'Boiler Room' exposes ugly underbelly of investment scams

Actor Giovanni Ribisi, right, got into the mindset of the predator

From Dennis Michael
CNN Entertainment News Correspondent

February 17, 2000
Web posted at: 1:18 p.m. EST (1818 GMT)

HOLLYWOOD (CNN) -- Wall Street regulators are praising the new film "Boiler Room," saying that it performs a public service by exposing the world of stock scammers, the same kind of alleged con artists busted recently on Long Island.

Prosecutors brought criminal charges earlier this month against 21 former managers and brokers at Sterling Foster & Co., a defunct Long Island company that specialized in small-company stocks. The firm's employees are accused of using high pressure, and false and misleading sales pitches to sell customers stock, in an attempt to artificially raise stock prices.

The reward for the brokers was high: Prosecutors say the tactics gained them more than $200 million in illegal profits.

It goes almost without saying that most stockbrokers are reaping the benefits of a booming stock market by legal means. But "Boiler Room" shows the dark side of all the fun the economy is having with the bull market. Out there among the legitimate brokerage firms are "chop shops," manipulating illegitimate stocks with high-pressure phone tactics, letting the little guy pay the very big bill.

From one kind of battleground to another

Younger

Actor Vin Diesel was part of the "Saving Private Ryan" ensemble cast; his "Pitch Black" premieres this weekend alongside "Boiler Room," in which he got to play the role of a boiler-room worker. His dialogue often revolves around the hard sell; in one scene, he tells a potential dupe over the phone that "this stock is blowing up right now. The whole firm's going nuts.

"Hold on," he continues, "let me open up the door to my office" -- so the client can hear the general uproar around him. "Look, I'm advising all my clients to get in on this, and heavy."

In his struggling days, director and screenwriter Ben Younger found himself up for a job in a boiler room. At the premiere, he described the jungle he discovered and put on film.

"They're preying on the bullish market because they know people want to get invested," Younger says. "And they single out doctors, people who have a lot of money, who don't have a lot of time to research their brokers, their stocks.

"They want someone to take care of it for them. So they're just jumping on this opportunity, this bullish market."

'These guys are sharks'

The pressure is high, but the rewards are astonishing. All you have to do, Diesel suggests, is give up any feeling or concern about the voice on the other end of the phone.

"I brought my friends tonight who took me around upstate New York, showing me around these boiler rooms," he says. "And they're pretty unusual. They're pretty scary -- these guys are sharks."

And actors Nicky Katt and Giovanni Ribisi, who take the audience into this cutthroat world, got to know the mind-set of the predator. Ribisi says his character's attitude is that, if clients "are stupid enough to give me money, then they shouldn't have it anyways, you know. So who cares about them?"

"Boiler Room" is set in Long Island, New York

Listening to Rabiesi say this, Katt jumps in. "It's hard to turn down, I think, when you're presented with something like that. You know: Hey, (I'm) ripping people off, but I've got a Lamborghini."

Ribisi: "Yes! In three months, you'll be a millionaire!"

Or a jailbird, like those Long Island boiler roomers whose operation federal authorities raided last week. The New Line film is set in Long Island.

"It's pretty timely," Younger says, quickly adding that this is nothing but a lucky coincidence: "Not that I had the foresight. I just -- I found a new world, and I figured I would represent it as authentically as I could, and it just happened to come at a time when this is the subject."

"Boiler Room" is a production of CNN Interactive sister company New Line Cinema, a Time Warner property.

CNNfn report: Ex-brokers face charges
February 9, 2000
Review: 'Saving Private Ryan' staggering, hellish, heroic
July 24, 1998

Official 'Boiler Room' site
New Line Cinema

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