Jonah Hill in the movie). According to Jordan Belfort's memoir, the event did happen but his partner Porush wasn't there. -MotherJones.com

Was footwear mogul Steve Madden really involved in Belfort's scheme?

Yes. As shown in The Wolf of Wall Street movie, Steve Madden had been a childhood friend of Belfort's partner Danny Porush (renamed Donnie Azoff in the movie and portrayed by actor Jonah Hill). Their fondness for drugs and alcohol reunited the two of them. During the initial public offering of his footwear company, Steve Madden Ltd., Madden acquired a large number of shares of his company, which were actually being controlled by Belfort and his firm, Stratton Oakmont. Once shares became available to the public, Stratton Oakmont got down to the business of selling them to unsuspecting suckers. Billing Madden's company as the hottest issue on Wall Street, Belfort's brokers in turn drove up the price. Eventually, Steve Madden was to sell off his shares when the hype was at its peak, just before the stock began its inevitable decline. Similar to what is seen in the movie, Belfort still maintains that Steve Madden tried to steal his Steve Madden shares from him. However, Jordan Belfort did make approximately $23 million in two hours as part of the deal with Steve Madden, who would later be charged as an accomplice to Belfort's scheme. -NYTimes.com For his part, Steve Madden was sentenced to 41 months in prison and was forced to resign as CEO of Steve Madden Ltd. He also resigned from the company's board of directors. However, he did not leave the company entirely. He kept his foot (or shoe) in the door by giving himself the title of creative consultant, for which he was well-compensated even while he was in prison. -Slate.com

Did Jordan Belfort really name his yacht after his wife?

Did Belfort's yacht really sink in a Mediterranean storm?

Yes. In real life, Belfort's 167-foot yacht, which was originally owned by Coco Chanel, sunk off the coast of Italy when Belfort, who was high on drugs at the time, insisted that the captain take the boat through a storm ( TheDailyBeast.com ). Listen to Belfort tell the story during The Room Live 's Jordan Belfort interview . As he states in the interview, his helicopter didn't fall off the boat during the storm like in the movie. Instead, they had to push the helicopter off of the top deck of the boat to make room for the rescue chopper to drop down an Italian Navy commando.

How long did FBI agent Gregory Coleman spend tracking Jordan Belfort and his firm?

FBI agent Gregory Coleman, renamed Patrick Denham for the film and portrayed by actor Kyle Chandler, made tracking Belfort and his firm, Stratton Oakmont, a top priority for six years. In an interview ( watch here ), Coleman says that the factors that drew his attention to the firm were "the flashiness, the brashness of their activities, the blatantness of the way they were soliciting people and cold calling people, and the number of victims that were complaining on a daily basis." -CNBC

Did Jordan really strike his wife?

Yes. The Wolf of Wall Street movie shows Jordan (Leonardo DiCaprio) hitting his wife (Margot Robbie) with his hand and fist. According to his memoir, he actually kicked his wife Nadine down the stairs while he was holding his daughter. She landed on her right side with "tremendous force."

Did Belfort really endanger his 3-year-old daughter's life by crashing his car through the garage door?

Yes. In real life, he put his daughter Chandler in the front seat of the car without a seat belt on, before crashing it through the garage door and then driving full speed into a six-foot-high limestone pillar at the edge of the driveway. Like in the movie, he was high at the time.

Tommy Chong was Jordan Belfort's cellmate in prison and encouraged him to write the book. What was Jordan Belfort's punishment?

When he was finally arrested in 1998 for money laundering and securities fraud, Jordan Belfort was sentenced to four years in prison. This was after agreeing to wear a wire and provide the FBI with information to help prosecute various friends and associates. In the end, the true story reveals that he served only 22 months in a California federal prison. His cellmate in prison was Tommy Chong of "Cheech and Chong" fame, who was serving a nine month sentence for selling bongs. -TheDailyBeast.com

What inspired Jordan Belfort to write his memoir?

It wasn't so much a what as it was a who. Tommy Chong (one half of "Cheech and Chong") was Jordan Belfort's cellmate in prison. After laughing at some of Belfort's stories from his days running the firm, Chong encouraged him to write a book. -TheDailyBeast.com

Why is Jordan Belfort's memoir filled with so many exclamations?

Jordan Belfort attempted to model his writing after Hunter S. Thompson ( Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ), who was known for using plenty of exclamation points.

What happened to Belfort's partner, Danny Porush, portrayed by Jonah Hill in the movie?

Danny Porush, renamed Donnie Azoff for the movie and played by actor Jonah Hill, served 39 months in prison for his part in the corrupt dealings of Stratton Oakmont, the firm that he co-founded with Jordan Belfort. Porush currently runs a medical supply business in Florida, where he lives with his second wife Lisa in a $4 million mansion. A 2008 Forbes article pointed out his company's fraudulent tactics, which included trying to persuade people to order diabetic supplies and getting them to provide information about their physicians that could be used to bill Medicare. A number of complaints surfaced accusing Porush's company of sending unsolicited packages that were accompanied by unexpected Medicare charges. Back in 2001, Porush was arrested in connection to a fraud scheme surrounding Noble & Perrault Collectibles, a company that sold commemorative coins over the phone. Victims saw their credit cards charged repeatedly, at times for thousands of dollars, while often never receiving any merchandise for purchases that were largely unauthorized to begin with. -Sun Sentinel Enjoying a well-to-do life in Florida, Daniel Porush and his wife drive matching Rolls-Royce Corniche convertibles. With regard to The Wolf of Wall Street movie, Porush said, "I really have no comment other than to say I would never try to profit from a crime I'm so remorseful for." -NYPost.com

I heard that Jordan Belfort is a motivational speaker, is that true?

How much did Jordan Belfort earn from his books and the movie?

Catching the Wolf of Wall Street includes more of Belfort's outrageous stories that were not included in his first book. As we investigated The Wolf of Wall Street true story, we discovered that Jordan's books, The Wolf of Wall Street and Catching the Wolf of Wall Street , netted him a $1 million advance from Random House. He also earned $1 million for the film rights to his story ( TheDailyBeast.com ). In a response to criticism over these profits and future profits from the movie, Jordan Belfort said the following via his Facebook page, "I am not turning over 50% of the profits of the books and the movie, which was what the government had wanted me to do. Instead, I insisted on turning over 100% of the profits of both books and the movie, which is to say, I am not making a single dime on any of this." According to Jordan, the money is being used to pay back the millions still owed to those who were scammed by his brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont.

