Original subtitles

Getting to Jordan's bachelor party--

I don't remember what year it was.

It was probably '89, '90.

We all met at JFK, 25-30 people.

There used to be old vending machines

where you could get soup.

And the head degenerate explained to us

at 6:00 in the morning, the warmth of the soup

helps the effect of the quaalude.

We all start the first round of quaaludes.

By the time we get on the plane,

we're already feeling no pain.

At Stratton, we live in our own world.

We call the shots.

Nothing affected us from the outside.

During the flight, there's a whole bunch of people

snorting coke on the plane.

The flight there alone was a bacchanal.

This is a scene from "The Wolf of Wall Street."

They get it right, but they're a little premature

because there were no prostitutes on the plane.

However, once we got to Las Vegas,

there was an abundance of them.

There were girls running around naked.

There were beautiful girls,

there were drop-dead ugly girls,

guys who were having sex on a table.

It was insanity.

I do remember walking through the suite

and fucking at the same time.

You know, like passing lanes on a highway.

In the middle of the bachelor party,

there was one particular guy

and he had a great quaalude slur.

I'm going to get under this glass table,

put my mouth up to the table, and one of you whores

are going to take a shit on the table.

Thus, it will appear

as if they're shitting in my mouth.

Within seven seconds, there was a taker.

It was all about drugs, hookers, and money.

We call the rules.

This is fucking Stratton.

Whoo!

Right.

Let me just find it.

Here it is.

Jordan, he's sitting on a cooler and was slightly stoned.

Just watch and observe.

Oops.

He was on quaaludes trying to get his sea feet back on

and we weren't even moving.

We were at the dock.

He loved being stoned.

So that's Jordan.

And that's the Duchess.

That's Nadine.

Hey.

Nadine was a beautiful girl, good personality.

She was on commercials.

I lived on Long Island. I took up horseback riding.

I think I'm Martha Stewart.

I take cooking classes I take wine classes.

If I'm going to buy a bottle of wine that's $2,000,

I want to know if it's a grape or a place.

If I'm going to buy a chair,

I want to know if it's Louis XIV or Louis XVI.

I think Jordan was definitely living his dream,

and I was one of his merry men.

Some crazy, wild times.

This is the video cruising around Newport, Rhode Island.

We took the helicopter off the yacht.

And these are all the mansions in Newport.

In the early '90s, Jordan started

living a lifestyle that I didn't even know existed

other than to rock stars and rappers

that made millions and millions of dollars.

Hi! Nice to meet you!

♪ Yow! ♪

Oh, my god.

There's no words for what a big spender he was.

And yeah, it was fun.

But I didn't realize it was a trap.

♪ Hey! ♪

Jordan's success and his possessions

and everything drove everyone at Stratton

to get motivated to make more.

That was another thing to aspire to.

I immediately said to myself, Howie,

if you don't make $100,000 a month,

you need to take a rifle,

put it in your mouth, and pull the trigger.

At the beginning of Stratton,

we were really dealing in penny stocks.

Then it was time to raise the bar.

We started getting involved in the initial public offering,

an IPO.

So that part of the movie was accurate.

An IPO is an initial public offering.

It's the first time a stock is offered for sale

to the general population.

Bill Gates is about $200 million richer this morning.

Microsoft hit a new record high on Wall Street.

Just think if you'd bought Apple when it first started.

Just think if you had bought Microsoft.

Young folks who are in their 20s go, why not me?

People just wanted to get in on IPOs

because it was a way of just making a killing.

You could triple your money in a day.

Jordan Belfort became famous for IPOs

that just seemed too good to be true,

but it was so complicated that it was hard to make sense

of what these deals were all about.

And what I wanted to do was to kind of look under the hood.

So I just filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

The records make it clear that these Stratton Oakmont-related

IPOs were pump and dumps.

The pump and dump was basically the company

buys inventory of a stock...

At a very low price...

manipulates it to a much higher price.

Now we pick up a phone and sell a security to investors.

