Original subtitles

Watching this scene from "The Wolf of Wall Street,"

it's kind of disturbing.

Turn around! Let's go the other fucking way!

We can't!

This is pretty accurate of how desperate it was.

Walk me through the story, the true story

of the sinking of the "Nadine."

The true part is, is that I actually lived it.

Jordan said, listen, we're taking the yacht to Sardinia.

I think there were 19 of us on board.

And Captain Mark says to Jordan,

there's a storm in the Mediterranean.

My advice would be stay in Rome.

Jordan's like, no fucking way.

We get on the boat against Mark's wishes.

Probably two or three hours into the trip,

people are getting sick.

Dishes are starting to move around.

Things are getting worse.

I'm starting to feel the boat shake a little bit.

And then, out of nowhere, I'm splashed, covered in water.

We're hitting 30, 40 foot seas.

I think everyone was pretty nervous.

What does Jordan say to me?

Rob, you got the 'ludes?

I'm like, no, I thought you had them.

Get those fucking 'ludes!

Rob, go get them.

The whole boat was full of water,

but it was still floating.

There was electricity in the water.

I was getting shocked the whole time, but I got them.

And then, just like in the movie...

Jesus Christ!

We were hit by the perfect storm wave.

And it crashed over the yacht.

We're all screaming and freaking out.

We're gonna die. We're gonna die.

It just brings it back again, you know?

You never forget something like this.

This is a life or death situation.

Just like the movie shows, we got into a squall.

And the waves, I don't even know how big they were,

but they were crashing over the boat.

And I definitely thought I was dying.

So the helicopter finally arrives over the yacht.

So like, oh, my God.

Thank God, we're gonna be saved.

I call my parents.

They say, we saw it on the news.

You know, Americans rescued by Italian Navy.

That whole 18 hours changed my life drastically.

I do have PTSD from it.

But for Jordan, he loved extreme life.

He loved taking things to extreme limits.

After that yacht sank, the Associated Press

were all getting videos of us.

He ate his 'ludes.

He was hanging out with the captain.

He didn't look at it as we could have died.

I wanted to fucking kill him.

I was cleaning myself. You know how it is.

This is Jordan on a chartered yacht.

And he just came out of the ocean.

And I said to him, hey, Jordan,

is it cool to take a shower

in front of the American flag naked?

And his response to me was...

It's the American way.

And to me, that was like basically saying

to the government, fuck you.

So now we're in the mid-90s, and Jordan is barred

from the securities industry.

Thanks to his sweetheart exit agreement,

Stratton is paying him $1 million a month.

Meanwhile, he seems to still be heavily involved in these IPOs

that Stratton and its sister firms are taking public.

We were in love and there was a lot of great moments.

So many great moments with friends coming over,

so many great trips.

And of course, babies come and they're

so adorable and beautiful.

But along the way, you know, he's just

dominating and doing drugs.

He's the father.

Then the drug addiction just gets, you know, like--

like the way it is.

It's a progressive disease. - Right.

Right, either you stop or it gets worse.

Don't get me wrong. Did he have a drug problem?

Absolutely.

But that came because he didn't know what to do with himself.

Him losing Stratton Oakmont was losing

the ultimate drug for him.

That was who he was.

I was a little bit worried, actually.

Jordan started to maybe act a little bit strange,

maybe a little more short-fused,

a little more jumpy.

Easy to get on his bad side.

I think that's when he started changing a little bit,

preparing for the inevitable.

My name is Gary Carlton.

In the 1990s, I worked for NASD,

the National Association of Securities Dealers.

NASD had been in contact with other regulators.

We were looking for patterns.

We found that there was a smaller case

involving one of the initial public offerings.

The offering was Master Glazier.

Master Glazier was a karate studio.

I don't understand why that would become public.

But I can tell you they did have at least one location,

maybe they had more.

It wasn't like a Starbucks.

But Stratton Oakmont took Master Glaziers public.

We looked at the initial public offering

for Master Glazier, and we noticed that

there were significant markups.

A markup is the price that a brokerage firm

is going to earn when they execute a trade

on a stock that they already own.

Anything over 10% of a markup is considered fraudulent.

Some of the securities were marked up as high as 33%.

Stratton was selling the Master Glazier stock

to investors that exceeded the legal limits.

