“They are insecure,” is how Leonardo DiCaprio, as investment advisor Jordan Belfort, describes hesitant customers in the film “The Wolf of Wall Street.” “Their only real objection is that they don’t trust you. Why should they?” And then he gives his employees all sorts of bad tricks on how to get strangers’ money.
The German Jordan Belfort was Jürgen Harksen from Flensburg. And he is said to have once said: “The more absurd my promises were, the more my customers trusted me.” But was it actually that simple?
Harksen was born in December 1960, the third of four children of a salesman and a hairdresser. He later reported that he didn’t have an easy childhood; his German father couldn’t handle alcohol and his mother, who came from Denmark, had a mental illness. His parents died early and Harksen, who had completed secondary school at a Danish boarding school, began to make his way through life with fraud. Because when it came to rhetoric, he definitely had talent. So great a talent that in some media – not least thanks to Dieter Wedel, who was inspired by Harksen’s life for the TV two-parter “Gier” (2010) – he earned the title “Fraudster of the Century”. This puts him in a row with Felix Krull, Gert Postel and the captain of Köpenick. Since the 1980s, Harksen’s “Köpenickiade” has consisted of telling very rich people that they could become even richer through him. So the counter model to what the activist Marlene Engelhorn is currently doing.
Dieter Bohlen and Udo Lindenberg also fell for Harksen
His company was called “Nordanalyse,” which attracted athletes, business people and celebrities. Harksen paid off the first investors and then left for Cape Town. It took nine years for Harksen to be extradited to Germany; some of the cases had already expired. Dieter Bohlen and Udo Lindenberg also reported that they were among his victims (although Lindenberg once praised the fact that at least he got his money back). Of the six years and nine months in prison that Harksen was then sentenced to for fraud, he served around five.
Even after that, he continued to build his myth: for example in the autobiography “How I took money from the rich”. It was almost logical that someone like him then went to Mallorca and tried his hand at being a wine merchant and with high-end restaurants, where, surprisingly, all sorts of German celebrities were once again to be seen. Harksen took his second wife’s last name and was now called Smith. In 2015 he was sentenced to a new suspended sentence by the Hamburg regional court: again it was about money and false promises. Harksen married again, closed his restaurants again and tried his hand at being a gallery owner. He was never particularly healthy; he suffered, among other things, from liver cirrhosis. At the age of 63, Jürgen Harksen has died in a hospital in Palma de Mallorca.