Catching the Wolf of Wall Street

“Why’d you choose that one?” asked OCD.

I shrugged. “It seemed like the dog with the least fleas. I mean, they had no real sales to speak of and there were something like fifty million shares outstanding. But, on the positive side, they’d just landed Macy’s as a customer, which I knew would sound good in a sales pitch. That, and the president of the company had once been a vice president at Revlon, and I knew that would sound good too.

“Anyway, when I finally was done with the script, I remember feeling very impressed with it. I’d made Arncliffe National sound like IBM or at least the next Revlon, and I hadn’t even lied that much. Of course, I’d omitted some material facts—meaning, information that the client really deserved to know to make a decision— but all in all I hadn’t really violated any securities laws.”

The Bastard shook his head gravely. “Material omissions are violations of securities laws,” he snapped.

“Yeah, I’m aware of that now. In fact, I was aware of it then too, although I knew it would be difficult to prove. See, what’s material and what’s not material is somewhat subjective. Don’t kid yourself— on Wall Street, material omissions are the rule rather than the exception. And that’s at big firms as well as small ones.”

A few moments of silence passed.

“In any event, as fabulous as my Arncliffe script was, Chris Knight hadn’t grasped the true beauty of it. ‘You’re wasting your time with that,’ he said, pointing to my script. ‘You don’t need a script to sell stock. You just swear to the clients that the stock is going up and they buy from you.’

“ ‘Yeah, well, thanks for sharing,’ I said, and then I picked up the phone and started dialing. I was using leads George had given me, which were actually return postcards from people who’d responded to a mass mailing. On the front of the cards was some cheesy sales hype along the lines of Make a Fortune in Penny Stocks, and on the back there were people’s names and phone numbers. They seemed like total dunk shots, these leads. I mean, what better lead was there than someone who’d filled out a postcard and dropped it in the mailbox?

“So when I got my first prospect on the phone—some friendly Southerner named Jim Campbell1*—I had reasonably high hopes. In a totally upbeat tone, I said, ‘Hey, Jim! Jordan Belfort calling from the Investors’ Center! How are you today?’

“‘Uh, I’m awe right!’ he answered. ‘How you doin’?’

“ ‘Oh, I’m great. Thanks for asking. Now, Jim, if you recall, about a week ago you mailed me a three-by-five postcard, saying you were interested in investing in penny stocks. Does that ring a bell?’ And after a few seconds of silence, Jim finally said, ‘Uh, yeah, I guess I did that. I mean, it sounds like sumthin’ I’d do!’

“I remember thinking, Good God! He was so eager! So incredibly receptive! It was mind-boggling. I maintained my composure and said, ‘Great, Jim. Now the reason for the call today is that something just came across my desk, and it’s the best thing I’ve seen in the last six months. If you have sixty seconds, I’d like to share the idea with you. You got a minute?’ And Jim said, ‘Sure! Fire away!’ With that I rose from my chair and prepared to give Jim my shpil. I remember catching a glimpse of Chris, who was sitting in his chair, watching me, and sipping a bottle of Evian.

“Into the phone, I said, ‘Okay, Jim, now, the name of the company is Arncliffe National, and it’s one of the fastest-growing companies in the cosmetics industry. All told, it’s more than a thirty-billion-dollar industry, cosmetics, growing at twenty percent a year. And it’s virtually recession-proof—yielding consistent growth in good times and bad. You follow me so far?’

“‘Yeah!’ said an impressed Jim. ‘I follow you.’

“ ‘Great,’ I said, and I went on about giving him some very loose facts about Arncliffe—the names of some of the products they sold, where the company was headquartered, and then, finally, I touched on the contract they’d just signed with Macy’s. Then I said, ‘But as good as all that sounds, the most important thing in any company is management. Wouldn’t you agree?’

“‘Yeah,’ answered Jim, ‘of course.’

“ ‘Good,’ I said shrewdly, ‘and in the case of Arncliffe National, management is blue chip all the way. The chairman of the board, a man named Clifford Seales,2* is one of the most astute minds in the cosmetics industry. He was a former VP of Revlon, a key player over there. And, with him at the helm, Arncliffe can’t go wrong.