Master Glazier's Karate was the one that

kind of tipped off the authorities.

And that was the beginning of the end.

At that point, we thought the only way

to resolve the question of Stratton Oakmont

was to have them expelled.

So you essentially shut down Stratton Oakmont?

Yes, absolutely.

When Stratton Oakmont shut down, there was no raid.

There were no explosions.

There were no guns and horses or anything like that.

I called one of the partners on the bat line,

of course, because it wasn't taped.

Ah, it's bullshit, it's bullshit, it's bullshit.

The bat line rang ten seconds later and said--

It's not bullshit.

We're done.

NASDAQ shut us down.

We were just taken off the NASD.

We're done.

♪ Hey, won't you be ♪

♪ My one and only ♪

Five or ten minutes later, one of the partners

walked out of his office with a bat

and smashed every single fax machine in the office...

So that no investor could fax over a sell ticket.

Everybody scattered like roaches.

The income stopped.

The camaraderie stopped.

Everything came to a screeching halt.

It was the end of an era.

After Stratton Oakmont was shut down,

Jordan was still involved in IPOs

through Biltmore and Monroe Parker.

And since he couldn't legally work in this industry,

a lot of his payment came under the table in cash.

The only thing I knew is that he had a lot of cash.

And I mean a lot.

He had $3 million in his bedroom in cash.

And I remember walking in the front door of the house.

And Jordan had a shopping bag, and he goes,

hey, I got a present for you.

And he holds his shopping bag over the banister

and he drops it to me.

And it hits the floor, and I look in,

and there's $1 million in cash in the shopping bag.

If he would have taken the millions of dollars

that he had at that point and just

lived his life happily ever after,

he would be living his life a millionaire.

But he is the epitome of the word greed.

Can you pick up the book under your chair

and read the first paragraph?

"Catching the Wolf of Wall Street" by Jordan Belfort.

"Joel Cohen, the disheveled Assistant United States

"Attorney for the Eastern District of New York

was a world class bastard with a degenerate slouch."

First of all, I don't think I'm a degenerate slouch.

Am I slouching degenerately?

Am I okay? Okay.

Common slate.

My name is Joel Cohen, and I was the prosecutor

in the Eastern District of New York.

So in 1997, I was doing a whole range

of white collar investigations.

Senior people in the office said

there's a Stratton Oakmont investigation

you probably know about.

It's been going on for a couple of years.

Would you be interested in taking this on?

Once NASD orders Stratton Oakmont to be shut down,

the question becomes, will anyone be held accountable

for the stock fraud, the manipulation that took place,

you know, over the years?

And then I met with the FBI agent, Greg Coleman,

who had been leading it.

In early 1997, I've picked up numerous brokers

and other people, but now I'm finally focusing

on the top two main guys,

Jordan Belfort and Daniel Porush.

We began to gather evidence that there was

money moving into Switzerland.

Back then, Switzerland was a famed and easy place

to hide money, and that's what people did there.

Jordan Belfort had so much cash

that came to him in the form of kickbacks

from his manipulated deals that

there was too much money to spend.

He really ran into the same problem

that sort of drug cartels have.

They conduct business, which is done in cash,

but they need to get rid of it at some point.

They need to get it into the system.

So the first step he has to do is get it to Switzerland.

He brings in a guy by the name of Todd Garrett.

How accurate was the portrayal

of Todd Garrett in the film?

Bring some of them chicks around here sometime, Ma.

Let 'em watch.

It was incomplete.

Todd Garrett was an interesting character.

Todd was a Bayside boy.

Jordan knew him from the neighborhood.

Good guy, fun guy.

One of the nicest people,

give you the shirt off his back,

but one of the toughest guys you've ever met.

Todd Garrett is brought in because of certain,

let's say, skills that he has.

He was a drug dealer.

He's the guy that's been selling Quaaludes

to the brokers at Stratton Oakmont.

He's married to a woman who's a Swiss citizen.

So Belfort and Porush bring in Todd and his wife

to be their couriers.

Now, at this point, I know nothing about any of this,

but it's what happens next that leads to me being tipped off.

In the movie, there was a transfer of money

from Danny Porush to Todd Garrett.

This is where funds are passed from

Jonah Hill, which is supposed to be Danny Porush,

transferring money to Todd Garrett.

