Also, one insider, Robert Trosten, received $45 million when he left his post as chief financial officer a year ago, according to an arbitration hearing this year.

Mystery still surrounds the collapse this month of Refco, a decades-old Wall Street firm that conducted billions of dollars in trades in commodities, currencies and U.S. Treasury securities for more than 200,000 client accounts last year. But investors and customers who are facing losses in Refco's bankruptcy will certainly want to understand how insiders could drain $1.124 billion from the company's coffers in the year or so leading up to its demise.

To some degree, the money that insiders took out is not surprising, given that Refco's executives sold a big stake in the company to Thomas H. Lee Partners, a private equity firm in Boston, in August 2004.

Most of the money that insiders received $1.057 billion was paid upon the completion of that deal. Two Refco insiders were on the receiving end of those payouts: Phillip Bennett, the former chief executive who has been charged with defrauding investors by concealing a $435 million loan he arranged with the firm, and Tone Grant, Refco's longtime chief executive before Bennett.

Bennett has denied the securities fraud charges but has declined to comment further. Grant could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Creditors of Refco will almost certainly try to recover what they can from payments made by the company to its top executives in the months leading up to its demise.

While compensation like salaries is typically not recoverable, payments made in the sale of a company or dividends paid to its owners are fair game if the company is insolvent, said Denis Cronin, a specialist in bankruptcy law at the New York firm Cronin & Vris.

The $1.057 billion came in two chunks, according to the Refco prospectus. First, Bennett and Grant appear to have shared in a $550 million cash payment in the transaction with Thomas Lee Partners. Then, Bennett appears to have received $507 million more from the deal.

Bennett did not cash out of Refco completely. At the time of the Lee deal, he agreed to roll over an equity stake in Refco worth $383 million, the prospectus said.

-- Gretchen Morgenson and Jenny Anderson,  The New York Times