“ ‘But the reason for the call today, Jim, is very specific: Clifford Seales is about to go down to Wall Street to tout his stock, and he’s going on the heels of staggering sales growth and a major contract announcement. He’ll be going to banks, insurance companies, pension funds—the institutional players. And you know what they say, Jim: Institutional money is usually smart money, and even when it’s not, it’s not enough to fuel the market anyway. You follow me?’

“‘Oh, yeah!’ said Jim, ‘I sure as hell do!’

“ ‘Good, Jim. Now, the stock is trading at only fifty cents a share right now, which is ridiculously cheap, considering the company’s future. And the key to making money here is to position yourself now, before Seales goes to Wall Street and meets with all the fund managers and pension managers, because once he does that, it’s too late.’ I paused for effect. ‘So what I’d like you to do is this, Jim: Pick up a block of one million shares of Arncliffe National’—and splat went a mouthful of water from Chris Knight’s mouth. Then he started choking, and then he popped out of his chair—Evian in hand—and ran toward George’s office. I shook my head in disbelief and continued with my sale, noticing for the first time that the other brokers were gathered around me. ‘It’s a cash outlay of only half a million dollars,’ I said casually, ‘and it’s not a question of funds today or tomorrow, Jim; you have a week to pay for the trade. But, believe me,’ I said, lowering my voice to just above a whisper, ‘if you position yourself now, before Seales comes down to Wall Street, the only problem you’ll have is you didn’t buy more. Sound fair enough?’”

“You asked the guy for half a million dollars?” asked OCD, chuckling.

“Yeah, I did. That’s what they used to do at Rothschild, so it just sort of slipped out. But, meanwhile, as I was waiting for Jim to respond to my half-million-dollar request, George came running out of his office, with Chris Knight in tow. I heard George muttering, ‘Someone go get a tape recorder! Hurry up! Who’s got a tape recorder?’ And then Jim said, ‘Uh, I’m sorry, Jordan, but I think you got the wrong guy. I work in a hat factory. I’m a machine operator. I only make thirty thousand a year.’” I paused for a moment. “Anyway, not to belabor the point, I ended up closing Jim for ten thousand shares, which was a five-thousand-dollar trade, which was one of the biggest trades in Investors’ Center history. I was about to learn that Investors’ Center was no small-time operation. They employed over three hundred brokers and had over thirty offices—all of them small, and all of them just as mismanaged as this one.

“But getting back to Jim Campbell for a second, I’d convinced him to buy the stock with the money in his IRA, which was the only real savings he had.” I paused and let out a troubled sigh. “And if you’re wondering if I felt guilty about that, the answer is yes: I felt absolutely horrendous. Despicable. I knew he shouldn’t be investing his IRA in a penny stock. It was much too risky. But I was so utterly broke at the time that the words rent money, rent money were playing in my head like a broken record. In the end, they drowned everything else out, including my conscience.

“Then, the moment I hung up the phone, I was instantly awash in the admiration of my peers—quashing any residual doubts. I remember George saying to me: ‘Where did you learn to sell like that, Jordan? I’ve never heard anything even remotely like it! It was amazing!’ Of course, I won’t deny that I relished every last drop of his admiration. And, not surprisingly, the rest of the brokers were equally taken with me. They were all staring at me wide-eyed, as if I were a god. I felt like a god at that moment. The dark cloud that had followed me around since the meat business had finally evaporated. I felt like a new man, or, better yet, I felt like myself again.

“Right then and there, I knew that my financial problems were finally over, and I knew that Denise would finally have the things we’d talked about and dreamed about during the dark days. A world of infinite possibility had suddenly opened, a world filled with a thousand opportunities. And from there things moved very quickly, starting when George approached me a few weeks later, asking me to train the salesmen.

“It was almost identical to what had happened in the meat business, when the manager asked me to train the salesmen. And again, just like in the meat business, my training sessions quickly turned into motivational meetings, and the room began to pump. In addition, I went about reorganizing the office, setting up the desks classroom style and instituting a dress code, and I put an end to all this nonsense of part-time stockbrokers.