That drove the stock up even higher.

After manipulating the stock...

Dump it on the market. Sell, sell, sell.

Now we all dump the stock.

The firms profited.

The stock crashed.

And eventually, most of the clients...

lost everything.

That was your classic pump and dump.

So you've got a whole bunch of young kids

who knew nothing about the business

on the phone all day trying to push a particular IPO.

There was a rumor we were taking

grandmother's Social Security money.

We want people who are rich. That's the guy you want.

The narrative at the time

was that we only contact high net worth individuals.

You had to at least make $100,000 a year,

be worth at least a half a million to a million,

and be in the stock market.

The "business model"

wasn't turning a virgin into a hooker.

It was turning someone that already fucks

into a real hooker.

I got a call from Stratton Oakmont.

He had an IPO called Computer Marketplace.

And he said, oh, we got this big IPO coming out

and all our customers are millionaires.

And you know, you stick with us, you'll be fine.

And so I agreed to buy that.

Probably going to say it was $30,000 range, I think.

And how did he make Computer Marketplace sound?

Oh, it was an amazing company.

You watch.

It's going to be worth ten times what it is,

you know, today.

And they had all the right things to say.

They were very professional, you know?

They often paint the picture that they're going after

you know, wealthy business owners.

Does that describe yourself?

No, I was just--I owned and operated a restaurant.

I worked hard and did OK,

but I wasn't in the league-- in that league, you know?

They knew all the right buttons to push.

Ya know, before you knew it, you're in.

Stratton Oakmont was about kill, kill, Make the money.

There are no concerns for investors at all.

Did you realize, like, hey, this is absolute fraud?

Like, this is a pump and dump scheme?

No. No, 'cause first of all, I don't--

again, I'm 23 years old.

I don't understand anything about the stock market.

I mean, I certainly thought it was wild

how they could can make so much money.

I was much more focused on my relationship with him.

Was there a moment when you realized,

we might be doing something wrong here?

You don't think like that.

Well, you know, I'm doing something wrong here.

I wanted to believe the lie, be honest.

I was blinded by the lifestyle.

And, uh...

God took care of me in his own way.

You got married-- you said 25? 26?

We got married, I think I was 23.

So I met him at 22. - Oh, it was fast.

Six months later, we were engaged.

Six months later, we were married.

The night before our wedding, we got into a rip-roaring fight

because I'm pregnant, because I got pregnant before my wedding,

and he's wasted the whole time.

And I'm furious.

And I'm like, are you fucking kidding me?

I'm giving you everything you want,

and this is how you're behaving?

And then I had 250 people

coming to the Malliouhana Hotel in Anguilla.

So I was like, OK.

Jordan flew me from California to Anguilla,

puts me up in a gorgeous room.

For a guy who came from a middle-class neighborhood,

it was pretty incredible, honestly.

Everybody was there.

Rob LoRusso, Howie Gelfand, all the top brokers.

I mean, what can I say? It was a fairy tale.

This is a scene from "The Wolf of Wall Street."

- Kiss the bride. - This is their wedding.

This is the lovely couple dancing at their wedding,

which I really don't recall

because I think everyone had been too fucked up already.

You know, I do a video about this on TikTok.

Put on my dress.

I showed up with a smile on my face.

Yet inside, I was deeply, deeply sad.

You might even see that in my eyes in the picture.

And I put myself into therapy.

I was smart enough to know that.

And I think she helped me really stay sane.

So you come back, now you're married to this guy.

Like, you knew he worked on Wall Street.

Yeah.

But I think I only went to the office,

honestly, like, one or two other times.

I'm sure I was kept away from the office on purpose.

He's just controlling everything.

Jordan realized that in order to manipulate a stock,

you couldn't manipulate it just by your one firm.

You had to be--the word that I use is "cahoots."

You had to be in bed with other firms.

And then in one of the big seminal events of my life,

I was called into Jordan's office along with

one of the junior partners.

And they asked us

if we would like to own our own brokerage firm

in South Florida.

