Stealing From Clients?

Via Ritholtz, Jesse's Cafe Americain on Jon Corzine's MF Global collapse:

 When 'non-consequential' customers were requesting their funds, they were issued checks instead of wire transfers. The checks of course were not honored and bounced. But days later, and just hours before the bankruptcy filing, MF Global was paying BONUSES to its UK traders. Remarkable in light of how much dirty business the NY firms have been outsourcing to London. Follow the hush money.

This is a scandal of the first order, and a severe test for the Obama Justice Department, the regulatory agencies, and the exchanges.  This is a great crime, undeniably premeditated, and possibly the tip of an iceberg that would shake the public confidence in a deeply corrupt financial system. 

If a registered broker can simply take Treasuries and receipts for physical assets like gold and silver from customer accounts and give them to a complicit crony lender, and then look at the public with a straight face and say the money is missing and they do not know where it is, then no one's accounts are safe, anywhere, at any bank or broker, in the US financial system. 

This has every appearance of a legally sanctioned theft, pure and simple.

I have been unable to believe that customer assets were pledged and lost to creditors.  I can't believe that Corzine, being worth hundreds of millions of dollars, would do something so stupid.  The man doesn't seem like one who would want to risk years in federal prison for criminal theft.  If they actually did this, he is going to have to go to jail.  Jesse is right, Obama's Justice Department should be putting together a criminal case against the parties on both sides of this deal.