Wall Street Crime And Punishment: Jordan Belfort, The Boiler Room Wolf

Does crime pay?

Wall Street Crime and Punishment is a weekly series by Benzinga's Phil Hall chronicling the bankers, brokers and financial ne’er-do-wells whose ambition and greed take them in the wrong direction.

“Making money is so easy,” said Jordan Belfort in a 2013 interview with New York magazine. “It really is. It’s not hard to do.”

Belfort’s breezy pronouncement came as part of the publicity drumming for the release of Martin Scorsese’s film version of Belfort’s autobiography “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which starred Leonardo DiCaprio as Belfort.

The New York article also featured input from Greg Coleman, the FBI special agent responsible for Belfort’s arrest for fraud and stock market manipulation. From Coleman’s perspective, Belfort wasn't worthy of movie star-level worship.

“From a moral perspective, he was a reprehensible human being,” Coleman said about Belfort. “Admiration would be the wrong word, but from the perspective of manipulating the market, he’s one of the best there is.”

A Kick In The Teeth: A native of New York City, Belfort was born in 1962 in the Bronx and raised in the Bayside section of Queens. Both of his parents were accountants who stressed the value of education and maturity.

Belfort received a degree in biology from American University and saw his career path in dentistry. He made money to pursue his dental studies by selling Italian ices on a beach in Queens and enrolled in the University of Maryland School of Dentistry.

He dropped out after the first day of studies when the dean of the school made the astonishing pronouncement: “The golden age of dentistry is over. If you're here simply because you're looking to make a lot of money, you're in the wrong place."

But what was the right career for making money?

Belfort returned from his day in dental school and found work as a door-to-door salesman in Long Island, where he sold meat and seafood. He started to grow a business based on this endeavor, but the effort failed to click and he wound up filing for bankruptcy by the time he was 25.

“I was pretty talented,” he would later recall about this unsuccessful venture. “But the margins were too small.”

However, a family friend pointed him to a position as a stockbroker broker trainee with the Manhattan-based firm L.F. Rothschild, but he lost that position when the firm experienced financial difficulty after the 1987 stock market crash.

He took positions with other firms including D.H. Blair and F.D. Roberts Securities and Investors Center — the latter was a penny stock brokerage shut down in 1989 by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) one year after Belfort joined its staff.

Discouraged at working for others in unstable environments, Belfort decided to turn entrepreneur and create his own financial operations, and that’s when the would-be dentist started his career lycanthropy into becoming the Wolf of Wall Street.

The Kodak Pitch: In 1989, the 27-year-old Belfort teamed with 23-year-old Kenneth Greene, a fellow Investors Center employee who previously drove one of Belfort’s trucks during his meat selling days.

The pair opened their own brokerage in a spare office in a Queens car dealership and then arranged to set up a franchise of Stratton Securities, a small broker-dealer operation.

The duo seemed to strike gold quickly. Within five months of starting their franchise, they accumulated $250,000 and were able to buy Stratton Securities for themselves, renaming it Stratton Oakmont and establishing an operations center in Lake Success, a Long Island town which was best known as the first site of the United Nations headquarters before its Manhattan campus was constructed.

By 1991, Stratton Oakmont generated $30 million in commissions from a 150-person workforce. Many of his team members were twentysomethings from blue-collar backgrounds eager to make a maximum amount of money in a minimal amount of time.

Belfort also enjoyed his first brush with fame in 1991 via a profile in Forbes that harshly displayed his virtues and vices. On the plus side, the Forbes coverage offered insight into Belfort’s instruction on teaching his eager young employees the art of cold-calling potential investors.

Using a technique he dubbed the “Kodak pitch,” Belfort instructed his brokers to begin their telephone spiel with a blue-chip stock such as Eastman Kodak KODK before doing a hard-sell on obscure penny stocks.

Belfort also insisted that his brokers refuse to take no for an answer, offering them the mantra “Whip their necks off, don't let ‘em off the phone.”

Belfort’s team took his lessons to heart: Forbes reported they were, on average, earning $85,000 a year.

Yet Forbes also highlighted Stratton Oakmont’s loosey-goosey approach to ethical operations, noting that the SEC began investigating the brokerage in its first year of operations over questionable sales and trading practices. Indeed, the magazine detailed several examples of pump-and-dump efforts by the Stratton Oakmont team that drove up prices on penny stock shares before selling them at their artificially inflated peak.

Forbes diplomatically declined to identify Stratton Oakmont as a “boiler room,” but it was obvious what was taking place.

Noting these antics, along with the SEC’s receipt of customer complaints, Forbes dubbed Belfort as “a kind of twisted Robin Hood who takes from the rich and gives to himself and his merry band of brokers.” Belfort defended his actions, claiming, “We contact high-net-worth investors. I couldn't live with myself if I was calling people who make $50,000 a year, and I'm taking their child's tuition money.”

Also cited in his media debut was Belfort’s automobile, a $175,000 Ferrari Testarossa. This lavish hedonism was the start of a trend that would shape and then disfigure Belfort’s life.

