This is a guy whose only fear, while being trapped with his wife and friends in the midst of a horrific storm at seas, minutes away from capsizing and death, was in not having enough Quaaludes. Okay, he was bazonkered out of his mind on his daily over-the-top regimen of drugs and alcohol. But just the same, can you imagine being fixated by thoughts about little pills to maintain your high (plus being ecstatic about getting rid of the 170-foot yacht you bought on a whim and hated) when your life’s got only about five to ten minutes left in its savings account? Irrational? Yes. You can make a case that fright or outright panic over your impending death might consume your thoughts.

But then again, you’re not Jordan Belfort, whose audacious life-optioned for film with Leonardo DiCaprio slated to star and Martin Scorsese to direct-was one of stuff too crazy to be fiction.
He had a prodigious appetite for drugs and the things an endless supply of money can do. He feared little-and why should he when he got away with everything? From head-on car crashes, sunk yachts, and drugged-out helicopter flights where he dozed off, to his brazen behavior in the face of the SEC, who was investigating him for all sorts of fraudulent activities-in his very office, no less-Belfort emerged unscathed. Either through buying his way out of problems (money is often the best medicine for life’s ills as Belfort would readily attest) or simply having luck as miraculous as his life, Belfort survived and prospered.

Until it all came crashing down.

In an excerpt from his fascinating book, The Wolf of Wall Street, we learn how Belfort illegally and unethically manipulated the stock market and earned hundreds of millions of dollars to feed his debauchery (often within the rules of the system) through Stratton Oakmont, the brokerage firm he founded and built up into the proverbial 800-pound gorilla.

* * *

I nodded sadly. "Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to belittle your relationship with Steve. But we’re talking about eight million bucks here, on the low side. Depending on what happens with the company, it could be ten times that." I shrugged. "Who really knows what’s gonna happen? I don’t have a crystal ball in my pocket-although I do have six Ludes there, and I’ll gladly split them with you after the market closes!" I raised my eyebrows three times in rapid succession.

Danny smiled and gave me the thumbs-up sign. "I’m in like Flynn!"

I nodded. "Anyway-in all seriousness-I will tell you that I got a really good feeling about this one. I think this company’s got a shot of hitting it out of the park. And if it does, we have two million shares. So do the math, pal: At a hundred bucks a share that’s two hundred million bucks. And that kind of money makes people do strange things. Not just Steve Madden."

Danny nodded and said, "I understand what you’re saying, and there’s no doubt that you’re the master at this stuff. But I’m telling you, Steve is loyal. The only problem is how to get that kind of money from him. He’s a slow payer as it is."

It was a valid point. One of the problems with ratholes was figuring out how to generate cash without raising any red flags. It was easier said than done, especially when the numbers went into the millions. "There are ways," I said confidently. "We could work some of it out with some sort of consulting contract, but if the numbers go into the tens of millions we’ll have to consider doing something with our Swiss accounts, although I’d like to keep that under wraps as much as possible. Anyway, the way things are going we have bigger issues than just Steve Madden Shoes-like the fifteen other companies in the pipeline just like Madden. And if I’m having trouble trusting Steve, well, most of the people I hardly even know."

Danny said, "Just tell me what you want me to do with Steve and I’ll get it done. But I’m still telling you that you don’t need to worry about him. He sings your praises more than anyone."

I was well aware of how Steve sang my praises, perhaps too aware. The simple fact was that I had made an investment in his company and taken eighty-five percent in return, so what did he really owe me? In fact, unless he was the reincarnation of Mahatma Gandhi, he had to resent me-at least somewhat-for grabbing such a large percentage of his namesake.

And there were other things about Steve that bothered me, things that I couldn’t share with Danny-namely, that Steve had made subtle intimations to me that he would prefer to deal directly with me than through Danny. And while I had no doubt that Steve was simply trying to earn brownie points with me, his strategy couldn’t have been more off the mark. What it proved was that Steve was cunning and manipulative-and, most importantly, in search of the Bigger Better Deal. If somewhere down the line he found a Bigger Better Deal than me, all bets would be off.

Right now Steve needed me. But it had little to do with Stratton raising him $7 million and even less to do with the approximately $3 million Danny had made him as his rathole. That was yesterday’s news. Going forward, my hold on Steve was based on my ability to control the price of his stock after it went public. As Steve Madden’s dominant market maker, virtually all the buying and selling would occur within the four walls of Stratton’s boardroom-which would afford me the opportunity to move the stock up and down as I saw fit. So if Steve didn’t play ball, I could literally crush the price of his stock until it was trading in pennies.

