Hustlers & Wolves

In the summer of 1984 the bankroll I had been playing ended with a loss, my most recent roommate moved back to California, doubling my rent, and my debts were mounting. I was playing a lot of bridge and one of the players recruited me for his sales outfit. Bill, a forty-year old former Kansan, had been a barber for most of the twenty years he lived in Vegas, but had switched to sales a few years before. He was hitting his stride, and had become an apostle for the pot of gold he was finding at the end of the sales rainbow. Even today two grand a week would be serious money; thirty years ago it was incredible. 

The outfit was one of the infamous boiler rooms. It stayed on the right side of the law; unlike many of its competitors, but what it sold was crap. "Advertising specialties" was the catchall for baseball caps, key chains and pens, mostly pens, upon which the customer's business would be emblazoned.  You, Richard Roe, could be the proud owner of one hundred cheap plastic pens with "Roe's Union 76, Bozeman, MT" there to remind that trucker hauling timber fifteen hundred miles away that if he was ever back in Bozeman, you could fill him up. All this, for only $239? Such a bargain!

Of course what we were selling was a dream, a dream of wealth, of the $2500 necklace, the $1500 cash, or one of the other "seven hundred and thirty-seven valuable prizes" you could win in our drawing. Buy some pens, and we put you in. Yowsa!

I could write at length about that job. It was the worst job I ever had. It was ten weeks of pure misery. The supervisor, Conrad, finally called me into his office, and told me that they were amazed by my perseverance, but clearly I was not cut out for sales.  Bill made two grand a week; Joe Burns made thirty-five hundred. The guy in the next booth, the one with the speech impediment who was obviously reading from a script, and obviously didn't understand what he was reading ("You could win a strand of Aggie-Ann pearls") was making a lowly two-fifty a week. That's what I made: two-fifty, total, for ten weeks.  Reflecting later I realized that no matter how polished my delivery - I am a trained actor - I was sending a silent message to the customers: "Do not buy these pens! This is a ripoff."

“Sell me this pen!” So demands Jordan Belfort (Leo DiCaprio) in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.  Jordan is teaching his first recruits the art of selling; the pen is the object nearest at hand; his point being that it matters not a whit what you sell, you are selling desire, in this case the desire for a pen.

The movie begins promisingly.  Jordan is living large. How large? Parade float large. Entire Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade large. When he isn’t hurling dwarves he is racing his white Ferrari, or crashing his helicopter in his trophy wife’s new rose bushes.  In between screwing endless hookers he winkingly informs us, if we wonder whether the money funding all of this was legally obtained: “Of course not!” All the while his drug consumption is such that Elvis would stage an intervention. We settle back for a trip through the fun house which will end with the rogue getting his rightful comeuppance.

Jordan Belfort’s firm, Stratton Oakmont, was real, and the events in the movie were based upon things that did happen. They inspired an earlier movie Boiler Room, also about penny stock swindles and insider trading. 

Like Wolf of Wall Street, American Hustle is based upon real events.  In 1978 the FBI enlisted the aid of a small time con man named Melvin Weinberg, in the moving Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale), and using an agent posing a sheik named Abdul they took down a bunch of New Jersey politicians who accepted bribes to facilitate casino licenses for the Sheik in Atlantic City, or to fast track his application for citizenship.

Lately I have been seeing the term “side boob” used to lure people into clicking on ads masquerading as news.  You have seen them: “Halle Berry shows side boob on the red carpet!” You click the link to see Halle Berry’s “side boob,” and get a teasing glimpse, never as good as promised, while reading that she was on the red carpet for a premiere for the new X-Men movie (which maybe you will see, though you probably won’t see any side boob there, either). I am going to coin the term “inner boob.” Irving Rosenfeld has a mistress, Sydney, played by Amy Adams, and a wife, Rosalyn, played by Jennifer Lawrence. They both show lots of “inner boob,” especially Sydney, who never met a dress that didn’t have a big hole in front.  I think it was two or three years before Playboy showed as much in a centrefold as Sydney shows going to the dry cleaner.

Besides the eye candy, Sydney and Irving, and Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper) and Richie’s mother and “secret fiancée” and his boss, and his boss’s boss, are all slightly nuts. Rosalyn is nuttier than squirrel poo. But their nuttiness has a relentless verbal logic to it, as when Rosalyn tries to microwave a metal plate, and then convinces Irving they are very lucky she blew it up in the nick of time.