We could work closely, or in cahoots,

with Stratton and do deals together

to make a lot of money.

I was a single guy, so for me,

it wasn't a difficult decision to move down there.

I didn't have a family to consider,

so I said, yeah, it sounds good to me.

Whoo!

And we opened our own brokerage firm

called Biltmore in South Florida.

We were doing IPOs

and we were training our brokers the same way.

So as Stratton Oakmont's ambitions grew,

they launch other firms.

Biltmore,

Monroe Parker.

And they appear to be kind of independent,

but they're all connected to Stratton Oakmont.

So what we would do is we would fly into New York

on private jets.

We'd meet Danny and Jordan for dinner.

We would discuss an upcoming IPO.

We would lay out a strategy of how to set the prices.

We would have two, three, four different companies.

That was our cartel.

You're not allowed to conspire to set a price,

but that's what we were doing.

That is all illegal.

On an IPO day, the boardroom was insanity.

Things were being thrown around.

People were screaming.

I made almost $800,000 in commissions

in, like, 15 minutes.

My income was $130,000 to $140,000 a month.

All of a sudden,

we were loaded and powerful and famous.

IPOs were huge moneymakers, not to be minimized.

It was like a dream.

It enabled me to help my father,

enabled me to help my sister,

enabled me to break up my girlfriend,

give her $5,000 a month out of guilt.

I guess the nice part about it,

you know, when my parents were alive,

I spoiled them to death.

Not literally.

My father was my best friend.

I threw him a surprise 60th at Caesars in Atlantic City.

I was able to retire my father.

And I bought him a house next to his best friend.

I gave my father 5,000 a month.

A lot of people got $5,000 a month from me.

I was a hot bachelor.

I used to get cold calls from mothers of Jewish girls

to set to date their daughters.

Everyone's life around me

had kind of depended on me pulling in this kind of money.

I became the chairman of the Miami City Ballet.

And I was on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art.

And it was a very exciting life.

Since we all knew that what we were doing

was potentially illegal, it was a closed society.

We socialized together. We had a lot of fun together.

We went on vacations together.

We spent a lot of time as friends, families.

He would take people on trips.

And a lot of our friends were friends.

You know, that was the fun part.

Like, we would all hang out together

with our husbands and our kids.

I had a child.

My daughter was born in 1994.

Jordan and Nadine had Chandler.

I think she was born in '93.

So the kids played together. The kids grew up together.

You know, great memories were made on that boat.

Happy New Year's!

There were parties with spouses.

Then there was the other partying

where the wives weren't present.

One time, Jordan said, we're going on a road trip.

We're going to the yacht. It was nine guys.

One of Jordan's mottos were, just remember,

hookers are not cheating.

I was told that they were going to bring in hookers.

Jordan flew in 13 hookers on this yacht,

and there were nine guys.

It was chaos.

The drugs were going around.

There was one scene that I will never forget.

The captain said to me, Ross, you gotta see this.

I look into Jordan's bedroom

and I see these two beautiful women

with Jordan in between them naked.

And you could see the drool

and you could see the look on his face.

And these girls are trying to get him aroused.

And we're dying of laughter.

So it got to the point where we went down to Jordan's room

and Jordan's--

Tell them I have a big cock.

So I turn to these beautiful naked girls.

By the way, girls, Jordan really has a big cock.

A lot of these guys partied with these hookers a lot.

Wherever there were just the guys, there were girls.

They went out to dinner, there were girls.

It was a very male, testosterone-y environment.

It was a frat house.

The culture at Stratton was very much

designed in the pursuit of the pleasures of men.

Part of that was a healthy little dose of sexism.

So Stratton Oakmont is making tons of money

and living the lives of millionaires.

But when investors want to sell the stock,

Stratton Oakmont often refuses,

knowing that this stock is going to crash.

The broker hears from the client, I want to sell.

I want to sell 10,000 shares of ABC.

OK.

He writes out a sell ticket.

