Daughter of the Boiler Room

The day my father had to surrender to prison, I drove him. My mother had locked herself in the bathroom crying and throwing up, becoming nothing short of a more beautiful version of Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine. Ironically enough, Marty, she looks like a cross between Sharon Stone and Michelle Pfeiffer. Totally your leading ingénue type. Anyhow, after my father successfully laundered money in my name, hiding what was left of our assets from the government in a Wells Fargo bank account, I arrived home to discover multiple phone calls from creditors and attorneys threatening to sue me. He’d left me in nearly $100,000 worth of debt. He left and never told me.

Jordan Belfort’s life story, The Wolf of Wall Street, is estimated to have made $35 million in its opening five-day run at the box office. Everyone, from Marty, Leo and Jonah to Jordan himself, is thrilled.

Well, not everyone.

For starters, the film shows a ton of female genitalia but it doesn’t show the face of even a single victim of Stratton Oakmont’s stock scams. And there were hundreds of thousands. 1999’s Boiler Room managed to incorporate the victims into the main plot line. In The Wolf, most of what didn’t involve cocaine or crotch was left on the cutting room floor.

This week, a letter written by the daughter of one of Belfort’s former business partners has gone viral as the former boiler room king enjoyed his faux-redemption parade. It’s worth a read:

An Open Letter to the Makers of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf Himself (LA Weekly)