Hunting down the
Wolf of Wall Street
A new stage show
gives you the chance
to inhabit the world
of Jordan Belfort.
Paul Kendall braves
a meeting with him
T
he day before I’m due to
meet The Wolf of Wall
Street, I receive a warning
that he is “operating on a
very stringent” schedule.
Jordan Belfort, who
scammed millions of dollars and then
deposited half the proceeds up his
nose, has reinvented himself as “The
World’s #1 Sales Trainer” and is hosting
a series of seminars in the UK.
Over four days, he is taking to the
stage, TED-talk style, in Colchester,
London, Manchester and Glasgow,
to teach halls full of ambitious sales
people how to elevate their “careers
and lives to the next level”. The
techniques they learn will help them to
increase their “closing rate by at least
40 per cent to 100 per cent” or their
money back.
The New Yorker, made famous
by Martin Scorsese in the 2013 black
comedy, is also hosting four private
dinners for £1,000 ticket holders who
want to “network with other VIPs”
and meet “The Wolf ” in person. And
all this on top of his daily YouTube
videos, separate business interests and
publishing career.
Infamy seems to be working out
well for the 57-year-old. And now a
new theatrical adaptation of Belfort’s
original memoir is about to raise his
profile even further.
Over four floors and 25 rooms
in a row of former town houses
near London’s Liverpool Street,
the immersive production of
The Wolf of Wall Street will
reconstruct Belfort’s luxury
home, favourite bar and the
notorious “boiler room” where
his employees mixed business
with pleasure.
The director, Alexander Wright,
has hired a 16-strong cast to play
the various people in Belfort’s
life – his business partner,
his wife, his father – but
audience members will
be encouraged to join
in too, either working
for The Wolf or for
the FBI agents
who finally
uncovered
his illegal
activities. “I
won’t lie – I
don’t know
much about
immersive
Arts
The Wolf of Wall
Street begins
previews on Sept 17
at 5-15 Sun Street,
London EC2;
immersivewolf.comInsane behaviour:
the film of The
Wolf, above, now
reimagined for the
stage, righttheatre, but it seems like a really
interesting thing that people will
enjoy,” says Belfort when he finally
arrives, 50 minutes late. Dressed in an
open-necked shirt, jeans and tailored
blazer, he has a chargrilled “New Yoik”
accent and punctuates his sentences
with swigs of Red Bull (“the hardest
drug” he takes now, he tells me).
“I don’t recommend that anyone
actually goes and does what I did. But
to feel the insanity, to get some feel for
what it would have been like, will be
really interesting for people.”
Interesting is one word for Belfort’s
story. He set up brokerage house
Stratton Oakmont in 1989 after losing
his job at a merchant bank. Within a
year he was making tens of millions of
dollars, mostly on the back of an illegal
“pump and dump” scheme, which
involved buying up cheap shares in
small companies and then inflating
their value by hard-selling the rest of
the shares to unsuspecting investors.
Once the stock peaked in value,
Belfort and his associates sold out,
making huge profits for themselves but
sending the price of shares tumbling.
The “Wolf ” couldn’t have cared less.
While his customers lost their shirts,
he led a wild lifestyle full of private
jets, luxury yachts, poolside parties,
prostitutes and, in Belfort’s words,
“enough drugs to sedate Guatemala”.
In one memorable scene in
Scorsese’s film, Belfort, played
with devilish abandon by Leonardo
DiCaprio, is so wasted on sedatives he
cannot walk and has to drag himself
across the floor of a smart country club
and then roll down a flight of stonesteps to get to his sports
car, a vehicle he then
proceeds to destroy on the
one-mile journey back to
his house.
The film also features
sex, orgies and, at one
point, a dwarf-tossing
competition in Stratton
HQ. As Belfort says,
things were “insane”,
the behaviour
“despicable”.
How much
of this
insanity will
be portrayed
in the show?
“The
dwarf-
tossing did
not happen
in reality,”
says Wright
when I talk to
him. “There’s
a conversation
about it in the
book, but it never
happened. So we are
politely sidestepping
that. And obviously weThe play will reconstruct
Belfort’s luxury home,
favourite bar and the
notorious ‘boiler room’won’t be working with real animals,
which means no roller-skating
chimpanzee. The wellbeing of the cast
and crew is our top priority.
