John Crudele

John Crudele

Business

My moment with the real ‘Wolf of Wall Street’

I remember the one and only phone conversation I had with Jordan Belfort even though it took place more than 22 years ago.

I’d been tipped off by someone about a Long Island brokerage firm that was being investigated by the Securities & Exchange Commission for doing naughty things — like pumping up the price of worthless stocks and then selling them to dupes at a significant profit.

Can’t remember who gave me this tip, but the reason I remember the conversation with Belfort is that he confessed.

Yeah, I asked if he and his company, Stratton Oakmont, were being investigated by the SEC and Belfort said, “Yep,” that’s what was happening.

Take my word for it, that was a Perry Mason moment — the guy’s being interrogated and he blurts out the truth. I can’t remember that happening again in the last two decades.

In case your cable TV has been turned off for nonpayment and you missed all the commercials, there’s a major movie coming out soon about Belfort.

In Paramount Pictures’ “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Leonardo DiCaprio plays Belfort and Martin Scorcese directs. I’m not sure my phone call is in the film, but if it is I hope Gilbert Gottfried does my voice.

I’m going to a special screening of the movie next week.

Naturally, it opens to the public on Christmas Day, which I guess is appropriate since there was so much white stuff in Stratton Oakmont’s office.

You can bet that Belfort’s scam began to unwind the day my column ran on Aug. 2, 1991. Nobody was going to do business with these — as the movie makes them out — likable bandits after The Post headline “L.I. Broker Getting SEC Scrutiny.”

What had Belfort been up to?

Jordan Belfort’s exploits inspired the film “The Wolf of Wall Street.”AP Photo/jordanbelfort.com

As I documented in that long-ago column, Stratton Oakmont had taken the stock of a company called Ventura Entertainment Group, which became public in 1988 at $3, and pumped it up to $19 a share.

A spokeswoman for Ventura said in 1991 that she assumed that Belfort was being looked into for only some minor violations. “Like a traffic ticket,” she said.

She was wrong and Ventura’s stock soon collapsed.

Another firm called IPS Healthcare was turned into a public company with Belfort’s and Stratton’s help in January 1991 at $8 a share. It soon fell to less than $4. And there were plenty more.

This is all quite quaint by today’s standards, when manipulating the stock market has become a daily event that’s winked at by regulators.

But even back then the story of puny Stratton Oakmont and its loose-lipped chairman apparently didn’t excite me.

I don’t think I ever followed up on that first story — not even when everyone else jumped on the Stratton Oakmont tale a year later or when Belfort was ultimately convicted of securities fraud.

That earned him 22 months in prison and a bill for $110 million in restitution (which he apparently hasn’t been keeping up on). He got out of jail in 2006. Justice wasn’t particularly swift in his case.

Had I known then what I do now — mostly from the amped-up movie trailers — I probably would have paid a visit, or two, or maybe three, to Belfort’s Lake Success “office,” which, the movie tells us, had formerly been a garage.

There was — according to trailers for the movie — lots of booze and parties and yachts and music and pranks and more beautiful women in one place than Long Island has probably seen since the Stones last played Nassau Coliseum.

Belfort was likely smirking when he told me over the phone back in 1991: “It’s a tough business, but it can be lucrative.” Lucrative indeed!

“We were making more money than we knew what to do with,” DiCaprio’s Belfort says in the movie. But the movie-Belfort also says he was angry: One year, he says, “I made $49 million, which really pissed me off because I was three shy of a million a week.”

Of course I don’t know how much of that is true and how much is Hollywood.

(Hey Hollywood: I know a bigger, more colorful Wall Street crook story than Belfort’s. And my story would make a much better movie. Give me a jangle if you are interested.)