“Ask a pal at a Wall Street firm about the box-office hit The Wolf of Wall Street, and brace for one of those sour faces that suggests there’s a bad smell in the room. Those sex-obsessed, drug-taking thugs who ripped off investors in Martin Scorsese’s all-time, biggest-grossing film have nothing in common with the refined investment professionals who do business on real Wall Street, they will tell you.

“On Wall Street, after all, people don’t toss midgets at targets in the middle of the trading floor. They don’t sell schlocky penny stocks of worthless companies, either, although they do have a knack for peddling big-commission products stuffed with time-bomb investments. They don’t do all those drugs and have all that sex; who could find the time when you’re so busy working to find investments that are in clients’ best interests?

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“It’s in Wall Street’s interest to put a distance between itself and rogues like Belfort and his firm, says Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for investors.

“If people understood the similarities between Belfort and Wall Street, there would be a riot in this country,” he says. Kelleher explains, for example, that Belfort’s operation dealt in barely-regulated penny stocks that came with either skimpy information or documents that twisted or obfuscated the facts. On conventional Wall Street, says Kelleher, firms bask in the convenience of the opaque, too, trading the kinds of over-the-counter derivatives that helped crash the economy in 2008.

“Wall Street likes nothing more than a non-transparent, non-regulated market,” he says, which is what investors got both in Stratton’s products and in some of the dense stuff that the Street sells today. Obscure products “are where you can rip people off the most,” he says.”

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