Wolves in white collars: The real story behind the other 'Wolves of Wall Street'
THEY talked their way into plum jobs and had millions at their disposal. But these men went from kingpins to jail cells when it all came tumbling down.
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THE Wolf of Wall Street may be the toast of Hollywood right now, but there were plenty of others taking down banks before Leonardo DiCaprio made it famous.
Take a look at the stories behind some of the world's most notorious white collar criminals.
Nick Leeson
Nick Leeson was just 23 when he scored his dream job based in Singapore trading futures on the Japanese stock exchange.
It was the 1990s and salaries were huge, bonuses were even bigger and the working class boy from England became a star trader at Barings, a 233-year-old investment bank that counted the Queen of England among its clients.
"It was a landscape of opportunity ... Banks were getting bigger, people needed to work in the city and I suppose in many ways it was a bit of a land grab going on. People were moving into new markets, new products. It was a wealth of opportunity," Mr Leeson told news.com.au from his home in Ireland.
Read Nick Leeson's full story here
However a flawed internal system meant traders could hide losses in a secret 'five eights' account, something Leeson did repeatedly while he would wait for the market to recover so he could trade his way out.
Over several years the account would fluctuate from $20 million in the red to back to zero as it was used to "hoover up" mistakes made on the trading floor.
It was eventually uncovered by a routine audit and the bank collapsed with $1.3 billion in liabilities, more than its entire capital reserves. Barings collapsed virtually overnight, later selling to Dutch bank ING for one pound.
Leeson went on the run and was eventually caught in Germany where he was extradited to face fraud and forgery charges in Singapore and sentenced to six years in jail.
After surviving cancer and divorce he returned to the UK to study psychology and start his own business helping people restructure their debt in his native Ireland. His experience became the basis for the movie Rogue Trader, starring Ewan McGregor, and he also makes money speaking about his experience.
Fabrice "Fabulous Fab" Tourre
French-born former Goldman Sachs trader Fabrice "Fabulous Fab" Tourre became a poster boy for Wall Street greed at the centre of a fraud case that is often sited as one of the main events that helped tip the US housing market into recession.
Mr Tourre was charged by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for misleading investors about subprime mortgage securities he knew were doomed to fail and setting the stage for hedgefund Paulson & Co - another Goldman Sachs client - to bet against the investments.
The SEC claimed Mr Tourre's made $1 billion for the hedge fund through the deals and millions in fees for Goldman Sachs, as well as a personal bonus of $1.7 million in 2007.
Testimony during the trial focused on an email he wrote to his girlfriend claiming "the whole building is about to collapse anytime now".
"Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab ... Standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!"
Mr Tourre was found guilty of six out of seven counts of civil fraud. The SEC announced it would seek $910,000 in fines, plus more than $175,000 in ill-gotten gains and $62,000 in interest. Goldman Sachs also paid a $550 million fine for its role in the investments.
Bruno Iksil, aka The London Whale
Bruno Iksil is an ex-JP Morgan trader nicknamed the "London Whale" for his whopping trades, which racked up more than $6.2 billion worth of losses at one of the world's biggest investment banks.
He flipped to become an informant during investigations and turned in his former boss and junior traders for hiding the true extent of losses they made while working in the bank's Chief Investment Office.
US authorities later filed criminal charges against Spanish national Mr Martin-Artajo and Frenchman Julien Grout for keeping false records, committing wire fraud and submitted false filings. The defendants each face fines of more than $5 million and up to 65 years in jail.
The bank was forced to pay more than $1 billion in fines while CEO Jamie Dimon took a pay cut over the issue. They have even been forced to downgrade fourth quarter earnings from 2013 because of legal bills arising from the case.
Bernie Madoff
Bernie Madoff became famous overnight for running one of the world's biggest and most elaborate Ponzi schemes which fleeced thousands of people including celebrities, charities and banks out of billions of dollars over several decades.
The simple scheme was established with $5000 in seed money and relied on word of mouth to attract new investors by promising returns of more than 10 per cent. The only problem was there was no real investment underpinning it all and it all came crashing down in December 2008 when Mr Madoff was reported by his own sons for securities fraud.
Mr Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 charges of fraud, money laundering and false filings and in 2009 the 71-year-old was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
Jordan Belfort, aka the Wolf of Wall Street
During the 1990s Mr Belfort employed more than 1000 stockbrokers at his brokerage firm Stratton Oakmont where he raked in $50 million a year. However he was also using an elaborate "pump and dump" scheme that would artificially inflate the price of shares before selling them off to unsuspecting investors.
He lived it up with a home in the Hamptons, fast cars, luxury yachts and a supermodel wife. However by the late 1990s things were starting to unravel. In 1999 Mr Belfort pleaded guilty to securities fraud and money laundering and agreed to gather evidence against his colleagues in exchange for a lighter sentence.
He was convicted in 2004 and sentenced to four years in jail, of which he served 22 months, and forced to pay $110 million in restitution payments by pledging half his future earnings to the government.
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