L.F. Rothschild was a merchant and investment banking firm where in 1987 Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker, finds a job working for Mark Hanna. Hanna fast draws him in with tales of a promiscuous stockbroker culture where drugs and sexual encounters with insanely beautiful women are on tap to the successful. Hanna believes that the only goal of a stockbroker is to make money for himself.
Come Black Monday, Jordan is terminated when the company folds. He takes a job at a penny stock firm based in Long Island, but he makes a fortune because he enjoys high commission and he has a high-rolling style that his clients find attractive.
Jordan and his neighbor Donnie Azoff found their own company, bringing a handful of Jordan's friends on board with them; Jordan trains them in his own particular art of the hard sell. They perfected the pump and dump scam, a form of securities fraud that makes positive statements in order to artificially inflate the value of a stock only to sell cheaply purchased stock at a much higher price. With so many shares being sold at once, the share price tanks, and the smaller investors lose their money. His company, Stratton Oakmont, is successful and a magnet to ambitious young financiers who want to work there. Jordan's life becomes all about drugs and prostitutes. Married at the time, Jordan meets a woman named Naomi Lapaglia, and marries her after his wife divorces him, having found out about his cheating.
Whilst he is enjoying the high life, the SEC are investigating Stratton Oakmont. Jordan secures the IPO of the footwear company Steve Madden, and makes twenty two million dollars in three hours, all completely illegally. This deal catches the eye of the F.B.I. and when Jordan learns he is under investigation, he decides to start moving his money away from the reach of the authorities. He opes a Swiss bank account in the name of Naomi's Aunt Emma, a British national and so outside of the reach of the American authorities. He smuggles the cash into Switzerland with his friend Brad Bodnick's wife and in-laws, who held European passports.
These are tense times, and tempers are frayed, at best. Donnie is finding it hard to maintain his composure. He starts an argument with Brad that turns into a brawl, and although he manages to leave before the police arrive, Brad does not, and is arrested. Although he is questioned hard he never mentions Jordan or Donnie. Jordan, meanwhile, has discovered that his telephones are being wiretapped by the F.B.I. and his father urges him to leave Stratton Oakmont and keep his head down. Whilst plans for this are being put in motion, Jordan's attorney negotiates a deal with authorities that guarantees him no prison time at all.
Jordan has every intention of leaving the firm because his head tells him it is the smart thing to do; but his heart is telling him something else. During his leaving speech he actually manages to talk himself out of leaving at all. He does leave town for a while though; he and Donnie take their wives on a vacation to Italy and whilst they are there, they receive word that Aunt Emma has passed away suddenly as a result of a heart attack. Jordan feels this would be a good time for a trip to Switzerland to settle the bank account he opened there in her name. He wants to bypass Swiss border control and so decides to sail to Monaco and enter the country that way; the yacht capsizes because of a storm. Jordan, Donnie and their wives are rescued but the plane that is flying them to safety collides with a seagull. This, decides Jordan, is God talking to him, telling him to change his life and clean it up.
Two years later, Jordan is arrested by the F.B.I. because Saurel has been arrested in Florida and has offered information about Jordan by way of a deal. The evidence against Jordan is overwhelming, and all he can do is agree to collect evidence on his co-workers in exchange for a more lenient sentence. Jordan's life is falling apart; Naomi asks for a divorce, and demands custody of the children. Jordan is angry, and they get into a violent fight, which ends when he hits her. He snorts cocaine that he finds hidden in one of his secret places in the couch cushions, afterwards snatching up his daughter and piling her into the car. He doesn't get very far; he backs into a pole trying to get out of the driveway.
In the morning, Jordan wears a wire to work as part of his deal with the Feds; he is not comfortable informing on Donnie and slips him a note warning him that he is wearing a wire. Donnie suffers from no such sentiment; he gives the note to the F.B.I. and Jordan is arrested again, this time for breach of his deal. Stratton Oakmont is raided and shut down.
Although he breached the agreement he made, Jordan receives a lenient sentence of three years in a minimum security prison, from where he is released on parole after serving twenty two months. He goes on to make a living as a motivational speaker, sharing his sales techniques with fresh new financiers at expensive, ticketed seminars.
