Real-life Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort on how to sell anything — even a Brexit deal

There’s a pained look on Jordan Belfort’s face when he talks about Theresa May. It’s not that he feels particularly strongly about Brexit — he has a charmed life in Los Angeles — he just can’t bear to see how badly she is selling her deal. “Either you are selling or you are failing,” explains Belfort, sounding exactly like Leonardo DiCaprio did when the star played him in the 2013 biopic The Wolf of Wall Street — but stockier and with darker, close-cropped black hair.

“Whether you are a parent selling to your kids that they have to make their bed or a politician selling Brexit, there are always two cases you make: logical and emotional. It’s the emotional case that closes the deal. Because May’s got to the bitter end of it she has to talk about the logical side but she is not selling the emotional equation that got people fired up originally enough to get away with it.”

Belfort, 56, prides himself on being able to sell anything and has come to London to share his skills on a speaking tour. His catchphrase is “See the wolf. Be the wolf”. For him, being the wolf has meant rebuilding his life from scratch — he is the master of comebacks. Twenty years ago he spent 22 months in prison for fraud and money laundering. As dramatised in The Wolf of Wall Street, he used his powers of persuasion for the wrong reasons. He made billions from selling stocks that didn’t exist and spent it on — he now says — “every drug going”. At his Wolfish height, he crashed a helicopter while high on quaaludes and arranged midget-tossing in his office.

“When I started taking the drugs it was amazing,” he says with a flicker of nostalgia. “Then it turns on you. When I finally got to rehab after an intervention there was a bag I carried around with me: it had 22 drugs inside it. Every f***ing drug. I was like a human petri dish. I had uppers, downers, and I was a really responsible drug addict, balancing out my highs, just the right amount of ’ludes and Xanax, Klonopin. Some drugs I just love the name, Klonopin is a great name for a drug.

“I started partying on a Saturday night, then it would stretch to Friday, then maybe I would take work off on Friday and party Thursday too,” he hits the table for emphasis. “I remember planning to wake up Monday morning and get high early so I could sober up before work.”

Now, “sober for so long it’s hysterical”, he insists he doesn’t miss banking — profit is no longer what drives him. “You end up making more when you play the long game of giving value first. People at my talks tell me they would pay 10 times more to see me. It’s like that movie Bohemian Rhapsody. Great movie. What it says is exactly what I feel — that I’m at my best on stage, I’m the most comfortable. It’s where I’m supposed to be and it’s addictive. It’s not about the money.”

Today, he’s on a sugar high. He enters the Kensington café with a can of Red Bull in hand and is delighted to see porridge with honey on the menu: “I love the way you guys do porridge.”

A member of his entourage orders it for him as he outlines where the Prime Minister is going wrong. “I don’t have an opinion either way on whether Brexit should happen — there's benefits each way. Watching from the US it seemed like the face of it all was that Nigel Forge.” Does he mean Farage? “Yes. He was hitting this strong emotional base, it’s like IT sales when you close a deal.

“Here’s an example: Bill Clinton. This guy lied to us, was caught, and we loved him because he was the best salesman. He’d give you this puppy-eyed look and you’d think he felt your pain. Trump was able to communicate a message through this but he could still benefit from my methods.” Trump and Belfort once moved in the same circles. “In the Nineties, Trump picked me up in his helicopter to go to his Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. He pointed out everything he owned as we flew over, — ‘I own that, oh that, and also that’.”

Belfort admits that he did vote for Trump, albeit ruefully, for a man usually so confident in his decisions. “I did it not so much because I love Trump but because I believe in less government. A big government is nice in theory but they f***ing just waste money. The private sector does things better.”

This individualist logic means he's confident that a post-Brexit Britain will be alright. “You guys seem on pins and needles but whether you stay or go there’s still going to be people that get rich.” It’s time for another film reference: “I watched the movie Darkest Hour recently. It’s a good f***ing movie, and it showed the British are resilient. That’s because of pride. So there’s no way they are going to curl up and die. You guys have been a banking centre for hundreds of years, nobody wants to go to Frankfurt — people speak English here. This is a country that always finds its way.” The idea that pride might have got us into this mess in the first place doesn’t seem to occur to him.

How did he find his own way when he hit rock bottom? “I understood what I needed to focus on to come back — my children. People need to identify their purpose and mine was not wanting to let my kids down. They saw me struggling and have to start again. They saw you can have a setback and put one foot in front of the other and get back, which is important for them.”

He has two sons — one's a rapper, the other is in business with him — and a daughter, who is at NYU training to be a psychologist or a doctor. What would he say if they wanted to go into banking? “Oh boy. I wouldn’t encourage them but I wouldn’t tell them no. There’s nothing wrong with banking, it’s a great way to make money but I think there’s better ways to achieve happiness. My daughter’s good with money though, and she’s a socialist.” Amused at this, he repeats it with a grin. “My daughter the liberal. But she’s not a crazy liberal.”

Is he more careful with money now? “Nah,” he says, a hefty Rolex on his wrist. “I was never careful with money, I wanted to make so much that I didn’t have to save. Now my wife spends all the money, she loves clothes.”

Belfort doesn’t know where this impulse to get rich came from. His parents were “risk-averse accountants”. “Watching them I saw that you can be smart, educated, hard-working but there was something missing: risk-taking and salesmanship.” At eight, living in Queens, New York, he decided he wanted to be different. “I got a paper round, I was doing magic shows, but the big money was when I was 16 and I sold Italian ices on the beach. I made about $40,000 that summer. That was the first time I identified as a success and set me up to be the person I became.”

Does he think the banking sector has reformed? “Most people have the misconception that [the 2007 crash] was a disaster but even in the worst of times 80 to 90 per cent of people were totally honest. It’s only a small percentage that go off the rails, but that’s enough to destroy the whole system. Britain has moved quicker than the US to change policy to stop conflicts of interest in things like the broker/client system. People have short memories — what happened in 2007 wasn’t the first crash. Things work in boom and bust cycles.”

Fortune has favoured Belfort. “Wolf was a good nickname and I got lucky with Leo playing me, it’s better than Danny DeVito,” he laughs. He and “Leo” go on bike rides together and “Leo loves dinner, we had Italian food last time”.

Margot Robbie, who played his wife in the film, has a powerful effect on him. “The first time I met her she sucked the air out of the room, she was that good-looking. She isn’t aware of how beautiful she is. She crossed her bare legs and asked what was it about my wife that made me so attracted to her.” He gestures as if to her legs. “She is one of the good ones, Margot. She still acts like she’s from a small town in Australia.”

The Wolf will be back here in May but before that he plans to lie low for a month while he recovers from shoulder surgery. Too much tennis has depleted the cartilage in his shoulder so he’s having a similar procedure to the one Andy Murray had in his hip. He’s survived worse, he says: “It’s amazing that I’m still alive.”

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