Jordan Belfort

At 62 years old, Jordan Belfort has this physical status:

Jordan Ross Belfort (born July 9, 1962) is an American author, motivational speaker, and former stockbroker.

As part of a penny-stock scam, he pled guilty to fraud and other charges in connection with stock-market manipulation and running a boiler room in 1999.

Belfort spent 22 months in prison as part of an pact under which he testified against many of his coworkers and subordinates in his fraud scheme.

In 2007, he published The Wolf of Wall Street, a book that was later turned into a film with the same name and released in 2013.

Early life

Belfort was born in 1962 in the Bronx borough of New York City to Jewish parents. Max and his mother Leah were both accountants. He was born in Bayside, Queens. Belfort and his close childhood friend Elliot Loewenstern earned $20,000 selling Italian ice from styrofoam coolers to people at a local beach between high school and college. Belfort went on to earn a biology degree from American University. Belfort planned on using the money earned with Loewenstern to pay for dental school and enrolled in the University of Maryland School of Dentistry. On his first day, he said, "The golden age of dentistry has come," the school's dean said to him: "The golden age of dentistry is over." If you're here simply because you're trying to make a lot of money, you're in the wrong place."

Personal life

Denise Lombardo, the first husband of Stratton Oakmont, Belfort, was divorced from his first wife Denise Lombardo. Nadine Caridi, a British-born, Brooklyn-raised model who attended a party, married Nadine Caridi, a Brooklyn-raised model who died at a party. He had two children with her. Belfort and Caridi eventually split due to her allegations of domestic abuse, which were fueled by his heroin use and infidelity. In 2005, they divorced.

Belfort was the last owner of the luxurious yacht Nadine, which was built for Coco Chanel in 1961. After Caridi, the yacht was renamed. The yacht sank off the east coast of Sardinia in June 1996, and frogmen from the Italian Navy's special forces unit COMSUBIN rescued all who were aboard. Belfort said he stubbornly sailed out in high winds against his captain's direction, resulting in the ship's sinking as waves smashed the foredeck hatch.

A hacker stole $300,000 in digital tokens from Belfort's cryptocurrency wallet in the fall of 2021.

Belfort is also a keen tennis player.

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Career

Belfort, a meat and seafood salesman on Long Island, New York, became a door-to-door meat and seafood salesman. In interviews and memoirs, he claims that the company was an initial success; he expanded his meat-selling company to include many employees and exported 5,000 pounds (2,300 kilograms) of beef and fish every week. As he filed for bankruptcy at 25, the company ultimately failed. According to his memoirs and interviews, a family friend of a L.F. Rothschild helped him find a career as a trainee stockbroker. Belfort claims he was fired after the company suffered financial difficulties as a result of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash.

Belfort founded Stratton Oakmont as a Stratton Securities franchisee, later purchasing out the original founder. Stratton Oakmont was a boiler room that sold penny stocks and defrauded investors with "push and dump" stock sales. Belfort lived a life of lavish parties and heavy use of recreational drugs, including methamphetamine, which resulted in an addiction. Stratton Oakmont acquired over 1,000 stock brokers and was involved in more than $1 billion in stock issues, including being responsible for the initial public offering for footwear firm Steve Madden. Throughout its entire history, the company was targeted by law enforcement officials, and its notoriety inspired the film Boiler Room (2000), as well as the film The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).

From 1989 to 2009, Stratton Oakmont was under near-constant scrutiny from the National Association of Securities Dealers (now the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority). The NASD eventually sacked Stratton Oakmont, putting the company out of business in December 1996. In 1999, Belfort was first charged with securities theft and money laundering.

Belfort completed 22 months of a four-year sentence at the Taft Correctional Institution in Taft, California, in exchange for a federal Bureau of Investigation plea deal for operating pump-and-dump scams that resulted in investor losses of about $200 million. Belfort was ordered to pay $110.4 million that he swindled from stock buyers. When Belfort was serving his term, he shared a cell with Tommy Chong, and Chong encouraged him to write about his time as a stockbroker. Since being released from jail, the pair remained friends, with Belfort lauding Chong for his new work as a motivational speaker and writer. Belfort said at a motivational talk that he gave in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on May 19, 2014: he delivered the following: 'We're talking about him'.

"Stratton Oakmont was not a real Wall Street company," federal prosecutors and SEC officials involved in the lawsuit, have stated, "not a legitimate Wall Street company, either literally or metaphorically."

Belfort's restitution deal obliged him to pay 50% of his income to the 1,513 people he defrauded until 2009, resulting in a total of $110 million in restitution. The auction of forfeited property was the reason for about $10 million of Belfort's victims as of 2013.

Federal prosecutors filed a lawsuit against Belfort in October 2013. Several days later, the US government filed a motion to find Belfort in default of his payments after his lawyers argued that he had only been responsible for paying half of his salary to restitution up until 2009, not sincere. In 2007, he paid $382,910 during his parole term (after escaping jail) and $170,000 in 2009. Belfort began restitution payment arrangements with the US government following this time. After a judge ruled that Belfort was not expected to pay half of his income after the end of his parole, Belfort's final deal with the government was to pay a minimum of $10,000 per month for life toward the restitution. Belfort has stated that in comparison to the $10,000 per month, he is also putting the funds from his public speaking appearances and media royalties into the restitution.

Prosecutors also said he had left Australia to avoid taxes and conceal his assets from his victims, but they later retract their statement, which had been released to The Wall Street Journal by demanding that The Wall Street Journal print a retraction. Belfort has also stated on his website and elsewhere that he intends to request that "100 percent of the royalties" from his books and The Wolf of Wall Street film be turned over to victims. Belfort's assertion was "not factual" in June 2014, according to the US attorney's spokesmen, who also received funds from the initial auction of the movie rights that was not entirely directed toward his restitution payments. Belfort owed only $21,000 to his restitution obligations out of about $1.2 million paid to him in connection with the film before its release, according to BusinessWeek. Belfort has stated that the government turned down his offer to put 100% of his book deal funds towards his restitution.

Belfort was a cryptocurrency skeptic at first. He had previously described Bitcoin as "frickin' insanity" and "mass delusion." Belfort changed his mind after learning more about cryptocurrency and later when cryptocurrency prices plummeted. Despite saying that "I could easily make $10 million" Belfort has turned down bids to create Wolf-themed N.F.T.s. Belfort has also stated that he is "sincerely looking forward to regulation" in the cryptocurrency industry. Belfort is now an investor in several cryptocurrency start-ups.

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