Memoirs of a Wall Street bandit

Jon Belfort, co-founder of the biggest and most notorious 'boiler room' in recent history, hasn't lost his Midas touch: in fact, the film rights to his newly released autobiography have already been snapped up by Martin Scorcese.

Jordan Belfort, co-founder of the biggest and most notorious "boiler-room" in recent history, hasn't lost his Midas touch. The film rights to his newly-released autobiography, The Wolf of Wall Street, have already been snapped up by Martin Scorcese who is to direct Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role. It's quite a coup for a debutant author and an ex-con at that, says The Sunday Times. But is Belfort happy? Apparently not; he claims to be racked with guilt over the victims of his crimes. "Not a day goes by without me feeling appalled about what happened." More to the point, he's in a financial bind. The US government will take 50% of his income until he pays back $110m to investors. So far, he has made about $600,000 in advances and film rights. "That still leaves a lot of books to sell."

The confessional Wall Street memoir has become a tired medium, says The New York Times. But Belfort's "unvarnished and often hilarious revelations" are compelling. Much focuses on his attempts to live the high life: how he crashed his helicopter on the lawn of his New York estate, too stoned to find the airport; or how he ship-wrecked his yacht (originally built for Coco Chanel) in the Med. The book owes a good deal to Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities: Belfort, who taught himself to write in prison, claims to have used the novel like a text-book and "can quote long passages with the authority and relish of a poet citing Shakespeare". But it's also a historical document, shedding light on the inner workings of a boiler-room operation. Belfort chronicles how he and his Quaalude-befuddled cronies foisted dodgy stocks on small investors, then cashed out before the shares crashed. In the early 1990s, before the onset of computerised trading, men like Belfort were the era's bandits. The motto of his brokerage, Stratton Oakmont, said it all: "No one hangs up the phone until the customer buys or dies."

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