“But, within the bounds of what’s
possible within a company of
performers, I think we need to go
there. In order to make [Belfort’s] fall
work, I think we have to push quite
hard at the hedonism. We’d be naive
and foolish to shy away from it, because
that’s the story.”
As a result, the show will be strictly
18-plus and theatregoers will have to
provide ID on the door.
The language will also be X-rated.
Scorsese’s movie broke the record for
the number of “f----” in a feature film- more than 500 all told – and Wright
admits his script is similarly “sweary”.
But, like Scorsese did when his
film was released, Wright rejects any
suggestion that his show will glorify
Belfort’s lupine lifestyle, even though
he himself is an enthusiastic supporter.
“We’re not coming to patronise
anyone or to preach, but I don’t think
people will be leaving saying ‘I must
buy a Ferrari’,” says Wright.
In fact, he argues, the immersive
nature of the show will mean the
various catastrophes that befall Belfort - divorce, arrest, the sinking of his 167ft
motor yacht in a storm – will be felt all
the more keenly by audience members.
“If you did Wolf of Wall Street as a
fourth-wall show, the audience could
watch a tragedy, the lights would come
up at the end, they would clap and then
they could walk away going, ‘OK, cool,
where are we going for dinner?’
“But if you have just spent two
hours investing in it, getting on the
phone and, in Jordan’s words, ‘ripping
someone’s eyeballs out’ until they
invest. If that’s how you’ve spent your
evening and then you watch it all go to
seed, you’re going to feel that harder
than if you had just sat in a theatre and
remarked to your fellow theatregoer:
‘Gosh, those aren’t nice guys, are
they?’
“It makes you more conscious about
your choices and hopefully people
will walk out into the world and re-
examine their moral compass.”
Whether Belfort himself has done
any soul-searching is a moot point.
He only served 22 months in prison
after pleading guilty to securities
fraud and money laundering, a short
spell that reflected his decision to help
investigators with other prosecutions,
and obviously thinks the new show is
going to do wonders for his business
(he often shows clips from Scorsese’s
film at his seminars and keeps a
sculpture of a wolf on his desk).
“In many ways I was a despicable
person, in many ways I was a
sympathetic person,” he says.
“Everyone makes their own judgment
about me based on their own life
experiences, and their belief systems,
and there’s no right or wrong to that,
you know?”
But what about all the lives he
ruined? In an impressive act of
historical revisionism, Belfort insists
Stratton Oakmont only targeted “very
rich” individuals who were able to
absorb their losses (the two key FBI
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telegraph.co.uk/culturenewsletter1The Wolf: after
pleading guilty, Belfort
served 22 months
in prison
agents who investigated Belfort tell a
very different story) and claims former
employees are grateful to him for
making them into “top closers” (to use
his sales lingo).
This includes the goldfish bowl
guy – the broker who is sacked on the
spot in the film because he is spotted
cleaning his goldfish bowl rather than
working. (Belfort’s partner, played by
a dentally challenged Jonah Hill, then
gets up on a desk and swallows the
goldfish.)
“He got in touch with me on
Facebook after the book came out and
thanked me a million times over for
making him into the world’s greatest
salesman,” says Belfort. “He’s ended up
very successful. I got a very positive
thing from him.”
In fact, mention the word “victim”
to Belfort and he screws up his well-
tanned face in disapproval. This all
happened a long time ago, his life
is very different now and besides,
he says, he pays a percentage of the
money he makes (reported to be
around $30,000 per seminar) into a
government “restitution” fund.
The new show, however, doesn’t
sound like it’s going to be quite as
sympathetic as he’d like.
For a start, unlike Scorsese’s film
and the original memoir, the story
will not be told solely from Belfort’s
point of view. Wright also intends to
dig deeper into the stories of people
in Belfort’s orbit – friends, business
associates, family – and reveal the
long-term impact he had on their lives.
“Stuff has been the god we worship
and I think it’s important to show what
happens when
that goes really
f------ wrong,” says
Wright. “If all the
stuff goes and we
haven’t looked after
our friends, we
haven’t looked after
our family, then we
will find ourselves
on our own and
bereft. People will
see the attractive
side of Jordan’s
lifestyle, but I think
it’s important to tell
those stories too.”GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO; LARRY ARMSTRONGThe Daily Telegraph Thursday 29 August 2019 *** 25
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