Patricia was infinitely more beautiful than that. But it wasn’t the sort of beauty you see in a 65-year-old woman in Town & Country magazine, the supposed barometer of what it means to age gracefully. In his book, Belfort writes that he found her ‘a calming influence’ and ‘incredibly soothing’. In fact, Belfort suggests Patricia soon became one of his closest confidantes as well as one of his most valuable assets. Well, if Belfort’s memoir is to be believed – and some are sceptical – it seems the two shared a special bond. And so a plan was hatched to open a Swiss bank account in Patricia’s (squeaky clean) name, through which his millions could be channelled.īut how on earth did The Wolf Of Wall Street convince this otherwise innocent pensioner to buy into his plan? What he needed, with the FBI now sniffing around his accounts, was someone to help him launder it. But then that was the whole point.īelfort, after all, had no problem making money. By the time Belfort met her at his opulent Caribbean wedding, she was divorced and living in Notting Hill, and seemed at first glance like an unlikely accomplice for the Wolf. She had grown up during the Blitz, before marrying an RAF test pilot named Teddy, one of the first men to fly the Harrier jet. Patricia, brought to life by Joanna Lumley in the new film, was Belfort’s wife’s aunt, an English, 65-year-old former private schoolteacher. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorsese, it is tipped to win a clutch of Oscars.īut while Belfort, played by DiCaprio, was the mastermind behind the criminal moneymaking scheme, which involved artificially inflating share prices before dumping them at a huge profit, the story also involves a modest London ‘grandma’ named Patricia. His dramatic true story, told in his bestselling memoir, is now a Hollywood blockbuster, The Wolf Of Wall Street. Belfort squandered dizzying fortunes on hedonistic parties, drugs and millionaire’s playthings, and in 2003, he was jailed for securities fraud. His methods, however, would have given the jitters to even the most rapacious bankers of today. In the 1990s, Jordan Belfort, a dentalschool failure, built from scratch a billion-dollar stockbroking firm. It is the tale of a modern-day Ozymandias, of greed, excess, hubris and a vast financial empire that eventually crumbled to dust.
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