Red Granite Pictures, a small Los Angeles production company co-founded by Riza Aziz, the stepson of then-Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, wrote the checks that put Leonardo DiCaprio on a yacht in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. The film, released in December 2013, cost roughly $100 million to make and grossed almost $400 million worldwide. U.S. Department of Justice civil forfeiture filings later alleged that a large share of that production budget came from money looted out of 1Malaysia Development Berhad, the sovereign wealth fund known as 1MDB.
A movie about a stockbroker who defrauds investors was paid for, prosecutors say, with the proceeds of one of the largest financial frauds in history.
The irony is the kind screenwriters usually have to invent.
The fund that was supposed to build Malaysia
1MDB was set up in 2009, the year Najib Razak became prime minister. The pitch was straightforward: a state investment vehicle that would borrow on the strength of Malaysia’s sovereign credit and pour the money into power plants, real estate, and infrastructure that would lift the country into the upper tier of developed economies.
Within a few years, the fund had raised billions through bond issues arranged by Goldman Sachs. Where the money actually went became the subject of investigations on four continents.
U.S. prosecutors allege that at least $4.5 billion was siphoned out of 1MDB between 2009 and 2015, routed through shell companies and offshore accounts, then spent on penthouses in Manhattan, a Bombardier jet, a 300-foot superyacht called the Equanimity, Van Gogh and Monet paintings, jewelry for Australian model Miranda Kerr, and a slate of Hollywood films.
Red Granite and the Scorsese pitch
Riza Aziz founded Red Granite Pictures in 2010 with an American partner, Joey McFarland, a former event promoter from Kentucky. Neither had produced a major studio film. Within two years they had outbid Warner Bros. for the rights to The Wolf of Wall Street, the memoir by convicted penny-stock fraudster Jordan Belfort that Scorsese and DiCaprio had been trying to get made for years.
Red Granite covered the entire production budget. They threw a launch party in Cannes in 2011 with Kanye West performing. The young executives told the trade press they had backing from wealthy Middle Eastern investors.
The real source, according to the Justice Department’s 2016 and 2017 civil forfeiture complaints, was Low Taek Jho, better known as Jho Low, a Malaysian financier in his early thirties who had become close to the Najib family and who allegedly orchestrated the looting of 1MDB from the inside.
How the money moved
The U.S. complaints trace a specific path. In 2012, prosecutors alleged, hundreds of millions of dollars traceable to diverted 1MDB bond proceeds moved into accounts linked to Red Granite and were used to fund film production.
From there, prosecutors say, money tied to the diverted bond proceeds helped finance The Wolf of Wall Street specifically. DOJ remarks at the time put the figure at more than $100 million involved in the theft from 1MDB used to finance the film.
The film opened on Christmas Day 2013. DiCaprio was nominated for an Academy Award. He thanked Riza Aziz and Joey McFarland at the Golden Globes when he won Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy.
The yacht, the paintings, the Oscar statuette
The asset list U.S. authorities tried to recover reads like a parody of what a 1990s screenwriter would imagine a corrupt billionaire owns. The Equanimity, valued at around $250 million, was seized off Bali in 2018 and later sold to a Malaysian gaming company for $126 million.
Malaysian authorities have since recovered and displayed Picasso and Joan Miró works that prosecutors say were bought with stolen funds, unveiling the paintings publicly as part of the asset-recovery effort.
Jho Low also allegedly bought Marlon Brando’s Oscar statuette for On the Waterfront as a birthday gift for DiCaprio. DiCaprio handed it back to investigators in 2017, along with a Picasso he had been given and a Basquiat collage.
Settlements, pleas, and a fugitive
Red Granite Pictures settled with the U.S. Department of Justice in March 2018, agreeing to pay $60 million without admitting wrongdoing. The settlement covered claims that production money for The Wolf of Wall Street, Dumb and Dumber To, and Daddy’s Home had come from tainted sources.
Najib Razak lost the 2018 Malaysian general election to a coalition led by his former mentor Mahathir Mohamad. He was arrested weeks later. In July 2020 he was convicted on seven charges of abuse of power, criminal breach of trust, and money laundering tied to a smaller 1MDB-linked entity called SRC International, and sentenced to 12 years in prison. His sentence was later halved to six years. His path from prime minister to prison inmate took barely two years.
Riza Aziz was charged in Malaysia in 2019 with laundering $248 million of 1MDB funds. Those charges were dropped in 2020 under a settlement requiring him to return assets, a decision that prompted public anger in Kuala Lumpur.
Goldman Sachs paid more than $2.9 billion in penalties to U.S., Malaysian, and other regulators in 2020 for its role in arranging the 1MDB bond issues. Its Malaysian subsidiary pleaded guilty.
Jho Low remains at large. Interpol has issued a red notice. He is believed to be in China.
The Switzerland trial
The case keeps generating new courtrooms. In April 2024, two men accused of embezzling $1.8 billion from the fund went on trial in Switzerland, another set of hearings stemming from the multibillion-dollar scandal that has touched banks, royals, and Hollywood studios across half a dozen jurisdictions.
Swiss prosecutors have been pursuing the case since 2015, when the country’s attorney general announced criminal proceedings over what he described as serious indications that funds had been misappropriated from Malaysian state companies.
What the film became
The Wolf of Wall Street made Scorsese’s longest theatrical cut, at three hours and two minutes, and the film’s reputation has only grown. It is taught in business ethics courses. Belfort himself tours the world giving motivational speeches.
Whether films about financial crime glamorize the behavior they depict, or warn against it, is a live question in academic research on media representation and public perception of crime. Outlets shape understanding by selecting which incidents to report and how to frame them, and the 1MDB case is a near-perfect study in that framing problem.
The film about Belfort’s quaaludes and stolen millions was paid for, prosecutors allege, with quaaludes-and-stolen-millions money. The closing scene shows Belfort, freshly out of prison, running a sales seminar in Auckland. The audience leans forward. They want to learn how he did it.
Why people do this
The psychology of large-scale financial fraud is its own field. One useful clue is the gap between how people see their own ethics and how they judge everyone else’s. A Psychology Today discussion of researchers’ self-ratings points to bounded ethicality and motivated reasoning, the ordinary mental machinery that can let people preserve a moral self-image while making decisions they might condemn from the outside.
Jho Low, in the few public statements his lawyers have made, has consistently denied wrongdoing. Najib has maintained that he believed the funds in his personal accounts, a now-famous transfer of roughly $681 million, were a gift from the Saudi royal family.
Malaysian voters did not buy that explanation. According to reports, Najib defended distributing money to win votes, a practice that critics said epitomized his administration’s approach to governance.
A footnote in the credits
The opening credits of The Wolf of Wall Street still carry the Red Granite Pictures logo. Streaming services have not edited it out. The film plays on Paramount+, on airline seatback screens, on television at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday.
The closing scene with Belfort in Auckland was shot in late 2012. By then, according to U.S. prosecutors, the wire transfers into Red Granite-linked accounts had already cleared. The film was, in a sense, already inside the crime it was about to depict.
Of the roughly $4.5 billion U.S. authorities allege was stolen from 1MDB, the Malaysian government has so far recovered a little over half. Jho Low’s whereabouts are unknown. The Equanimity sails under a new name. And somewhere in a federal evidence locker, a Picasso and an Oscar statuette wait to be sent home.
