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He was from Goldman Sachs.

That is the refrain you hear over and over again when MF Global insiders try to explain why they went along with Jon Corzine’s risky trades — the same ones that caused a crisis of confidence at the firm and, ultimately, its bankruptcy on Monday.

Mr. Corzine was at Goldman Sachs for nearly 25 years, rising to become its senior partner before being ousted in a boardroom coup in 1999. He was considered a bright, aggressive trader who had a history of making big bets that paid off. When he joined MF Global last year — after a decade in politics as a Democratic senator and governor of New Jersey — he talked openly about his ambition to create a mini-Goldman.

Being a former Goldmanite has long been considered the ultimate calling card.

But, in some cases, it has proved to be a liability: A series of blunders by former senior Goldman executives raises questions about whether Goldman’s secret sauce can actually be exported. Think John Thain. Or Robert Rubin. Or J. Chris Flowers.

“Those people walked around with halos around them. Myths have been created on Wall Street. Nowhere is the myth bigger than at Goldman,” William Cohan, the author of “Money and Power, How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World,” a 658-page volume that explored the firm’s history and culture, said in an interview.

But Mr. Cohan, pausing briefly, added that whatever myths might exist around Goldman, “Everybody puts their pants on the same way, one foot at a time.”

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It is a lesson that some of Goldman’s smartest alumni have learned the hard way, none more so than Mr. Corzine.

His outsize bets at MF Global on European sovereign debt — many of which he made personally — proved the firm’s undoing because of the large amount of leverage that he used to magnify his bets. As of the firm’s filing at the end of June, it had $44.4 billion worth of liabilities; yet it only had $1.4 billion of equity. That kind of leverage was enough to scare credit ratings agencies into downgrading the firm last week, which led counterparties to stop trading with it.

In truth, Mr. Corzine’s bet may still prove to be correct. Many of the Italian and Spanish bonds that Mr. Corzine bought — most of which mature in 2012 — are still trading at 98 and 99 cents on the dollar. Mr. Corzine’s investment thesis always was that the European Central Bank and the European Union would find a way to prop them up. But Mr. Corzine’s bets also relied on short-term funding and, given the skepticism in the market, counterparties quickly ran for cover.

Even if Mr. Corzine’s gamble was right, it is hard to believe that he could have made such a large bet at Goldman Sachs.

“The one thing Goldman really does well — better than everyone else — is the internal accounting and compliance function. They give those people a lot of power,” Mr. Cohan said. At MF Global, Mr. Cohan asked: “Who in the world was going to stand up to Jon Corzine? Nobody. They didn’t have the compliance or the culture.”

That may be the special ingredient at Goldman. While the firm encourages risk-taking by its traders, it also empowers its risk managers — at other firms considered the back office — to constantly challenge even the most senior leaders to keep them from going over the cliff.

Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s current chief executive, loves to tell people that he spends “98 percent of my time thinking about 2 percent probabilities.” That is not something you hear from most bank chief executives.

In the case of Mr. Corzine, at MF Global, he was the chairman and chief executive. Given that he was directing the investment strategy, he might as well have been the compliance officer too. The only people with any authority who could have meaningfully pushed back were the board. And it is possible the Goldman halo may have even kept regulators at bay.

“The firm may have been cut some slack given who he is,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. (Still, he says he think it was unlikely.)

Once outside of the Goldman fishbowl, with its layers of risk management, Wall Street can become a lonely place for some of its most famous alumni.

Mr. Thain, Goldman’s former chief financial officer, took the top job at Merrill Lynch after personally doing what he thought was a deep dive into the firm’s financial records and declaring that the firm had a clean bill of health. Less than a year later, he was forced to sell the firm to Bank of America and was later fired after the disclosure of huge losses. (In fairness, Mr. Thain didn’t create Merrill’s problems — they happened on Stanley O’Neal’s watch — but he didn’t manage them particularly well.)

Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of Goldman — and former Treasury secretary — joined Citigroup as a senior adviser and board member in 1999. A dazzling trader when he was at Goldman, he counseled Citigroup that the firm should take more risk. While he did not manage the firm’s trading or its day-to-day activities, the firm lost more than 70 percent of its value during his tenure, and ultimately the government had to bail out the company twice. It is clearly debatable whether he deserves blame, but the outcome is incontrovertible. What is clear is that Citigroup did not have the kind of risk management or culture that Mr. Rubin had grown accustomed to at Goldman.

Likewise, Mr. Flowers, a remarkable Goldman banker, left the firm in 1998 to strike out on his own. One of his first investments — Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, which became Shinsei Bank — turned out to be a grand slam home run, reaping him $1 billion in profits. But since then, the investment has lost ground and his investment record has been spotty. His most recent fund has already lost almost $4 billion.

Which brings us back to Mr. Corzine, who is a good friend of Mr. Flowers. Mr. Corzine happens to be an operating partner and investor in Mr. Flowers’s firm. Mr. Flowers is, in turn, an investor in MF Global. His fund stands to lose about $48 million as a result of MF’s bankruptcy. Maybe they could have used another risk manager from Goldman?