By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night, he spent it as fast as he could on drugs, sex and travel. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht, crashed a Gulfstream jet, and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab; to the wife and kids who waited for him at home; and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding; here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called The Wolf of Wall Street. In the 1990s, Jordan Belfort became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astounding and hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess no one could invent - the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down...

About the Author

Jordan Belfort served twenty-two months in prison, spent one month in rehab, and is currently living in Los Angeles, California.

Reviews

Rich at 26, Belfort headed up the shady investment firm Stratton Oakmont and eventually was convicted of fraudulent practices, serving barely two years in prison. Here's an account of his wild life. Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.

Belfort, who founded one of the first and largest "chop shop" brokerage firms in 1987, was banned from the securities business for life by 1994, and later went to jail for fraud and money-laundering, delivers a memoir that reads like fiction. It covers his decade of success with straightforward accounts of how he worked with managers of obscure companies to acquire large amounts of stock with minimal public disclosure, then pumped up the price and sold it, so he and the insiders made large profits while public investors usually lost. Profits were laundered through purchase of legitimate businesses and cash deposits in Swiss banks. There is only brief mention of Belfort's life before Wall Street or events since 1997. The book's main topic is the vast amount of sex, drugs and risky physical behavior Belfort managed to survive. As might be expected in the autobiography of a veteran con man with movie rights already sold, it's hard to know how much to believe. The story is told mostly in dialogue, with allegedly contemporaneous mental asides by the author, reported verbatim. But it reports only surface events, never revealing what motivates Belfort or any of the other characters. (Oct. 2) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.