From the author

This is a book of memoirs, a true story about the most interesting events of my life. In special cases, the names and characteristics of some of the characters in the book have been changed to protect their privacy. I recorded the dialogues in the form in which I remembered them, and in some cases, for the sake of greater narrative fascination, I combined several events and time periods.

Prologue

Coot

“You are more insignificant than the most miserable bastard,” said my new boss when he led me through the Al-Rothschild company brokerage room for the first time. “You have a problem with that, right, Jordan?”

“No,” I answered. - No problem.

- Good! Growled the boss and moved on.

We made our way through the maze of mahogany desks, wrapped in black telephone wires. The labyrinth was on the twenty-fourth floor of a tower of glass and aluminum, lifting all forty and one floors above Manhattan, over the famous Fifth Avenue. The brokerage room was spacious, about fifty by seventy feet. The situation was simply overwhelming: all these desks, telephones, computer monitors - and arrogant yuppies, there were already seventy of them. All of them at that moment — it was 9:20 in the morning — were sitting without jackets, lounging in their chairs, reading the Wall Street Journal and clearly enjoying their position as Masters of the Universe.

Being the Master of the Universe seemed to me an extremely enviable fate, and when I walked past these arrogant yuppies in my cheap blue suit and cheap shoes, I passionately wanted to become one of them. But my new boss immediately returned me from heaven to earth.

“Your job,” he looked at the plastic badge on the blue lapel of my cheap jacket, “your job, Jordan Belfort, is the job of the dialer.” So, you’ll be dialing phone numbers five hundred times a day, trying to break through to the bosses through their secretaries. You will not try to sell anything, you will not advise anything and you will not create anything. You will simply dial to the owners of the companies.

He stopped for a moment, and then spewed out a new batch of poison.

“And when you finally get through, you only say:“ Hello, Mr. So-and-so, I would like to speak with you Scott ”- after which you will transfer the phone to me and you will start calling the next one. Do you think you can handle it? Or is it too complicated for you?

“I can handle it,” I replied with a confident tone, although panic covered me with my head, like a huge tsunami. The internship at Al-Rothschild was supposed to last six months. These months, apparently, will be harsh and debilitating, because I will have to completely depend on such morons as this Scott, who, it seemed, had just hatched from a bubble that rose to the surface from the most terrible depths of the bottomless underworld of yuppies.

Looking askance at him, I decided that Scott looked like a goldfish. He was bald and pale, and the miserable whisk of hair that remained on his head was dirty red. He was a little over thirty, quite tall, with a narrow skull and pink puffy lips. He was wearing a bow tie and it looked funny. Behind the spectacles in a thin metal frame, bulging brown eyes goggled, and on the whole he looked completely bland, a spilled fish. More precisely, a goldfish.

“Good,” the vile goldfish muttered, “now the basic rules: no interruptions, no personal calls, no passes for illness, no lateness, no idleness.” You have thirty minutes for lunch ...

He stopped, enjoying the effect.

“... and I would be in your place back from dinner on time, because fifty people are eager to take your place if you are profiling it.”

He walked on without stopping for a minute, and I followed him a step behind, mesmerized by the flickering of quotes, thousands of orange lines gliding across the gray computer monitors. In the front of the room, a mirrored window overlooked the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan. The Empire State Building stood in front of me. He was above everything else and seemed to rise directly to heaven to really scrape them. It was a funky sight, quite worthy of the young Master of the Universe. But at that moment the cherished goal seemed to move farther and farther from me.

“To tell you the truth,” Scott hissed, “I don't think you're made for this job.” You look like a boy, and Wall Street is not a place for youths. This is a place for killers. A place for cold-blooded mercenaries. So, in one sense, you're in luck: it’s not me who decides who to hire.

And he grunted a few sarcastically.