Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: More Incredible True Stories of Fortunes, Schemes, Parties, and Prison [Hardcover]

Jordan Belfort (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 24, 2009

In this astounding account, Wall Street’s notorious bad boy—the original million-dollar-a-week stock chopper—leads us through a drama worthy of The Sopranos, from the FBI raid on his estate to the deal he cut to rat out his oldest friends and colleagues to the conscience he eventually found. With his kingdom in ruin, not to mention his marriage, the Wolf faced his greatest challenge yet: how to navigate a gauntlet of judges and lawyers, hold on to his kids and his enraged model wife, and possibly salvage his self-respect. It wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, for a man with an unprecedented appetite for excess, it was going to be hell. But the man at the center of one of the most shocking scandals in financial history soon sees the light of what matters most: his sobriety, and his future as a father and a man.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Book Description
In the go-go nineties Jordan Belfort proved to Wall Street that you didn’t need to be on Wall Street to make a fortune in the stock market. But his company, Stratton Oakmont, worked differently. His young Long Island wannabes didn’t know from turnaround plans or fiduciary trust. Instead, they knew how to separate wealthy investors from their cash, and spend it as fast as it came in--on hookers, yachts, and drugs. But when Jordan’s empire crashed, the man who had become legend was cornered into a five-year stint cooperating with the feds. This continuation of his Wall Street Journal bestseller, The Wolf of Wall Street, tells the true story of his spectacular flameout and imprisonment for stock fraud.

In this astounding account, Wall Street’s notorious bad boy--and original million-dollar-a-month stock chopper--leads us through a drama worthy of The Sopranos, from his early rise to power to the FBI raid on his estate to the endless indictments at his arrest, to his deal with a bloodthirsty prosecutor to rat out his oldest friends and colleagues--while they were doing the same. With his kingdom in ruin, not to mention his marriage, the Wolf faced his greatest challenge yet: how to navigate a gauntlet of judges and lawyers, hold on to his kids and his enraged model wife--and possibly salvage his self-respect. It wasn’t going to be easy. In fact, for a man with an unprecedented appetite for excess, it was going to be hell.

From a wired conversation at an Italian restaurant, where Jordan’s conscience finally kicks in, to a helicopter ride with an underage knockout that will become his ultimate undoing, here is the tale of a young genius on a roller coaster of harrowing highs--and more harrowing lows. But as the countdown to his moment in court begins, after one last crazy bout with a madcap Russian beauty queen, the man at the center of one of the most outrageous scandals in financial history sees the light of what matters most: his sobriety, and his future as a father and a man. Will a prison term be his first step toward redemption?

---

Amazon Exclusive: Jordan Belfort on Catching the Wolf of Wall Street

At this moment, our financial system has all but imploded. Real estate prices have plummeted, Wall Street's most venerable investment banks have gone belly up, the credit-crunch has brought the economy to a grinding halt, and once-thriving cities have been turned into financial Hiroshimas, with foreclosed homes littering every block and abandoned pets roaming the streets.

When I wrote my first book, The Wolf of Wall Street, I wanted it to serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who was living a life of unbridled hedonism, to anyone who thought there was something glamorous about being known as a Wolf of Wall Street. Now, with Catching the Wolf of Wall Street, the dire economic straits we find ourselves in have made that desire even more powerful.

Catching the Wolf of Wall Street is an eye-opening glance into the self-destruction of my own life, as a result of my own criminal actions.

In short, I get my comeuppance...and then some.

You might find many of the chapters to be completely hysterical (reading about someone else’s pain can be that way sometimes, especially when they deserve to feel pain, like I did), but I can assure that writing this book was an incredibly painful undertaking, especially the parts that dealt with my separation from my children when I went to jail. I shed many a tear, dredging up those memories, and I found myself having a renewed appreciation for some of life’s simpler things, like freedom, for one.

That being said, when I look back at it all, I can only come to one sad conclusion: that I lived one of the most dysfunctional lives on the planet. I put money before integrity, greed before ethics, and covetousness before love. I chose friends unwisely, cut corners wherever I could, and then drowned my guilt and remorse beneath elephantine doses of recreational drugs.

I deserved to get caught.

Of course, some of you might be wondering whether or not I’ve changed at all--if I’m truly sorry for my crimes, and if the many public apologies I’ve made to people who lost money as a result of my actions were, indeed, sincere.

The answer to that is an unequivocal yes; I am sorry, and I do apologize. In fact, not a day goes by when the mistakes of my past don’t back up on me or are thrown in my face. But then I remind myself why I wrote these books in the first place, and of the many supportive letters I’ve received from people all over the world, who’ve gotten the intended message--namely that: crime doesn’t pay. Perhaps the latest crop of Fat Cat CEOs and Wall Street powerbrokers will get that message too.

