There’s no such thing as bad publicity — as Wall Street wolf Jordan Belfort’s wife counselled — but there might be such a thing as not enough. The FT’s foreign editor Roula Khalaf credits herself as the spark behind the Scorsese blockbuster.
Writing in today’s FT, she says: “I am the journalist who in the movie wrote the 1991 ‘hatchet job’ on Mr Belfort but was disgruntled about getting only ‘a few seconds play’ in the film.”
Khalaf then sets about exploding some myths about Belfort, who “started out as a meat and seafood salesman” before moving into stocks in an office “in suburban Long Island not Wall Street”.
Even the wolf’s title, Khalaf contends, was self-appointed: it was “not one given to him at the time by Forbes or anyone else I know of”. Khalaf: the Wolf of Fleet Street?