We just ripped up the fucking piece of paper.

I mean, it doesn't get much more illegal than that.

Do you know how much you bought?

It was like $72,000, which was a lot of money back then.

I'm just a blue-collar worker.

You know, that was all the money I had at the time.

Couldn't get a hold of anybody to sell everything.

And I says, oh, my god. I says, this is bad.

Eh, we're not getting the money back.

That's when I decided I'd get the lawyer.

I went to the lawyer,

explained to him what happened,

and I went to arbitration.

An arbitration is basically,

you're getting sued for doing illegal activities

that cost our client a lot of money.

I got so many arbitrations

that I can't tell you how many I got.

At arbitration, they said, oh, he's a multi-millionaire,

you know, and he makes all this money a year and stuff.

And it wasn't accurate

because Stratton Oakmont had altered the original document

when I opened the account.

They had inflated my net worth.

They had inflated my annual salary.

He sold Dr. Pepper and he bought this SMT Healthcare?

I said, I didn't authorize that.

You know, they had forged paperwork and stuff.

We had three days of arbitration.

We won the case.

When the arbitration check came,

I went to the lawyer, naturally,

tried to pay his fees, his expenses.

I wound up getting

if I remember-- you know, it wasn't very much.

And you know, I had three children

and college expenses, et cetera.

We'd use it for my family, for the future.

It's gone, you know?

Stratton Oakmont loses.

But at the end of the day,

the result of an arbitration is you pay a fine.

Ultimately, this just becomes

the cost of doing business for Stratton Oakmont.

And Jordan's attitude was the cost, really,

it's just part of the business, almost like a store has,

you know, 3% theft included in their revenues.

I don't think he was even concerned

with the audits and the compliance part of it.

Because I remember he said,

the longer I keep it open, the more I'm going to make,

so I'll just keep paying my way through this.

He would get a slap on the hand.

I think one of the fines was $1 million.

$1 million was a lot of money,

but not when you're taking in tens of millions of dollars.

I went to Las Vegas to do an arbitration and it was great.

I don't remember whether I won or lost,

but I spent two weeks in Vegas.

I flew out my little niece and nephew.

They were younger at the time.

And we had the time of our lives.

And that was the ethos that existed within our ecosystem.

If you got the power, you can do

whatever the hell you want to do and the laws don't apply.

Didn't take long for arbitrations

to start coming in.

Typical firm would get maybe a handful a year.

We were getting much more than a handful.

That alerted the authorities

it's time to really look into what these guys are doing.

I happened to pick up the newspaper

and I notice that there's an article

about the SEC investigating Stratton Oakmont.

Jordan called me right after the article appeared

and said, I need to talk to you.

I said, where the fuck have you been?

Now you're under full investigation.

Like in Scorsese's movie, we set them up in a room.

I had it bugged

and the air conditioning turned up so high

that it felt like Antarctica in there.

The scene in the movie with the temperature, um,

I didn't witness that, but I believe that.

Jordan continuously felt invincible.

I had to run reports

and I knew all these investigations were going on.

And it was almost like

a "Catch Me If You Can" environment.

We were, like, trying to stay ahead all the time.

The SEC was kind of really, you know,

ironical about the SEC 'cause they were not

the sharpest tools in the shed.

I never had much respect for them at all.

The attitude was screw the SEC.

Hire a lawyer and let them take care of it, whatever.

Quite frankly, without being pejorative,

it was totally slow-moving and terribly ineffective.

Hi.

Whenever news came across, it was quickly dispelled

as bullshit, it's bullshit, it's bullshit.

We were convinced that we were untouchable.

Few weeks ago, I went with my son to polo

and there was a sweater with a teddy bear.

And it was 250 and I fucking didn't buy it.

Back then, I never looked at a price tag.

I just bought it.

At the time, side note,

I was dating the shot girl from Scores,

a very, very high-end strip bar.

Everyone I've gone out with since the beginning of time

has just been one smoke show after another.

