神奇小子拯救明富环球落难客户

    詹姆斯•库图拉斯插手这桩位居美国有史以来最大破产案之列的官司时，他的法律经验几乎为零。

    “出席破产法庭的第一天，我看到了法官脸上的那副表情，但我不能怪他，”他说。“破产法庭是一个富人俱乐部，四周都是老头，我站在那里显得很突兀了。老实说，刮了胡子我看起来也就12岁左右。”

    然而，在如今已解散的期货经纪公司明富环球（MF Global）的前客户中，30岁的库图拉斯或许是少数几位敢于公开抗议他们目前所受待遇的“勇士”之一。自10月31日申请破产以来，明富环球的麻烦事就接踵而至。首当其冲的问题是，该公司丢失了估计达10多亿美元的客户资金。从普通的农民、大农场主，到对冲基金，这笔损失直接导致期货市场上这些最活跃的参与者钱包缩水。

    库图拉斯是成立3年的大宗商品基金台风资本管理公司（Typhon Capital Management）的首席执行官。他是无意中闯进这场法庭大戏的。明富环球申请破产后不久，由库图拉斯创办的这家位于芝加哥的公司——其大部分业务都在期货市场上进行——发现，在它管理的7千万美元资金中，有5,500万已经被拖入破产程序。这太出人意料了，因为根据法律，客户资金应该与经纪公司的自有资产完全隔离。但明富环球并没有这样做。到了这时候，库图拉斯和明富环球成千上万的其他客户才猛然意识到大事不妙。

    “我的目标真的很简单：把大家的钱要回来，”他说。“而且我认为，我们成功的几率非常高。”11月初，库图拉斯连同芝加哥另一位期货交易商、田纳西州共和党众议员菲尔•罗伊博士的儿子约翰•罗伊共同创办了为明富环球前客户复杂的法律利益代言的草根组织——大宗商品客户联盟（Commodity Customer Coalition）。短短几周的时间，这个组织就聚集了8,000多位成员，并收到了数万美元的捐款。它凭借一己之力证明：足够多的人聚集在一起就可以改变一桩案值数十亿美元的破产案的进程。

    但有一个问题。尽管库图拉斯是一位受过专门培训的律师【他是西北大学法学院（Northwestern Law）2006界毕业生】，但他的法律经验仅限于一桩标的额为8,000美元的公益性官司。“我从未有过当执业律师的打算，”库图拉斯说。他的父亲是一位会计师，母亲是一名家庭主妇。“我讨厌律师这个行当。我上法学院只是为了避免以后不被这些家伙愚弄罢了。”

    James Koutoulas walked into one of the worst bankruptcies in U.S. history with almost zero legal experience.

    "When I got up the first day in bankruptcy court and saw the look on the judge's face, I couldn't blame him," he says. "Bankruptcy court is a rich man's club where everyone is old, so I stood out. Honestly, when I'm shaved, I look like I'm about 12."

    Yet Koutoulas, 30, may be one of the only former customers of MF Global, the now-defunct futures brokerage house, with the gumption to publicly object to the way they are being treated. Since filing for bankruptcy Oct. 31, MF Global's woes have rapidly piled up – chief among them losing an estimated $1 billion-plus of customer funds. The loss directly crimped the wallets of some of the futures market's most active participants, from small-time farmers to ranchers to hedge funds.

    Koutoulas, chief executive of three-year-old commodities fund Typhon Capital Management, stumbled into the courtroom drama accidentally. His Chicago firm, which conducts the bulk of its business in the futures market, discovered shortly after MF Global's bankruptcy that $55 million of its $70 million under management had been dragged into the proceedings. This was a surprise, because, by law, customer funds are supposed to be kept completely segregated from a brokerage firm's own assets. That wasn't the case with MF Global. For Koutoulas and tens of thousands of other MF customers, it was a rude awakening.

    "My goal is real simple: getting everybody's money back," he says. "And I think we have a very high likelihood of doing just that." In early November, Koutoulas, along with fellow Chicago futures trader, John Roe – son of Tennessee Republican congressman Dr. Phil Roe – founded the Commodity Customer Coalition, a grassroots group that seeks to represent the complex legal interests of MF Global's former clients. In the space of just a few weeks, the group has amassed more than 8,000 members, received tens of thousands of dollars of donations and singlehandedly proven that enough people, when banded together, can change the course of a multibillion-dollar bankruptcy.

    But there's a catch. While Koutoulas is a trained lawyer who graduated from Northwestern Law in 2006, his legal experience extends no further than a one-time $8,000 pro bono case. "I never wanted to practice law," says Koutoulas, whose father was an accountant and mother a homemaker. "I hate lawyers. I only went to law school to specifically avoid getting screwed by them."