When former stockbroker Jordan Belfort began serving his sentence for securities fraud and money laundering in 2004, his cellmate at Taft Correctional Institution was Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong fame. Chong was doing nine months in the facility for conspiring to distribute drug paraphernalia—more specifically, bongs. The two were housed in a minimum security prison and, according to Belfort, it was “like a boys’ club.” Chong later compared the facility to a hotel in Manhattan.
When Belfort first arrived, Chong said it was “like Elvis coming to jail.” “We were part of the elite gang,” Chong told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2013. The pair ate meals “Goodfellas-style,” along with PGA Tour caddie Eric Larson, who spent almost 11 years behind bars for selling cocaine. “We had these beautiful vegetarian, healthy meals every night, and Jordan was part of the gang. We had a nice little hierarchy there, intelligent famous guys hanging out together.”
Chong was working on a book at the time, and encouraged Belfort to do the same. “We used to tell each other stories at night, and I had him rolling hysterically on the floor. The third night, he goes, ‘You’ve got to write a book.’ So I started writing,” Belfort recalled during a 2014 interview with The Hollywood Reporter. As Chong tells it, “All the stories were really about how he coped with his inadequacies, you know?” The comedian went on to say, “Like, he is a genius…but he is short, shorter than most, and Jewish, and so he compensated with money, you know, being able to make a lot of money. But the way he made it was part of his genius, because he would inspire salespeople to basically go rob people.”
Initially, Belfort thought his writing was terrible, but he found inspiration in the work of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson and decided to keep at it. The resulting book was the 2007 best-seller The Wolf of Wall Street. His infamy proved lucrative, as a number of publishers approached him about purchasing his memoir, with Random House picking it up for over $1 million. It was eventually adapted into the 2013 Martin Scorsese film of the same name, which became the highest-grossing movie of the director’s career.
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