You may know the story or have heard of his movie “Wolf of Wall Street,” but there is a deeper story to Jordan Belfort, the real wolf. He got the name from being one of the most persuasive and money hungry men on Wall Street. Jordan Belfort was born in the Bronx on July 9th of 1962. He was the biggest stock broker on Wall Street, and by the 1990s he had built one of the most successful businesses in Wall Street history. During that time, he was earning over $50 million a year. This earned him the nickname “The Wolf of Wall Street.”

Jordan Belfort was driven to make money, and he was driven by something called greed.or Belfort, it brought him to the peak, but he abused his wealth and it drove himself to the ground in just 15 years. I talked to many people and they all said something that caught my attention, how they saw people rise with drugs but let it completely take over their lives, which made me think, could drug use be okay in the Wall Street world, a world fueled by greed, but monitored and limited.

Before those 15 years of power he was born to be a businessman, even if he didn’t intend it at fir was a people person, a great persuader, a great liar and most of all he wanted it the most, he was a salesman from the day he was born he ran a meat and seafood business on long island for 3 summers and earned 20,000$.

Out of anyone in his first firm, he rose to the occasion and built an empire on Wall Street. While living in Queens, he and his close childhood friend, Elliot Loewenstern, earned a lot of money selling Italian ice from styrofoam coolers to people for his dental school tuition. He was then told, “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,” so he dropped out and explored different possibilities and found Wall Street and stocks, basically the home of persuasion and money.

He first started his stock market life with small ventures. He was a door to door salesman because a family friend helped him find a job as a trainee stockbroker at L.F. Rothschild. L.F. Rothschild showed him the ins and outs of the business, a few years later they went bankrupt and Belfort was laid off, he was then prepared to start Stratton Oakmont his first firm.

As he got bigger and bigger, he marketed penny stocks with Stratton Oakmont, Belfort then learned defrauded investors with the “pump and dump” type of stock sales. Pump and dump sales is a greedy and manipulative way to make money, stock brokers buy cheap stocks and then resell them for more money while lying about their worth and value. As he got older and more successful he started doing this with bigger companies.

Stratton Oakmont had employed over 1,000 stock brokers and was trading stocks totaling more than $1 billion. However, they had gotten the attention of the law and eventually got charged with money laundering and fraud. Belfort had served 22 months in prison, before starting his Motivational speaking career, which is what he does today.

He has already paid 14 million out of the 110 million of what he owes to the government, he has some way to go, he only stays in contact with his new children, not his eldest daughter nor his old wife.

Addiction on Wall Street

Addiction in the dictionary is defined as a condition, something that takes over your body and it is the act of being addicted to a particular substance, thing, or activity. Belfort had an addiction but it didn’t directly hurt him until the end, which was a huge problem for him and people on Wall Street, they are too confident in themselves.

As Jordan Belfort grew bigger and bigger, he started exploring his “work hard, play hard” lifestyle. He started doing drugs, throwing parties, which then led to his addiction. He was especially addicted to methaqualone, which is better known as “quaaludes” or “ludes”.

According to The Guardian, at the time, this drug had been banned in the U.S. because of the “devastating consequences if taken in high doses”. He was also known to use cocaine, among other things.

In general, and according to The New York Post, rates of addiction in Wall Street have reached epidemic levels. Financial work environments are risky, stressful, and employees can have a hard time concentrating. This means employers, if they want their employees to make money, can’t be too strict about what their teams are doing to stay focused. Many bosses will ignore the reality of their workers’ drinking and drug while on the job. Also, many firms do business with pharmaceutical companies that supply the drugs so people have easy access to purchase and receive these drugs.

According to the American Addictions Center, people in financial jobs will sometimes do the most to over achieve and outperform their colleagues. “For example, they may run on two or three hours of sleep, always wanting to be the first at work. For some, even… substance abuse is an opportunity to demonstrate control.” In an interview with the telegraph Belfort said “…life came off the rails because he kept pushing the boundaries of what he could get away with. It was about becoming numb to what’s right and wrong.

Greed on Wall Street

Another reason Belfort pushed these boundaries was because he got greedy. Greed played a huge part of his life.Many brokers think about money more than anything else.

In an interview withSam Polk, ex-hedge fund manager,  ,done by PBS, they said that Wall Street has a culture that is entirely focused on what’s good for itself. “It’s impossible to overstate how often Wall Street traders think about their bonuses. Those thoughts drive every trade, meeting, client dinner and ball game. The carrot at the end of the stick.” As in the carrot being that extra amount of money, that they always want, can get so close to but never reach.

