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Daily Mail
December 23, 2013
Behind the gleaming black-glass facade of the sprawling office building, on a sales floor almost the size of a football pitch, a pretty young woman sat on a wooden stool, wearing only a bikini as she faced the collective scrutiny of hundreds of her colleagues.
Outnumbering the women by ten to one, the men stood baying in their sharp suits and crisp shirts as they relished this latest in a long line of tasteless spectacles that punctuated their working lives.
Today this semi-clad office junior was having her long blonde hair shaved off in return for the cash she needed for a breast enlargement operation.
Previous depravities had included a dwarf-tossing contest, and betting on whether a senior manager would dare to gulp down a live goldfish. Unfortunately for the fish, that manager did go through with it.
But then, at the corrupt American stockbroking firm of Stratton Oakmont, there was no telling what each day might bring.
This was a workplace where the staff were encouraged to snort cocaine, consort with prostitutes who worked the underground car park, and have sex with each other in the company’s glass-walled lift.
Anything went as long as it kept the hungry young sales staff selling the dodgy investments which made millions of dollars each day for their boss Jordan Belfort, himself only in his early 30s.
In 1999, Belfort would be found guilty of swindling investors out of $200 million (£120 million) and sentenced to 22 months in prison, but until then he indulged in a life of astonishing excess.
Confessing that he had taken enough drugs ‘to sedate Guatemala’, he once insisted on an ill-advised sailing trip while high and wrote off both his 167ft yacht and personal helicopter in one afternoon.
He boasted of having made love to his wife on a ‘mattress’ of $3 million, made up of stacks of $100 notes, and slept with hundreds of call-girls in luxury hotel suites across the world.
Some were so ‘high-class’ that they took only credit cards but what they charged didn’t matter to Belfort, a man who was raking in the dollar equivalent of £30 million a year by his late 20s and once made £7 million in just three minutes.
Now, inevitably, Hollywood has taken up his story.
Taking the nickname in which he rejoiced as its title, the new Martin Scorsese film The Wolf Of Wall Street sees Belfort played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who has likened his character’s penchant for humiliating public spectacle and debauchery to that of Ancient Rome’s most dissolute Emperor.
‘He was like a modern-day Caligula,’ DiCaprio said. ‘He held nothing back. He was unapologetic about his lust for wealth and his mad consumption.’
In one scene, crumpled-up $100 bills are tossed into rubbish bins in an extravagant parody of basketball.
In another, a bikini-clad woman has great wads of cash taped around her body, ready to be covered up by her clothes so that she can smuggle it out of the country and into Swiss bank accounts.
But even so, the film may struggle to capture the true scale of Belfort’s fast living.
As Belfort admits in the memoirs which inspired the movie, much of that consumption was a playing out of his adolescent fantasies.
Upon making his first million, he bought a white Ferrari Testarossa, the exact make and colour of car he had seen Don Johnson drive in Miami Vice, his favourite TV show when he was growing up in a tough working-class neighbourhood in Queens, New York.
Born in 1962, the son of two accountants, he hawked ice-creams on the beach as a teenager and then sold meat and seafood door-to-door before finding far more profitable outlets for his salesmanship on Wall Street.
In May 1987, he joined the investment banking firm of L. F. Rothschild, cold-calling companies to find potential clients for its brokers.
On his first day, he was taken to lunch in Rothschild’s penthouse restaurant by his boss, who brazenly snorted cocaine at the table and recommended it as a means of making Belfort ‘dial faster’.