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Ain’t We Got Fun? Besides the SEC, Stratton Oakmont had been under watch by the National Association of Securities Dealers, the forerunner of today’s Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, right after its founding. Yet Stratton Oakmont was not expelled from the NASD until 1996 and Belfort was not indicted for securities fraud until 1999.

In the years between his Forbes profile and his arrest, Belfort engaged an extravagant form of slow-motion, self-immolation fueled by drug addictions and financed by his pump-and-dump business.

“I suffered from a disease called ‘more,’ he would lament in retrospect. “No matter how much I had, I wanted more. You don't lose your ethics all at once. It happens very slowly and, almost imperceptibly, you know you're doing things right and one day you step over the line.”

Well, Belfort certainly went very much over that proverbial line. Financially, he was far ahead of the average American — at the peak of his earning power, he pocketed $50 million per year.

Belfort’s wealth enabled him to purchase luxury residences and expensive toys that he had a strange habit of destroying, such as a luxury yacht once belonging to iconic designer Coco Chanel which he sank in a storm off the Sardinian coast in 1996; a Mercedes he totaled while driving high on quaaludes; and a helicopter that he somehow crash-landed on the front lawn of one of his mansions.

The damage he inflicted on his property was mirrored by the insanity his drug habit inflicted on his body. “It was just like coke, coke, coke all day and I was like, ‘Screw you I don't have a problem,’” he would recall, adding, “I was like Al Pacino in ‘Scarface’ with a pile of cocaine. That's what my life had descended to.”

The Inevitable Downfall: Belfort’s luck began to slowly fray by 1994 when he reached an agreement with the SEC that required a lifetime ban from the securities industry. But he circumvented the prohibition by continuing to conduct business through Danny Porush, his right-hand man at Stratton Oakmont.

Belfort also played fast with the rules in arranging the 1993 initial public offering for childhood friend Steve Madden’s shoe company. Madden would become entangled in Belfort’s schemes, including a deal to secretly buy and sell stock in Stratton deals on behalf of Porush, who was legally limited in trading stocks in those companies, and a secret arrangement to provide Belfort with a majority stake in his company despite the NASD’s severe restrictions on Belfort’s actions.

Despite evidence of finance chicanery, Belfort’s downfall began with the arrest of his drug dealer, a martial artist named Todd Garrett, who was caught with $200,000 in cash from Belfort and Porush destined to be secretly transported to Switzerland. One year later, a French private banker who worked for a Swiss bank was arrested in Miami as part of a money-laundering scheme. In exchange for a lighter prison sentence, he identified his clients and cited Belfort and Porush.

On Sept. 2, 1998, Belfort was arrested for conspiracy to commit money laundering and securities fraud that resulted in 1,513 investors being swindled out of more than $200 million. After a week in custody, Belfort agreed to cut a deal with law enforcement agencies and agreed to wear a wire and record conversations with business associates who were under investigation.

Belfort’s work as an informant brought dozens of financial professionals and lawyers into prison, but he was not spared from incarceration. Although sentenced to four years in prison in 2003, he only served a 22-month sentence. He was also ordered to pay a $110 million fine.

A Stellar Encore: While serving his prison sentence, Belfort shared a cell with comedian Tommy Chong, who was incarcerated on drug-related charges. Chong encouraged Belfort to write his autobiography. After his release from prison in April 2006, his memoir “The Wolf of Wall Street” was acquired by Random House for $500,000 and became a critically acclaimed best-seller upon its 2007 publication. A second book, “Catching the Wolf of Wall Street,” was published in 2009.

The film version of “The Wolf of Wall Street” brought Belfort a new degree of pop culture recognition and helped in his post-prison career as a motivational speaker.

These years have not been without controversy. Prosecutors have accused him of failing to compensate the victims of his crimes and pocketing lucrative speaking fees instead of channeling them to his restitution requirements. But the federal government overplayed its hand by accusing him of fleeing to Australia to hide his wealth and avoid paying taxes — Belfort received a public apology for the release of that misinformation.

Belfort filed a $300 million lawsuit against Red Granite, the production company that purchased the film rights to “The Wolf of Wall Street,” after it was exposed that the deal was financed with questionable funds from Malaysia. Belfort insisted he would never have transacted with the company if he was aware of the dirty money that financed its operations.

Last month, Belfort posted a photo on his Facebook page that found him happily engaged in a poker game on a yacht’s casino table while a half-dozen cuties in bathing suits holding champagne glasses posed behind him. The message that accompanied the photo said, “If you want to be rich, never give up... If you have persistence, you will come out ahead of most people... When you do something, you might fail... Do it differently each time... and one day, you will do it right. Failure is your friend.”

For ex-FBI agent Greg Coleman, Belfort’s phoenix-like rise from the ashes of his own making represented the worst possible conclusion. Coleman considered Belfort’s ability to profit from his swindling and sourly told New York magazine ahead of “The Wolf of Wall Street” film premiere, "Crime pays."

Photo: Jordan Belfort in a screenshot from his YouTube show “The Wolf’s Den."