So this is called the Miracle Mile.

And why?

Because if you can afford to shop here,

it's a fucking miracle.

It is every high-end brand.

Ralph Lauren, Christian Dior, Gucci.

There's Tiffany.

Back then, I bought 500 bars of Tiffany soap

because I liked it.

Rolex, that was my go-to store

because I had a addiction to watches.

I amassed $300,000 to $400,000

in watches.

I'd buy stuff that you would never, ever buy.

I bought a $1,600 Gianni Versace soap tray.

I still have it and look at it and go, what the fuck?

Who buys a $1,600 soap dish?

Took a limo everywhere.

People used to tease me, what do you do,

take a limo to the mailbox, you know?

They had a tailor that would come

and do custom suits for people.

We used to jump on a helicopter to play golf,

come back the same day.

I was on probably five or six yachts

before Jordan bought the actual yacht, "Nadine."

Jordan had it lengthened by 25 feet

so he could put a heliport on top of it.

We went to Monte Carlo.

I had wired in money

and we were there for maybe a couple hours

and I won almost $1 million.

It was youth wasted on the young to the utmost degree.

If it weren't so illegal, what we were all engaged in,

it would have been something I'd probably still be doing.

The SEC, they moved relatively slowly.

But eventually, the SEC picks up the phone,

calls somebody in the U.S. Attorney's Office,

and says, have I got a case for you.

They said no white shirt and all of my...

I appreciate that.

Business shirts are white shirts.

That's what J. Edgar told us. Gotta wear the white shirt.

My name is Gregory Coleman.

I'm played by Kyle Chandler

in the movie "The Wolf of Wall Street."

And you got the beautiful girls here!

It's wonderful. - All right.

Get the fuck off my boat.

Belfort had the good luck of setting up shop

when the FBI really wasn't focusing

on securities fraud cases.

But all of that changed in 1992.

The FBI sets up a group of agents designed to investigate

Wall Street-related crimes.

Because of that, it moves it from the civil realm

where you're just suing people and getting money

and barring them from the business

to the criminal realm,

because now he could go to jail for it.

The time and tested plan in other criminal enterprises

is to really work your way up from the bottom.

Pick off a couple of low-level brokers was my idea.

During my investigation, there was a group of brokers

who paid other people

to take the test to become a licensed broker.

Their fingerprints were found on those forms

many years after the test-taking occurred.

That meant that from day one,

they were never properly licensed

to sell securities to the public.

The brokers admitted to having other people take their tests

and that gave us leverage.

We were taking the brokers that we've--what we call flipped,

that are cooperating with us.

We just set them up as witnesses

and then had them feed us information

on a regular basis as to what was going on.

When the SEC sues you, you can pay a fine.

But when the FBI get involved,

that's the guys with the windbreakers

with the letters on the back

and the guys who have the guns.

That's what you don't want.

So now there are all kinds of signs

that there's stuff going on that's not good.

You start hearing clicks on your phone.

You try to open up a bank account and the bank says,

no, I'm afraid we can't open an account.

What the hell's up with that?

One day, Jordan said, Ross, we're going to play golf.

Helicopter would fly over

and he would look at the helicopter

and goes-- and he would say to me,

oh, they're definitely watching me.

I think he was getting nervous.

And I think that's when he got bodyguards, too.

Let's turn to your friend, Jordan Belfort.

First of all, he's not my friend.

He's a little punk.

He knows I don't like him.

My name is Bo Dietl.

My real name is Richard Dietl,

but Bo, I adopted when I was 12 years old.

I did security for Jordan and his family.

Marty Scorsese called me up.

He goes, who are we going to get to play you?

I said, Marty, I'm playing myself.

The last time you took these fucking pills,

you put your head in the fucking macaroni.

I had to pick it up.

How did you first meet Jordan Belfort?

Well, it was-- I got a call from Dick Grasso.

Dick Grasso, at that time,

was the head of the New York Stock Exchange.

He says, there's this company in Lake Success.