Does Jordan Belfort have a cameo in The Wolf of Wall Street movie?

Yes, the real Jordan Belfort appears at the end of the movie as the person who introduces Leonardo DiCaprio's character before he takes the stage at his Straight Line seminar.

Have any other movies been based on Jordan Belfort's story?

Yes, but only loosely. The brokerage firm in the movie Boiler Room , released in 2000, was inspired by the illegal practices of Jordan Belfort's Stratton Oakmont firm. In the movie, actor Ben Affleck portrays Jim Young, the Belfort-esque co-founder of the firm, who, like Jordan Belfort, trains his brokers in the "pump and dump" scheme. -NYTimes.com

Watch The Wolf of Wall Street movie trailer. Also, view Jordan Belfort interviews and home video footage of him speaking at a Stratton Oakmont party in the 1990s.

• Jordan Belfort's Website
• Danny Porush's Website (played by Jonah Hill)
• Mark Hanna's Website (played by Matthew McConaughey)
• The Wolf of Wall Street Official Paramount Movie Site

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Meet the Real Wolf of Wall Street Superyacht Built for Coco Chanel

The yachting disaster is one of the most dramatic scenes in Martin Scorsese’s blockbuster The Wolf of Wall Street , and like many of the tales in the Leonardo DiCaprio flick, it’s based on a true story. In real life, predatory tycoon Jordan Belfort bought a yacht in 1993 called Big Eagle and renamed her Nadine , after his English-born second wife. The vessel had been built in 1961 by Witsen & Vis in Holland for fashion icon Coco Chanel, but had undergone many transformations by the time Belfort got his mitts on it. Originally 121 feet long, in the 1970s she was extended by nearly 15 feet, and in 1988 she was cut in half and had another 29-foot section grafted on, finally totaling 167 feet.

The luxury yacht used in Scorsese’s film actually bears little resemblance to the  Nadine , being a far more modern vessel. The director hired the 148-foot  Lady M , built by Intermarine Savannah in 2002 and refit in 2011, for filming. It features luxury accommodations for 10 guests, and a marble and granite interior with gold accents.

In Coco Chanel’s day the yacht was mainly used to cruise from Monaco to Deauville for the summer horse racing season. The real  Nadine  sank in 1997 during a storm off the east coast of Sardinia while crossing from Porto Cervo to Capri, much as the movie depicts. Belfort has said that his insistence on sailing in a storm caused the yacht to capsize. Luckily, everyone on board at the time was rescued by the Italian coast guard. 

Jared Paul Stern

Jared Paul Stern, JustLuxe's Editor-at-Large, is the Executive Editor of Maxim magazine and has written for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, the New York Times' T magazine, GQ, WWD, Vogue, New York magazine, Details, Hamptons magazine, Playboy, BlackBook, the New York Post, Man of the World, and Bergdorf Goodman magazine among others. The founding editor of the Page Six magazine, he has al... (Read More)

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Iconic Scenes: The Wolf of Wall Street – The Yacht Bribe

I love The Wolf of Wall Street . I think it is a spectacular film that seems to grow more relevant as time passes. I also think that the central character and narrator, Jordan Belfort, is not the most important or key character – that is Agent Denham. So I’m looking at the brilliant scene where Belfort and Denham first meet.

What Happens

Multi-millionaire and thoroughly corrupt stockbroker Jordan Belfort invites two FBI agents to his luxury yacht after he learns that they are investigating him. Agent Denham, and a virtually silent partner, arrive for what starts as a very friendly meeting. Belfort hands over some of the information the FBI has been trying to get while constantly trying to impress them with his wealth and insisting he’s done nothing wrong. Belfort draws Denham into a conversation and it seems the FBI agent is not happy at being given the case and would be willing to play ball with Belfort. At which point, Belfort tries to bribe Denham, and then the tone changes. It’s immediately obvious that Denham is not willing to play ball and is determined to bring Belfort down. The conversation gets increasingly acrimonious and ends with Belfort literally throwing lobsters and handfuls of cash at the departing FBI agents.

When you sail on a yacht fit for a Bond villain, sometimes you gotta act the part

DiCaprio is sensational in this scene. Despite getting very good advice not to contact the FBI and try some scheming, this is exactly what Belfort does. They meet on his insanely luxurious yacht, where Belfort has beautiful women lounging on chairs, he is dressed in bright white “yacht clothes” and constantly turning on his beaming smile. He offers them lobsters and drinks. It does not seem to occur to Belfort that showing off his immense, and ill-gotten wealth, might not be the best idea when you’re being investigated for crimes in the stock market.

Belfort’s attempt at bribery is fantastic. Basically detailing a story where he advised someone in need of money in what stocks to invest in and that person making a fortune and how Belfort “would be willing to do that for anyone”. When challenged about this being a bribe Belfort reveals he researched what legally constitutes a bribe and that wouldn’t count. Again, it’s a little suspicious for someone to be able to recite the criminal code of a crime if they’re not a lawyer.

Good for you, Little Man

Oh, Agent Denham, you film stealing hero. Denham is played by Kyle Chandler who, and this is important for the Denham role, is your go-to guy for American decency (if you need someone younger than Tom Hanks), he is probably best known for his role in Friday Night Lights where he played an honourable, upstanding and inspirational football coach. Denham’s casual chatting with Belfort seems to suggest he is not interested in the case and possibly dissatisfied with his job, the attempted bribe being when he flips to his real character.

As Belfort becomes more aggressive Denham responds in kind and leads to one of the all-time best deliveries, “Good for you, little man,” when sarcastically congratulating Belfort on becoming a Wall Street douchebag without any help from anyone else. Belfort is stunned by this comment but mainly in that he can’t understand it…he’s rich, really rich, how can he be a “little man”, he’s a giant. A colossus. The embodiment of the American Dream. The thing is, of course, Denham is right.

