After watching The Wolf Of Wall Street I have to ask, what did Jordan Belfort do criminally wrong exactly?
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Pump and dump.
Sell a junk stock to as many people as possible who don’t understand stocks or persuade them to keep it rather than sell it. This is the pump.
Once the value is high enough, the stocks are then sold off quickly, devaluing their worth almost instantly. This is the dump.
Belfort capitalized financially because of the fees he collects on sells. By initiating a sell when the price was high enough, this is where he broke the law.
It’s a form of insider trading, but wholly manipulated by the stock broker.
It’s illegal, but due to the inability for the SEC to impose serious fines and imprisonment, it’s getting worse.
Belforts is a testament to this. Despite being arrested and fined, he still made millions.
It’s ridiculous to think a punishment system issuing fines in the millions will change the behavior of those making billions.
Other have mentioned ‘pump and dump’ and various stock related crimes but he was also evading taxes and money laundering.
I don’t exactly have an answer, but this is why I hated (ok, disliked) this movie. We see some broad explanatory scenes that Belfort and his crew were selling stock in shitty companies but pretending they were great investments. So the audience has a vague idea of the crimes…but were they really crimes? There’s a grey zone between outright lying about a product you are selling and hooking suckers that are eager to part with their money.
But what does the movie focus on? Sex and drugs. And sex and drugs. And MORE sex and drugs. So we see the debauchery side of things over and over and over again but Scorsese never spends much time on the actual crimes. I think movies (and all forms of art, really) are at their most interesting when they can *teach* us something. *Goodfellas* is one of the best movies ever made, and that’s largely because it goes through what it’s like to be a mafiosi, and virtually every scene outlines the crimes they commit. *Wolf of Wall Street* is like a 19-year-old telling you about his weekend: “Dude I got fucked up! Drugs and hookers and man it was fucked up and wild! Woohoo!” That’s the vibe of the *entire* movie. Kind of surprised that a great director like Scorsese would so something so simplistic and base.
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