Just then Nadine scooted over to the side of the bed, sending $70 or $80,000 onto the floor. It joined another quarter million or so that had gone flying off the bed along with me. Still, it didn’t make a dent in the picture. There was so much green on the bed it looked like the floor of the Amazon rain forest after a monsoon.

The Duchess fixed me with a warm smile. “I’m sorry, sweetie! I didn’t mean to throw you off the bed…I swear!” She shrugged innocently. “I just had this terrible cramp in my shoulder, and I guess you don’t weigh that much. Let’s go into the closet and make love there. Okay, love-bug?” She flashed me another lubricious smile, and with one athletic move she popped her naked body right out of bed and stood beside me. Then she crooked her mouth to the side and started chewing on the inside of her own cheek. It was something she did whenever she was having trouble making sense of something.

After a few seconds, she stopped chewing and said, “Are you sure this is legal, ’cause I don’t know. There’s something about it that seems…wrong.”

At this particular moment I had little desire to lie to my wife about my money-laundering activities. In fact, my only current desire was to bend her over the side of the bed and fuck her brains out! But she was my wife, which meant she had earned the right to be lied to. With the utmost conviction, I said, “I told you, Nae—I took all the cash out of the bank. You’ve seen me do it. Now, I’m not denying that Elliot hasn’t given me a few dollars here and there”—a few dollars? Try $5 million!—“but that has nothing to do with this money. All this money is strictly legit, and if the government were to come charging in here right now, I would simply show them my withdrawal slips, and that would be that.” I put my arms around her waist and pressed my body against hers and kissed her.

She giggled and pulled away. “I know you took the cash out of the bank, but it just seems illegal. I don’t know…having this much cash…well, I don’t know. It just seems weird.” She started chewing on the inside of her mouth again. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

I was slowly losing my erection, which deeply saddened me. It was time for a location change. “Just trust me, sweetie. I got it under control. Let’s go in the closet and make love. Todd and Carolyn are gonna be here in less than an hour, and I wanna make love without rushing. Please?”

She narrowed her eyes at me, then all at once she took off into a run and said over her shoulder, “I’ll race you to the closet!”

And off we went—without so much as a care in the world.

There was no denying that some very wacky Jews had fled from Lefrak City in the early 1970s.

But none of them was wackier than Todd Garret.

Todd was three years older than me, and I can still remember the first time I laid eyes on him. I had just turned ten years old, and Todd was standing in the one-car garage of the garden apartment he had moved into with his two wacky parents, Lester and Thelma. His older brother, Freddy, had recently died of a heroin overdose, the rusty needle still in his arm when they’d found him sitting on the toilet bowl, two days postmortem.

So, relatively speaking, Todd was the normal one.

Anyway, he was kicking and punching a white canvas heavy bag—wearing black kung fu pants and black kung fu slippers. Back then, in the early seventies, there weren’t karate centers in every local shopping center, so Todd Garret quickly developed a reputation as being somewhat of an oddity. But at least he was consistent: You could find him in his tiny garage, twelve hours a day, seven days a week—kicking and punching and kneeing the bag.

No one took Todd seriously until he turned seventeen. It was then that Todd found himself standing in the wrong bar somewhere in Jackson Heights, Queens. Jackson Heights was only a few miles away from Bayside, but it might just as well have been on another planet. The official language was broken English; the most common profession was unemployment; and even the grandmas carried switchblades. Anyway, inside the bar, words were exchanged between Todd and four Colombian drug dealers—at which point they attacked him. When it was all over, two of them had broken bones, all four had broken faces, and one had been stabbed with his own knife, which Todd had taken from him. After that, everyone took Todd seriously.

From there, Todd made the logical leap into big-time drug dealing, where through a combination of fear and intimidation, along with a healthy dose of street smarts, he quickly rose to the top. He was in his early twenties—making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. He spent his summers in the south of France and the Italian Riviera—and his winters on the glorious beaches of Rio de Janeiro.

All was going well for Todd until one day five years ago. He was lying on Ipanema Beach and got bitten by an unidentified tropical insect—and just like that, four months later, he found himself on the waiting list for a heart transplant. In less than a year he was down to ninety-five pounds, and his five-foot ten-inch frame looked like a skeleton’s.

After Todd spent two long years on the waiting list, a six-foot six-inch lumberjack, who apparently had two left feet and an unusually short lifeline, fell from a California redwood tree and plunged to his death. And, as they say, one man’s curse was another man’s blessing: His tissue type was a perfect match for Todd.

Three months after his heart transplant Todd was back in the gym; three months after that he was back at full strength; three months after that, Todd became the biggest Quaalude dealer in America; and three months after that, he found out that I, Jordan Belfort, the owner of the fabled investment-banking firm of Stratton Oakmont, was addicted to Quaaludes, so he reached out to me.

That was more than two years ago, and since then Todd had sold me five thousand Quaaludes and given me five thousand more—free—in exchange for all the money I was making him in Stratton new issues. But as the profits on the new issues soared into the millions, he quickly realized that he couldn’t possibly reciprocate with Quaaludes. So he began asking me if there was anything he could do for me, anything at all.

I had resisted the impulse to have him beat up every kid who had looked at me wrong since the second grade, but after the three thousandth time of him saying, “If there’s anything I could ever do for you, even if it means killing someone, you just let me know,” I finally decided to take him up on the offer. And the fact that his new wife, Carolyn, happened to be a Swiss citizen made things seem that much more natural.

At this particular moment Todd and Carolyn were standing in my master bedroom doing what they always did: arguing! At my urging, the Duchess had gone into town to do some shopping. After all, I didn’t want her to see the very insanity that was now transpiring before me.

The very insanity: Carolyn Garret was wearing nothing but white silk panties and white Tretorn tennis sneakers. She was standing less than five feet from me, with her hands clasped behind her head and her elbows cocked out to the side, as if a policeman had just screamed, “Put your hands behind your head and freeze, or I’ll shoot!” Meanwhile, her enormous Swiss breasts hung like two overfilled water balloons slapped onto her thin-boned, five-foot two-inch frame. A lusty mane of bleached-blond hair went all the way down to the crack of her ass. She had a set of terrific blue eyes, a broad forehead, and a face that was pretty enough. She was a bombshell, all right—a Swiss bombshell.

“Tahad, you are zdupid fool!” said the Swiss Bombshell, whose thick accent dripped with Swiss cheese. “You are hutting me weeth zees tape, you ahhs-zole!” Hurting me with this tape, you asshole.

“Shut up, you French wench,” replied her loving husband, “and stay fucking still, before I slap you!” Todd was circling his wife, holding a roll of masking tape in his hand. With each complete revolution, the $300,000 of cash already taped to her stomach and thighs grew that much tighter.