Jon Corzine was born in 1947 and grew up on a small Illinois farm, played quarterback and captained the basketball team, made sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserve, and earned a University of Chicago MBA at night while working at a regional bank. He joined Goldman Sachs in 1975 as a bond trader, rose to CEO and senior partner by 1994, and helped organize the 1998 private rescue of Long-Term Capital Management. Forced out in 1999 after a power struggle with co-CEO Henry Paulson, he left with an estimated $400 million from the firm’s public offering. He then spent a record $62 million of his own money to win New Jersey’s 2000 Senate race by about three points, co-authored the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, voted against the Iraq war resolution and chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Corzine spent another $38 million to win the governorship in 2005. In 2006 he shut down state government, including Atlantic City’s casinos, until the legislature accepted his increase of the sales tax from 6 to 7 percent after six days. In April 2007 his state SUV crashed on the Garden State Parkway at 91 miles per hour while he rode without a seatbelt, leaving him in critical condition. He abolished the death penalty and reformed school funding but lost to Chris Christie in 2009. As CEO of MF Global from 2010 he made large leveraged bets on European sovereign debt, and when the firm filed for bankruptcy in October 2011, $1.2 billion in customer funds was missing.

• A pollster urged him to drop the Wall Street image, and he campaigned on universal health care, gun registration and preschool.
• His breakup payout to Carla Katz, who led a Communications Workers of America local, exceeded $6 million; an ethics panel found no code violation.
• The crash shattered his femur and broke his sternum, a vertebra and 11 ribs; he paid a $46 ticket and filmed a PSA that opened with “I should be dead.”
• His toll road plan would have let tolls on the Turnpike and Parkway rise 50 percent every four years to pay down state debt.
• In a 2017 CFTC settlement he paid a $5 million penalty and accepted a lifetime ban from the futures industry; customers eventually recovered their money.