The owner is this guy, Jordan Belfort.

And he's being shaken down by gangsters,

organized crime guys.

And he needs your help, Bo.

So go over and see him and tell you tell him I sent you.

The organized crime guys,

they knew what kind of money Jordan was making.

Prior to me coming there, they had probably said to him,

Jordan, if you need some cash to buy you this stuff,

we can lend you some cash.

But, you know, once you let them in,

you can't get rid of 'em.

I gave my card to Jordan.

I said, when they come back, just tell them to contact me.

I'll keep them away from you.

And then I would get the phone call,

and oh, what are you doing over there, Bo?

You know, my boss told me to call you.

So we had to sit down.

And I told the guys, look, guys,

tell your boss to call his boss and ask who I am, OK?

And I knew everybody. I grew up with all of them.

And I had a respect factor.

I grew up in Ozone Park.

I grew up with John Gotti, the Scopo brothers.

I met Fat Tony Salerno driving Scopo up to the Colonial.

So I knew everybody.

They're my friends, so that's simple.

Let's just go somewhere else.

You know, this one, I'm protecting.

I'm going to make money doing the security here legit.

And that's it.

And I'm not going to let you shake this place down.

That was the end of that.

Jordan had a nice-sized piece of property.

That is portrayed in the movie.

We had security at his home 24/7.

I had Rocco day, Rocco night.

We even had two guards who worked in shifts.

Both named Rocco.

We had the security in his offices,

the place of business.

But Jordan was paranoid.

He was seriously a paranoid little punk.

They're coming, they're coming.

Oh, he's looking over his shoulder.

He was a constantly high, constantly high.

Jordan, he was the guy to dangle the carrot

in front of people's faces.

People knew that he made a lot of money,

he had a lot of money.

Everybody wanted a piece of that.

And now, they were indebted to him.

So he controlled people that way.

It was all about him making that money.

I am a good guy and I was a good guy,

but I got involved in a very bad thing.

Once I knew it was full-blown illegal, I had a real dilemma.

And I think that's what really accelerated my drug use.

So it got to the point where

I needed to be stoned to do what I was doing.

I would be so stoned at the end of a day

that there was no getting me up.

They would roll me

out of my office

out the doors

into my car.

Every time I got into a car, I was never sober.

I crashed 17 cars.

I actually got the opportunity to crash a Bentley

into the brick wall of one of the most

famous steakhouses in Long Island.

Now, one may ask, Howie, how did you do that?

Oh, because in my stoned head,

I thought they had a drive-thru.

I was drinking and doing quaaludes.

And I had a Ferrari and I smashed it up.

It wasn't all fun and games.

You know, young guys,

and they think that's the funniest thing in the world.

It's amazing that I'm alive.

It ate away at my soul.

And I can remember when I was on substances

writing all the time,

when will World War III in my head stop?

I had the real Howie on this shoulder

do the right thing, you're a good guy.

And on this shoulder...

go rob more money. You'll love it.

As we went further in an investigation,

I met a low-level broker who we had leverage on

to become a cooperating witness.

So this particular doc, I'll just read you a section.

It says...

This is coming from sources.

Now you have to go out and confirm

what the sources are saying.

So for me, I go out and knock on doors.

Eight out of ten would tell me to get off their porch

and the other two would tell me

to get the fuck off their porch.

But I was never going to give up.

I envisioned the bad guys in a suit of armor.

And I just needed to get into the suit of armor

and infect them and then they would die.

I was going to latch on to a leg and never let go

no matter how much they kicked me and tried to push me away.

While the FBI was struggling to make headway

in its investigation, the SEC come to realize

through their own probe into Stratton Oakmont

that this is a company built on fraud,

manipulation, deception.

It all revolves around Jordan Belfort.

The SEC was convinced he was a bad guy,

he shouldn't be in the business,

so Jordan had decided he wasn't going to fight them.

Jordan took a settlement.

Jordan took a bar from the securities business.

You're out. Lifetime. You're out.

