Stratton Oakmont

Okay, so in 1989, Jordan Belfort and a man named Danny Paroosh started a brokerage in Lake Success, New York.

and they called it Stratton Oakmont, which sounds kind of like an old law firm or something, but you, of course, recognize it if you've seen the movie Wolf of Wall Street.

Now, Paroosh, by the way, is the main real-life model for the movie's Donnie Azoff.

You guys remember him.

and the victims weren't necessarily hollywood

or famous people or ultra rich people they were regular investors who got a call from a very confident young man and his team and they believed them and the people who were supposed to be watching they'd been watching for a while here's something the movie only half tells you belford did not get caught by one dramatic knock on the door He got caught the slow, boring way, paperwork, patients, and a drug dealer who kept the receipts.

The industry regulators at the National Association of Securities Dealers had been scrutinizing Stratton Oakmont almost since the day it opened in 1989.

In 1994, Belfort settled with the SEC and agreed to a lifetime ban from the securities industry.

They all work on Wall Street, right? Because the big New York party school.

And I go, really? He goes, where do you work? He goes, I work at a place called Stratton Oakmont with a guy named Jordan Belfort, right? I go, really? He goes, yeah.

Starts showing me this, this.

Four weeks later, I moved.

Yeah.

His, uh, company is Stratton Oakmont.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Based on Belfort's book of the same name, chronicles his rise and fall.

The founder of Stratton Oakmont, basically a brokerage firm involved in penny stock fraud the whole way.

They manipulated the market, his nonstop drug use, [laughs] and the FBI eventually catch enough.

It is...

And his background is something else.

Back in the 1980s, he worked at Stratton Oakmont.

Yeah, that's Stratton Oakmont, the Jordan Belfort Wolf of Wall Street outfit.

He was a partner there, left after a year, built his own firm in South Florida, took small cap companies public, built a $100 million business, and then, in his own words to TechCrunch, Some of the success came through breaking the law, securities laws, and ultimately, as I knew inevitably would happen, I had to pay the price.

I lost everything, and most significantly, my freedom.

And that's worth saying out loud on a day otherwise full of people trying to skip the human in the loop.

That's the menu, kiddos.

A president building a toll booth around his own press releases, a math proof nobody understands, a $3 billion referee, and a guy from Stratton Oakmont trying to do right by the people he once would have stepped over.

Leonardo DiCaprio's char- character getting that advice? You know, they talk.

They'll say bad things about, about, uh, Stratton Oakmont or what- or whatever the, the, the, uh, the, the company was, was called.

Yeah, spot on.

Ab- absolutely spot on.

Music This is Scorsese's 2013, I guess it's a comedy, a dark comedy, a commerce comedy starring Leonardo DiCaprio who plays the real life person Jordan Belfort who was the wolf of Wall Street.

He had the Stratton Oakmont stockbroker firm and did a lot of bad stuff and got into all sorts of debauchery in the time and at the time.

And they, I think Leo and Martin Scorsese were like, this guy's life is crazy.

Let's make a movie about it.

So first up, we have The Wolf of Wall Street, which is a really fun film to watch, but I would argue that the title is a little bit misleading, as it wasn't a real Wall Street firm.

It was a penny stock brokerage running a pump and dump scheme, and the firm it's based on, Stratton Oakmont, was located in a strip mall in New Hyde Park, Long Island, which according to Google Maps is a solid two-hour commute from Wall Street during rush hour.

I guess The Wolf of a Really Bad Commute to Wall Street wasn't a punchy title, so they called the film The Wolf of Wall Street instead.

I don't wanna seem pedantic, but there are no actual wolves in the film either.