It was this very ax, in fact, that hung over the heads of all Stratton Oakmont’s investment-banking clients. And I used it to ensure that they stayed loyal to the Stratton cause, which was: to issue me new shares, below the prevailing market price, which I could then sell at an enormous profit, using the power of the boardroom.

Of course, I wasn’t the one who’d thought up this clever game of financial extortion. In fact, this very process was occurring at the most prestigious firms on Wall Street-firms like Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley and Dean Witter and Salomon Brothers and dozens of others-none of whom had the slightest compunction about beating a billion-dollar company over the head if they chose not to play ball with them.

It was ironic, I thought, how America’s finest and supposedly most legitimate financial institutions had rigged the treasury market (Salomon Brothers); bankrupted Orange County, California (Merrill Lynch); and ripped off grandmas and grandpas to the tune of $300 million (Prudential-Bache). Yet they were all still in business-still thriving, in fact, under the protection of a WASPy umbrella.

Penny-stock firms were notoriously decentralized, having dozens of small offices spread throughout the country. Yet, Stratton had only one office, which made it easier to control the negativity that would spread throughout a sales force after the SEC filed a lawsuit. Usually that alone was enough to force a penny-stock firm out of business. And penny-stock firms would target unsophisticated investors, who had little or no net worth, and convince them to speculate with a couple of thousand dollars, at most. Stratton, on the other hand, targeted the wealthiest investors in America, convincing them to speculate with millions. In consequence, the SEC couldn’t make their usual claim that Stratton’s clients weren’t suitable to risk their money in speculative stocks.

But none of this had occurred to the SEC before they filed their lawsuit. Instead, they mistakenly assumed that the bad press would be enough to drive Stratton out of business. But with only one office to manage, it had been easy to keep the troops motivated, and not a soul left. And it was only after the SEC had already filed their lawsuit that they finally got around to reviewing Stratton’s new-account forms and it dawned on them that all Stratton’s clients were millionaires.

What I had done was uncover a murky middle ground-namely, the organized selling of five-dollar stocks to the wealthiest one percent of Americans, as opposed to selling penny stocks (priced under a dollar) to the other ninety-nine percent, who had little or no net worth. There was a firm on Wall Street, DH Blair, that had danced around the idea for more than twenty years but had never actually hit the nail on the head. In spite of that, the firm’s owner, J. Morton Davis, a savage Jew, had still made a bloody fortune in the process and was a Wall Street legend.

But I had hit the nail on the head, and by sheer luck I’d hit it at exactly the right moment. The stock market was just beginning to recover from the Great October Crash, and chaos capitalism still reigned supreme. The NASDAQ was coming of age and was no longer considered the redheaded stepchild of the New York Stock Exchange. Lightning-fast computers were appearing on every desk- sending ones and zeroes whizzing from coast to coast-eliminating the need to be physically located on Wall Street. It was a time of change, a time of upheaval. And as volume on the NASDAQ soared, I, coincidentally, was embarking on an intensive three hour-a-day training program with my young Strattonites. From out of the smoldering ashes of the Great Crash, the investment banking firm of Stratton Oakmont was born. And before any regulator knew what hit, it had ripped through America with the force of an atomic bomb.

Just then an interesting thought occurred to me, and I said to Danny, "What are those two idiots from the SEC saying today?"

"Nothing really," he replied. "They’ve been pretty quiet, talking mostly about the cars in the parking lot, the usual shit." He shrugged. "I’ll tell you, these guys are totally fucking clueless! It’s like they don’t even know we’re doing a deal today. They’re still looking at trading records from 1991."

"Hmmm," I said, rubbing my chin thoughtfully. I wasn’t all that surprised at Danny’s response. After all, I’d been bugging the conference room for over a month now and was gathering counterintelligence against the SEC on a daily basis. And one of the first things I’d learned about securities regulators (besides them being completely devoid of personality) was that one hand had no idea what the other hand was doing. While the SEC bozos in Washington, D.C., were signing off on the Steve Madden IPO, the SEC bozos in New York were sitting in my conference room, entirely unaware of what was about to transpire.

"What’s the temperature in there?" I asked with great interest. Danny shrugged. "High fifties, I think. They’ve got their coats on."

