Author Reveals the Real Difference Between ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ and the Real Wall Street
John LeFevre, the British-born former banker behind Goldman Sachs Elevator, has just substantiated for those outside the insular world of investment banking that the behavior on Wall Street is spot on with how the movie “Wolf of Wall Street” portrayed it.
One discrepancy between real life and the movie, according to LeFevre, however, is the background of the people living fast and hard.
LeFevre told Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,”
“I’m saying Wolf of Wall Street is about scumbags who dropped out of community college and went to Long Island and commit crimes and partied like rock stars.
“A lot of the manifestations of greed and excess and deviance and debauchery you see in the best and the brightest. The guys who went to Ivy League, the ones who went to Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs.”
The timely agreement coincides with today’s release of LeFevre’s new memoir, “Straight to Hell: True Tales of Deviance, Debauchery, and Billion-Dollar Deals,” which chronicles LeFevre’s seven-year stint at Citigroup as a debt syndicate, working in such places as New York and Hong Kong. The book is a confession of sorts, with LeFevre revealing how he took part in, or saw, Wall Street as a debauched hotbed for parties, drugs and hookers.
LeFevre became internet-famous after being outed as the writer behind popular Twitter feed Goldman Sachs Elevator, which chronicled conversations supposedly overheard in the firm’s elevators, providing a voyeuristic look into the real world of financing written by a supposed anonymous Goldman Sachs international banker.
LeFevre never actually worked at Goldman Sachs, however, and he wasn’t even employed at an investment bank while writing Goldman Sachs Elevator; he only briefly worked at international outposts at Citigroup.
As LeFevre put it:
“The success of the account I don’t think really had anything to do with whether or not people thought I was actually in an elevator at Goldman Sachs. I mean that’s preposterous.”
The backlash that followed allegedly forced Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, to cancel the book which, weeks later, publisher Grove Atlantic surprisingly picked up.
In his new book, LeFevre says he writes truthfully about his time on the global investment banking perch with Citigroup.
h/t: Business Insider
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