Bringing Down Bear Stearns, by Bryan Burrough. Vanity Fair, August 2008.
On Monday, March 10, the rumor started: Bear Stearns was having liquidity problems. In fact, the maverick investment bank had around $18 billion in cash reserves. But soon the speculation created its own reality, and the race was on to keep Bear’s crisis from ravaging Wall Street. With the blow-by-blow from insiders, Bryan Burrough follows the players—Bear’s stunned executives, trigger-happy reporters at CNBC, a nervous Fed, a shadowy group of short-sellers—in what some believe was the greatest financial scandal in history.
by Bryan Burrough August 2008

The Story of Deep Capture, By Mark Mitchell, with reporting by the Deep Capture Team (In PDF here)

This is very long, around 70 pages, but it is enthralling. At root is "naked short selling", something currently being debated in Washington. And at issue is a small number of law-breaking hedge funds who have seemingly co-opted or gamed the financial media.