The Naked Short Selling That Toppled Wall Street, by Mark Mitchell. DeepCapture.com, October 2nd, 2008.

In other words, hedge funds and brokers sold as many as 9 million shares that they did not possess (which is why they “failed to deliver” them), and they kept the market saturated with at least 1 million phantom shares for more than two weeks. WaMu’s stock price dropped by more than 30% during this period. Similar attacks, with similar effects, occurred one after another in the months leading up to June.
This attack lasted long enough to put Bear Stearns on the threshold list, but by then, it was too late. The bank’s mangled remains had been swallowed by JP Morgan. Ultimately, at least 11 million shares of Bear Stearns were sold and never delivered.
Two days after Lehman was vaporized, AIG watched its stock fall to as low as one dollar. The data through June shows that AIG was repeatedly blasted with phantom stock, often in stretches of eight days (three + five), with peak failures to deliver reaching 2 million shares. It’s a safe bet that the data will show that these attacks continued, and grew in magnitude, until a price of one buck per share resulted in paralysis, and AIG had to be nationalized. But the company never appeared on the SEC’s threshold list.

After AIG, the rumor was that Citigroup would go down next. The data through June shows that Citigroup was bombarded – blast, pause, blast – with massive amounts of phantom stock. Failures to deliver peaked at 8 million shares. No doubt, the blasts continued and grew in magnitude in the days leading up to September 16, when Citigroup’s stock went into a death spiral.
Wow. Just wow.

"Notorious B.I.G. said it best: Either you're slinging crack rock, or you got a wicked jump shot.' Nobody wants to work for it anymore. There's no honor in taking the after school job at Mickey D's. Honor's in the dollar, kid. So I went the white boy way of slinging crack rock. I became a stock broker."
- Seth Davis, Boiler Room (2000)

These guys went the white boy way of robbing banks. They became hedge fund portfolio managers.