And so it was that five days later I convinced the Jewish Blow-Job Queen to break up with her boyfriend, and I moved her into my mansion on Meadow Lane, where twice a day she gave me world-class bl*w j*bs and occasionally made love to me. And it was perfect. We exchanged our first “I love yous” on day seven and started talking marriage on day ten. She shrugged off my ankle bracelet as if it were no big deal—in fact, the Bastard, in a rare moment of humanity, had eased my restrictions, changing them from a twenty-four-hour lockdown to a midnight curfew—and I shrugged off her excusing herself from the dinner table and vomiting up her food with the same kindness and understanding.
Meanwhile, my cooperation was going fabulously. I hadn't heard from OCD in weeks, which, according to Magnum, was par for the course. After all, I had spent a solid month singing on Court Street, going through all of Stratton's deals while giving OCD and the Bastard the education of a lifetime. Now they needed to do their homework—to subpoena records, interview witnesses, follow paper trails.
On a down note, my meeting with the Blue-eyed Devil had turned out to be a complete waste of time. He was far too cagey to get caught speaking on tape, especially to someone under indictment. Nevertheless, my captors had taken my failure in stride, assuring me that it wasn't my fault. As long as I tried my best, said OCD, I would receive my 5K letter. It was all about honesty; just remember that, he'd urged, and I'd emerge from jail still a young man.
And that was the last time we'd spoken, with the exception of a brief heads-up call, during which he told me that Danny had made bail and that Victor Wang had finally been indicted. And without saying it, the message was clear: Danny was cooperating, and Victor had become the Witch's captive, her personal trophy to be put on display.
Whatever the case, it was sometime around Thanksgiving when I finally introduced the kids to the Blow-Job Queen. And she was wonderful with them; in fact, with the exception of one hiccup-she suffered a panic attack, accompanied by violent body shakes, while the four of us were having lunch in East Hampton—I began to view her as a suitable stepmother for the children. And while we hadn't actually set a wedding date, it was only a matter of time. We were perfect together, two damaged souls who had somehow managed to fix each other.
And then disaster struck. It was the week before Christmas, and we were lying in bed together, happy as clams. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I was watching TV and she was reading a book. I glanced over and noticed that she was wearing granny glasses. I also noticed a tiny scar beneath her chin. I stared at the scar. Not very attractive! I thought. Then I stared at the granny glasses. Even less attractive! I thought. Then I lowered my gaze to her tiny chest and her reed-thin arms. Downright ugly! I thought.
We were lying beneath the white silk comforter, so I couldn't take in her whole body, but, in spite of that, there was no denying that I'd caught her at a very bad angle. And that was it: I no longer loved the Blow-Job Queen.
I took a deep breath and tried to steel myself, but it was no use. I couldn't have her in my house anymore. I needed to be alone, or with the Duchess. Perhaps I could convince the Duchess to get back together for the sake of the kids. Alas, I had already tried that angle, to no avail. The latest rumor was that she was banging Michael Bolton, that ponytailed bastard of a singer!
In any event, the next day I threw the Blow-Job Queen out—or at least tried to, at which point she had a nervous breakdown in my living room, threatening suicide. So I told her that I was only kidding, that I didn't really want to end things. I was just getting cold feet as a result of all the turmoil in my life.
To that she smiled sadly and asked me if I would like a bl*w j*b. I pondered that for a moment, knowing that this would most certainly be the best bl*w j*b of all, considering the Blow-Job Queen would now be blowing me to maintain her position on Meadow Lane.
But in the end I told her that I wouldn't, although perhaps I would later. She seemed relieved by that, so I quickly excused myself, saying I needed to take a quick ride to see my sponsor, George, who lived just down the road.
“Can't you just come over with a straitjacket and take her away?” I asked George. “I don't see any other solution.”
Those weren't the first words I'd uttered to George that afternoon, but they were close to the first. The first were: “I'm in deep shit, George. The Blow-Job Queen is threatening to commit suicide, and my dick is so sore from all the bl*w j*bs that it's ready to fall off!”
