Jon Corzine — Lives Of The Rich And Famous

Source: Decline of the Empire

Surely you haven’t forgotten Jon Corzine, former Goldman Sachs CEO and governor or New Jersey, and most recently, captain of the sunken ship MF Global. This ABC News story is from December 13, 2011.

Former MF Global CEO Jon Corzine is scheduled to testify before Congress again on Tuesday, this time before the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, but the whereabouts of about $1.2 billion in client money is still unknown.

The bankruptcy bankruptcy of the commodities trading firm on Oct. 31 was the eighth largest in U.S. history.

Corzine testified before the House Agriculture Committee last Thursday, saying he was at a loss as to what happened to the misssing money. “I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date,” Corzine testified. “My understanding is that our books and records were reflecting the chaos that occurred in the last two or three days as the firm was under severe pressure and had lost the confidence of the marketplace.”

The New York Times, however, reported that the former New Jersey governor and Goldman Sachs CEO “played a much larger, hands-on role in the firm’s high-stakes risk-taking than has previously been known” and that Corzine, who became chief executive of MF Global in March 2010 and resigned Nov. 4, was “convinced that he could quickly turn the money-losing firm into a miniature Goldman Sachs.”

According to the Times, Corzine “compulsively traded for the firm on his BlackBerry during meetings, sometimes dashing out to check on the markets.” In a move considered out of the ordinary for a chief executive, Corzine “became a core member of the group that traded using the firm’s money. His profits and losses appeared on a separate line in documents with his initials: JSC.”

Yes, that 1.2 billion dollars is still missing. Those who used this broker-dealer, including doom forecaster Gerald Celente, are still shit out of luck, although we are assured that Corzine was a core member of the group that traded using the firm’s money, and that his own profits and losses appeared on a separate line in documents with his initials: JSC.

A recent story in Vanity Fair called On Eve of $41 Billion MF Global Bankruptcy Filing, Jon Corzine Was Château Shopping in France confirms that Jon was a “hands on” manager of MF Global’s trading. 

As federal authorities searched for the brokerage house’s more than $1 billion in missing customer money, friends and former associates of Corzine weighed in on the ways his personal quirks informed his management style. “On this, Jon became a zealot,” one person says of Corzine’s European-debt trades. [Here's what a former employee said:]

“He managed the process soup to nuts. 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.”

Yet, it is Jon’s personal life that interests us the most. It is so interesting that we need to switch to the red font.

“I think he is the most competitive guy in the world,” says a person who was close to him at MF Global, explaining why Corzine took the job in the first place—despite prime opportunities both on Wall Street and in Washington, where he was frequently invoked as a possible Treasury-secretary successor to Timothy Geithner.

“He knows there are people out there who don’t like him, and he wants to prove them wrong. 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.”

Just how competitive is the most competitive guy in the world? I don’t know, but how about fuck-your-wife-and-make-you-watch-with-your-eyelids-taped-open competititve? Now, that’s the most competitive guy in the world! Some guy! A real winner! He’s the man!

Vanity Fair reports on Corzine’s personal life as well, saying that on October 15, two weeks before MF Global filed for bankruptcy, Corzine and his wife, Sharon Elghanayan, were at a birthday party in Paris talking about a château they were about to buy in the South of France.

“It’s not in Cap Ferrat,” one person recalls Elghanayan saying, perhaps to mitigate the extravagance [pictured left]. “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.”

Well, I think we need to lighten up a bit here. After all, that chateau in the South of France was not in Cap Ferrat. And our sympathy for Corzine increases when we learn the details about the break-up of his first marriage.

“The marriage [fell] apart, mostly because Jon was a workaholic,” a family friend says of Corzine’s relationship with his first wife, Joanne. “[She] contributed to that, too. The more Jon brought in, the more she wanted a great big life. She loved being around people who told her how important she was.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

For Corzine, one of the more distressing aspects of the divorce involved David Tepper (a onetime Goldman trader) and the estranged couple’s Sagaponack house. “For years, friends say, Corzine had felt Tepper and Joanne were becoming too close,” Vanity Fair reports. “Bad blood between the two men dated back to 1992, when Tepper, a fixture on the high-yield trading desk, was passed over for partner; he went on to form Appaloosa Management, a hedge fund, and, over time, became a billionaire.

Just days before the divorce was finalized, Joanne startled Corzine by suddenly insisting on keeping the Sagaponack house. Corzine had hoped it would become a gathering place for their children and a way to rebuild his ties to them. But Joanne insisted, and he gave in, valuing the house at roughly $9 million.

That might have been the end of the story, except that Joanne has what one friend calls ‘a real nose for real estate.’ In 2010, after renting the house for a stunning $900,000 for a single summer, she sold it for $44 million. The buyer was none other than David Tepper. Corzine, friends say, was apoplectic. One suspects he grew even angrier when Tepper tore down the house to build one of his own.

‘That was just a massive fuck-you to Jon,’ recalls a friend.

Jon Corzine is not in jail. In fact, he is shopping for some office space in Manhattan “according to people familiar with the matter.” The rule of law doesn’t apply to him as it does to you and me. It never does in the lives of the Rich & Famous. Nobody can find that 1.2 billion dollars. I simply do not know where the money is says Jon, although he managed the process soup to nuts, knew the intimate details of every trade on European debt made by MF Global.

You know, there’s not enough sarcasm in the world to express what needs to be expressed here. What is the bottom line? In a sane world, Jon Corzine and Joanne (1st wife) and Sharon (2nd wife) and billionaire David Tepper would have been tossed off the planet long ago for the obvious, huge risks they pose to the rest of us.

But this is not a sane world, and that’s clearly too much to hope for.

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