But when Irving has to con Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), the Mayor of Camden, he finds true friendship.  Carmine is salt of the Earth, which in this movie means he and his wife are characters straight out of Goodfellas, but with no bodies in the trunk of their car.  I’d better place an asterisk on that, as who turns up but Robert “Jimmy the Gent” DeNiro himself, this time called Victor Tellegio. Irving respects Carmine, because Carmine doesn’t want the money for himself, he wants it for “the people of Camden,” though how a casino in Atlantic City helps the people of Camden is never explained.

Eventually Irving cons the FBI out of two million dollars, temporarily, but still loses the friendship of Carmine. (Digression: back in the seventies my dad told me about a con man that scammed the US Attorney’s office out of two million dollars. It seems a certain US Attorney, sent by Tricky Dick to dick Dick Daley for slights real or imagined - let’s call this fellow “Big Tim Johnson” - caught a con man who convinced them that he could snare bigger game if they let him. He would need two million “flash cash.” Big Tim wasn’t going to just hand over two million dollars to a con man, no, too smart for that. So he went to his buddy, president of a big bank downtown, let’s call it Cadillac Illini, and they came up with a foolproof method. The president would issue a note for two million, but post-date it two years.  The con man said that would be great, it was the idea that he had two million that mattered, and now, if they would give him elbow room, he would head out to California where all big crooks are found. Once there, he found someone selling a mansion in Beverly Hills for 1.1 million. “I will give you 1.2 for it, but …” For the house and a half million cash, he traded the note. Then he dumped the house for three-quarters of a million cash, and disappeared. A year later the bond holder sold the bond to a California bank for a discount, that bank went back to Cadillac Illini, who at first said they had no record of such a note, but then when they mentioned it to the President … He in turn called the US Attorney’s office, who called Big Tim Johnson, who was now Governor of Illinois, who said: “Gee, sounds like a problem, Sam. Sure glad it’s yours, not mine.”)

After the busts take place, Irving chides Richie: “You never let me go after the big money guys! Instead, all we got was politicians trying to do something for the people.” Excuse me!? Who would be bigger than a US Senator and a bunch of US Congressmen and some state level politicians?  They were all accepting bribes on behalf of the people? And just where does the Mafia killer fit into this tale of civic virtue? I liked The Sting; I enjoy movies about con men. In The Sting the mark was a vicious killer, so it is easy to root for Gondorff and The Kid.  Irving and Sydney were conning innocent people until they were ensnared. There were real victims. Yet the film suggests we root for them because … Near as I can tell because they listen to Duke Ellington.

The morality of Wolf is even worse.  After two hours of wretched excess, and Jordan’s smirking confrontation aboard his yacht with two straight arrow FBI agents, we are ready for the big takedown.  But then, Jordan decides not to leave the business because … he owes it to his traders! He is in it for them. He gives a maudlin speech about how he helped one of them, a single mother, loaning her twenty-five thousand dollars the day he hired her “because I believed in her!” So he stays, is busted, goes to jail.

But then … Even in jail, he says, he is rich, and he is in a place where everything is for sale. His sentence is over in less than a minute’s worth of screen time. And while Jordan’s millions were stolen millions, we never see a victim.  After which we get two appalling scenes. The FBI man who takes down Jordan is a tight-assed party pooper, but he is right: Jordan is a crook. And during their confrontation he indicates he is proud to ride the subway; owning a yacht doesn’t impress him. Finally, one character with values, the only one in the whole bloody movie! So what does Scorsese give us near the end? The man riding home on the subway, shot in such a way we can only assume he is having second thoughts. 

The very end shows Jordan out of jail and in New Zealand. He is introduced as the “world’s greatest sales trainer.” The room is packed with eager learners, and Jordan challenges them to “sell me this pen.”

I grew up on outlaw movies, on Bonnie & Clyde, Steelyard Blues, and many others. Those were antiheroes, who did terrible things.  But they had some sense of morality, however twisted. This pair of films ultimately glorifies bad people and bad behaviour, and implies that there are no victims if you just ignore them hard enough. They are selling us pens; I am not buying.