The reference page mentioned their "hot wallet" went dry (presumably it ran out of coin) and someone went to their offline storage and took out the USB stick with the offline wallet and will drive back into town and put some coinage into the account.

I suppose if you knew who the Mt Gox folks were, and you had enough BTC you could try to 'stage' this ala Oceans 11 or the Italian job but given the challenge of moving really large quantities of BTC into fiat currency I'm not sure that makes sense.

One of the things that is really fascinating about the BTC ecosystem is that all of this stuff happens visibly, unlike private banks where they just find the guy who embezzled the money shoot him and drop him off a pier or something.