It’s 6:45 am on a Wednesday night and I’m almost an hour into a sales pitch called “The Truth Behind Its Success”. A few hundred other people are sitting in rigid plastic chairs in the Los Angeles Convention Center, seeking transformation.

“My dad f —— hated vendors. Vendor equals slime and a bucket,” Jordan Belfort says as he crosses the stage. “The truth is, selling is everything in life. You sell or you fail.”

This is Jordan Belfort, aka the “The wolf of Wall Street” played byLeonardo DiCaprio in the Martin scorsese movie of the same name. the magnified film plus $ 390 million worldwide and was nominated for five Oscars. The Wolf of Wall Street motivational speech cost me $ 89 and was aggressively promoted on a discount site Groupon (50% off!).

The world is divided between ducks and eagles, by Belfort. “The ‘duck'” – he spits the word out in his Long Island accent – “has a story, their bullshit story. They quack like a duck. Why can’t they have what they want? Their story them. prevents them from getting what they want. They have what I call an “impossibility option”. “

Now the eagles – the eagles are different. “The eagles hover above the crowd,” said Belfort, before delivering his truth. “One thing I can promise you: there isn’t a single duck in this room.” You know why? Ducks don’t come to things like that.

This is Belfort’s “Straight Line: Sales & Entrepreneurship” technique. It’s basically a bunch of clichés and aphorisms (“results, people do shit”, to win you have to be “sharp”, “enthusiastic as hell” and “an expert in your field” ). On stage, he can’t help but interrupt himself with his own improbably wild and illegal tales, most of which were portrayed in the film, punctuated with the required naming. (“Leo was so convincing, not just because he’s a great actor but because I spent months working with him.”)

Read more The Wolf of Wall Street: Movie Review

Here again, the truth tends to bend in the world of Belfort. He’s a guy who swindled $ 110 million of its investors in a “pumping and emptying” system on

penny stocks
.

You just have to ask Joel M. Cohen, the federal prosecutor who forced Belfort to turn against his friends and colleagues within 48 hours. Even the nickname is misleading: “Belfort invented the name ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ for his book,” Cohen tells me over the phone. “In my months of debriefing and years of investigating his business, no one ever called him.”

On the big screen, DiCaprio’s Belfort was contained in sleaze, a swift ball of creaminess heading towards its target, amassing collateral damage in the form of cars, boats, strippers and friends. In real life, Belfort is scattered, restless and fuzzy. He scribbles his points on a series of four easels filled with Office Depot paper, the writing is indecipherable. He goes up and down the stage, marker in hand. It is less Tony robbins, a more muscular guy at the gym distributing unsolicited workout tips.

Dressed in a white golf shirt, black dress pants, and $ 500 Golden Goose sneakers – he rocks the ex-inmate life pretty well. He is buff and pompous, full of unrepentant bluster. Belfort relishes every detail of a $ 167 million yacht sinking in a quaaludes overdose, not to mention bragging about cheating on his wife. It was with an “Ethiopian six feet tall,” he said, keeping the moment. “When was I going to have the chance to do it again?”

Humiliated, he is not. Then again, he’s the first to admit that his 22 months of incarceration wasn’t exactly hardcore. “I was in a not-so-bad jail. I didn’t get Bubba’s ass fucked every night.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I really wasn’t, by the way.”

Watch more Real life ‘Wolf of Wall Street’: ‘It was horrible what I did, but I was taking a lot of drugs’

His cellmate was Tommy chong, (yes, from Cheech and Chong), who told Belfort that his stories were too outrageous not to be dismissed. Belfort boasts of having learned to write and that the New York Times book reviewer once said: “I wrote as Tom wolfe and Hunter S. thompson were my mentors. “

The wolf brings a friend on stage to present a real estate transaction. It is a guaranteed method of making money on real estate, with no “upfront fees, no credit checks, and no income checks”. (You can also work from home). Oddly enough, he detailed the subprime mortgage collapse and financial crisis while using the same rhetoric the banks used for “liar loans” – in a 40-minute live infomercial. It sounds outrageous to me, but people around me buy into it.

“It’s an active game. There’s no risk. I’m not doing any of that,” Belfort said on the sidelines, between sips of red Gatorade. He says he just wants to share the opportunity with us. “But there isn’t much more time to get in there.” About forty people are inspired by it. Belfort’s friend shows a slide of a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house he says his students bought for $ 110,000 and returned for a profit of $ 86,300. (A Zillow listing of the property reveals that it is a two-bedroom, one-bath home. It costs $ 284,900 and was sold last July for $ 275,000. The listing agent didn’t did not return my requests for comment.)

After about 40 minutes, Belfort takes the stage again. It is now past 9 p.m. and it doesn’t look like it will be over any time soon. Belfort says that after he is finished he will answer questions, “but about business, not just about drugs and prostitutes.” I walk towards the back of the room.

A financial planner and his tax lawyer friend stand there with their arms folded and shake their heads. The planner tells me he will try to get a refund; he is insulted by the field. Apparently I just missed a wife and her husband who paid $ 500 each for VIP seating and one-on-one. They also wanted a refund.

A little less than four hours, Belfort finally begins to relax. He’s offering to host people for his three-day seminar for only $ 1,997 if 100 of us register. Apparently it’s worth $ 10,000.

Read more Jordan Belfort of ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ says he’ll earn more talking about tour than stock trading

It’s not entirely clear how much money Belfort is making from this tour, or how much of the $ 110,362,993.87 in restitution it owes the federal government it actually pays. According to an October 11, 2013 letter from the Justice Department, Belfort coughed up just over $ 11 million, but took the position that since he is now free he is no longer obligated to pay.

It’s about $ 99 million still owed to its victims.

The day after the Los Angeles conference, I called the Belfort agency to find out how much he was making. Anne Koppe “from Jordan Belfort’s office” reminds me, immediately launching into a rant about how he wants to reimburse the restitution but the government is withholding him because the lawyers want to take their share of the fees (American lawyers are salaried, they don’t not charge by the hour). Belfort, in fact, pays more than what is needed, she says. (Anne Koppe was also the name of Belfort’s fiancé when THRinterviewed him earlier this year.)

Koppe insists he doesn’t make any money from the US tour – but when asked about international bookings, she replies, “Well, we’ve got to eat.”

Her speaking costs range from nothing for charitable events, she says, to $ 100,000 a day. The Justice Department maintains that Belfort has money in his Australian company, to which he does not have access.

But what about the wolf claims he would make $ 100 million during his lecture tour? She laughs. “It’s just Jordan Belfort who is Jordan Belfort. You have to dream big. That way if you fail, you are still rich.”

E-mail: Soo.Youn@THR.com
Twitter: @lalasoo