"For Chrissake, Danny! Why is it so fucking warm in there? I told you-I want to freeze those bastards right back to Manhattan! What do I have to do, call a fucking refrigeration guy in here to get the job done? I mean, really, Danny, I want icicles coming out of their fucking noses! What about this don’t you understand?"

Danny smiled. "Listen, JB: We can freeze ’em out or we can burn ’em out. I can probably get one of those little kerosene heaters installed right in the ceiling, and we can make the room so hot they’ll need salt pills to stay alive. But if we make the place too uncomfortable, they might leave, and then we won’t be able to listen to them anymore."

* * *

And as part of their long-standing practice of having their heads up their asses, they reserved the distinguished honor of setting the price for the opening tick for me, the Wolf of Wall Street. It was just another in a long line of ill-conceived trading policies that were so absurd that they all but assured that every new issue coming out on the NASDAQ would be manipulated in one way or another, regardless of whether or not Stratton Oakmont was involved in it.

Just why the NASD had created a playing field that so clearly fucked over the customer was something I’d thought about often, and I’d come to the conclusion that it was because the NASD was a self-regulatory agency, "owned" by the very brokerage firms themselves. (In fact, Stratton Oakmont was a member too.)

In essence, the NASD’s true goal was to only appear to be on the side of the customer and to not actually be on the side of the customer. And, in truth, they didn’t even try too hard to do that. The effort was strictly cosmetic, just enough to avoid raising the ire of the SEC, who they were compelled to answer to.

So instead of allowing the natural balance between buyers and sellers to dictate where a stock should open, they reserved that incredibly valuable right for the lead underwriter, which in this particular case was me. I could choose whatever price I deemed appropriate, as arbitrary and capricious as it might be. In consequence, I decided to be very arbitrary and even more capricious, and I opened the units at $5.50 per, which afforded me the glorious opportunity of repurchasing my one million rathole units just there. And while I won’t deny that my ratholes would have liked to hold on to the units for a weeeee bit longer, they had no choice in the matter. After all, the buyback had been prearranged (a definite regulatory no-no), and they had just made a profit of $1.50 per unit for doing nothing and risking nothing-having bought and sold the units without even paying for the trade. And if they wanted to be included in the next deal, they had better follow the expected protocol, which was to shut the fuck up and say, "Thank you, Jordan!" and then lie through their teeth if they were ever questioned by a federal or state securities regulator as to why they sold their units so cheaply.

Either way, you really couldn’t question my logic in the matter. By 1:03 p.m.-just three minutes after I’d bought back my rathole units at $5.50 per-the rest of Wall Street had already driven the units up to $18. That meant I had locked in a profit of $12.5 million- $12.5 million! In three minutes! I’d made another million or so in investment-banking fees and stood to make another three or four million a few days from now-when I bought back the bridge-loan units, which were also in the hands of my ratholes. Ahhhh- ratholes! What a concept! And Steve himself was my biggest rathole of all. He was holding 1.2 million shares for me, the very shares NASDAQ had forced me to divest. At the current unit price of $18 (each unit consisting of one share of common stock and two warrants), the actual share price was $8. That meant that the shares Steve was holding for me were now worth just under $10 million! The Wolf strikes again!

It was now up to my loyal Strattonites to sell all this inflated stock to their clients. All this inflated stock-not just the one million units they had given to their own clients as part of the initial public offering but also my one million rathole units that were now being held in the firm’s trading account, along with 300,000 bridge-loan units I would be buying back in a few days…and then some additional stock I had to buy back from all the brokerage firms that had pushed the units up to $18 (doing the dirty work for me). They would be slowly selling their units back to Stratton Oakmont and locking in their own profit. All told, by the end of the day, I would need my Strattonites to raise approximately $30 million. That would more than cover everything, as well as give the firm’s trading account a nice little cushion against any pain-in-the-ass short-sellers, who might try to sell stock they didn’t even own (with the hopes of driving the price down so they could buy it back cheaper in the future). Thirty million was no problem for my merry band of brokers, especially after this morning’s meeting, which had them pitching their hearts and souls out like never before.

At this particular moment I was standing inside the firm’s trading room-looking over the shoulder of my head trader, Steve Sanders. I had one eye on a bank of computer monitors directly in front of Steve, while my other eye looked out a plate-glass window that faced the boardroom. The pace was absolutely frenetic. Brokers were screaming into their telephones like wild banshees. Every few seconds a young sales assistant with a lot of blond hair and a plunging neckline would come running up to the plate-glass window, press her breasts against it, and slip a stack of buy tickets through a narrow slot at the bottom. Then one of four order clerks would grab the tickets and input them into the computer network- causing them to pop up on the proprietary trading terminal in front of Steve, at which point he would execute them in accordance with the current market.