I need you to shove it right up your wife's Latvian cunt,

you understand? - Oh, my fucking wife?

Chill!

That isn't even close to accurate.

So Danny Porush drives

to Bay Terrace Shopping Center in Queens.

And as his fancy car pulls into the shopping center,

it catches the guard's attention.

So they actually turn the cameras on the car.

What happens next is, Todd Garrett

pulls into the shopping center and he parks.

Now, the way Todd Garrett is dressed at this point,

he looks like either a ninja or a drug dealer.

He's dressed in all black,

and he comes through the parking lot

and he meets a guy who looks like

some kind of businessman driving another fancy car.

So all of these things were incredibly strange.

The guards called 911, saying,

we believe we've seen a drug deal go down.

So the police find the car.

At gunpoint, they pull the driver out of the car.

They see a briefcase on the seat.

They open it up and inside is $200,000 in cash.

The police question him.

Is this your money? Yes, it is.

And he says, well, I have a friend who's a broker,

and he just loaned it to me for a heart transplant.

Now, the police can't believe the answer

that they've just gotten. A heart transplant?

And he says, no, really.

And he lifts up his shirt,

and he shows them a scar on his chest,

and he says that he's on the donor list for a new heart.

Well, the police aren't really sure what to do next.

So ultimately, they arrest him,

and they run him through the FBI's computers.

That's what leads to me,

because they were subjects of my investigation.

And we realized that probably was money

that was destined for Switzerland.

It was a white collar money laundering,

is essentially what was happening.

And it had been caught on videotape.

I had $1 million in cash.

And I really thought that would last me the rest of my life.

That was just an inexhaustible amount of cash.

Certainly to look at, it was endless.

But my monthly overhead was $30,000,

maybe $40,000 just to pay my rent,

parents' mortgage, the cars, the insurance.

My average day, I took 15 Quaaludes.

They were $30 a pill.

That turns out to be a $13,000 a month cash Quaalude habit.

I turned around and the last bit of cash was gone.

Gone. Zero.

I, at this point, was so addicted

that there was no such thing as getting a job.

And I remember explaining to one of the 12 therapists

that I had had over those years the feeling.

And I said, could you imagine you're Michael Jordan,

and all of the sudden you get a phone call one morning

and they say, hey, good morning, Mike.

You can't play basketball anymore.

Have a nice day. Click.

That's what it was like.

This is all I knew.

What am I gonna do?

Jordan always felt that he was pretty much indestructible.

He took Quaaludes quite a bit.

He drove wasted plenty of times.

He also flew a helicopter a few times with me

in it--'luded,

which is amazing that we're still alive.

But he was not a happy person.

And what he did in return was took to drugs.

So we are at the infamous Brookville Country Club.

Jordan never spoke from his home phone

because he felt it was tapped, and he decided to drive here

to the payphone in Brookville Country Club,

which is three blocks from his house.

And this is where Jordan, in the movie,

crashed his Lamborghini.

Jordan took a few Quaaludes,

and he went to this country club.

And like in the movie, the Quaaludes really kicked in.

Pow.

He walked out of the building and then proceeded

to roll down 20 or 30 stairs.

But as you can see, it's four steps

and four steps in real life.

He did manage to get into his car 'luded,

and was able to drive the three blocks

back to his house.

Get out of the fucking way!

God forbid you should get behind the wheel of a car.

The scene when Jordan drove while he was very high

really smashed up his car.

That was a real event that occurred,

and everybody knew about that.

I remember the phone call at 9:00

that Jordan got into an accident.

I said, Nadine, I'll be right there.

I drove down this driveway to the garage in front of me,

where his Mercedes was parked and still running.

The door was open.

Jordan was totally spiraling out of control.

The movie depicts it when you start seeing it going bad.

When he came back from the country club,

that's when things really, I think, start to turn.

He treated Nadine really bad.

He was an abusive drug addict, and he was an abusive husband.

You know, when you're dealing with addiction,

which I had never dealt with before, nothing works.

I would stay home with him. I would leave him at home.

I would tell him not to do it. We'd get into fights.

And I was like, guys, he can't go out.

And they were like, oh, just tell him to do some coke.

I'm like, that is not a solution.

The coke was really what did him in.

That's when it got really bad.

I'm just wondering how long that would have lasted.

And obviously, it didn't last because it blew up.