Fun Coupons

A lot of this scene is purely about status. Of all the places Belfort could have met with the FBI agents he chooses his insanely expensive yacht. He is obsessed with money and how much the FBI agents make, originally pretending to be sympathetic but quickly changing to just mocking them. Belfort assumes that because Denham works for the FBI for what to him is an insignificant amount of money he is a loser. The idea that Denham might believe in what he’s doing is either inconceivable or at best a pitiable weakness. To me, this is the best and most interesting scene in the whole film – not the drug-filled hedonistic parties, not the cult-like team talks Belfort gives his employees, not the incredibly charismatic phone calls Belfort makes when selling stocks but this scene where Denham sizes up Belfort and sees right through him.

Years ago David Cross and Bob Odenkirk made a sketch show called Mr. Show , which contained a sketch based on the premise “someone who makes more money than you is better than you”, so Van Gogh, Einstein and Galileo are actually pretty unsuccessful people. This is Jordan Belfort’s philosophy – he is better than just about everyone he meets because he is richer.

The Hero I’m Going To Be Back At The Office, When The Bureau seizes this boat!

All Belfort manages to do in this scene is upset the FBI and probably convince them that yes, he is absolutely breaking the law. It’s an interesting look at the dynamic of power in America (and indeed the whole world) – who is the more powerful person? Belfort with his huge personal wealth or Denham as a federal officer, a representative of the most powerful country on Earth. There was a lot of discussion at the time about if people actually saw Belfort as the hero of this film, that people liked him and wanted him to win. I saw this as Goodfellas but for white-collar crime. In this scene Belfort helps further his own downfall, antagonising the FBI. In the final moments of this scene, Belfort has just finished throwing money at Denham and his arrogance and deluded grandeur fade as he realises he has just made a terrible mistake.

Also Read: Iconic Scenes: American Psycho – Business Card Scene

Richard Norton

Gentleman, podcaster and pop culture nerd, I love talking and writing about pretty much all pop culture.

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10 Things You May Not Know About 'The Wolf of Wall Street'

Belfort’s inspiration to write the book 'The Wolf of Wall Street' came from an unlikely place

Following his arrest for stock-market manipulation, Belfort pled guilty, and in exchange for his cooperation with an ongoing FBI investigation, was sentenced to 22 months in prison. In 2004, Belfort arrived at Taft Correctional Institution, a low-security federal prison in California, where his cubemate was actor, comedian and marijuana rights activist Tommy Chong, who was serving a nine-month stint for selling drug paraphernalia.

The two men bonded, exchanging stories about their outsized pre-prison lives. Chong, who was writing a book of his own, encouraged Belfort to take a stab at capturing his life story. According to Chong, Belfort’s first tried his hand at fiction, unsuccessfully. As he told MacLean ’s , “You’ve got to write those stories you’ve been telling me at night. Your real life is much more exciting than any kind of imaginary story you could come up with.” Belfort was also inspired by Tom Wolfe’s satirical novel of 1980s excess, The Bonfire of the Vanities , which he discovered in the prison library. Belfort and Chong remained friends after their time in prison.

The trip from page to screen was rocky — and 'The Wolf of Wall Street' was almost a very different film

Following his release, a broke Belfort redoubled his efforts, receiving an advance from Random House for more than $1 million for his manuscript. Hollywood quickly came calling, with stars like Brad Pitt and Mark Wahlberg eyeing the part. Among those most interested was DiCaprio, who brought director Scorsese on board, for what would be their fifth collaboration. But after a deal with Warner Brothers fell through, the film was in limbo, and director Ridley Scott was briefly attached.

In 2010, an independent production company, Red Granite Pictures, bought the film rights, and casting got underway. For the role of Donnie Azoff, Belfort’s co-founder, a number of actors were considered, before Jonah Hill convinced DiCaprio and Scorsese that he should audition for the role — the first time he’d had to audition in years. Actresses Blake Lively , Amber Heard and others were reportedly considered for the role of Belfort’s second wife before Australian newcomer Margot Robbie was cast. Alan Arkin reportedly passed on the role of Max Belfort, Jordan’s father, which went to Rob Reiner. And the role of Robbie’s on-screen aunt, eventually played by former Bond Girl and Absolutely Fabulous actress Joanna Lumley, was originally offered to Julie Andrews , who turned it down due to the after-effects of ankle surgery.

One of the most well-known scenes wasn’t in the script

Early on in the film, DiCaprio has lunch with a successful stockbroker named Mark Hanna. While Hanna was a real figure, his unusual behavior during the meeting didn’t happen. Matthew McConaughey ’s rhythmic beating of his chest and humming was actually an acting technique he used before filming to get himself ready for a scene. As he told Graham Norton, “That's something I'll do…to relax myself, get my voice to drop. I've been doing it for a while, but it's just something I do.” DiCaprio noticed it during rehearsals and suggested to Scorsese that they film it, later saying that it helped set the tone for the movie.

The names of the real-life people who inspired the film were changed for the big screen

While Hanna’s real name made it into the film, others didn’t. Belfort’s first wife was named Denise, not Teresa. And his second wife’s name was Nadine, not Naomi (although Belfort did nickname her The Duchess and named his yacht after her). FBI Special Agent Gregory Coleman, who spent more than half a decade investigating Belfort and his company, became Patrick Denham in the film. The real name of Belfort’s friend and Stratton Oakmont co-founder was Danny Porush. Belfort used his name in his book, but after Porush threatened to sue the film’s producers, they changed it to Donnie Azoff.

The real-life “Donnie” disputes some of the film’s depiction of events

Porush admitted that many of the film’s most outlandish events actually occurred, including Belfort sinking his yacht in Italy and nearly crashing his helicopter on his lawn. It’s also true that Porush ate the goldfish of a broker with disappointing results and that the company paid a secretary $10,000 to shave her head. And Porush actually was friends with shoe designer Steve Madden, who, along with Belfort and Porush, wound up going to jail for his role in the securities fraud surrounding the stock offering of his eponymous company.

But he took issue with some of the other moments depicted in both Belfort’s memoir and the film. According to Porush , nobody ever referred to Belfort as the “Wolf” of Wall Street, Belfort instead gave himself the nickname for the book. And Porush denies that employees abused the little people the company hired by throwing them as shown in the film.

