The Wolf of Wall Street: why London's bankers love real-life fraudster Jordan Belfort

City boys are flocking to private screenings of Scorsese’s hit film about a Wall Street fraudster. As a new anti-hero emerges, Joshi Herrmann reports on why London’s bankers love Jordan Belfort
20 January 2014

Four minutes into Martin Scorsese’s new film The Wolf of Wall Street, during which Leonardo DiCaprio’s character Jordan Belfort has done coke off a hooker’s arse and had two of his staff throw a dwarf into a target in the middle of the trading floor, the film’s protagonist lays out his philosophy.

“Of all the drugs under God’s blue heaven, there is one that is my absolute favourite,” he says as the camera trains on DiCaprio cutting an enormous line with his credit card. “Enough of this shit will make you invincible — able to conquer the world and eviscerate your enemies,” he explains, staring at the drug. Unfolding the hundred-dollar bill he’s just used to snort powder up his nose, he clarifies that he’s talking about the money.

Some films become cult classics unexpectedly, inspiring devotion in places that their makers couldn’t have predicted, such as Victor Fleming’s 1939 The Wizard of Oz and its runaway popularity in the gay community. With The Wolf of Wall Street it’s already clear who the keenest fans are going to be.

The film opens in cinemas tomorrow, but such is the enthusiasm for it among City workers that many companies have decided to put on special viewing parties for their staff. Cinemas across London are preparing to welcome thousands of bankers, brokers and traders to bespoke private screenings, the Standard has learned, and a cinema booking company says there is more corporate demand for this film than any they can remember.

With one company planning to dress up Nineties Wall Street-style for the occasion, the City’s buzz about Belfort has the ring of an enthronement. It is tempting to think that DiCaprio’s character might be a new cult hero for a new generation of bankers, as Gordon Gekko (protagonist of 1987’s Wall Street) was to their bosses. You can imagine the Square Mile’s new generation quoting Belfort’s corny phrases about money, drugs and women like their pre-crash predecessors did Gekko’s.

A comedy email flying around between bankers in London and New York this week makes the link, plotting a market index since the Eighties with arrows showing major price falls on the release dates of Wall Street and its 2010 sequel Money Never Sleeps, and a Wolf of Wall Street arrow pointing at today’s high price. Will the Wolf consign so many bankers and traders to therapy and rehab that the markets will plummet on its release, the jokes goes. At least I think it’s a joke.

City managers have certainly clocked that their staffers want a bit of the Wolf. US business consultancy FTI has booked a whole Odeon auditorium in Covent Garden next Thursday and invited 250 young brokers, analysts, accountants, lawyers and other clients to come and take in Belfort’s biopic. It is expecting 180 guests to join 40 FTI staff at the cinema — the first time it has put on a film.

“We’re inviting people to watch the film, we’re not there to say we support everything that went on,” says one of the organisers, referring to the pump and dump trading frauds for which Belfort was jailed in 2004. “People have been asking if they can bring a colleague,” the FTI worker says, adding that some of the senior staff are annoyed they haven’t been invited.

Oil and gas recruiter Spencer Ogden is going further. “The entire London office will be dressing up for the day in power Nineties suits and slick hair,” says development director Simon Taylor. The company’s social secretary has hired out a cinema room on Monday night, Taylor says. “It’s going to be quite a sight — all 150-plus of us walking down down Tottenham Court Road!”

Venue booking company Hire Space says it has received unprecedented enquiries for its cinema venues, including from shipping companies, trading firms, banks and consultants, and has already organised half a dozen corporate screenings.

CEO Will Swannell says his phones have been “off the hook with City clients competing for the few venues that are offering private screenings”. He says the hire price for West End cinema screenings has jumped to about £4,500, three times the normal rate. One of his colleagues says: “It is definitely the one film where we’ve seen a major increase in enquiries.”

A PA tasked with finding a screening space for the staff at a City commodity trader told the Standard: “I spoke to 20 cinemas across London. Nobody is letting in private screenings and if they are they’re charging three times the normal rate, it’s madness.” And this morning CityAM’s diary reported that picture houses at the Barbican and Greenwich, as well as the Cineworld on West India Quay, have corporate bookings.

The City’s rush to see the film follows a story from Reuters published over the weekend that Scandinavian bank Nordea had booked all 140 seats in a downtown Stockholm cinema for the same purpose. “As lack of self-awareness goes, bankers prove again to be a notch below the animal kingdom,” one tweeter responded.

A banker at JP Morgan told the Standard yesterday: “A lot of my desk have a bit of a cultish hero worship vibe going on when they talk of [Michael] Douglas [who played Gekko] and Wall Street so I’m sure they’ll love the Wolf.”

Preparing for the film, DiCaprio said he asked some bankers why they joined Wall Street. “What was funny, and so ironic, was that we were making a movie about the debauchery of Wall Street but 80 per cent of the guys I talked to said the reason they got into the world of finance was to try to be like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street,” he told Square Mile magazine.

The Standard’s film critic David Sexton says Scorsese “doesn’t even attempt [to replicate] the supposed criticism of Gekko and the greed-is-good mantra that there was in Wall Street— the film is an out-and-out celebration of Belfort’s excesses and none of his victims ever appears, except as anonymous suckers on the phone”.

Half an hour into the film, DiCaprio says of his staff: “I know they’re knuckleheads but I need them to want to live like me.” All the signs are that by the end of the month, the City’s young gunslingers will want just that.

GEKKO VS THE WOLF: THE FATTEST LINES

Gordon

“The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”

“What’s worth doing is worth doing for money.”

“It’s all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation.”

“Lunch is for wimps.”

“We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paperclip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it.”

“If you need a friend, get a dog”

Jordan

“Money doesn’t just buy you a better life, better food, better cars, better pussy — it also makes you a better person.”

“The year I turned 26 I made $49 million, which really pissed me off because it was three shy of a million a week.”

“I am not gonna die sober!”

“I’ve been a poor man, and I’ve been a rich man. And I choose rich every fucking time.”

“My Ferrari was white like Don Johnson’s in Miami Vice, not red.”

Fred Nathan

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