The Wolf of Wall Street is a film about a man who makes a fortune by manipulating speculative stocks and selling them to investors who trust his brokers. And some of the money that paid for the film, prosecutors suggested, was itself stolen from a fund meant to serve the people of an entire country.
Everyone knows the story on screen. The one worth understanding is what was going on behind the camera.
The film that made fraud look glamorous
Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film follows Jordan Belfort, a real stockbroker whose firm manipulated the prices of speculative shares and sold them to unsuspecting investors in the 1990s.
The film is famous for its excess: yachts, drugs, a wall of money that never seems to run out. Plenty of viewers walked away thinking Belfort looked like he was having a good time. That tension, condemning greed while filming it in loving detail, has followed the movie since release.
The film was produced by Red Granite Pictures, a Los Angeles company started in 2010 by Riza Aziz, stepson of the then-Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak, and Joey McFarland. It did well. The Wolf of Wall Street took in around $392 million worldwide against a budget of roughly $100 million. Accepting best actor at the 2014 Golden Globes, Leonardo DiCaprio thanked Red Granite for “being not only collaborators, but taking a risk on this movie”. He was not accused of any wrongdoing, and there is no suggestion he knew where the money came from. Read back now, though, the line has an edge nobody intended.
Where the money actually came from
The financing traces back to 1MDB, a Malaysian state investment fund set up in 2009 to fund projects for the country’s benefit. U.S. authorities say that instead, huge sums were siphoned out of it in one of the largest financial frauds ever prosecuted. In Najib’s own trial, prosecutors set his conduct against the wider scheme, in which investigators allege the theft of about $4.5 billion from the fund overall; the charges against Najib himself concerned smaller, specific sums. The scheme, prosecutors say, was largely run by the financier Jho Low.
Part of that money, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, ended up paying for the movie. The DOJ said Red Granite used more than $100 million in stolen 1MDB funds to finance the film. Court filings from Najib’s trial later pointed to a $9 million advance to the producers from a company owned by Low.
The name in the credits
The detail that makes the whole thing land is small and easy to miss. Jho Low, the man prosecutors put at the centre of the fraud, was given a “special thanks” credit at the end of the film, even though he held no official role at Red Granite.
What happened next
In July 2016 the DOJ went to court to recover assets bought with the stolen money, and among the targets was all future profits from The Wolf of Wall Street. The prosecution’s framing was blunt. “Neither 1MDB nor the people of Malaysia ever saw a penny of profit from the film, or from any other investments made with money diverted,” said Leslie Caldwell, then head of the DOJ’s Criminal Division. That was the government’s allegation, not a finding reached at trial.
Red Granite said that “To Red Granite’s knowledge, none of the funding it received four years ago was in any way illegitimate, and there is nothing in today’s civil lawsuit claiming that Red Granite knew otherwise.” In 2018 it agreed to pay $60 million to settle the DOJ’s claims, without admitting any wrongdoing.
The irony the film itself couldn’t have scripted
Strip away the legal caveats and the shape of it is what stays with you. A film that spent three hours showing how a charming man separates trusting people from their money was, on the government’s account, made possible by something strikingly similar, on a scale the film’s own villain never came close to. The fraud dramatised on screen cost investors more than $100 million. The alleged wider scheme behind its financing ran to billions.
What is hardest to shake is not the money. It’s that the movie is, in a sense, a study of why nobody asks the obvious question when the returns look this good and the party is this fun. Belfort’s victims didn’t want to break the spell either.
And somewhere in those same years, a lavishly financed film about a stock swindler rolled into production, hired one of the great American directors, put a global star at the top of the bill, and thanked a financier in the credits, while the source of the money attracted remarkably little mainstream scrutiny until investigations into 1MDB brought the financing into public view.