George and I were sitting in his French country kitchen on opposite sides of his bleached-wood table, while his wife, Annette, a five-foot-tall, beautiful Brooklyn firecracker with strawberry-blond hair, perfect Irish Spring skin, and a ferocious Brooklyn accent fixed us coffee. Actually, it was more than coffee (it was donuts, muffins, coffee, and freshly cut fruit), because Annette never did anything half-assed, especially when it came to achieving her life's primary mission, which was to make George's life as comfortable and wonderful as possible. And, in truth, George deserved it.
At sixty-two, he was twelve years older than Annette and served as living proof that a leopard can change its spots. Those who hadn't heard from George in the last twenty-two years would warn you: “If you see this guy walking down the street, cross it and don't make eye contact. He's angry and dangerous, especially when he's drunk, which is always. And if he does happen to beat you up or simply hold you upside down by your ankle and shake you for a while, don't bother calling the cops, unless you tell them that it was some six-foot-tall, two-hundred-fifty-pound guy named George who assaulted you. This way they'll know to bring tranq-darts!“
Whatever the case, George eventually got sober, and spent the next twenty-two years of his life redeeming himself. He made his first fortune in real estate, his second fortune in drug rehabs, and, along the way, helped more recovering Hamptons alcoholics than any other ten men combined.
Ironically, the first time I met George was on TV, when his menacingly handsome face popped onto my screen at three in the morning, while I was in the midst of a coc**ne binge. George was doing an advertisement for his rehab facility, Seafield, and he was saying things like, “Are you stoned… drunk… high? Where is your family
right now? You need help; Seafield has the answers…”. My response to that was to throw a bronze sculpture through my TV screen, putting a premature end to George's commercial.
Yet I remember thinking at the time that the face on my TV was the sort I would never forget—those gruffly handsome features, those piercing brown eyes, that perfectly coiffed salt-and-pepper hair—which was why it didn't take long to recognize him when I ran into him six weeks later in Southampton, in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. And now, eighteen months after that, he was much more to me than just a sponsor. In point of fact, he was like a father.
“I can't just come over with a straitjacket,” said George, with a few shakes of his enormous head. “You know, I warned you about this: Two alcoholics dating are like two dump trucks running into each other.” He shrugged his enormous shoulders. “Anyway, like I said before: You—are—not—done—with—your—wife—yet. It's too soon.”
Just then Annette chimed in, with her wonderful Brooklyn accent: “Oh, what's the harm, Gawge? A few BJs ain't gonna kill anyone! Jordan's lonely; he needs to have a little fun!” With that, she padded her way across the gleaming terra-cotta floor and placed the coffee and consumables on the kitchen table.
“Annette,” said George, staring at her for a second too long, “he does not need to be encouraged in this department.” Then he looked at me and said, “I'll see if I can convince Sarah to check into Seafield, but only because I think it would be good for her. In the meantime, I suggest that you don't date for a while. You should stay alone for a year and learn to be by yourself. And keep going to the high schools, giving antidrug lectures; that's the best way to spend your free time right now, being productive and not getting laid.”
I promised George that I would, and for the next four weeks I followed his advice to the letter—almost. The “almost” had to do with an occasional tryst with a young Russian gold digger—or a Natasha, as the newspapers referred to them—courtesy of a casual acquaintance of mine in the Hamptons, a local playboy type who could send a posse of naughty Natashas to all four corners of the earth at the drop of a dime.
Pretty soon, though, that got old too. In fact, by the beginning of April, I decided to close the revolving door for good, or at least for a while, and I settled into a daily regimen of boringness and tediousness, punctuated by weekend visits from the kids and nightly dinners with George and Annette.
Yes, it was boring and tedious, all right, but it also gave me a chance to find myself, to try to figure out who Jordan Belfort really was. The last decade of my life had been unspeakably complicated, and the child my parents had sent out into the world bore little resemblance to the Jordan Belfort of today. So who was I now? Was I a good man or a bad man? Was I a battle-hardened career criminal or an upstanding citizen who'd simply lost his way? Was I capable of being a loyal and loving husband, or was I a habitual whoremonger who would refuse to wear a condom until his dick fell off? And what of my drug addiction? Was the beast merely sleeping or had I kicked the habit for good?
