Catching the Wolf of Wall Street

Amazon Exclusive: Jordan Belfort on Catching the Wolf of Wall Street

At this moment, our financial system has all but imploded. Real estate prices have plummeted, Wall Street’s most venerable investment banks have gone belly up, the credit-crunch has brought the economy to a grinding halt, and once-thriving cities have been turned into financial Hiroshimas, with foreclosed homes littering every block and abandoned pets roaming the streets.

When I wrote my first book, The Wolf of Wall Street, I wanted it to serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who was living a life of unbridled hedonism, to anyone who thought there was something glamorous about being known as a Wolf of Wall Street. Now, with Catching the Wolf of Wall Street, the dire economic straits we find ourselves in have made that desire even more powerful.

Catching the Wolf of Wall Street is an eye-opening glance into the self-destruction of my own life, as a result of my own criminal actions.

In short, I get my comeuppance… and then some.

You might find many of the chapters to be completely hysterical (reading about someone else’s pain can be that way sometimes, especially when they deserve to feel pain, like I did), but I can assure that writing this book was an incredibly painful undertaking, especially the parts that dealt with my separation from my children when I went to jail. I shed many a tear, dredging up those memories, and I found myself having a renewed appreciation for some of life’s simpler things, like freedom, for one.

That being said, when I look back at it all, I can only come to one sad conclusion: that I lived one of the most dysfunctional lives on the planet. I put money before integrity, greed before ethics, and covetousness before love. I chose friends unwisely, cut corners wherever I could, and then drowned my guilt and remorse beneath elephantine doses of recreational drugs.

I deserved to get caught.

Of course, some of you might be wondering whether or not I’ve changed at all—if I’m truly sorry for my crimes, and if the many public apologies I’ve made to people who lost money as a result of my actions were, indeed, sincere.

The answer to that is an unequivocal yes; I am sorry, and I do apologize. In fact, not a day goes by when the mistakes of my past don’t back up on me or are thrown in my face. But then I remind myself why I wrote these books in the first place, and of the many supportive letters I’ve received from people all over the world, who’ve gotten the intended message—namely that: crime doesn’t pay. Perhaps the latest crop of Fat Cat CEOs and Wall Street powerbrokers will get that message too.

Then we go about fixing this mess.

—Jordan Belfort

(Photo © Blake Little)