Victor Wang, The Real-Life Chester Ming
Kenneth Choi’s character Chester Ming doesn’t play the largest role in The Wolf of Wall Street, but his real-life counterpart, Victor Wang, features prominently in Belfort’s memoir. The two were sometimes collaborators, most often rivals, and even enemies at the worst of times.
LinkedInVictor Wang, a former collaborator and rival of Jordan Belfort.
“Like the rest of Long Island’s educationally challenged dream-seekers, Victor had also fallen into my employ,” Belfort wrote, “albeit not at Stratton Oakmont.”
Belfort and Wang were introduced to each other by Wang’s childhood friend Kenny Greene — who Belfort calls “Blockhead” — and it was clear from the beginning that Belfort didn’t care for his new partner. From the start, Belfort referred to Wang as “a dead ringer for Oddjob, the hitman from the James Bond movie Goldfinger.”
Wang served as the CEO of the public company Judicate, a satellite venture of Belfort’s, the offices of which were in the basement of Stratton Oakmont. Officially, Judicate was an Alternative Dispute Resolution company, a “classic example of a business looking terrific on paper but not translating into the real world.”
According to Belfort, these sorts of companies were used by Wall Street elites all the time, and most of them failed by design. Wang, however, took issue with his “company’s” slow decline, despite Belfort admitting there was nothing Wang could do about it.
Paramount PicturesKenneth Choi as Chester Ming, a character based on the real-life Victor Wang.
In the face of Judicate’s failure, Wang wanted Belfort’s help in opening his own firm. He wanted a chance to make it on Wall Street, but Belfort seemed to believe that Victor Wang had an inflated ego — one that stopped him from becoming a “Strattonite” in the early days. However, Wang wasn’t a fool, and he knew Belfort was planning to sell off his stocks before the bubble burst.
So, Belfort agreed to help Wang, all the while plotting against him.
“I would then advise him to trade in such a manner that would leave him subtly exposed,” Belfort wrote. “And there were ways to do that that only the most sophisticated traders would pick up on, ways that Victor certainly would not… And when he least expected it, when he was at his most vulnerable point, I would turn on him with all my power and attack.”
Wang ultimately became another of Belfort’s victims in the true story of The Wolf of Wall Street. He found himself flooded with stocks with no way of knowing who was buying them, and he flew into a panic. And in 1999, his partnership with Belfort would come back to bite him.
As The New York Times reported at the time, Wang wound up pleading guilty in federal court to charges of enterprise corruption in relation to his firm, Duke & Company, and Stratton Oakmont.