Belfort has a cameo in the movie

During the years-long delay in production of the movie, Belfort acted as an advisor for DiCaprio. He estimated that he spent hundreds of hours with the actor, walking him through both the details of his financial schemes and how to portray the physical and mental effects of the drugs Belfort consumed on a regular basis. As DiCaprio told The Wall Street Journal , Belfort was “incredibly open about his life, especially the most embarrassing parts. I interviewed him incessantly and tried to pull out every detail I possibly could. We incorporated a lot of other stories that weren't even in the book into the movie."

Despite his years of work with DiCaprio, Belfort didn’t meet Scorsese until near the end of filming, when Belfort had a small role in the film’s final scene. He’s the man who introduces DiCaprio’s Belfort at a seminar in Australia where Belfort’s a featured motivational speaker.

The characters’ rampant drug use is a key part of the film but showing that descent came at a cost

For the infamous Quaalude scene, where an impaired DiCaprio tries to drive his car, it was the actor who came up with the idea to open the car’s door with his feet. After several attempts at getting the tricky physical shot, DiCaprio injured his neck and had to wear a brace for several days. And all that cocaine? It was crushed vitamin B. The cast snorted so much of it during production that Hill developed bronchitis and wound up being briefly hospitalized .

The film was banned in several countries

Thanks to its depictions of drug use, sex and an almost record-breaking level of profanity, it’s perhaps not surprising that the film rattled overseas censors. In fact, Scorsese had to cut several scenes in the U.S. version to avoid receiving an NC-17 rating. Additional cuts were made before its release in India and Lebanon, while the United Arab Emirates initially cut 45 of the film’s 180 minutes. Singapore officials limited its distribution, and the film was banned entirely in Malaysia and Nepal. Despite this, it was Scorsese’s highest-grossing film to date, netting $392 million worldwide.

Scorsese and DiCaprio received criticism for the film’s portrayal

Critics and audiences were divided in their reactions to the film. Some, including law enforcement officials who had worked on Belfort’s case and those who had been victims of his fraud, were angered by what they considered to be the film’s glorification of both Belfort’s debauched life and the crimes that funded it. Especially since the film opened just a few years after the 2007-2008 financial crisis , caused in large part by unscrupulous Wall Street actions. Others defended the film, saying that it played like a morality tale, with Belfort getting his just deserts and going to jail. DiCaprio defended the film, noting, “I wanted to make an unapologetic film on the subject matter that didn’t give any false sense of empathy for the character, but that instead was an analysis of man gone awry.”

The film has been ensnared in a number of legal cases

Before filming even began, the Department of Justice sought an injunction against Belfort’s publisher and DiCaprio’s production company, only relenting when Belfort agreed to pay 50 percent of his earnings as part of his deal to pay $100 million in restitution to his victims. In 2018, federal prosecutors accused Belfort of reneging on his restitution deal, claiming he still owed more than $90 million — despite pocketing millions as a motivational speaker thanks to the film’s success.

Red Granite, the film’s producers, were implicated in a scheme that saw billions siphoned from a Malaysian development fund — including the money used to finance the film. Producer Riza Aziz was indicted, and the case led to the downfall of the government of his stepfather, Malaysia’s prime minister. In 2020, Belfort filed a lawsuit that accused Red Granite of fraud, alleging that he’d been unaware of the illegal source of the film’s funding, and asking to be released from his contract with the company, which owns the rights to both The Wolf of Wall Street and Belfort’s second book.

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“There Is No Limit”: The Oral History of the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ Minions

Ten years ago, Martin Scorsese made a movie about the horrific excess of the finance world in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Leonardo DiCaprio was in the foreground, but what was going on in the background was just as wild. 

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P.J. Byrne never liked making cold calls. While majoring in finance at Boston College in the early 1990s, he took a summer internship selling AAA-rated municipal bonds over the phone. At the time, he’d planned to be an investment banker on Wall Street, but after two weeks on the job, he realized dialing numbers wasn’t the path for him. “I was like, this just feels car salesman–y to me,” he says. “I wanted nothing to do with that.”

About 15 years later, after pivoting to drama school and pursuing an acting career, Byrne gave cold-calling a second chance. In a taped audition for The Wolf of Wall Street , the actor leaned into his brief boiler room experience, took a gamble, and improvised an outrageous sales call monologue in which he pretended to scam a former client’s widow out of $100,000. In a devastated voice, he built a sob story around her husband’s financial intentions. “I started pilfering information from this woman,” Byrne says. “But on the other side of the phone, she can’t see that I’m humping the desk and having a blast.” Without realizing it, Byrne had channeled Jordan Belfort—the movie’s craven, money-hungry, criminal protagonist—to a T.

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It wasn’t long before he got a callback to go to New York—along with several other green actors, including Brian Sacca, Henry Zebrowski, and Kenneth Choi—to convene inside a suite at Le Meridien Hotel, where they would perform the same monologues in front of Martin Scorsese and casting director Ellen Lewis. The group was, understandably, nervous as hell. “I thought it was going to be a serious audition,” Byrne says. After a few minutes, however, everyone quickly realized the director wanted them to channel the absurdity of their original auditions, use prop desks and phones, and take advantage of the unusual group setting. “And then,” Byrne adds, “you heard him cackling.”

“We were doing it almost like a scene,” Sacca says. “At one point, I said something on the phone: ‘If you buy these stocks, I will let you snort coke off of my tits.’ That got a big laugh from Marty and the other guys.”

Though The Wolf of Wall Street mostly chronicles Jordan Belfort’s real-life rise and fall as a corrupt CEO (dynamically portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio), the movie’s hedonistic heart belongs to his unquestioning, cultlike worshippers, tracing their evolution from blue-collar schemers to suit-and-tie heathens eager to debase themselves in the name of money and power. The “merry band of brokers,” as Forbes nicknamed them —Nicky, Robbie, Chester, Alden, and Toby (Ethan Suplee)—might not be in charge, but they double down on their penny-stock-peddling debauchery. “Those are the types of people you’re looking to recruit,” Wolf writer Terence Winter says. “A guy who is morally malleable and hungry and has half a brain.”

