The Wolf of Wall Street is a 2013 American epic black comedy crime film co-produced and directed by Martin Scorsese, written by Terence Winter, and based on the 2007 memoir by Jordan Belfort. The film chronicles Belfort’s career as a New York City stockbroker and how his firm, Stratton Oakmont, became involved in widespread Wall Street corruption and fraud, leading to his downfall. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort; Jonah Hill as his business partner and friend, Donnie Azoff; Margot Robbie as his second wife, Naomi Lapaglia; Matthew McConaughey as his mentor and former boss, Mark Hanna; and Kyle Chandler as FBI agent Patrick Denham, who plays Gregory Coleman. This is DiCaprio’s fifth collaboration with Scorsese.
In 1987, 25-year-old Jordan Belfort was hired as a Wall Street stockbroker for L.F. Rothschild, under Mark Hanna. He was quickly drawn to the drug-fueled stockbroking culture and Hanna’s belief that a broker’s sole purpose was to make money for himself. Jordan lost his job after Black Monday, the largest one-day stock market drop in history following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and took a job at Investor’s Center, a small brokerage firm on Long Island specializing in penny stocks. He made a handsome profit through his aggressive sales style and high commissions. Jordan befriended his neighbor Donnie Azoff, and together they founded a “boiler room” brokerage firm.
They recruited Jordan’s childhood friends Robbie Feinberg, Alden Kupferburg, Nicky Koskoff, Chester Ming, and Toby Welch, along with Brad Bonick, a local drug dealer, all of whom Jordan had trained in the art of “hard selling,” and set up the company in an abandoned auto repair shop. Jordan’s tactics and salesmanship played a key role in the success of the stock-spinning scheme, in which misleading, positive statements inflated the price of a stock so that it could be sold at an artificially high price. When the scammers sold the overpriced securities, the stock price plummeted, and those who had been duped into buying at a high price were suddenly left with shares worth far less than they had paid. To cover this up, Jordan gave the firm the more formal-sounding name Stratton Oakmont in 1989.
Soon after, the firm became extremely successful, moving from its auto repair shop to a larger office. An exposé in Forbes magazine called Jordan the “Wolf of Wall Street”—“a kind of corrupt Robin Hood who stole from the rich and shared it with himself and his brokers.” This initially angered Belfort, until hundreds of ambitious young financiers flocked to the firm, prompting them to move to even larger offices.
While all this was going on, Jordan became extremely successful and fell into a debauched lifestyle of prostitutes and drugs. He had an affair with lingerie designer Naomi Lapaglia; When his wife, Teresa, found out about the affair, Jordan divorced her and married Naomi in 1991. Meanwhile, the SEC and FBI began investigating Stratton Oakmont.
In 1993, Jordan illegally raised $22 million in just three hours after securing the IPO of Steve Madden, Ltd., founded by Donnie’s childhood friend and women’s shoe designer Steve Madden, bringing further FBI attention to him and his company. Jordan unsuccessfully attempted to bribe Agent Denham, forcing him to find a safe place to stash the money. He opened a Swiss bank account with Jean-Jacques Saurel, a corrupt banker, under the guise of Naomi’s aunt, Emma, a British citizen who was now out of reach of U.S. authorities. He used Brad’s Swiss-Slovenian wife, Chantalle, and her family, who had European passports, to smuggle money into Switzerland.
Donnie and Brad got into a heated argument in public during a money exchange, which led to Brad’s arrest and Donnie’s escape. Donnie informed Jordan that he had found some Lemmon 714 Quaaludes, which Jordan called the “holy grail” of drugs. The two took the pills at Belfort’s house, but they had no effect. They thought the pills had expired, and ended up taking the rest of the pills.
Jordan’s private investigator Bo Dietl calls him and tells him he needs to talk to him on a payphone. Jordan drives to a local country club and calls Bo, who informs him that the FBI is wiretapping his phones. While talking with Bo, the quaaludes kicked in, and Jordan became extremely inebriated, struggling to get home in his Lamborghini Countach. When he gets home, he finds Donnie talking on the phone, and nearly strangles him with the phone cord. Donnie chokes on some meat; Jordan ingests a large amount of cocaine and gives him the Heimlich maneuver. The next day, the police arrived and informed Jordan that his car had been trashed.
Fearing for his son, Jordan’s father Max advises him to leave Stratton Oakmont and lie low while Jordan’s lawyer negotiates a deal to keep him out of prison. In the midst of his farewell speech, Jordan cannot bear to quit and talks himself into staying, to the immense support of his friends and employees, but to the anger of his father.
In 1996, Jordan, Donnie, and their wives were on a yacht trip to Italy, when they learned that Emma had died of a heart attack. Fearing for the money he left under her name in his Swiss account, Jordan announced that they will chart a course to Switzerland to forge her name on a document and save the account before going to London for the funeral. To bypass the border patrols, he orders his yacht captain Ted to sail to Monaco, but their ship capsizes in a storm. After their rescue, the plane sent to take them to Geneva was destroyed when a seagull flew into the engine; Jordan takes this as a sign from God to address his worsening drug addiction and attempts to sober up.
In 1998, Saurel and Koskoff were arrested for an unrelated crime, the former informing the FBI about Jordan as part of a plea bargain. Since the evidence against him is overwhelming, Jordan agrees to gather evidence from the rest of his colleagues in exchange for leniency. After having sex for the last time, Naomi tells Jordan that she is divorcing him, and wants full custody of their daughter and infant son. In a cocaine-fueled rage, Jordan punches Naomi and tries to drive away with their daughter, but crashes his car in the driveway.
Later, Jordan wears a wire to work and slips a note to Donnie, warning his partner. However, the note was shortly found by the FBI, who arrested Jordan, before they raided and shut down Stratton Oakmont. Despite breaching his deal, Jordan received a reduced sentence of 36 months in a minimum security prison for his testimony, and is released in 2000 after serving 22 months. After his release, Jordan makes a living hosting seminars on sales techniques, using the same test he used with his founding partners at his company.
