Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I'm confused by Jordan's delusion of grandeur whereby he assumes `everyone' knew who he was and what he was doing both during his `hey day' and afterwards. If, during the time of his Stratton days, you'd asked 1000 Wall street people if they'd ever heard of Belfort or Stratton Oakmont, I guarantee you 997 of them would say no. If you'd asked 1000 non-Wall street people, 1000 would never had heard of him or Stratton...assuming they weren't clients. The only reason I ever heard of Stratton was that my firm cleared his trades.
By the way, Jordan (early in the book) states that his clients "...could have sold their shares anytime they wanted to..." Not quite. If I had a dime for every Stratton customer who called my firm complaining about their inability to sell, I'd be living in Old Brookville.

It's been a long time since I read a book from cover to cover in one sitting. Belfort's writing style is laugh out loud entertaining. He shows his frailties and describes others with extreme candor. And the book's subject matter is extremely relevant today. Belfort may just be a blip compared to today's crooks( although he did it with more panache - and with more self destructive tendencies), but his book explains very well the mind set of greed, excess and entitlement on Wall Street.

I bought this book on an impulse in LaGuardia Airport. I wish I had looked up reader reviews first. I thought I might gain insight into how a Wall Street con artist could fool so many people, but instead I got an unbearable dose of narcissism and too many intimate details of this con's personal life. If you're hoping to actually learn something, don't throw your money away on this waste of time. I couldn't stomach it long enough to finish, and ended up tossing it rather than foisting it on another unsuspecting soul.

Ever the con man, Jordan Belfort is cashing in on the wave of Wall Street scandal books. From the title of this book you'd think it had been written about Ivan Boesky or Michael Milken. Traders and bankers who worked on Wall Street shook their heads when they read the headlines in the New York Post. Who on earth is this guy? It's telling that Belfort was the "Wolf of Wall Steet" in the New York Post--not the Wall Street Journal.

Jordan Belfort had a brokerage on Long Island that pushed penny stocks to retail customers who didn't know any better. The odds of success were stacked against the clients and fees ate up their money. Belfort says his script came from Lehmann but that hardly matters because his product was worse than junk. He made a fortune but he was not a financier, nor a tycoon. His crime had the hallmarks of small time crime and the crimes he committed were all about simple, everyday lying and fraud--oh and money laundering, can't forget that.

But Jordan is a genius--no question. He's a genius of a salesman, and his appitite for exageration won't quit, even when it means exagerating his credentials as a criminal. He thinks big--really big.

Jordan Belfort is also a natural writer. Though I certainly would not let my money anywhere near him, I enjoyed reading his observations of the people around him. The long descriptions of wealth and ill gotten gains, drugs and prostitutes are the background but the really interesting parts of the book happen when he describes the prosecutors who who worked with him in the U.S. Attorney's Office, his second golddigger wife Nadine, his accountant known as "Chef" (because he could cook the books), his Russian mistress (the one and only former Miss Soviet Union!) and many other people.

Belfort tells us many stories of drugs and crazy behavior. The strangest thing is that all the money seems to have done little except to make him miserable. I hope he keeps up his writing but I'm not sure he will ever understand that money really is not what makes a person happy.

laughed the whole time i was reading this and could not put it down. belfort is self-deprecatingly hysterical. also some amazing insight into wall street schemes and scams. crazy thing is all the wild stories are true. i also like watching the author on CNN talk about the current scandals, he explains it so you can understand it. a must read!

interesting enough story although the telling of it was a little egotistical and at times left out the detail that would have made it better.

The first book "The Wolf on Wall Street" left me wanting more, a conclusion. This book gives you just that. As with the first book the story is a bit of a reach but its fun to just go with it and enjoy the book for what it is: A rise and fall self destructive tragety. Lessons learned!
Buyer beware - Strong language and content. Its not as good as the first book a bit repetitive - But its Okay.