Jordan Belfort: From Italian Ice to the $200 Million Stratton Oakmont Scam

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Jordan Belfort made $20,000 one summer selling Italian ice from a styrofoam cooler on a public beach. Years later he made far more selling worthless penny stocks over the phone. Born in the Bronx in 1962 and raised in Bayside, Queens by two accountants, he walked out of dental school on the first day after the dean warned that the golden age of dentistry was over. A door-to-door meat and seafood business moved 5,000 pounds a week before collapsing into bankruptcy when he was 25, and a trainee job at L.F. Rothschild ended with the Black Monday crash of 1987.

This episode sets aside the Hollywood version and follows the record. At Stratton Oakmont, more than a thousand brokers ran pump and dump schemes that cost investors roughly $200 million. Regulators expelled the firm in December 1996, and Belfort was indicted in 1999, wore a wire against his partners, and went to prison. There his cellmate, comedian Tommy Chong, urged him to write the memoir that launched his second career as a speaker and sales trainer.

• Stratton Oakmont brokers bought worthless shares cheaply, hyped them to retail investors by phone, then sold at the peak, and the firm even handled the Steve Madden IPO.
• In 1996 Belfort overruled his captain and sailed the yacht Nadine, built for Coco Chanel in 1961, into a storm off Sardinia, where it sank and Italian Navy special forces rescued everyone.
• He threw away his first 130 pages, then landed a $500,000 advance from Random House and a bidding war for the film rights.
• He was ordered to repay $110.4 million to 1,513 clients, and his lawyers later argued the 50 percent income rule ended with his parole in 2009.
• After calling Bitcoin mass delusion he became a crypto investor, and in 2021 a hacker stole $300,000 in tokens from his digital wallet.