But--but I think she stuck around till the end,

until it got really, really ugly.

The tremendous benefit to the case of arresting Todd Garrett

is it's part of the money laundering chain.

And so we began to see if we could flip him.

It was not easy. Todd Garrett was a tough guy.

He was an ex-Hell's Angel.

He's a boxer.

He had sort of cauliflower ears.

He had the crooked nose.

He was a tough-looking guy.

I had heard rumors that if he pulled down his bottom lip,

he had RIP tattooed inside.

The big breakthrough was that Todd Garrett

really was on the list to get a heart transplant.

And I realized that extreme circumstances

call for extreme measures.

So I communicated to Todd Garrett's lawyer

that we had enough evidence to bring charges against him

for Quaaludes possession, and that that would

take him off the list to get a heart transplant.

Did you have any ethical qualms

about, like, is this going too far

to get the information I want?

I certainly thought, when I communicated

to Garrett's lawyer how to say it.

It's not a threat; you're just communicating facts.

Play ball or you might not get a new heart.

And I was just telling him the truth.

And then he came in and cooperated.

And that was the Wolf of Wall Street's downfall.

Todd Garrett came in and revealed to us even more

than we could have imagined.

He gave us information that Belfort and his wife and others

would have parties at their Long Island mansion,

and they would have friends who would fly over

with the money to Switzerland, including Garrett's wife.

So there's a scene in "The Wolf of Wall Street."

They're strapping cash to Todd Garrett's wife.

That was a scene that was meant to be over-the-top

funny from Hollywood.

The real smuggling was very much less glamorous,

and they would just put it in bags,

like, hundreds of thousands of dollars in, for example,

a Louis Vuitton bag.

They would put a lock on it and they would

check it onto the airplane.

This document is essentially explaining

how Belfort and Porush were smuggling cash

out of the U.S. to Switzerland,

depositing it into bank accounts for shell companies,

and then wiring it back to the U.S.

This circular flow allowed them to disguise

their illegal profits as legitimate investments.

Once we had the courier,

the case against Belfort and Porush is all but done.

And I remember looking at Greg and thinking, oh, my God.

These guys are toast.

At this point, I believe Nadine

was getting fed up having to have this type

of volatility for her family.

So my ex-wife and I had gone to a therapist.

And my ex told Nadine about her,

and Nadine went and liked her.

And then Nadine convinced Jordan to go see her.

And after he did see her, Jordan said,

this therapist is a cult leader.

He flipped out.

And that therapist basically told her,

you're in a bad situation.

There's no getting out of it.

Run.

That's Nadine in the background.

And he ultimately blamed my ex and I.

And our relationship really severed from that point on.

So I was working on myself all along,

but that really didn't matter.

Right, because I couldn't change him.

And you have a last straw moment.

There was one when I told him if he didn't get sober,

I was leaving him.

And he went crazy because I said,

you have to get an intervention.

I'm not gonna sit here and watch you kill yourself, right.

And he went nuts, got violent.

Lack of remorse is the knife in the heart.

And then he got arrested.

So I got lucky.

So that was my window.

And I was like, he can't hurt me anymore.

I'm out.

There were two arrests that were made

around Labor Day of 1998.

Danny Porush was arrested by agents in Miami.

And at the same time, a large group of FBI agents

went to Jordan Belfort's mansion.

And that was actually the first time,

after all of these years that I met Belfort face to face.

I remember him sitting there.

He was in handcuffs.

His eyes were very glassy.

I couldn't tell if he was tired or if he was high.

And I walked in, and I just looked at him

and said, do know who I am?

And he just shook his head and said, yes.

I found out reading the papers like everyone else.

And I was worried that, you know,

a lot of others, we would get arrested.

Once Jordan got arrested, being the genius that I am,

seemed to me the higher ups were next in line.

It wasn't just gonna be Jordan.

At a certain point, I had a dinner

with my partner at Biltmore.

And I said, listen, I just can't do this anymore.

You know, I--

I'm just overcome with how awful this is.

And the guilt had really just sort of overcome me.

And I said, I'm leaving.

And I walked away from a lot, because we had a lot of money

in this trading account.

I said, you keep it all, do whatever you wanna do.

I've had it.

That was like, 1997, '98.

I left.

