Wall St wolf’s real parties ‘more debauched than movie’
THE cop who caught Jordan Belfort – the dodgy stockbroker immortalised in The
Wolf of Wall Street – says the party scenes in the 2013 Hollywood film were tame in comparison to what actually happened.
“The scary part is, the excess part depicted in the movie wasn’t accurate, it was worse, it was bad,” retired FBI agent Gregory Coleman said.
“If you can imagine young guys in their 20s with millions of dollars and every kind of vice and type of debauchery, craziness that you could imagine, they were into it.”
Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Belfort is depicted as an abuser of Quaaludes and cocaine, and regularly hosts wild parties.
“Belfort at this point freely admits to that kind of thing in his books and his movies, you name it, it was there,” Mr Coleman said.
The white-collar crime expert joined the FBI in 1989 and in 1992 he was assigned to a specially created Wall Street financial crime squad in New York, investigating things like stock manipulation, stock fraud and insider trading.
By late 1992 the squad was tipped off by the US Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate Belfort, who was becoming known for his stockbroking business Stratton Oakmont.
“By that point in time he had been up and running for a number of years, he had a lot of momentum behind him, in fact, he set up his business around when I joined the bureau,” Mr Coleman said.
“So from 1989 to 1992 when I was out doing other cases, he was perfecting his fraud, his manipulation, his scams.”
The Belfort case was one of seven cases Mr Coleman and his colleagues were working at any one time, and it took many years of poring over financial records to bring him to justice.
“From beginning to end it was six years before we got him, but before we got to him we arrested a number of people along the way to get to the top,” Mr Coleman said.
The process involved requesting bank records, brokerage records and trading records from the financial regulator, and then figuring out the buy prices and sell prices of stocks.
Mr Belfort eventually pleaded guilty to fraud and related crimes in 1999 and served 22 months in prison. He is now a successful motivational speaker and author.
His arch nemesis Mr Coleman was in Sydney this week speaking at the BAE Systems’ Business Defence Forum about financial crime.