Editor’s note: This article was first published in February 2014; it is a news piece tied to the release of the film The Wolf of Wall Street, and the job titles of Xavier Serbia and José Gabilondo are as of that date.
Xavier Serbia, one of CNN’s presenters, was about to interview José Gabilondo, a professor at Florida International University, about the real Jordan Belfort and the part of the fraud that Hollywood left out, or at least did not go into in detail.
To the interviewer’s surprise, Gabilondo practically started out defending Belfort, suggesting that much of what he did was legal, given the way IPO fraud works, and arguing that what Belfort did is, in a way, also done by JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, only they are better protected by their legal advisers.
The presenter starts to get heated and the tone of the interview rises to the point where it is no longer the guest giving his opinion (which is what he had been invited to do), and it is the presenter who ends up explaining how Belfort carried out the IPO fraud.
Gabilondo did, of course, find time to say that the greedy investors who bought the shares were more to blame than Jordan Belfort himself.
The truth is that what Xavier Serbia says is completely true, and what José Gabilondo argues is also correct. Here is the video of the debate-interview.
Watch: Xavier Serbia and José Gabilondo debate the real Wolf of Wall Street (YouTube)
Featured image: Frostly, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