I knew the day would eventually come where

I'd have to be moving on.

There's a scene out of "The Wolf of Wall Street,"

the SEC barring him from the industry.

He makes this rah-rah speech that he ain't leaving.

I'm not fucking leaving!

Well, this speech never happened.

That scene was complete bullshit.

He got thrown out.

The movie is inaccurate.

So he leaves, he gets a small fine,

like $100,000, a slap on the wrist, and he leaves.

He quietly sailed off into the distance.

There was never a farewell speech.

Never happened.

The truth of the matter is

Jordan left the firm and Danny took over.

For Jordan, this was yet another moment

where he was at a crossroads.

What was he going to do next?

Stratton Oakmont was directed to change its ways,

become legit in order to continue its business.

I get a phone call.

Jordan and I, we hadn't spoken in a while.

I'm literally buried in law school

and he is in this new life.

He just said, Andy, I need to see you.

OK, I drop what I'm doing and I go and see him.

'Cause he asked me to, period. That's the relationship we had.

He was my best friend.

Jordan's probably closer to me than my own brother.

So I arrive at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel

and I go up to his room and big, lush suite.

And I'm looking around, like,

this is not the world that I live in.

I'm coming from law school.

I'm expecting to take jobs at a DA's office.

Jordan tells me what he's dealing with.

He was having problems with the regulators.

The SEC, NASD.

I don't remember if it was during that conversation,

but he asked me to come.

My role was to implement

what was being required from the SEC.

And he knew that my mother was terminally ill.

So it was, like, providing me an opportunity

to come back to New York so I can have

those last, you know, moments with my mom.

This is a very difficult subject for me.

I mean, I had choices.

Build this career, or, you know,

my mother would pass away and then I'd have no time with her.

Having an opportunity to be around my mom

for those last years was important.

So I was going to find a way to make it work.

My first arrival there,

and I'm working 16, 18-hour days

to make sure that this firm survives.

Stratton Oakmont could have been changed,

transactions could have changed,

and still made the firm a zillion dollars.

The SEC rule states I had to record all the phone calls

going in and out of this firm.

If you were caught doing a transaction

and I couldn't pull the tape of that transaction,

you have violated the SEC guidelines.

All of this system from '94,

it's working, but in '95...

All of a sudden, it started happening where there were

certain conversations that were missing.

Think about what you're dealing with.

You know, they came in and they said,

every phone call's going to be taped.

Ooh, wow.

So we had a phone system for "taped calls"

and we then built a phone system for not-taped calls.

You know, it didn't take very much thinking on that one.

So it seems like the SEC's directives

were not taken seriously by Stratton Oakmont,

and it was just business as usual.

To be honest, I think that Danny was just

the front person of Stratton.

And Jordan is the puppet master

and he's pulling strings in the background

wheeling and dealing.

Jordan was active in coordinating deals

with Biltmore after he was suspended.

We would get together at restaurants

and we would discuss trading

with other firms that comprised our axis of evil.

Jordan was still involved in IPOs

through Stratton's sister firms,

Biltmore and Monroe Parker.

I have these FBI documents that actually states

Jordan's making money off of these IPOs,

but it seems to be in violation

of the agreement he signed with the SEC that barred him.

Mr. Belfort was involved in all the deals.

The man behind the curtain was always Jordan Belfort.

During this time, '94, '95,

we went on vacations to Newport

and Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

We would spend time together.

When I was at Stratton Oakmont,

my job was to handle all of the federal regulators,

deal with the lawyers, the independent auditor.

I knew what had to be done and I did it.

He trusted me.

Why me?

'Cause he knew that there was nobody

that was going to throw me off-kilter.

And I dealt with all the regulators

and attorneys straight up,

But that's the part where this unravels.

One day, we're going through piles and piles of documents.

Up comes a copy of a document

that had not yet seen the light of day.

No one knew that that document existed.

The document paid him $1 million a month.

A month.

On his way out from Stratton Oakmont,

Jordan negotiates this exit agreement.