The three-hour comedy, released 10 years ago this week, ultimately becomes an American tragedy of unchecked testosterone, spiraling greed, and blind idolization. To pull off the corporate circus, everyone in the group—much like the characters they played—embraced excess and chased their id. Guided by Scorsese’s kinetic camera and Winter’s loyal adaptation of Belfort’s autobiography, the cast practiced slimy sales techniques, improvised office high jinks, snorted fake cocaine, simulated orgies, and lost their voices screaming at clients over the phone. Making it was a marathon of endurance, frat-like behavior, and pinch-me moments.

“I was astutely aware,” Sacca says, “that the things that were happening were the stories I was going to be telling forever.”

In 2007, when Winter first pored through Belfort’s The Wolf of Wall Street , he couldn’t wait to turn it into a Hollywood script. Belfort’s first-person account had plenty of cinematic moments—office sex parties, a quaalude trip, a sunken yacht—and followed a classic rise-and-fall narrative, but Winter mostly related to its ambitious protagonist. The pair were around the same age, had grown up in New York’s outer boroughs, and both dreamed of moving to Manhattan and becoming rich. In 1987, around the same time Belfort began his financial career at L.F. Rothschild, Winter had started as a legal assistant at Merrill Lynch. “I was literally working a quarter of a mile away from where Jordan was working on Wall Street,” Winter says.

In other words, he knew this guy. He knew what drove him. But perhaps more importantly, he knew exactly how Belfort built and scammed his way to the top with a bunch of low-level nobodies. “They reminded me of my own friends,” Winter laughs. “These are guys who don’t have the strongest moral compass. They’re not necessarily college educated. These aren’t guys who would go the more traditional route to work for a legitimate Wall Street firm.” Effectively, they were door-to-door salesmen ready to make a quick buck who would pledge loyalty to anyone who could make them money. “As long as Jordan looked like the pillar of success, that’s all he really needed,” Winter says. “If you’re rich, they don’t care how you got there.”

After securing an initial option deal and commitments from Scorsese and DiCaprio, Winter began investigating more about Belfort’s life. He met with Belfort’s parents, his ex-wife, and his financial victims. He drove to Long Island, toured Belfort’s home, and visited his country club. Most shrewdly, Winter convinced Belfort to reenact one of his daily pump-up speeches at CAA’s headquarters, where Winter taped his old sales presentation for reference. Soon after, Winter structured his screenplay with voiceover narration, changing key names and crafting composite characters—like Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff, Stratton’s second-in-command—for legal reasons. But he never strayed from the real-life insanity of Belfort’s cult creation. “I wrote the whole script in 17 days,” Winter says. “It was maybe the most fun I’ve ever had writing a script.”

About five years later, the movie went into production, and the recently cast Belfort boys began their preparation with a sales crash course from the wolf himself, which clarified and informed the entire shoot. “It gave you a little glimpse,” Choi says. “When you have that killer shark energy, everybody else around you has to become a killer shark, or you get swallowed up and eaten.”

Henry Zebrowski (Alden “Sea Otter” Kupferberg): When we first came together, we went to Leo’s apartment. He had Jordan come in and give an example of his ramp-up training speech.

Kenneth Choi (Chester Ming): Sort of a mini sales pitch tutorial.

Zebrowski: We were talking with [Belfort], and he said, “Have you guys ever seen $25,000?” And he pulled out a bunch of money and threw it on the table, which he probably had to scoop up and put back into his pockets. Then they popped a bunch of bottles.

Terence Winter (writer): It’s really fascinating when you see somebody who understands the psychology behind how to set you up. It’s a whole series of questions and answers to the customer. It’s like a good cross-examination. I am going to move you into a corner where your only response can be the one I want.

Choi: He would say, “If you ever get lost, follow the script. The script is your bible. The script is gold. Memorize the script.” Even in that little training session, you could kind of see him step back in time. He got swept up in it.

Zebrowski: Jordan would say, “I just had this piece of paper come across my desk.” He was like, “You wave your hand across. I know it’s dumb, but this is how I talked to the dumb shits I worked with back in the day.”

P.J. Byrne (Nicky “Rugrat” Koskoff): I was like, this guy is a fucking con artist. Holy shit. This scared the fuck out of me.

Choi: I think it was valuable not just to hear how he would do it, but to see his energy and really feel it right in front of you. He was constantly teaching you how to divide and conquer.

Winter: He basically applied high-level skills to a low-level sales force, taking the skills of a Jedi and bringing them into a shitty boxing gym. The idea that this is a legitimate, Wall Street–trained broker and using the spiel you would get from L.F. Rothschild or Goldman Sachs on a mailman. … It was like taking candy from a baby.

Ethan Suplee (Toby Welch): We are playing blue-collar guys who couldn’t cut it as blue-collar guys. We suck at this. You’re not going to find a whole lot of legitimate guys who are willing to do that because there’s risk. You’re doing something completely immoral and unethical, but also illegal.

Zebrowski: The direction for my character was like, this is kind of a revenge against society. Because everybody always told me I was fat and dumb and I was never going to be a millionaire and I was never going to make it. Now, here I am. Jordan believes in me. He saw something in me. I’m just like him.

Suplee: Jordan was like the pied piper. He is the messiah of this industry of ripping people off.

Zebrowski: Intelligent, self-conscious people get pulled into cults all the time. It’s because there’s extreme comfort in letting someone else take the wheel.

Byrne: You’ve got to remember, these guys are all narcissists. And they all ruin the people closest to them. No one has a long-term relationship. If you get sucked into their orbit, you’re going to get chewed on and shit out. But while you’re there, it’s a fucking insane ride.

In an early, seminal montage, DiCaprio mimics Belfort’s presentation, teaching his friends how to reel in customers and shake them down with nefarious tactics. Throughout the scene—which functions as a shared monologue—they follow their scripts and reap the rewards, helping turn Stratton Oakmont from a garage facility into a full-blown office. Using variations of their monologue auditions, the group of actors leaned into their comedic roots to make every office call sizzle.

Zebrowski: It was like two weeks of rehearsal. Scorsese loved improv, but you better be very, very good. He doesn’t want time wasted.

Brian Sacca (Robbie “Pinhead” Feinberg): They hired us because we were guys who could improvise, who could be in the moment and come up with some shit. Some of my favorite moments were: “We need you to do something.”

