Everything You Know About Jordan Belfort Is A Lie

Before he was the wolf, Jordan Belfort was a kid from Queens.

He was born in the Bronx in 1962 and was raised in Bayside, Queens.

He was the son of two accountants, and this is a man who would go on to defraud thousands of investors.

But he came up from a house of people whose job was quite literally to make the numbers add up.

And his first business, which we mentioned, was selling Italian ice at Jones Beach with a childhood friend of his.

They cleared about $20,000, which is very real money for a teenager, particularly back in the 70s.

And according to the new docuseries, there was a trick to it.

He squeezed the cups to cut down on how much ice he gave the customers.

And at this point, it sounds like a tiny thing, right? But it's also the whole story here of Belfort in miniature, okay? It's the same product, but they're getting less of it.

The customer doesn't notice it until later.

So Belfort, he went to American University, got a biology degree, and he enrolled in dental school.

Here's where his own version of the story gets good.

He says that on his first day, the dean told the class that anyone in it for the money was in the wrong place.

Delfort heard that and decided he was, in fact, in it for the money, and he walked out.

You know, a remarkable level of understanding yourself.

So he tried selling

meat and seafood door-to-door on Long Island, and by his own account, the business took off.

But then it collapsed, and at 25, he had already filed for bankruptcy.

And that's the starting line to the rest of the story.

He's broke and about to find out the one skill that the world would actually pay him a fortune for.

And that was talking.

A family friend got him a trainee job at the Wall Street firm L.F. Rothschild.

Rothschild's, of course, a legendary finance family.

And he says the timing was terrible because the stock market crashed in October of 1987 on a day called Black Monday.

And he was laid off in the aftermath.