The Wolf of Wall Street

NEW YORK TIMES **BESTSELLER** • **Now a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio** By day he made thousands of dollars a minute. By night he spent it as fast as he could. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids waiting at home and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king, here, in Jordan Belfort’s own words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called the Wolf of Wall Street. In the 1990s, Belfort became one of the most infamous kingpins in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. It’s an extraordinary story of greed, power, and excess that no one could invent: the tale of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices to making hundreds of millions—until it all came crashing down. **Praise for *The Wolf of Wall Street** * “Raw and frequently hilarious.” **—** The New York Times “A rollicking tale of [Jordan Belfort’s] rise to riches as head of the infamous boiler room Stratton Oakmont . . . proof that there are indeed second acts in American lives.” — Forbes ** “A cross between Tom Wolfe’s** The Bonfire of the Vanities **and Scorsese’s** GoodFellas **. . . Belfort has the Midas touch.”** — *The Sunday Times* (London) ** “Entertaining as pulp fiction, real as a federal indictment . . . a hell of a read.”** — *Kirkus Reviews ***** ### From Publishers Weekly 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ### Review “A cocky bad boy of finance recalls ... [his] career as a master of his own universe.... A hell of a read.”— *Kirkus Reviews * “A memoir that reads like fiction.... [concerning] the vast amount of sex, drugs and risky physical behavior Belfort managed to survive.”— *Publishers Weekly* From the Hardcover edition.