Choi: We sit around a table, we have the script, and you would just throw everything against the wall. You’d react off someone’s bit, and then Leo and Jonah would react off it. I’d improvise one thing and you’d get the script back a couple days later and your stuff would be in there word for word.

Winter: Anything beyond the dialogue is great. And sometimes, that’s where the gold is, especially when you get an actor who’s really good at it.

Sacca: There were like six of us, including Ted Griffin, the on-set writer, finding how the Tetris of this sales monologue through that long montage is going to work up until an hour before we shot that.

Byrne: Marty knew it would get boring. And he’s like, “How do we keep it interesting?”

Sacca: There was one day of rehearsal where we’re all in a room around a table reading that monologue. And a debate happened between Scorsese and Leo: “Do we let the guys go free-form and improvise, or do we keep it contained and to the script? Finally, I just raised my hand: “Guys, you’re going to shoot this on a circle track, right?” And immediately, I’m like, “What the fuck am I saying? Am I going to get fired off this movie?”

Byrne: [Scorcese’s] like, “I was thinking you’re next to Kenny, and I was going to put a [circle] track around both of you, let’s just say this little part of the monologue.” We were only supposed to do a paragraph, and the monologue is like three pages. We kept passing it and passing it. The room’s quiet now and filled with hundreds of extras, but everyone’s now listening. You can feel the energy. I’m in the zone of zones. Kenny’s in the zone. We’re just making this magic.

Zebrowski: Everybody kind of got to just throw in on their character. And it allowed me to feel comfortable with these people. As we became masters of the universe, it was really important to kind of go from our dumb Queens clothes to the suits. You kind of see how that changes everything.

Choi: I specifically was asked to gain 20 pounds. This guy is about excess. He eats everything, he consumes as much cocaine and women and booze as he can. And that’s where some of my little moments like the doughnut scene came from. He’s just a slovenly pig.

Sacca: We all had our specific traits that we liked to play with. But we all had different levels of aggression. That kind of yes-men, doofus quality was a through line between a bunch of us.

Once Stratton Oakmont grew into a Wall Street middleweight, the office became littered with shocking and vulgar HR violations. As chronicled by Belfort, almost anything related to sex, drugs, and alcohol happened within the walls of the brokerage firm, which more often looked like a bacchanalian madhouse. But Winter wasn’t too surprised by the colorful revelations. During his own brief stint in Merrill Lynch’s law department, he’d seen firsthand the kinds of unholy shenanigans taking place at Stratton. “Somebody had a marching band and brought a monkey onto the trading floor,” Winter says. “When the market closed at 4 p.m., everybody went out and just partied all night. And you’d get guys coming in the next morning hungover and just coked out of their minds.”

Of course, the bigger firms couldn’t compete with Stratton’s no-holds-bar approach, something Scorsese and Winter became devoted to portraying and sometimes embellishing. Spitting in the face of discretion, the filmmaking team leaned into the company’s voracious and lustful appetite, depicting everything from stampeding strippers, to thrown-around little people, to impromptu animal stunts. Not to mention Belfort’s motivational speeches, which turned the office into a pep rally every afternoon. “The whole thing is about excess, and when is too much too much?” Winter says. “It just got crazier and bigger and out of control.”

In some ways, showing it all became a sort of PSA, especially when things come crashing down in the third hour. “That’s the power of comedy,” Byrne says. “You’re able to turn the mirror on yourself with society and go, this is wrong .” In order to capture the chaos, the production moved from Manhattan into a massive office stage in Westchester, where, for nearly two months, the Belfort boys—alongside hundreds of extras—lived inside an unethical bubble catering to their leader’s absurdist ideas.

Sacca: My voice was gone for a good six weeks because we were screaming so much.

Choi: I wasn’t very talkative because I had to gain so much weight that I always felt like taking a nap.

Sacca: I’ll shout out the AD and second AD, who had to wrangle 500 extras to get all of us to be screaming and then shut the fuck up in between takes. That was hard.

Choi: There’s so much importance put on AI in our SAG contract. There’s a reason for that. When you’re in a real space with 300 human beings who are in the background, the energy just swells and you can feel it. Everybody is going apeshit trying to “sell, sell, sell,” and that informs your performance because you feel that surge of energy come through you as an actor.

Suplee: There’s a lot of shit happening in the background of that movie that’s just as crazy as what’s happening in the foreground.

Zebrowski: It was just us bullshitting for 12 hours being animals. Scorsese used to come by and go, “Yeah, you pigs, you ready to get going, you pigs?” We’re like, “Yeah!”

Choi: There’s a scene where Leo walks through with a chimpanzee for no reason, which scared the shit out of me. The whole time I’m thinking, “This ape is going to fucking pounce on me.” I think I just bent down and did some fake lines of cocaine.

Sacca: We had to snort a lot of cocaine in this movie. At the beginning, it was very finely powdered vitamin B12. And man, did it fucking feel good. It was so nice.

Zebrowski: We could snort B12 forever. And we did. And we took every single opportunity we could because we were in a Scorsese movie, and we were animals.

Sacca: About three months into production, they switched it up—they put some dog shit in there. And we were like, “No, no, no, no. Where’s our B12? Bring back the good shit!” We had to sit down with the props master and be like, “Come on, man, we have to snort this shit all day long.”

Suplee: The other brokers and I were in our cast chairs reading books and playing chess, and they came and dragged me to this private set. Leo helped me get sober many years ago, and he was like, “Do you know how to [blow cocaine up someone’s butt]? I was like, “Yeah, I do know how to do this. Unfortunately, I am your technical drug adviser.” But I was happy to help. It was so funny to see them sitting on this closed set discussing amongst themselves, “How do we do this?”

Choi: The head-shaving scene was a huge fucking deal. I think it was a woman who was somehow friends with Leo, and she offered to do it.

Byrne: When we started shaving her head, it was shocking. I practiced with a razor on a fake scalp a lot because I was like, “I don’t want to ruin this moment for her.”

Choi: You have 350 people yelling at P.J. to shave her head. It was so overwhelming.

Byrne: You’re simultaneously going, “Holy fuck, this is crazy, I can’t believe this.” And then: “There’s the camera. Make sure you’re doing it perfectly for the camera.”

Choi: [P.J.’s] hairpiece should have got its own credit, that’s for sure.

Byrne: I still have the hairpiece. It was a thing having that on.