All these questions and many more like them had been ricocheting around my skull as I passed the rest of my winter in exile. The insanity, as I had come to think of it, had penetrated every aspect of my life and had destroyed everything in its path. So this was my chance to finally sort things out, to get to the bottom of things. The only question was, how long would I have?
Not long, as it turned out, because OCD quickly broke the boredom.
It was a Monday evening when he called, and it was a disturbing call to say the least. I was sitting in my living room, on an armchair, when the cordless phone rang. I put down my AA handbook and picked it up. “Hello?”
“Hey—it's me,” said OCD. “Are you alone?”
Given the fact that it was the FBI calling, I actually looked around my own living room to make sure that I was alone. “Yeah,” I said, “I'm alone.” And I stood up and started pacing around nervously. “What's going on? How've you been?”
“Busy,” he replied. “Following up on things. Anyway, how ya holding up out there? Slept with any Ruskies lately?”
“Very funny,” I replied, with a healthy dose of nervous laughter. “I'm done with the Natashas for now. I can't take their accents. You know, da, da, da… blah, blah, blah. It gets annoying after a while.” On the advice of Magnum, I had told OCD about the naughty Natashas, lest it come out on the witness stand under cross-examination. So OCD did his own investigation, and, not surprisingly, came to the legal conclusion that there was nothing inherently against the law about getting raked over the coals by gold-digging Russians. “Anyway, what's going on?” I asked. “I haven't heard from you in a while.”
No response at first, just a few moments of sickly silence, the sort you hear when a time bomb ticks down to zero and there's a seemingly endless delay before the explosion. Finally he said, “Not much, really, but I need you to wire up against Dave Beall.” More silence. “I know this isn't pleasant for you, but you need to do this.”
“Why?” I snapped. “He's nobody!” And even as the words escaped my lips, I knew how ridiculous they sounded. It had nothing to do with whether or not I had committed crimes with Dave Beall (of course I had, simply because I'd committed crimes with all my friends), and it had everything to do with whom Dave Beall could lead them to.
OCD, calmly: “Who he is isn't what's important; what is important is that I know he's one of your closest friends.” He paused for a moment, as if searching for the right words. “Listen—I don't take any great pleasure in this, and, believe it or not, neither does Joel. But this is something you have to do. I want you to try to set a dinner meeting with him, okay?”
With a sinking heart: “Yeah. I mean, what f**king choice do I have, right?” I let out an obvious sigh. “When do you want me to call him?”
“There's no time like the present,” said OCD. “Can I make the call?”
I shook my head sadly. “Yeah, what's the f**king difference anymore? Where do you want me to set the meeting?”
“In a restaurant, a quiet one, somewhere on Long Island, but not in the Hamptons. It's too far for me.”
I thought for a moment. “How about Caracalla, in Syosset? It's Italian, small, quiet, good food.” I shook my head in despair. “It's as good a place as any to betray my best friend, you know?”
“Don't be so hard on yourself,” said OCD. “If the shoe were on the other foot, he would do the same thing. Trust me.”
“I do trust you,” I said, but what I didn't say was that I knew he was wrong. Dave would never betray me. “Go ahead, make the call. Let's get it over with.”
“All right, hold on a second…” Silence for a moment, then two clicks, then: “This is Special Agent Gregory Coleman of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The date is April third, 1999, and the time is eight p.m. This is a consensually recorded phone conversation between Jordan Belfort, a cooperating witness with the federal government, and David Beall.” Another moment of silence, then I heard the dull-thudded ringing of Dave's home telephone, and with each ring my spirits sank lower. The moment Dave picked it up, it occurred to me that I was no longer lower than pond scum.
Now I was lower than the mucus that feeds off pond scum.
*Name has been changed
CHAPTER 14
A CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE
n a way, David Michael Beall came to represent everything that could have been righteous and pure about Stratton Oakmont. Born in the ultrahick town of Burtonsville, Maryland, where sports like horseshoes and cow-tipping were the favorite pastimes, he had grown up dirt-poor and without the benefit of a father. It was the sort of do-it-yourself childhood in which a deep cut was stitched up by your own mother, using a heated sewing needle and thread.