We hadn't been approached by the U.S. attorneys or the FBI

or anything at that point, but I knew

it was just a question of time.

So we have Jordan Belfort in custody,

and Belfort is a bright guy.

I think if you see the movie,

you get a somewhat rough, approximate presentation

of what happened.

- Did you just say wear a wire? - A wire.

What does that mean? You want me to rat?

Is that it? - No. I want you to cooperate.

No, you want me to rat.

That's fucking exactly what we want you to do.

To rat.

And he did.

It's the following Tuesday.

And for Belfort, he's now out of jail.

Remember, this is getting heavily covered.

So we are trying to perpetuate the image

that he's fighting the case, that he's not cooperating.

So he's coming in to meet in my office,

coming in through the back elevator,

through a parking lot so nobody could see him.

We spent hours and hours debriefing him.

So remember, when we're hearing all these stories,

there is no "Wolf of Wall Street" books.

There is no "Wolf of Wall Street" movie.

And when they would start to tell you how things worked...

Whoo!

Their reaction was,

yeah, this is just what we did every day.

You know, the acts like it was like ancient Rome,

where you're like, this is like the Colosseum.

That is impressive.

There was midget-tossing.

People's heads were being shaved.

Goldfish were being eaten.

It was almost like adult Disneyland

for dysfunctional people.

The movie doesn't even accurately portray

the level of insanity that occurred back then.

Drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, trade some more stock.

Rewind, do the same thing again.

Greg and I would look at each other and say, oh, my God.

This really happened.

They would describe it the way that somebody might describe

what they ate for breakfast.

For me, knowing he's going to cooperate is fantastic.

But the other thing I needed to figure out was,

is he really on board?

Yes, he's been speaking with us.

Yes, he's got a recording device and a transmitter.

But sometimes these guys think they're smarter than we are.

And so I have to pick the person

that he is going to visit first.

When did you find out he was wearing a wire?

When I got arrested.

Jordan was wearing a wire several times a week.

He did a lot of meetings

in some of the fanciest restaurants in New York,

where he would be out and about public,

and people would see him, and it would perpetuate

the impression that he was not pleading guilty,

when in fact, he had already pled guilty.

He was very talented at this

because Jordan could get anybody

into a conversation about anything.

He just was a natural at it.

Jordan came to me for help.

Hey, can you help me?

Take me to go-- come to an AA meeting.

And he came to an AA meeting with me.

And he was asking me all these questions and stuff,

and I knew--I knew it was-- something wasn't kosher.

And then I remember one time he took me

to dinner by myself,

asking me all these questions and everything.

You know, we went through everything,

what we were doing.

We were promoting stocks on a website.

And we own the stocks.

Jordan pretended he wanted to get involved.

You know, you wanted it to be true.

I don't know how to explain how you want--you close your eyes.

I was an idiot and I trusted him.

I was warned by a friend of mine

that Jordan's gonna call you.

And sure enough, he calls me.

Hey, Ross. What's going on? It's Jordan.

You know, how's it going?

He goes, what are you up to?

I said, you know, I'm divorced now.

I'm living in Bayside again.

He goes, oh, are you renting or do you own?

Ding, ding, ding, ding.

He would never, ever ask a question like that.

That was way out of character.

Now I know he's recording me and that was the end of it.

That was the end of our conversation.

He's a rat piece of shit.

You know, why me?

A few weeks later, six FBI officers

knocking on my door, guns drawn like I was Al Capone.

It got to the point where every one of my partners

had been arrested.

And my brother being an attorney

and being a very good one and smart one,

said, listen, asshole.

You're the only one that hasn't gotten arrested yet.

So what we're gonna do is, we're gonna go to them

before they come to you.

And that's precisely what we did.

We voluntarily made an appointment

to walk into the FBI and said, here we are.

And they asked me to wear a wire.

And then they told me the consequences

of disagreeing with them on that.

And I said, I agree.

There were no tough guys here.

Everyone was ratting on everyone.

No one could rat on another one quick enough.

I avoided ever getting arrested,

indicted, charged, nothing.

There was a knock on the door.

It was a man and a woman.

They opened up their coats and sure enough,

there was a badge and a gun.

They said, you are going to be indicted.

And I can tell you that if you talk to us now,

we could probably make a deal.

And I would have to wear a wire and try to

bring cases against other people.

