NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Evan (Brent) Dooley, the 40-year-old wheat trader whose wrong-way bet cost Bermuda-based MF Global Ltd. $141.5 million, lost his house and car in a 2002 bankruptcy and borrowed from family and friends after earlier reversals.

Public records and interviews paint a picture of a man who repeatedly ran into financial scrapes, then tried to work his way out of trouble. Sometimes he gambled all night at casinos in Tunica, Mississippi, according to divorce-court filings.

MF Global, the largest brokerage of exchange-traded futures contracts, fired Dooley from its Memphis office last week after discovering he had "substantially exceeded his authorised trading limit." The company said it immediately tightened risk controls and ordered an outside review. It hasn't explained why a man with Dooley's history was allowed to bypass company security.

"These are sophisticated, smart people who should have known better," says Mark Williams, a finance professor at Boston University.

MF Global spokeswoman Diana DeSocio said that when the company put Dooley on commission, it requested a credit check that missed his bankruptcy record.

"Nothing in the background check would have precluded his hiring," DeSocio said in an interview yesterday. "We're continuing to conduct internal reviews and aren't able to comment further at this time."

MF disclosed the loss on February 28, sending the shares down 40 percent in two days.

In January, Societe Generale SA, France's second-largest bank, said Jerome Kerviel lost 4.9 billion euros ($7.5 billion) by taking positions on European stock market indexes.

Last week, MF Global's Davis told analysts that Dooley, trading for his own account, was able to amass "significant positions" on wheat futures contracts "very, very quickly" between midnight and 6 a.m. on February 27.

Expecting the price of wheat to fall, Dooley traded more than 15,000 contracts covering 75 million bushels on the Chicago Board of Trade, said a person familiar with the matter who declined to be identified because the information is private.

The value of the position ranged from about $800 million to $1 billion, based on overnight trading prices.

The US Attorney's Office in Chicago is investigating Dooley's trades, said Sheldon Zenner, with the Chicago law firm Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, who said he represents MF Global.

"We've been told that we are not a target," Zenner said, speaking for MF Global. The company is "cooperating fully," he said.

"There were a few isolated trading terminals on retail execution desks inside the company that didn't have buying-power controls on them," Davis said. The limits weren't in use to allow faster trading, he said. The trades were discovered internally and no longer are possible, Davis said.

Dooley didn't respond to requests for an interview, and his attorney, Arthur Quinn of the Bogatin Law Firm PLC in Memphis, had no comment. Friends and family also declined to discuss Dooley's trading loss. In a brief telephone conversation, his second wife, Lori Dooley, 42, said they were relying on the advice of legal counsel.

For the past several days, the curtains have been drawn at the Dooleys' home in Olive Branch, Mississippi, a half-hour from downtown Memphis. The front yard is bare. A child's red wagon was parked in the driveway. There were welcome signs at each door.

Lori Dooley said she was recovering from breast cancer and she and her husband and four-year-old daughter are struggling.

"I try to stay positive," she said.

Brent Dooley's 2002 personal bankruptcy filing lists $390,590 in unsecured debts linked to two commodities brokerages in Memphis and Chicago. On federal income tax returns between 2002 and 2005, he reported $90,000 in personal trading losses. He also was behind by $10,252 in alimony and child support in late 2006, according to court filings.

He worked part-time at the commodities brokerage McVean Trading & Investments LLC while attending what now is known as the University of Memphis. He graduated in December 1990 with a bachelor's degree in finance, according to a copy of his resume.

Before joining MF Global as a non-employee associate in 2006, Dooley worked at six other commodities firms.

In 1995, he established his own commodity trading advisory firm, Dooley Trading Co. That August, he bought a new brick house on Paradise Drive in the Memphis suburb of Cordova for $122,500.

The following May, he married his first wife, Michelle, and the couple had a daughter in July 1998.

Michelle Dooley filed for divorce in March 2001, accusing her husband in a complaint of adultery and physical abuse and of being "secretive and unwilling to discuss the parties' finances". She alleged that he drank and gambled excessively.

Brent Dooley denied each of the allegations.

In a July 2001 filing in the divorce case, Michelle Dooley describes a December 2000 family outing to the Grand Casino in Tunica, where he allegedly bet and lost, drawing funds from credit cards and borrowing from his mother.

In September 2002, Brent Dooley filed for bankruptcy, listing $153,600 in assets and $669,816 in liabilities. He gave up his house and a leased 2003 Cadillac DTS, court records in Memphis show. His US income tax return that year reported $87,910 in trading losses. Dooley's debts included $240,590 owed the now-defunct Delta Trading Co. of Memphis and $45,000 due a former trading partner there, Tom Bonds, according to bankruptcy documents. He also owed $105,000 to Kent Woods, the former branch manager of Tenco Inc., who is now chief executive officer of Futures International LLC, both of Chicago.

Dooley tried to revive a commodities trading career that he said in divorce court fell apart after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks disrupted US financial markets.

"I have tremendous fundamental and technical knowledge of all futures markets," he said in a resume in the divorce file.

During this period, Dooley drove a truck for Fayette Packing Co. and managed the downtown Memphis Grits restaurant, earning $6,950 in 2003, according to his tax return. Included on the return is $24,225 in trading losses through an account at Refco Inc., later acquired by MF Global.

"He borrowed heavily from family members and friends to pay his bills and to attempt to continue trading in the commodities market," Tennessee circuit court Judge Karen Williams wrote in a December 2003 order.