He grew up in shadow of Wall Street, then got into debt settlement
In the early 1980s, 19-year-old Jordan Belfort — who would go on to become known as the Wolf of Wall Street — had a fortuitous encounter on Jones Beach, on Long Island, N.Y., with another teenager selling ice cream named Stephen Drescher.
The two became friends. Prosecutors would later note their shared hustling spirit, a drive for entrepreneurialism that curdled into a drive for grift. Within a few years, Belfort started building a pump-and-dump stock-scam empire. He took Drescher under his wing as he built a boiler room brokerage that would go on to defraud more than 1,000 investors.
Belfort’s enterprise collapsed in the late 1990s, when he pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering. Drescher went down not long after, convicted of securities fraud and sent to federal prison for nearly four years. He, too, had a spiritual successor of sorts: his stepson Ryan Sasson.
Sasson is CEO of Strategic Financial Solutions, a large employer in Buffalo, N.Y., often hailed by politicians and business publications as a fast-growing exemplar of corporate citizenship.
The company’s primary business is debt settlement, helping consumers buried in credit card bills negotiate down what they owe. Strategic has more than 75,000 clients and has saved them $1 billion over the past three years through its negotiated debt deals, the company’s president said in January in a legal filing.
But state and federal prosecutors, former clients and former employees cast Strategic in a different light.
The company’s business is predatory, they say, and uses a nationwide network of accomplice law firms to exploit clients — many of them struggling, low-income people — and extract fees that often total tens of thousands of dollars for services that can sometimes leave customers worse off than when they started. Clients