After an interview with one of an old long time workers at Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, David Haythe ,who has worked on Wall Street, talks about working with greedy people who lost it all to drugs.He couldn’t disclose the person’s name, however, he said he saw him take a line of cocaine in the office and make 15 sales in under 10 minutes. “For some people, drugs and money go well together not one or the other, and that was a big issue in Wall Street.” It was also so easy to get since money was being made so easily.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Belfort talks about this. He says, “You make all this money but there’s nothing attached to it. You make your money buying and selling the ingenuity of other people.” He goes on to say that “there’s an “emptiness” to that sort of money…  So the bankers and brokers try to fill the void with material possessions – and when that’s not enough, with drugs.”

This is a problem that we still see today. Sam Polk said that, “when I was on Wall Street, my entire life’s goal was to make more money than the next guy.”

And, according to Business Insider, “Wall Street’s problem with money is tied to a very well-known, innate human desire— the desire to feel powerful.”

So, in a way, drugs weren’t the only thing Belfort became addicted to. He was addicted to the money and power as well.

Jacques Soenens, someone who works with  Great Gable Partners, said that “drugs can be a fuel for money or can take it all away, I don’t personally take drugs, and never have but some of my closest co-workers uses them to function in the office and stay efficient, it isn’t recommended but not frowned upon funny enough.” Jordan Belfort said that  he despised the man he once was.” When he was writing his memoir he says, “Sometimes I laughed, sometimes I cried. Sometimes I just shook my head and thought what a —-ing nut I was.”

Greed is kind of a factor in Wall Street, that can be used as motivation or something good, however it must be measured and not abused. Belfort abused this greed and didn’t stop when he should have, he got deeper and deeper into this blackhole of want over need. That is what got him caught up with the government, the use of drugs altered his want of other things, it not only re-wired how he thinks about wanting drugs, but wanting more things in life, such as money.

Life After Wall Street

His life after Wall Street has very boring. married a new wife, Anne Koppe, and has 3 kids, two that he is in contact with and one daughter, who he is not in contact with. He has said that was difficult to come back into a normal lifestyle because he is completely sober and is in a lot of debt. He has also recently had some health problems, he woke up one morning and could not move part of his face, he has been diagnosed with Bell’s Palsy.

Jordan has actually been doing motivational speaking throughout his career because of his ingenious persuasion skills. As seen in The Wolf of Wall street film, he makes multiple speeches a day to his entire company and they love it, they use him almost as a role model, which influenced them into thinking what they were doing wasn’t worth time locked up, they thought it was a little offense and a huge way to make money.

Jordan was not bad at what he did, and not bad at what he does now, his motivational speaking will “turn average salesmen into “world-class closers” Jordan said. Anyone can book Jordan, but his time is indeed pricey. People have come back saying that his speaking is very helpful and have made them more money than before.

When speaking with an anonymous source who previously worked on Wall Street, she was saying “When you start to get addicted to drugs, you do anything to make money to get accessibility to those drugs, it becomes a hidden drive for money, it becomes a main focus, a work hard then party even harder kind of lifestyle” she would go on to say that she saw her mother’s life almost get completely affected by it.

The film, he said, didn’t cover half of the drugs and illegal things he actually did. He said that there was a lot more than what was shown. He was very happy that there was even a film being made, the older one, he is very open about what happened and about the information in that film. He even responds to normal people who are just curious.

In the movie it shows him getting doing all sorts crazy wild things, but he seems to be enjoying himself, people have said that the real wolf could have been drugs, money and sex and he recently said in an interview that he didn’t even have control or a realization that drugs were controlling his life and making his choices for him like a “demon or something”  had posseded him.

His life was never and will never be the same, in the span of 15 years he made and lost more money than most people will ever. He became one of the most powerful people in america, paying off cops, doing drugs, making millions but all at a cost, and he had everything taken away that fast. The effects of what that has done to him and his mind has shown through getting Bell’s palsy and depression but who knows, he might not regret it at all. That might just be him talking, while I was looking at his interviews he seems apologetic, but also like proud and boast about what he did, this might just be his greedy side which re-wired his brain though.

Addiction, greed, and mental health are all very complicated subjects and will never be fully explained but if people are looked out for anyone can be saved from drugs, money and greed, people just need to be more open minded.