Before I left the trading room, my final instructions to Steve were that under no circumstances was he to let the stock drop below $18. After all, I wasn’t about to shaft the rest of Wall Street after they’d been kind enough to manipulate my stock for me.

* * *

Oh, yes, Stratton Oakmont had the power, all right. In fact, Stratton Oakmont was the power, and I, as Stratton’s leader, was wired into that very power and sat atop its pinnacle. I felt it surge through my very innards and resonate with my heart and soul and liver and loins. With more than eight million shares changing hands, the units had closed just below $19, up five hundred percent on the day, making it the largest percentage gainer on the NASDAQ, the NYSE, the AMEX, as well as any other stock exchange in the world. Yes, the world-from the OBX exchange way up north in the frozen wasteland of Oslo, Norway, all the way down south to the ASX exchange in the kangaroo paradise of Sydney, Australia.

Right now I was standing in the boardroom, casually leaning against my office’s plate-glass window, with my arms folded beneath my chest. It was the pose of the mighty warrior after the fray. The mighty roar of the boardroom was still going strong, but the tone was different now. It was less urgent, more subdued.

It was almost celebration time. I stuck my right hand in my pants pocket and did a quick check to make sure my six Ludes hadn’t fallen out or simply vanished into thin air. Quaaludes had a way of vanishing sometimes, although it usually had more to do with your "friends" snatching them from you-or you getting so stoned that you took them yourself and simply didn’t remember. That was the fourth phase of a Quaalude high and, perhaps, the most dangerous: the amnesia phase. The first phase was the tingle phase, next came the slur phase, then the drool phase, and then, of course, the amnesia phase.

Anyway, the drug-god had been kind to me, and the Quaaludes hadn’t vanished. I took a moment to roll them around in my fingertips, which gave me an irrational sense of joy. Then I began the process of calculating the appropriate time to take them, which was somewhere around 4:30 p.m., I figured, twenty-five minutes from now. That would give me fifteen minutes to hold the afternoon meeting, as well as enough time to supervise this afternoon’s act of depravity, which was a female head-shaving.

One of the young sales assistants, who was strapped for cash, had agreed to put on a Brazilian bikini and sit down on a wooden stool at the front of the boardroom and let us shave her head down to the skull. She had a great mane of shimmering blond hair and a wonderful set of breasts, which had recently been augmented to a D cup. Her reward would be $10,000 in cash, which she would use to pay for her breast job, which she’d just financed at twelve percent. So it was a win-win situation for everyone: In six months she’d have her hair back, and she’d own her D cups debt free.

I couldn’t help but wonder if I should’ve allowed Danny to bring a midget into the office. After all, what was so wrong with it? It sounded a bit off at first, but now that I’d had a little time to digest it, it didn’t seem so bad.

In essence, what it really boiled down to was that the right to pick up a midget and toss him around was just another currency due any mighty warrior, a spoil of war, so to speak. How else was a man to measure his success if not by playing out every one of his adolescent fantasies, regardless of how bizarre it might be? There was definitely something to be said for that. If precocious success brought about questionable forms of behavior, then the prudent young man should enter each unseemly act into the debit column on his own moral balance sheet and then offset it at some future point with an act of kindness or generosity (a moral credit, so to speak), when he became older and wiser and more sedate.

Yet, on the other hand, we might just be depraved maniacs-a self-contained society that had spiraled completely out of control. We Strattonites thrived on acts of depravity. We counted on them, in fact; I mean, we needed them to survive!

It was for this very reason that, after becoming completely desensitized to basic acts of depravity, the powers that be (namely, me) felt compelled to form an unofficial team of Strattonites-with Danny Porush as its proud leader-to fill the void. The team acted like a twisted version of the Knights Templar-whose never-ending quest to find the Holy Grail was the stuff of legend. But unlike the Knights Templar, the Stratton knights spent their time scouring the four corners of the earth for increasingly depraved acts, so the rest of the Strattonites could continue to get off. It wasn’t like we were heroin junkies or anything as tawdry as that; we were unadulterated adrenaline junkies, who needed higher and higher cliffs to dive off and shallower and shallower pools to land in.

* * *