“What I was trying to do, in essence, was to make the place feel like Wall Street, to make the brokers feel like true stockbrokers. And I got resistance from no one; they all followed me blindly— both George and the salesmen—and everyone’s commissions soared, especially mine. My first month, in fact, I took home a check for forty-two thousand dollars.” I paused for a moment, letting the number sink in. “And let me tell you something: It was more money than I’d had in my entire life. Straightaway, Denise and I paid off all our bills, and then we went out and bought a brand-new Jeep, a Wrangler, for thirteen thousand dollars. Then we both bought new wardrobes. I bought her her first gold watch, then a diamond tennis bracelet. And at the end of the month we still had ten thousand left over!

“The next month I made sixty thousand dollars, and I went out and bought the car of my dreams: a brand-new pearl-white Jaguar XJS.” I smiled at the memory. “It was the two-door model, the one with twelve cylinders and three hundred horsepower. The thing was a total beast. And while Denise refurnished our apartment, I was paying back all my old creditors from the meat business. And the next month I made another sixty thousand, and that was it; that was when Denise and I looked at each other in awe. We simply didn’t know what to do with all the money. We had everything we needed, and money was pouring in faster than we could spend it. I remember one day in particular, when we were sitting at the edge of a long wooden dock in Douglaston, not far from where Investors’ Center was. It was the middle of March, and it was one of those warm winter days where you feel the first hints of spring in the air.

“I think I remember this day so vividly because it was one of the few times in my life when I’d been truly happy, truly at peace. It was late afternoon, we were sitting on two fold-up lounge chairs that we’d carried down with us, and we were holding hands, watching the sun set. I remember thinking that I’d never loved a person as much as I loved this woman, that I’d never thought it was even possible to love someone so purely, so completely. I didn’t have a single misgiving about her, not a single second thought.

“On the other side of Little Neck Bay, I could see the edge of Bayside, where Denise and I lived, where I grew up, and just behind me was the North Shore of Long Island, where I would be moving in a few years and raising a family.” I shook my head sadly. “In a million years I would have never guessed that home wouldn’t include Denise and that the mother of my children would be another woman. It would seem utterly impossible at the time.

“But what I had no way of knowing back then was that the insanity—as I’d come to call it—was right around the corner, slowly creeping up on me, without me knowing it.” I shook my head once more. “In the end, it spared no one. Not me, not Denise, not my family. Almost everyone I knew and everyone I grew up with would come to work for me soon, or at least become financially dependent on me. You understand what I’m saying?”

They both nodded, then the Bastard said, “How long after this did you meet Danny?”

I thought for a moment. “Not long; maybe three or four months. I’d seen him around the building a few times, but I’d never said more than a few words to him. Kenny, however, was about to reenter my life almost immediately. It was that very weekend, in fact, or the weekend after, when he called me out of the blue and asked if I’d train him to be a stockbroker.”

“How did he know you’d gotten in the market?” asked OCD.

“From his cousin Jeff. He was one of the few people I still kept in touch with from college. Jeff had told Kenny how well I was doing. But I was totally turned off by Kenny’s call at first. I mean, the last time we’d crossed paths, the guy had crashed one of my meat trucks, then left me with a three-hundred-dollar food bill. And what vague memories I did have of him were entirely negative. There was something a bit off about him, something I couldn’t put my finger on. And that was even before I met Victor Wang. Together, though, the two of them were like a complete freak show: the budding Blockhead and the Talking Panda.” I rolled my eyes. “Anyway, let’s just say my memories of Kenny were less than fond. I had him pegged as someone who loved to talk about rolling up his sleeves and working hard but hadn’t the vaguest idea what the concept meant.”

“Why’d you hire him, then?” asked OCD, smiling.

I smiled back. “That’s a damn good question, Greg… but let’s just say the Kenny Greene I met in the meat-and-seafood business and the Kenny Greene I met the second time around were two different people. I mean, he was still a budding Blockhead and everything, but now, at least, he was a humble budding Blockhead. He seemed to know his place in the world. In fact, one of the first things he said on the phone was that he wanted to meet me for a cup of coffee so he could pay back the money he owed me.