Then we go about fixing this mess.--Jordan Belfort

(Photo © Blake Little)

From Booklist

Belfort’s memoir (his recollection of events with some changed names and reconstructed dialogue) was written after serving almost two years in prison for securities fraud. The author recounts his meteoric rise on Wall Street, where he built one of the largest brokerage firms by age 27. He reflects upon his remarkable journey, explaining his core skill of training salesmen, especially stupid or naive young people, showing them how they can become rich. This is the story of a scam artist who enjoyed a lifestyle of parties, hookers, and drug dealing until the FBI took him away in handcuffs at age 36. It tells of his cooperation with the government and his life as an informant. In recounting what he acknowledges was his dysfunctional life, his apparent devotion to his children is a bright light. This sordid saga will either become popular as a cautionary tale of greed and treachery or it will become romanticized as glamorous excess and celebrity. --Mary Whaley

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Bantam; First Edition edition (February 24, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553807048
• ISBN-13: 978-0553807042
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.5 x 9.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #515,447 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars better then the first one but still not very good, May 27, 2009

By 

je "concerned-citizen" (ny,ny) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: More Incredible True Stories of Fortunes, Schemes, Parties, and Prison (Hardcover)

After Belfort's first disaster, he comes back with a continuation of his life after Stratton. I find the author to be very self indulgent, whether it's cheating in business or on his wives, abusing drugs and alcohol, or boasting about how much everything in his house costs. As the Feds close in, Belfort is offered a deal: rat on your friends for a reduced sentence. Jordan takes about ten minutes before quickly agreeing. Even though he is now faced with repaying the staggering sum of over $100 million in restitution, Jordan shows very little remorse for all the people he ripped off. Instead, he seems to whine over being supposedly singled out for something "everyone on Wall Street does". After being barred from the securities industry, Jordan enters an appropriate field: taking advantage of lower income people in the refinancing business.

For those who don't quite grasp what Jordan did, here is a little primer:

Stratton would seek to a company public; lets call it ABC. Stratton would look to raise 6 million dollars by selling 1 million shares at 6. (a lot of these deals were units with warrants attatched, but for the sake of simplicity I'm going to just call them shares. The concept is the same). Three to six months before going public, Stratton would structure a bridge loan to ABC for say $500,000. ABC might need this money to pay legal and accounting expenses. An investor (generally a friend of Jordan's) would put up the money in return for one million shares at $.50.
Six months later, ABC goes public. Stratton's brokers are selling it like crazy, promising investors that the stock is the next Microsoft and ready to go "TO DA MOON!" Lets say instead of selling clients one million shares, they sell them 2 million. Where did the extra million shares come from? Simple. Remember the bridge loan at fifty cents? Well Jordan would pay him two dollars for his stock. The investor makes a quick $1.50/share, or $1.5 million on a $500,000 investment. Not bad. Frequently, the investor would kick back some of these proceeds to Jordan.
Okay, lets go back to the first day of trading. Stratton has virtual total control over the float of the stock by not allowing a broker to sell unless he had a corresponding buy order. Thus, no stock would ever hit the rest of Wall Street. Because Stratton controls the market, they might open the stock up at say, 15. Jordan then goes out to his sales force with a great deal: He will let them but one million shares at 11, and sell them to their clients at 15. The brokers will make $4/share, or over 25%! Why would Jordan offer them stock at 11? Because he took it from the bridge loan investor at 2. So Stratton makes $9/share on one million shares in it's trading acct, plus all the investment banking fees and any kickbacks as well. Remember, they only raised six million (minus fees) for the company. So, Jordan makes over 150% on the money he raised! Sooner or later, the stock collapses, and the investors are left holding stock worth pennies. Needless to say, this is all totally illegal.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars One Book Too Many, March 23, 2009

By 

D. Wagner (Baltimore, MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: More Incredible True Stories of Fortunes, Schemes, Parties, and Prison (Hardcover)

Who would write a book boasting about snitching on all their friends? And it's unclear to me why he needs to describe every detail of his sex life with his wife. Classy. What he needs to do is learn to write a sentence that doesn't have a cliche in it; and if I ever see the word "alas" again I'm going to shoot myself in the head. His first book was amusing, due to the drug and spending sprees, unfortunately this book takes place after those ended.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Unrepentant, July 6, 2009

By 

M. DUTRA (Sao Paulo, Brazil) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Catching the Wolf of Wall Street: More Incredible True Stories of Fortunes, Schemes, Parties, and Prison (Kindle Edition)

It is hard to review this book because we get so upset about the main character that our feelings spread to the book itself. The book is fun and interesting, not because it is well written (it is not) but because the situation itself is original and adventurous. Therefore, the only merit Belfort has as an author is that "he has been there".

In this book, Belfort tells us about the events after getting caught by the FBI, how he ratted his friends, and his relationship with women. He sounds like he was very sorry about being caught, but not at all about the people he screwed. In fact, the first thing he does after his money runs dry is to start selling mortgage based loans to poor people (knowing well that they will lose their houses).

Belfort suffers from a pathological inability to put himself in other people's shoes, he is unable to relate to feelings and to have anything more than a childish relationship with anyone. This goes for his victims and his women. My bet is that he is a psychopath in some degree. He refers to his second wife as a Duchess, and basically has a marriage based on sex. Everybody tells him she is a gold-digging whore, but he is the only one who can't see it (she is). Then he goes on to live with a dysfunctional super-model who can't even have a conversation with him. Women are trophies for his vanity.

The only truth we read in the whole book is when the judge says that he is not super-talented as he thinks, that many people as talented as him didn't get as much money just because they refrained from crossing the criminal line. That's the bottom line: Belfort is not super smart, he is a super liar, one who lies even to himself.