And I said, I'm not about to start

trying to ruin other people's lives.

I mean, I just--

I could not live with doing that on top of everything else.

So they said, okay, if you change your mind,

here's our card.

And you'll be hearing from us.

It was well over 80 people that were prosecuted.

It was like a rogues' list of criminality.

There were politicians that were being investigated.

There was money launderers.

Even long after I left the U.S. attorney's office,

for about three or four years, the office staffed

about four or five or six prosecutors who just

handled all these cases kinda full time

because there were so many cases that were the byproduct

of their cooperation.

Before sentencing, I brought the judge about 200 cards

and letters from AA people.

Judge looked at me and said, I think you're an idiot,

and you can't even be a janitor in a brokerage firm.

But I'm not sending you to jail.

I was given three years' probation.

I ended up taking a plea where

I admitted that I had committed

wire fraud and securities fraud.

And I ended up receiving a couple of years

in federal prison, which I served.

And now I'm a convicted felon.

After Jordan got indicted

and after they seized everything,

we invited him for dinner one night at my house.

Jordan and I sat in front of the fire,

and we started talking.

How have you been?

And he's like, I'm trying to see my kids.

I have no money to buy toys for my kids.

I was in the mortgage business.

I started bringing him to my office.

We start working together.

And then, one day, I get a call.

Jordan just gave a meeting in front of 50 people.

And he said, oh, Rob is out.

I'm taking over the company.

So when I heard this, I'm like, wow.

This is his-- here he goes again.

I said, what is wrong with you?

Don't you see what you did?

It's over now.

And that's when the friendship went awry.

After it all happened, we all parted our ways.

And Jordan had an opportunity to--

to reach out to me a few times.

And one was when my daughter was diagnosed

with leukemia, Olivia.

And she fought for her life and eventually did die.

Nadine was supportive.

All of our friends were supportive.

And never...

Not even--not a card, not a phone call.

Not a message to us.

Nothing.

Did he let me down a lot? Yeah, he let me down.

Jordan and Danny both pled guilty to indictments

where they admitted to everything.

Every single one of the 34 initial public offerings

that they brought through Stratton Oakmont

was riddled with fraud from beginning to end,

and also money laundering

involving the Swiss activities.

They were facing anywhere from 16 to 20 years in jail.

But the judge has total discretion

to sentence Belfort anywhere he wants,

including no time at all.

At the end of the day, the judge came up

with a sentencing package that sentenced Belfort

to four years in jail.

I remember leaving that courtroom

and calling up a few of my FBI friends

and throwing the F word around,

probably more than I should have.

That sentence was painful to find out about.

He should have gone away for 20 years.

A minimum of 20 years.

There was many questions asked about that.

How did they get such a significant reduction

in their sentences?

One is the amount of cooperation

that they gave was so extreme,

it brought down so many other bad actors.

Second was they were fortunate in that they got

assigned Judge John Gleeson.

Judge Gleeson is the person who took down John Gotti.

Running the nation's largest organized crime family.

And one of the key witnesses he had to use in the Gotti case

was someone who had been involved in murders.

And so Judge Gleeson appreciated

the value of cooperation more than almost anyone.

Justice was done because a lot of really bad actors

and people working with them were stopped.

In hindsight, he did 22 months

in a country club federal penitentiary,

like in the movie, a camp that he played tennis every day.

And what a small world that Tommy Chong

from Cheech and Chong would be his bunkie?

How do you describe your brand of humor?

Pot. Pot humor.

How much a part does that play in your comedy skits?

It depends on how much you take.

Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong fame--

comedian, star of many movies,

smoker of many joints.

And it was Tommy Chong that said,

you need to write a book.

We would tell each other stories at night,

and I would tell them some of my stories,

and he would just be laughing and couldn't believe it.

Then he--

Saying, there's no way that could be true.

After the third day, he goes, I thought

you were making this stuff up. But my wife googled you.

And it's like, you gotta write a book.

And he started writing a book in jail.

The minute you step in prison is a traumatic event,

but in a very weird way, I'm glad I went through it.

Because I needed it.

It taught me about humility.

There's something about scrubbing the toilets

for 100 men every day that teaches you lessons

that I desperately needed to learn.

You know, my higher power took care of me, punished me.

I went through hell for two years.