Sacca: One of the little people we threw was an employee of Stratton Oakmont, and he told stories that were fucked up. These weren’t stories like, “I can’t believe what they did to me.” These were stories of: “Let me tell you what I did.” We were like, “Oh man, don’t share those.”

Suplee: First of all, we couldn’t actually do it. It’s not like throwing a 50-pound weight. The guy weighed 150 pounds. That’s a lot to pick up and throw.

Byrne: [Our characters] are not nice people. When you watch that and you know they’re throwing little people, that’s fucking disturbing. And that’s what these fucking guys did.

Suplee: Terrifically uncomfortable. This is all the behavior of really abhorrent people. But sometimes as actors we have to lean into that discomfort. I also think that it’s important to show that.

Sacca: I think I would have been more uncomfortable if the two guys who were a part of it weren’t as excited. They were both thrilled to be part of it. And they were really cool dudes.

Zebrowski: My guesstimation is that 80 percent of it happened. And then the rest of it was mostly just having money and getting hammered with the same five guys and getting rejected at the club and going home to your wife.

Suplee: If I had gotten rewarded for being at my worst, what would that do to me? It probably wouldn’t have been good for my life. I probably wouldn’t be alive. At my worst, I would be dead for sure, and that was what I was thinking about: Turn the bad behavior up. It’s kind of like frat boy culture. Bad behavior just seems to breed more bad behavior. And I don’t know if it’s that business that attracts and breeds that personality. How much sushi can you stuff down your face? How much can you drink? How much coke can you do? How much money can you make? How many girls can you sleep with? It’s just all part of it.

Arguably the most obscene imagery of the movie comes from Belfort’s bachelor party, when the camera pans down the aisle of a plane that has been turned into a giant orgy. The scene, filmed on a soundstage in Queens for a day, lasts just a few seconds, but it became an instant memory for everyone involved.

Sacca: We’re in a metal tube, there’s some hot-ass lights, and there are 60 naked people at 8:30 in the morning.

Choi: It’s so fucking cramped. Everyone’s sweaty because everyone’s kind of in a rambunctious state. And you’re doing it over and over and over for this poor Steadicam guy who’s trying to get everything.

Zebrowski: It was a long day.

Suplee: This was my first experience with an intimacy coordinator. I suspect they invented that job for Wolf of Wall Street .

Sacca: We had a rehearsal where we met with the choreographer, and we were partnered with people who we were going to be interacting with. It never doesn’t get weird. I couldn’t help but think: My parents are going to see this.

Zebrowski: I was with a couple of Rockettes and a couple of professional dancers. You have a super awkward moment where you’re having fake sex with someone for an entire take and then you realize the camera wasn’t on you.

Byrne: The camera’s tracking. We’re going, boom, boom, boom. Where do I want to be? I know I have one second. What can we do in that one “boom” that no one else is doing?

Choi: In between takes everyone’s real respect, respect, respect . Robes come off. I just kept looking up in the air because you don’t want to be leering. Then you get in the mode of: “This is just about excess.”

Zebrowski : I remember having to psych myself up. I was sitting there in my chair, saying to myself, “You love strippers! You love cocaine! You love going nuts!” And I was like, “This is your favorite day. So you go in there and have your favorite day you’ve ever had.”

Byrne: I had a bachelor party, which was G-rated. But I remember my friends made me walk around in a meat bathing suit with a banana hammock. I’m like, if I’m doing that at mine, what are these despicable, wealthy 10-year-olds doing? At the time, I was walking past the Museum of Sex—like, there’s got to be something that’s going to trigger something disgusting for me. Remember those Pez bracelets that you could eat as a kid? They had that in an underwear version. I was like, that’s what I’m going to wear.

Choi: P.J.’s attitude was, they’re illicit stockbrokers, they do a bunch of drugs, consume all this booze. There is no limit. There is no top. Anything fucking goes.

Byrne: I went to Sandy Powell, the Oscar award–winning costume designer with jet-red hair. I’m like, “This is candy underwear that just covers my dingle-dangle junk.” She looked at me like I was a despicable, disgusting man. She paused for 10 seconds, but it felt like two days. She looks at me. She looks at that. She just goes, “OK.”

Suplee: I’ve lost a lot of weight, I’ve got loose skin. I’ve never once felt proud of my body. I have a lot of body issues. I don’t really ever want to do a sex scene. I have four daughters. And then you’ve got Henry Zebrowski, who has got no body shame and is willing to put himself out there.

Zebrowski: I have done naked improv for a long time. Nudity just becomes the scenery. You’re kind of like, “When’s this going to get over with?”

Suplee: I wound up pitching stuff that allowed me to keep my clothes on. What if we’re playing cards? What if I’m asleep? What if I’m playing solitaire?

Sacca: He’s my favorite moment because he’s just sitting there having a conversation with somebody. It made it better.

Suplee: I have not been to an orgy, but I imagine that’s what an orgy smells like. Like every private part coming into contact with a private part.

Zebrowski: It got very human in that room.

Sacca: That day was Scorsese’s 70th birthday. We had cake.

In the midst of shooting, actor and character began to blur. Every day that DiCaprio arrived to set, he greeted hundreds of screaming women and paparazzi, affirming his A-list stature, before going to work, where he’d receive even more admiration on the fake trading floor. It was an eye-opener for Zebrowski and the other young actors, who couldn’t believe the way their leader had to operate—and how that might affect someone’s identity. “It was weird how many mountains had to move for him to move,” Zebrowski says. “I will never say he’s trapped, but he can’t go anywhere.”

Leo’s celebrity—and his connections around the city—further accented Zebrowski’s similarities to his own character. “I’m from a working-class family. This is my first time seeing any of this shit,” he says. “I went to the back door of 1 Oak, and you could see the models register. I’m not supposed to be there.” There was a similar vibe once the cameras began rolling. “All these friends and stockbrokers wanted to do was please Jordan,” Choi says. “Everyone on set, all they wanted to do was please Leo and Marty and Jonah. You would have given everything in the scene to make sure that they got what they needed.”