Intellectually, Dave was neither overly bright nor overly dumb; he was average. And he wasn't much of a salesman; he was too honest and forthright, speaking with the sort of slow Southern drawl that couldn't convince anybody to do something they didn't want to do in the first place.
Like most kids from Burtonsville, he didn't grow up with a burning desire to be rich—that would come later—but what he did grow up with was a clear understanding that the world was filled with few chiefs and many Indians and that he was an Indian, and there was nothing wrong with that.
Normally, a six-foot-two-inch country bumpkin like Dave Beall would never go to college; instead, he would take a job at the local garage, doing oil changes and tune-ups, and then pass his weekends trying to get into the skintight jeans of the local Mary Joe Something-or-other. But as luck would have it, Dave was blessed with two wonderful things—speed and strength—which together earned him a full ride to the University of Maryland on a wrestling scholarship.
Along the way, he met a beautiful blond Jewess named Laurie Elovitch, who was half his size and his complete opposite. Laurie was from Long Island, and she came from a very wealthy and politically connected family, so after she and Dave graduated, they moved up to Long Island to be near them. It was understood that a guy like Dave—whom you would normally find sitting on a bale of hay, wearing denim overalls and no shirt—would be a fish out of water in cutthroat Long Island. Everyone assumed that Laurie's father, Larry, would help Dave find his way, that he would use his political connections to get Dave a decent job (perhaps in the parks department or in sanitation).
But again, fate would intervene in the life of Dave Beall—when, in November of 1988, Laurie stumbled upon a help-wanted ad in the New York Times and Dave became one of the first young Americans to answer the Stratton call-to-arms. Like many young bucks who came after him, he drove to his interview in a piece-a-shit car, wearing a piece-a-shit suit, which, in his case, was so tattered that his future mother-in-law had to use masking tape to stop it from coming apart at the seams.
Nevertheless, he passed the mirror test without incident and then went through the training program and learned how to sell— or, in Stratton terms, he learned to become a killer. Twice a day, as I stood before the boardroom and did my thing, he also came to believe that greed was good, that clients should either buy or die, and that a life of wealth and ostentation was the only true path to happiness.
And—voilà!—six months later, Dave Beall was driving a convertible Porsche, dressing in $2,000 suits, and speaking with the unbridled cocksureness of a world-class stockbroker.
However, it was through his marriage to Laurie that his fate would ultimately be sealed; Laurie would strike up the closest of friendships with the Duchess—thereby thrusting Dave and I into a very unlikely one. We were an odd couple, for sure, yet, as my drug addiction spiraled out of control, Dave became the perfect companion for me. After all, he never had much to say in the first place, and now I was too stoned most of the time to understand him anyway. So we watched movies together, the same ones over and over again—James Bond, mostly, and original episodes of Star Trek—while we holed up in my basement, with the shades drawn and the lights dimmed, and I consumed enough drugs to knock out a family of grizzly bears.
Of course, Dave loved his drugs too, but not nearly as much. (Who did, save Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones?) Either way, he was always sober enough to keep an eye on me, which was the Duchess's order. Her own patience had already run out, so she put Dave in charge of making sure I didn't kill myself before she figured out a way to get me into rehab.
Eventually, she did, but not before I did try to kill myself.
And as I had stood in Dave's kitchen two years ago, distraught and desperate, chewing on a hundred tablets of morph**e, he wrestled me to the ground and stuck his fingers in my mouth and scooped the pills out. Then he called an ambulance and saved my life.
Four weeks later, when I emerged from rehab and arrived in Southampton with my marriage in tatters, it was Dave and Laurie who came out to the beach and did what they could to help us pick up the pieces. While I was well aware that that was something only the Duchess and I could do, it was a gesture I would never forget.
Yet even more telling was how Dave and Laurie acted after my indictment: While most of my friends ran for cover, Dave stood by me, and while most of the Duchess's friends jumped on the dump-your-husband bandwagon, Laurie tried to convince her to stay.