No one knew about Jordan's exit agreement

except for Danny, Jordan, and their accountant.

But now we know

over time, they agreed to pay him $180 million.

The document as written

did not technically violate his SEC agreement.

But the argument that could be made

is that you really had control of the firm

because all the money's being paid out to you.

If all this money is still flowing to Jordan,

one could argue that he actually never left.

Now Jordan and I have a private conversation.

There was a lot of yelling.

He didn't want for the regulators

to have that document.

He just said, Andy, you work for me.

You're going to do everything to protect me.

'Cause as far as he's concerned...

I'm supposed to fall on my sword.

Isn't that what best friends do?

He threw me over the side.

I was not going to do that and put myself in a position

where the company could say I did something wrong.

It took a part of me.

It took a part of who I am.

Because I no longer could feel that I could trust.

It was very hard for me

between all of this, and my mother's terminally ill.

So it was like, my life

came and blew up in Stratton Oakmont.

That was it. Our friendship was over.

After Jordan's finally disbarred in 1994,

his whole attitude changed.

His power, his empowerment, you saw, started to lessen

because he wasn't able to give his morning meetings.

He wasn't a part of that whole camaraderie that he created.

He was upset about that 'cause he loves to work.

You know, you have to remember

when you have that sort of personality,

that grandiose personality,

nobody's going to tell him what to do.

It has to put pressure on a person.

Constantly running, constantly plotting,

constantly tap-dancing and keeping up this illusion.

It could not have been easy.

He was a multi-faceted human being like we all are.

But I don't know what their relationship was,

Nadine and Jordan, but I know it was starting to deteriorate.

We didn't really fight about women ever.

We fought about his drug addiction.

But he has all the money and he has all the power.

Even if I want to leave him,

I'm thinking, is he going to try to take my kids from me?

I'm totally afraid of him.

Jordan had a big vial of ludes.

And Nadine said to me, Ross, I do not want him having these.

Take them.

Nadine was upset and worried

that Jordan was going to kill himself on all these ludes

'cause he was taking them very frequently.

Jordan was partying in the Hamptons,

ripping apart furniture looking for drugs.

He would fall asleep in public routinely.

It was sad. It was sad to watch.

His drug addiction became out of control

to the point where my friendship to him

was also being his bodyguard and his babysitter.

He really didn't care.

He was in such a stupor

that he never realized that-- what was coming.

With this investigation, I knew I was on the right trail.

I had all of this information, but I can't prosecute a case.

I can only investigate it.

There did come a point in time where

I just didn't think I was ever going to get it prosecuted.

One of the big drawbacks was a turnover of prosecutors.

We went through five.

After each prosecutor left, I would start over

and I would bring in the same witnesses again.

We'd go through the same testimony again.

It really started to concern me.

Even people at the FBI were saying,

hey, Coleman, you gotta make this case, right?

You gotta do something here.

There was a point in time where I was pretty sure

the Bureau was going to shut down the investigation.

But then at some point, Joel Cohen joined the case.

Literally changed the case.

I'd just come back from a year's assignment in Paris

and senior people in the office said

there's a Stratton Oakmont investigation

you probably know about.

It's been going on for a couple years.

It's not making a lot of headway.

Would you be interested in taking this on?

In the mass of everything that Greg had been gathering...

there were a lot of gems

and a lot of pathways to be successful.

These guys are toast.

Inside Stratton Oakmont,

the brokers believe they're invincible.

The Batline rang and said...

NASDAQ shut us down.

Everybody scattered like roaches.

But Jordan is addicted to the game.

He had $3 million in his bedroom.

It's the American way.

And to me, that was like

basically saying to the government, fuck you.

The FBI is conducting an investigation.

Jordan started to feel the heat.

The big breakthrough was an ex-Hell's Angel.

He is a piece in the money laundering chain.

Our goal was just to try to see if we could flip Jordan.

And we tie it with the bow. We have our indictment.

He's a rat piece of shit.