I had small pieces of cancer removed.

Two weeks later, I got sepsis in my stomach.

I was put in a coma for seven days,

where I died twice on the table.

It was terrible life. It was just terrible.

God's punishment.

I was at rock bottom.

I was living by myself.

How my dog survived, I'll never know.

But I had gone from this person

who lived like a prince,

making $1 1/2 million a year,

to being an obese drug addict, homeless,

penniless, friendless, and everything else.

I was smart enough to, when the chair stopped moving,

to have $1 million.

And if I was sober enough, I'd be retired today.

I never had a shortage of opportunities

present themselves.

I was just always too much of a mess to take advantage of them.

I, at this point, was so addicted that my brother

got me into a sober house.

I walked into the sober house.

And here I am, in Ferragamo shoes, Louis Vuitton luggage.

Everyone's looking at me like I gotta be the biggest

fucking asshole in history.

And all of a sudden, out of the guy's office, I hear,

"Howie fucking Gelfand?"

Guy comes out of the manager's room,

and it's a kid I knew from high school.

And what does he have in his hand?

"The Wolf of Wall Street" book.

"The Wolf of Wall Street" tells

the real life story of Jordan Belfort.

The one-time stockbroker spent 22 months in prison.

When Jordan's book came out, did you read the book?

I read the book.

What did you think?

I was mentioned in the book and I wasn't mentioned

very nicely, but I understood it.

I think Jordan Belfort is the classic anti-hero.

There's every reason to not like him.

He has a lot of traits that are not likable.

But for some reason, you are rooting for him.

And I can tell you from knowing him personally,

I felt that way myself.

I bought the book.

I got on the subway.

And I turned to the yacht page.

And I saw my name, my ex-wife's name,

what we did in life, how our lives were.

I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?

He needs to embellish himself that much

that he has to name people?

He mentioned how Rob's the cheapest guy alive.

Most of the people he talked about, he made fun of.

You know, it's just constant little jabs at people.

Whether it's his wife, his friends, his friends' wives,

very rarely something good about somebody.

He wrote this book.

You know, I read it.

And I was like, what the hell is this?

And he's like, no, I did it for you.

I did it for us.

I'm like, no, you didn't do it for me.

I'm happily remarried.

You did it for you. That's okay.

I don't agree with what you're doing, but it's your life.

You gotta do it, right?

And then there were rumors that a movie was coming out.

And I'm like, there's no fucking way.

As long as you portray people as authentically

as you possibly can, and you give an accurate portrayal

of their very nature, audiences will go along with you on that.

What guy on Wall Street wouldn't wanna have

Leonardo DiCaprio play you in the movie?

The movie becomes a sensation.

Everyone's talking about Martin Scorsese's

"The Wolf of Wall Street."

"The Wolf of Wall Street" is closing in on $100 million

in box office.

Five Oscar nominations.

"The Wolf of Wall Street" has received

two Golden Globe nominations.

And like the phoenix rising, Jordan Belfort is actually

able to reinvent himself.

In that book, I came up with the most

effective persuasion strategy in the history of Wall Street.

He goes on TV shows to pitch a sales technique,

starts giving lectures, and is able to start

a whole motivational speaking lifestyle, business.

When you get hit with an objection,

you engage in something called deflection.

Fueled by nonstop stream of online videos.

And you look within yourself and find you,

find your best self.

Start a free trial right now and get a 20% discount.

Jordan has become a legend.

The legendary Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort.

It's the real Wolf of Wall Street.

Belfort!

I got the chest bump. All right.

Jordan is treated by social media influencers

as kind of an influential figure, a role model.

The younger generation really looks up to him.

I will not die sober.

Are you gonna die sober?

They wish that they had been there for the fun

and the money and the women.

Every time I go on Instagram, he's in my face.

These people.

"Wish I could meet you."

"Legendary" with two flames.

"Wow! Wish I was there."

To what?

Become a fucking drug addict and get arrested?

I see that he's got, like, upcoming trips to Miami,

Brazil, Florida, Poland?

And now he gets $100,000.

He does speeches, fly in private jets.

But the real way to make money is to invest in yourself.

There's thousands and thousands of victims

that have bought stocks that these guys

put them into and lost a lot of money.

People would be literally wiped out.

Jordan was ordered to pay more than 110 million

by the government as part of his sentence for his crimes.

