Jon Corzine's "House-Shopping" In The South of France Raises More Questions

"House'" is in quotations, because he and his wife were really shopping for a chateau on the French Mediterranean.  Not exactly a three-bedroom, two-bath in Jersey...Vanity Fair:

“To buy any decent château is at least a couple of million euros,” explains another person who was at the party, “and that is before the renovation with the air-conditioning and the new kitchen. Sharon was very excited. She said she was flying down there on Monday morning.”

 This, two weeks before MF GLobal went belly-up, with Crooked Jon putting on his best "who, me?" face as he told Congress he has no idea where the missing $1.5 billion in customer funds went. But shocking lack of concern or utter cluelessness is not the point here. What interests us is that if Jon and his wife were shopping for a multi-million Euro house, he apparently had no concern about his own finances whatsoever. Which leads us to ask: Where was Dirty Jon's cash-stash?

It is almost unanimously mandated by Wall Street that officers of brokerage firms keep their investment accounts at the firm where they work. This is done for compliance reasons.

If Corzine and his inner cadre of lieutenants had their millions at MF Global, were their accounts breached as well?
Are they being treated identically to other MF Global account holders in terms of the massive amounts of their missing money and the lack of access to what’s rightfully theirs?
If Corzine et al. didn’t keep the vast majority of their money at MF Global, then why not?

Good questions. Maybe Congress will ask them the next time he is called to account, assuming he doesn't get asylum in the French Rivera.

Meanwhile, Vanity Fair paints the profile of a man who did, in fact, know what he was doing, even if he wasn't totally aware of why he was doing it:

“On this, Jon became a zealot,” one person says of Corzine’s European-debt trades. “He managed the process soup to nuts,” says a former employee. “He knew every number back and forth. He’d talk to the accountants and the board. He’s not a detail-oriented guy, but on this he knew every detail.”

Sort of puts lie to his previous sworn testimony before Congress:

“Nor was I an expert on the complicated rules and regulations governing the various different operating businesses that comprised MF Global,” he said.

 That's not what your (former?) friends are saying, pal. And the rest of the nation is finally getting a clearer picture of exactly who you are - although we in Jersey already knew this when we tossed your sorry ass out:

"He’s very focused on reputation and how he’s perceived. He wants to be perceived as a winner, and he will do what it takes to get there.” Says a former colleague, “He wanted to be in the game, to prove he was back, to prove he was the man.”

“There are a lot of us who consider Jon to be a friend and mentor,” says a former Goldmanite. “That group is horrified [by the scandal].” He continues: “There is another group who thinks this is par for the course.”

“At first I thought, Oh, Jon must be crushed,” says one person who knows him well. “It’s not like he was doing this [playing the accounting games] to earn a big bonus. But he needed to feed his ego that he would be perceived as being successful. And there are lot of people who are paying a much higher price than he is.”

Those of us who knew him know this is, in fact, par for the course. And he has always left a trail of bodies in his wake. Hopefully, this time, he'll be forced to pay the price.

And ironically, if he is metaphorically "strung up", it will be by none other than the torch & pitchfork wielding, anti-Wall Street mobs that his friend and mentor, Barack Obama, let loose upon America.

Sometimes there is justice, after all...

"What have you been doing lately, Jon? Playing the market with the company's money?

....Look at you. You used to be so cocky. You were going to go out and conquer the world... What are you but a warped, frustrated young man? A miserable little clerk crawling in here on your hands and knees and begging for help....."

~Mr. Potter, "It's a Wonderful Life"