Unlike Belfort, however, who wanted his employees leveraged and desperate, DiCaprio came to set open-minded and generous, wanting to nail every scene with his collaborators. Ahead of speeches and group scenes, his dedication to preparation became an infectious trait and inspired the cast to deliver unblemished, gonzo performances. “When you have 500 people worshipping this guy, you can feel how energizing and exciting that would be,” Sacca says.

Suplee: When Leo’s giving those speeches, you almost feel like a fistfight could break out. He’s sending people off to war. He’s the general, and we’re going to go die for him.

Zebrowski: Chills still go up my spine when I think about it sometimes.

Sacca: He would come in with these 15-minute monologues, word perfect, accent perfect, still being able to improvise on top of it, coming up with ideas in the moment.

Zebrowski: He could do it one way, they’d give him a note, he’d do it a completely different way. They’d give him a note, he’d go back to the old way, mixed with the second way.

Sacca: I was enthralled with it, but it wasn’t necessarily the personality of Leonardo DiCaprio or Jordan Belfort’s words, it was this fucking performance that was like, “Holy shit, I don’t think I can do that.” I can’t crank out these monologues and do a gazillion takes of them and then be like, “All right, let’s do another one.”

Suplee: I’ve never seen a crack in Leo’s professionalism. They knock on his door to tell him they’re ready on set, and he is exploding from his chair. He is always prepared.

Zebrowski: For a bunch of green dudes who weren’t movie stars, he was extremely generous. That’s where the Belfort comparison doesn’t work, because that dude would have never shown up and done the dirty work himself.

Choi: It’s Hurricane Sandy. Everybody got sick over a three-week period. At some point, Leo got so sick that they shut down shooting for a day. We come back, and it’s the “I’m not leaving” scene.

Winter: I was writing it with Leo in mind. I had taped some of what Jordan said and then added my own embellishment to make it flow a little clearer or better if it needed it. A lot of times, it didn’t. Some of his stuff was just pure gold.

Byrne: We stayed up all night because the days moved. And I was like, “How the fuck is he going to do this?”

Choi: I happened to be outside smoking a cigarette, and I watched him in front of his trailer. I was like, “Oh, this guy’s rehearsing.” He would go through his motions. You’d see him kind of shake his head, turn around, go back to his starting mark in the parking lot, and do it again and again and again. He’s a craftsman. He’s pumped up with meds, he comes in, he does one rehearsal, and I’ll never forget, I could see in his head he missed a line. So he took one step back, remembered the line, and carried through with it. After that, he didn’t flub once, and he did it over and over with so much energy.

Sacca: It’s like a preacher, like Jim Jones speaking into a microphone to his disciples.

Choi: He was walking down the aisle bashing this microphone on his head. The prop guy came and showed us. It was caved in because he was smashing it on his skull.

Byrne: He’s a baller, dude. And honestly, that’s the world that I like to work in and live in. All day we’re here to kill. When we’re on set, we’re not coming back here again. Let’s make sure we fucking get it.

Zebrowski: [In that moment], Jordan’s not a bad guy. He’s not a fucking criminal. He’s helping all of us. You just don’t understand that what he’s doing is including you in his crime.

Byrne: When you see me get crazy at the end, it’s like, I don’t want my “god” to leave. I don’t want this meal ticket to end.

Choi: In the wedding scene where we’re all dancing and stuff, [Leo] had this huge case of 5-Hour Energy drinks. He came in right before like, “Everyone take one! Everyone take one!” And then we slammed it, and then we went into the scene.

Zebrowski: They’re putting us all in a circle, and they just have the music going.

Choi: We actually were talking about the Kid ’n Play dance. I go out there and do my dance move, and I knew to throw it right to him so he’d come out pop-locking. I was shocked that he was so fucking good with the pop-locking.

Zebrowski: I guess he’d been doing it for forever on his own.

Byrne: How fucking insane a dancer is Kenny? And then Leo saw that. He’s like, let’s fucking go. And then everybody had their moment to be who they were.

Choi: He looked at me and went, “Come here, come here, come here,” so that we could do the Kid ’n Play dance. That’s why he’s amazing. There’s some actors out there who don’t want you to steal the light.

When The Wolf of Wall Street premiered on Christmas Day, many critics lauded Scorsese’s return to bombastic filmmaking and comedic storytelling. But a vocal contingent couldn’t get past the movie’s inflated running time and excessive antics, believing they celebrated Belfort’s unethical behavior. As David Edelstein argued in his Vulture review , the movie is “three hours of horrible people doing horrible things and admitting to being horrible,” later calling it “thumpingly insipid.” Later, in an open letter to LA Weekly , a woman connected to Belfort accused the movie’s characters of “exacerbating our national obsession with wealth and status and glorifying greed and psychopathic behavior.”

The critique resembled the conversations surrounding Goodfellas , despite the fact that both movies highlight their protagonists’ calamitous, unglamorous falls. “When you see Ray Liotta getting chased by helicopters and he’s fucking high out of his mind on cocaine, at no point do you look at that and say, ‘God, being a gangster is pretty cool,’” Suplee says. Wolf ’s length and its punishing scenes of depravity, he adds, only helped illustrate the fatiguing and ruinous state that Belfort inspired and embodied. “It was the same experience I had with drugs, which is: You get high, and then you’re just chasing that experience over and over again and you never get it. You always get some muted version of it.”

Ten years removed, it’s perhaps easier to see the movie as a warning signal, an example of how scammy, magnanimous figures can organize a cultlike following and engender loyal defenders based on flashy facades and mostly empty promises. The examples of the last decade—the fanaticism around Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and so many more—feel akin to Belfort’s own crew hyping up their public con man. “It’s all about selling dreams,” Byrne says. “They are so good at selling you to make you buy in on believing it. And they create this world around them that you’ve now been absorbed into.”

Byrne, of course, might as well have been referencing the movie’s own world. For each of the Belfort boys, The Wolf of Wall Street remains the most memorable experience of their careers, a testament to the camaraderie they found together and Scorsese’s commitment to capturing everything as it looked. “Not just because it’s Martin, not just because it’s Leo,” Choi says. “It was the scope of it. You have everything there for you. And the more stuff you have that’s real, the more it informs the performance.” It made them itch to go deeper and wilder.

As Sacca notes, “I couldn’t wait to get off set and call my wife and say, ‘Let me tell you what fucking happened today.’”

Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times .

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