I've been trying to settle this thing for years,

and they have essentially stonewalled me at every step.

So I've said enough about this. Let's move on.

Let me ask you this one thing, though.

Let's move on, okay?

Honestly, I'm ready--I'm not gonna get attacked here.

You're here. So I'm done with this. Next.

The judge ordered that the defendants contribute

half of their proceeds, half of their profits,

to this restitution fund.

If you look at other people in my position,

I'm the only one who, over the long term,

has been paying back investors.

And I'm proud of that.

And, you know, my goal one day would

be to pay back all the money.

Various victims' representatives

would come to court and raise concerns,

while the government tries to do what it can

to make victims whole, it's often

next to impossible to do that.

I had worked hard to accumulate that money.

And it was all the money I had at the time.

I was fortunate that I could pick up extra shifts at work.

I worked for a long time,

like 18 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You know?

The first day I took off was when my daughter got married,

I think, yeah.

Money comes hard and it goes easy.

You know, you work your tail off and poof,

it goes like that.

They knew the whole game.

They sold their soul for the money, basically.

You know, they have to live with that.

The Stratton years of the damage I caused

for these people eats away at me to this day.

I had felt such remorse.

And the more sober I got, the more remorse I felt.

The lifestyle that we all led was great,

but I wasn't aware that the money

was literally being taken from people's

lives and their savings.

It all funneled into everything that was bought and purchased

and lifestyles and the car I drove.

And it was all a big part of that.

And I feel--honestly, I have guilt.

I feel guilt.

I let my greed and my ego stand in the way

of my better judgment and my morality.

I don't think the fact that I feel guilty about it

makes me any better a guy.

I think it makes me a worse guy

'cause I knew what I was doing was wrong.

I regret letting myself be blind.

I regret hurting people.

People lost money.

You could say, they take the risk

and they could afford the risk.

You could use all the excuses you want.

But the truth of the matter is,

they had no chance of making money.

If you could talk to the victims who lost their money,

what would you say to them?

What would I say to them?

You know, all I can say is, believe me,

I paid a price for it.

But I don't expect your forgiveness.

I haven't forgiven myself.

Why should you?

Do you have any regrets?

Not one.

Hi, Chandler!

I have my beautiful children.

And my daughter's a therapist.

And she just gave birth, so I have a beautiful grandson.

And my son's a musician.

And I have three beautiful stepdaughters.

So life turned out good.

So Jordan's story, when he gives talks,

when he's doing interviews,

it's a story about his redemption.

How do you wanna be remembered?

As the ultimate comeback story,

ultimate redemption story.

Part of Jordan's narrative is that he took people

from the gutter and turned them into millionaires.

The thing about my life that I think, really, when you get

down to it, is that I made all these disempowered kids

into superstars.

This is not a guy who deserves to be

giving interviews of being an expert on something.

In the book, I really show you

a system that is about being 100% honest, integrous.

Anyone who falls for that crap is an idiot.

My life into itself serves as inspiration to people.

Jordan affected and hurt a lot of people and no remorse.

I guess I can say I'm proud that I was

able to turn my life around.

I see the same old Jordan.

He has reinvented himself, but he really is, at his heart,

just a salesman.

My message is this.

There's only one way to get rich, and that's quick.

And he's just selling a different product now.

And the product is Jordan.

He went from felon to cooperator,

and then he writes this book.

Now he was the Leonardo DiCaprio guy in the movie,

and then he becomes reincarnated as a celebrity.

Only in America.

♪ I like the way you control everything ♪

♪ I never stop from letting go ♪

♪ Never stop from letting go ♪

♪ You got me down on the floor ♪

♪ Oh, you've got me beggin' you for so much more ♪

♪ Beggin' you for so much more ♪

♪ 'Cause the way that you tease me ♪

♪ Keeps me holding on ♪

♪ And the way that you treat me ♪

♪ Brings me back for more ♪

♪ So come on, jump into the flames ♪

♪ And I just need to feel your fire ♪

♪ So come and jump into the flames ♪

♪ And I just need to feel your fire ♪

♪ So come and jump into the flames ♪

♪ And give in to your dark desires ♪

♪ So I can feel the heat on you ♪

♪ Come on and jump into the flames ♪

♪ Jump into the flames ♪