After I put this book down I had to google and make sure Belfort was for real.
A millionaire many times over by the time he was 31, Belfort run himself rugged with a combination of hard drugs, fast women and even faster cars.
He founded and run a successful investment bank manned by virtual clones of himself – young, ambitious and debauched.
But the more money he racked in the more he felt he had to cut corners with a series of tax dodges and money laundering scams, fuelled by a prodigious drug habit that had him throwing back a cocktail of drugs that shocked even him.
In one of the highlights of the book he loses his 172-foot yatch in a storm, not before shoving off h is helicopter into an angry Mediterranean sea in a last ditch attempt to save his yatch.
It comes to a head and he loses it all, his firm, a lot of his money and his family.
This book reads like a thriller and gives new meaning to the term stranger than fiction.
It is a must read if only to warn us against the pitfalls of wealth and fame.