Jordan Belfort hits South Africa

hose who missed him during his recent blitz tour of South Africa can catch the Wolf of Wall Street when he returns here again early next year. That is when the man – soon to be portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in a new motion picture of his life, the Wall Street super fraudster Jordan Belfort – will again be coming to train, motivate and inspire South Africans hungry for success and money.

Or differently put, that is when Belfort will be here once again demonstrating – despite his own denials – that crime does pay. Pay in the sense that, after his Wall Street empire came crashing down and he landed in jail for 22 months for ripping off investors to the tune of $100 million during a greedy drug- and sex-fuelled frenzy, Belfort turned his harsh demise into a kind of Damascus conversion, resulting in a lucrative worldwide writing and speaking enterprise.

But for millions around the globe, he is the real thing in an almost Biblical sense: a gifted, self-made man who had it all, crossed the line in an orgy of greed and lust, lost it all, and then stood up out of the ashes reborn and ready to help others on the road to honest success.

Raised in the tough learning school that is New York’s Queens Borough, Belfort got his first taste of sales and business as a 16-year old, selling ice cream on the beach.

He would have been a medical doctor today if it had been up to his mother, but despite her best efforts, he dropped out after his first day at dental school.

After his day at dental school, he worked as a door-to-door meat, fish and appliance salesman; started his own short-lived and ill-fated business, “making every entrepreneurial mistake in the book”; and then landed a job with a Wall Street stock firm.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for Belfort, after six months of training, his first day of working as a stockbroker happened to be Black Monday when stock markets around the world crashed spectacularly in October 1987, recording the world’s largest one-day percentage decline in stock market history.

“The firm I had joined went out of business. However, times of chaos and uncertainty on Wall Street like that present the greatest opportunities, so I launched my own firm,” he says.

“I hit upon a system entailing selling $6 stocks to the wealthiest 1% of Americans, as well as training my stockbrokers on how to sell, how to communicate and how to close a deal. If you’re not a closer, you won’t be able to sell,” the 48-year-old Belfort told Leadership in his rapid-fire, heavily New York-accented manner of speaking from his home in the Hollywood area of Los Angeles. Almost as if every conversation, every speech, is a vital sales opportunity charged with persuasive verbal energy.

Of which the actor DiCaprio, Belfort’s friend of a few years, says: “There is nothing quite like his public speaking.”

During the 1990s, Belfort’s brokering firm Stratton Oakmont became notorious for functioning as what is known as a “boiler room” – a beehive of telesales activity where glib salesmen employ high pressure, often dishonest, sales tactics and fail to disclose the fact that the brokering firm has a beneficial relationship with the company whose stocks it is promoting.

At the height of Stratton Oakmont’s success, Belfort employed more than 1 000 stockbrokers and raised capital of over $1.5 billion in start-up capital for more than 30 companies, including that of celebrity shoe designer Steve Madden, who himself went to prison in 2002 after being convicted of “pump and dump” stock manipulation and securities fraud.

Madden, also a native of Queens, was a childhood friend of Belfort and Danny Porush, who co-founded Stratton Oakmont with Belfort.

Nonetheless, before notoriety caught up with him, Belfort rapidly gained a wealth of experience, his sales techniques proved successful, and he, together with Porush, built Stratton Oakmont into a very successful brokerage.

He built himself a very healthy personal fortune, earning over $50 million a year – a feat that earned him the name, “The Wolf of Wall Street”.

These days, Belfort’s marketing profiles refer to that period of his life as having proven for more than 22 years “his tremendous ability to build businesses, transform sales teams and help thousands of people create massive wealth” as the owner of “one of the biggest and most successful brokerage firms in Wall Street history”.

But as his success grew, so did his greed and an accompanying desire for living in the fast lane; and soon the veneer of carefully cultivated respectability started peeling off.

“Somewhere around 1992, I started spiralling out of control and I stepped over the line actively. In any business, but especially on Wall Street, that is totally unacceptable. It was a huge mistake,” Belfort says.

His well-publicised fall from grace included price-manipulated stock deals from which illegal profit kickbacks were used to launder money to accounts in Switzerland.

In this, a former South African Harry Shuster, whom the Los Angeles Times describes as “the flamboyant Beverly Hills entrepreneur who cast his fortunes with passing fads from animal parks to cigar clubs”, played no small role. When the scheme eventually came crashing down, Shuster, who over the years regularly made the newspaper headlines in Los Angeles for all the wrong reasons, was one of those sent to jail along with Belfort.

During this period, Belfort was introduced and became addicted to cocaine and high-priced prostitutes, and is said to have piloted and crashed a helicopter while high on Quaaludes.

Other stories portray him as once waking up in restraints on a flight to Switzerland after groping a flight attendant, arranging a midget-tossing party in his office, and watching a colleague eat a live goldfish.

Meanwhile, investors were starting to lose money in a big way, eventually totalling more than $100m.

Regulators and federal investigators had started taking an interest in Stratton Oakmont, Belfort and a host of other people involved in fleecing investors, committing securities fraud, tax dodging and money smuggling. Attempts were made to shut down the firm.

In an attempt to get away from the stress, Belfort took his family and friends on a Mediterranean cruise on a 170-foot yacht once owned by Coco Chanel, and promptly sank the yacht in bad weather – almost drowning all on board.

