To
save my steeple, I visited people;
for
this I'd gone when I met Little John.
His
name came, I understood,
when
the judge said "You're a robbing hood."
Last weekend, the Dutch financial newspaper Het
Financieele Dagblad (FD) printed a
two-page ‘exclusive’ interview with Jordan Belfort, aka The Wolf of
Wall Street. The interview was held by Gerben van der Marel, the well-respected
Wall Street correspondent of the FD newspaper.
Jordan Belfort, a typical crook-becoming-hero has now passed his time in jail and is
now sturdily on his way to become a global celebrity and secret inspirator for
numerous ‘hoping-to-become-well-to-do’ people. These people see him as a ‘villainous,
but nevertheless very exciting’ guy, after the blockbuster movie with Leonardo
di Caprio.
Jordan Belfort is currently giving ‘up-to $100,000’
speeches, which he apparently uses – just like the royalties coming from both his best-selling book
and the resulting movie – to pay back the €110 million in damages that he caused
at his victims, according to the justice that judged him.
By the way, Belfort himself claims that the company that
he founded – Stratton Oakmont – had been operational for four more years, after
he left it. He claimed that the $110 million in damages was an unjust and
exaggerated number and stated that the real damages that he caused, were south
of $50 million, at most.
On the pictures in the article, Jordan Belfort looks
like a mixture of a hot-shot, celebrity lawyer and a movie star: goodlooking, sun-tanned and
well-manicured, with an open collar shirt and a wide-shouldered American powersuit that
Italians/Brittons hate so much. And… to top it off, he wears a Swiss gold(?) watch, in seemingly
the $10,000 plus category.
Clearly not someone, who went through a very rough
time in prison and who is now hellbent to pay back all his dues and live a life
of sobriety and abstination, ashamed as he is about what he did to other people in the past. This impression is perfectly in synch with the text of the interview
Although Van der Marel goes ‘through the motions’ with
some critical questions to Belfort, the whole interview breathes the atmosphere
of a junior editor for a pop magazine, who is encountering a relaxed Justin
Bieber, after his concert:
GvdM:
Not everybody
believes your story that you ‘stumbled
into’ this business. Some people think that you are a born imposter. Cunning, misleading
and manipulative. Until this day…
JB:
Who told you that?!
My ex-wife? Then you can call every person, who brought himself in trouble, a
sociopath. Ridiculous. I’ve been in therapy and I really don’t have these characteristics.
I made big mistakes, but other things I did very well actually
GvdM:
Like?!
JB:
Listen. I’m not like
Bernie Madoff with his enormous Ponzi Scheme. We traded in existing stock. We didn’t
make it up. We did operate in a grey zone all the time. The SEC (i.e. Securities
and Exchange Commission) investigated us for years and they didn’t have a case.
Where we did clearly enter into illegal business, was with the cash money, which we
stashed in Switzerland. Even FBI agent Coleman, who is very smart, had trouble
displaying the illegal parts of it. It was not shamelessly criminal, what whe
did.
GvdM:
You pleaded guilty
for all kinds of stock market fraud.
JB:
I was not so bad.
On a scale from one to ten, Warren Buffett is a one and Bernie Madoff a ten. I
was a seven in my worst years. I never stole money from the accounts of people.
GvdM:
You sold them
worthless stocks.
JB:
No, I didn’t!
GvdM:
You palmed stocks
off on people for much too much money.
JB:
Correct. Welcome to
Wall Street. I don’t approve of it, but it was very usual to act like I did.
Especially in those days. Everybody knew that my stock arrangements were very
popular. Everybody in Wall Street also participated. However, we bought large
packages of stock at bottom prices and later we rebought this stock. That is
called 'free riding' and that was our real crime.
You catch my drift with the rest of the interview, as
these were the most critical parts of it.
Summarizing: “Bernie
Madoff was a real crook, but I’m not. Everybody did it on Wall Street in those days and consequently,
I’m merely the victim of my circumstance. What I did was just a teeny weeny bad
and not very bad at all! By the way: wasn’t Gordon Gekko
your ultimate hero too?! Ooh, he was mine!
Nevertheless,
I did my time and I’m doing my
veeeeeeeeeeeery best to pay back my damages…
By the way, did you read my book or did you see the movie. I look so
much better than Di Caprio, in my humble opinion!”
Unfortunately, not everybody has the greatness to feel
really ashamed about doing bad things in the past. It happens far more that such
people rather feel victims – they really do – than perpetrators of crimes. In
this case, however, it were crimes, which ruined numerous middle-class people. Normal, simple people, who were
trying to earn their 401k or who were trying to gather a nest egg for a rainy day,
at the stock exchanges with their savings’ money.
Belfort’s behaviour is something that I can understand,
however…
What I don’t understand, on the other hand, is why
people and institutions, like Gerben van der Marel and the FD (but also every
other newspaper in the world, and the US visitors of Belfort’s $100,000 speeches), are so
fascinated with such people: they almost immediately lose their critical stance
and virtually turn into worshippers.
Seemingly, the media are almost driveling, when they
have the opportunity to have an exclusive interview with this guy. I bet that
when Bernie Madoff would be released today, he would be offered a multi million
dollar book contract for his (auto)biography, as well as the opportunity to organize
$500,000 speeches, per evening…, every evening.
And I even dare to say that Monica Lewinsky’s cigar raised
the "post-Presidential" market value of former president Bill Clinton by at least 100%, when it
comes to paid speeches and fund-raisers, as his affair with Lewinsky made a much longer lasting impression than his whole presidency, to be frank.
In case of Jordan Belfort, I suspect that the fact that
he is a ‘reversed Robin Hood’ (i.e. someone who steals from the middle-class,
in order to get rich himself) and a goodlooking gentleman, turns him into the favorite
scoundrel of many neo-liberal / neo-conservative ‘Captain
Entrepreneur's’:
“Of course, he is
a crook, but hell… did he live life to the fullest and did he nearly get away
with it. And damn, what a beautiful watch has he got. I want to have one of
those myself. And those middle class people are so frigging boring…
Groce-me-out”.
Yes…, of course this is an overly moralistic article on my behalf
and yes… there will definitely be a much broader story behind this guy than meets the eye, and
other blatant scoundrels at Wall Street and beyond. And yes, of course it is
interesting to hear this guy’s story of his life!
But in the month in which BBC’s Jeremy Paxman
threw the towel, with respect to his television career as master interviewer, a
new generation of Paxman’s is so dearly missed in the current media.
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