“The only problem was that I didn’t need the money anymore. So I was tempted just to say to him, ‘Fuck you, pal! Where were you and your damn checkbook when I needed you?’ But, of course, I didn’t. Truth is, there was something about the Blockhead that I liked. I mean, even to this day I still feel a certain warmth toward him, although I have no idea why. He’s like having a giant lapdog that pisses and shits all over your house, but you know he doesn’t mean anything by it; he just can’t control himself. Yet every morning you can be damn certain he’ll be out on your front lawn, fetching your newspaper.

“Anyway, the two of us met at a little Greek diner, just down the road from Investors’ Center, and the moment we sat down Kenny handed me a check for three hundred dollars, along with an apology for having crashed my meat truck. Then he told me how his cousin Jeff was always telling him that I was the sharpest guy around and how there was nothing more in the world he wanted than to work by my side, as my right-hand man.” I shook my head and chuckled. “It’s rather ironic that Kenny had more foresight in this department than I did. He was convinced I would be the next great thing on Wall Street, while I had zero aspiration in this area. I think I was just too shell-shocked from the meat business still; that, and I was so in love with Denise that I didn’t want anything to change.”

OCD narrowed his eyes. “What made Kenny believe in you so much? I mean, I understand that he heard you give a sales meeting at your meat company, but it still seems like a bit of a leap of faith on his part.”

“Yeah…” I said open-endedly, “well, I actually missed one important thing. You see, I wasn’t really sure if Kenny was cut out for the stock market, so rather than agreeing to train him on the spot, I told him after the meeting to come to the Investors’ Center that night, so I could give him a firsthand demonstration of being a stockbroker. And it was after hearing me on the phone for the first time that he swore loyalty to me. Does that make more sense?”

OCD nodded. I nodded back and took a moment to think back to that night. Then I started chuckling. “What’s so funny?” snapped the Bastard.

I shook my head quickly. “You don’t want to know,” I replied.

“Actually, I do,” he shot back.

“Well, if you insist,” I said with a smile, and I gave my neck a nice, slow roll. “Okay… so rather than just meeting me at the Investors’ Center, Kenny offered to pick me up at my apartment. When he pulled up to my building, he wasn’t alone; he’d brought his girlfriend along for the ride with him.” I paused for a moment, twisting my lips at the thought of her. “Let’s just say she had tits the size of NFL footballs and the lips of a goldfish. She wasn’t gorgeous or anything, but she was one of the sexiest little numbers I’d ever laid eyes on.

“In any event, the two of them sat in the boardroom and watched me do my thing on the phone—and, of course, I couldn’t help but ham it up a bit for the Goldfish, who was busy undressing me with her eyes as I pitched into the phone. I ended up having a pretty decent night—making around three grand—and I remember her whispering to Kenny how wet she was getting, just from listening to me. But it wasn’t until the ride home that I got my first pure dose of the Goldfish and, for that matter, Kenny Greene.

“We were in Kenny’s red Mustang: He was behind the wheel, I was in the passenger seat, and the Goldfish was sitting between us, on the armrest, wearing a tiny midriff T-shirt and some wildly sexy perfume. We were on the Cross Island Parkway near the exit for Bayside, when Kenny said to her: ‘Go ahead, sweetie, tell him!’

“ ‘No,’ she whined, ‘I’m too embarrassed, Kenny!’

“So Kenny said, ‘Fine, I’ll tell him, then,’ and he looked at me and said, ‘She got really turned on watching you sell tonight, so she’d like to blow you. And trust me: The girl can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch! Just look at her mouth. Pucker up for him, sweetie.’

“I looked at the Goldfish, astonished, as she stared back at me with her fabulous goldfish lips puckered up into a sensuous pout. Then she started nodding her head bashfully, as if to say, ‘I’d really like to blow you, sir!’”

I paused for a moment, searching for the right words. “Now, I want you to know that I had every intention of resisting the Goldfish’s charms; I mean, I loved Denise with all my heart and soul and I had never cheated on her before. But then the Goldfish began rubbing me over my jeans and sticking her NFL footballs in my face. While she had me still stunned by that, she crawled down to the little foot area in front of me and slowly unzipped my fly.” I paused and shook my head gravely. “Well, needless to say, the Goldfish overpowered me, and next thing I knew she was giving a world-class bl*w j*b as we cruised down the Cross Island Parkway.