Eventually, it all came crashing down when investigators closed in on Stratton Oakmont.

Belfort decided to co-operate, earning himself a relatively light 22-month jail term.

However, he and his convicted partners have to pay back half of all future earnings until they have compensated their victims for the approximately $110m they lost.

“The hardest part for me was being separated from my family,” says Belfort. Although he and his wife were divorced, he is reunited with his children these days.

He laments that had he done all his business legitimately, he would have made 10 times more money.

But Belfort considers his incarceration as something of a lucky break.

“I am now grateful for the experience, as it was this combination of events that positioned me in a unique way to help people not just create wealth, but to use it for the greater good,” he says.

“In my world, making lots of money and creating a successful business is easy. The part that takes more work is to understand what it really means to be on the road to riches and how to use those lessons to make a greater difference for yourself and all those who join you on this path.”

To which adds DiCaprio: “Jordan stands as an example of the transformative qualities of ambition and hard work. In that regard, he is a motivator without peer.”

Belfort used his time in prison to teach himself how to write books, making an intensive study of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, eventually leading to his two best-sellers: The Wolf of Wall Street and its sequel, Catching the Wolf of Wall Street.They have been translated into 18 languages and published in almost 40 countries.

The books led to invitations to address executives and employees at various large business corporations, thus launching Belfort into a career of training and motivational speaking.

“It’s all in the books, where I talk about what I actually used to do at the firm, how I used to motivate the brokers and teach them how to sell and that sort of thing. So when people read the book, they thought wow, what’s that thing you do, how did you teach all these young kids to become so wealthy and successful?

“At the heart of it was a system of influence and persuasion, both on the sales side and the marketing side,” he says.

“Now I show people how to duplicate themselves, how to recognise what they are doing and communicate it effectively. I show them how to focus on where they want to go as opposed to what they are afraid of, which unfortunately is what most people do.

“When you take that back into a real business situation, it’s brutal success. If you are always focused on what is wrong and complaining, it’s very hard to succeed. If you manage to focus them on their own ambition for their future, that which inspired them first, and they learn to share that vision with other people, get other people to close on their vision, how to market their product or vision – that is a whole formula for success,” adds Belfort.

“I show people how to create any vision for their future and then step into that vision and make it real in the actual business world through proven strategies and process which I lay out to them.

“You see, I don’t come from the seminar world.

“I am a businessman. In the seminar world, the problem is they make their money selling books and tapes. They never actually did it in the real world. The difference is I teach people very real world strategies,” he explains.

Belfort’s recent visit to South Africa involved public speeches to some 1 500 people, addressing a number of large local companies, signing people up for his Boot Camp three-day course, and engaging with successful South African businessman and philanthropist Bertie Lubner in doing charity work in places such as Alexandra and Diepsloot.

The latter he describes as the best part of his trip here. “I got to work with the kids and with the youth leaders, showing them how to motivate the kids.”

Belfort will be back in Johannesburg at the end of January to do another three-day Boot Camp.

Essentially, his Entrepreneur Boot Camp seeks to empower people with what he calls “the keys to extraordinary achievement”: from the “inner game skills necessary to get – and stay – at the top of one’s game, to the outer world strategies necessary to navigate success in the real world”.

It is based on the signature systems he developed in his Wall Street days but, of course, this time without sacrificing integrity and ethics.

Those signing up for his Boot Camp are promised the ability to “create and reinforce your business plans against any economical force”.

“Regardless of the state of the economy, there is always massive potential for astute, business-minded people to acquire large quantities of wealth. If you want the freedom and security that comes with being financially independent, there has never been a more fertile time to start pursuing that dream,” says Belfort.

“Gordon Gecko got it wrong. Greed is not good – ambition is good,” he says, referring to the lead character in the movie Wall Street, whose life story is remarkably similar to Belfort’s.

These days, says Belfort, he makes his money from corporate training, public speaking and writing. He still dabbles a little in stocks, but only for his own account.

When I ask about persistent rumours about his having stashed a small fortune in the Cayman Islands, Belfort says: “If I deny it, you won’t believe me. If I say it is true, the authorities would be on to me very quickly. So either way, it is a question I cannot answer.”

But he adds: “I am living modestly and don’t have a lot of money.” And yet, he does live in one of Los Angeles’ wealthiest suburbs.

Half of the money Belfort made from his two best-selling books went to paying back his victims. But now he stands to hit an even bigger pay day when Warner Brothers start filming the life story of the Wolf of Wall Street in January, set for release in 2012.

The movie is sure to increase Belfort’s already considerable global cult following, which has a growing South African component.

South Africans have not been slow in coming round to the Belfort gospel and heaping praise on him by posting messages on his official website, of which the following by one Jabu Ntlou says it all: “I really would like to be part of this wealthy journey you are spearheading. I attended your session in JoBurg (sic) on Monday the 18th and I was fascinated by your gospel.

“The only obstacle was the R15 000, as I used all my reserves to start up a business after loosing (sic) my daily job in 2008. How I wish I was the guy sitting in front who got to attend the Boot Camp free. lol. Kindly consider me even if I have to repay in instalments. I think I stand to benefit more than the entry fee outlay. I wanna be a millionaire, so frikin’ (sic) bad!” ▲

Stef Terblanche