The “piece of shit hairpiece” that left Martin Scorsese in the middle of a $50m lawsuit
In Hollywood, legal action doesn’t often have the devastating consequences that would be wrought upon us mere mortals. Hell, sometimes icons like Martin Scorsese can become embroiled in $50million lawsuits, but it’s little more than water off a duck’s back.
When he made The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013, Scorsese notched the biggest financial success of his storied directorial career, racked up five Oscar nominations for a film that somehow became a Gen Z classic, despite being set in the 1980s. On the other hand, though, the ludicrously debauched film also became a lightning rod for controversy like never before, despite Scorsese’s career already being littered with controversial lightning rods.
In the film, the director told the story of stockbroker Jordan Belfort and his firm Stratton Oakmont, which defrauded its clients and Wall Street as a whole on an unprecedented scale. The movie surrounds Leonardo DiCaprio’s Belfort with a host of characters, most of whom are based on real people but with their names changed, along with some composite characters amalgamating several real people into one.
Jonah Hill’s Donnie Azoff, all turkey teeth, a bad tan, and an inhuman appetite for narcotics, is one of the characters loosely based on a real guy, while PJ Byrne’s Nicky ‘Rugrat’ Koskoff is a composite of several people in Belfort’s orbit during the Stratton Oakmont days. Or, at least, that’s what the filmmakers claimed when Andrew Greene, who was on the company’s board of directors in the ‘90s, launched a defamation lawsuit to the tune of $50m, arguing that Koskoff was 100% based on him.
Now, why was Greene so convinced that Scorsese and writer Terence Winter hadn’t plucked inspiration from several different sources to create the bespectacled, toupe-wearing Koskoff, a drug-fuelled swindler who attended law school before joining Belfort’s band of fraudsters? Well, because he did Koskoff’s job at Stratton Oakmont, wore a hairpiece that regularly got him teased by his co-workers, and attended law school before becoming a stockbroker. Maybe he had a point?
According to Greene, the movie depicted Koskoff, his thinly-veiled screen counterpart, as a “criminal, drug user, degenerate” who was “depraved and devoid of any morals or ethics”.
Naturally, he didn’t much care for that, nor did he appreciate that Koskoff was arrested in the film for money laundering, while in real life, he was never implicated by the authorities in any of Belfort’s wrongdoing. He felt that Koskoff’s toupee, which is called a “piece of shit hairpiece” in the movie, and his nickname ‘Rugrat’ proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the character was supposed to be him, because he was nicknamed ‘Wigwam’ in real life. Both ‘Rugrat’ and ‘Wigwam’ are common colloquialisms for toupees, y’see.
Naturally, Paramount’s team of bloodsucking lawyers attempted to argue that Koskoff wasn’t Greene by any other name, but a Long Island judge ruled his suit could go forward. In her opinion, the burden of proof for Greene became demonstrative that people who knew him would watch Koskoff in the movie and reasonably associate the character with him. Simple, right? Wrong.
As the suit proceeded through the courts, Scorsese was deposed by the prosecution, which also attempted to bring DiCaprio in for a deposition. The One Battle After Another star’s legal team resisted this demand, though, and by September 2015, most of Greene’s claims were dismissed by the courts. Then, in December 2018, his final remaining claim of public libel was shot down as the judge ruled he couldn’t prove there was “actual malice” involved on the moviemakers’ part, and that Koskoff was, indeed, a composite character. Put that one in the win column for Mr Scorsese.
