Angelo Mozilo

Angelo Robert Mozilo (December 16, 1938 – July 16, 2023) was an American banker who was chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Countrywide Financial until July 1, 2008.

Angelo Robert Mozilo was born in the Bronx on December 16, 1938.

His grandparents were Italian immigrants and his father was a butcher.

He attended Catholic schools as a child, and helped his father with his business from age 12.

When he was 14, he began working as a messenger for a mortgage broker.

He was a graduate of Fordham University.

In 1969, he and his former mentor David S. Loeb, who had already started a mortgage lending company, founded Countrywide Credit Industries in New York.

They later moved the headquarters to Pasadena, California, and then to Calabasas, California, in Los Angeles County.

When subprime loans came onto the scene in the late 1980s (Guardian S&L) and 1990s (The Money Store), his company did not participate.

After Countrywide was listed on the NYSE in 1984, Mozilo sold $406 million (~$ in ) worth of its stock, mostly obtained through stock option grants.

He privately described the subprime loan mavericks of the 1990s as "crooks".

However, his company began to lose business to the subprime lenders.

He had to compete with them or keep losing market share.

Mozilo and Loeb cofounded IndyMac Bank, which was originally known as Countrywide Mortgage Investment, before being spun off as an independent bank in 1997.

The company's status as a major lender of subprime mortgages made it a central player in a subsequent mortgage crisis which collapsed the industry, bursting a housing bubble which had accumulated throughout the 2000s, and contributing heavily to the Great Recession.

Mozilo later paid over $67 million in fines to settle a series of federal charges related to his conduct at the company.

Thus, by the early 2000s, Countrywide began using subprime loans.

Perhaps more than any single individual, Mozilo has come to symbolize, and bear the blame for, the subprime mortgage crisis.

Mozilo's compensation during the United States housing bubble of 2001–06 later came under scrutiny.

During that period, his total compensation (including salary, bonuses, options and restricted stock) approached $470 million.

His compensation also included payment for equity memberships and annual country club dues at Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks, CA, The Quarry at La Quinta golf club in La Quinta, California and at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia.

$129 million (~$ in ) of this was realized in the 12 months ending August 2007.

In the beginning, Countrywide was a pioneer in the nationwide non-bank mortgage industry, and grew to become one of the biggest mortgage lending companies in the United States.

Mozilo was very concerned with the quality of credit borrowers and the quality of their loans.

IndyMac collapsed and was seized by federal regulators on July 11, 2008.

In a New York Times feature on October 20, 2008, Henry G. Cisneros, former secretary of HUD and member of the Countrywide board of directors, described Mozilo as "sick with stress—the final chapter of his life is the infamy that's been brought on him, or that he brought on himself."

CNN named Mozilo as one of the 'Ten Most Wanted: Culprits' of the 2008 financial collapse in the United States, theory further supported in Inside Job, an Academy Award-winning documentary on the global financial crisis.

For years afterward, Mozilo denied that the subprime mortgage industry bore any responsibility for the crisis, instead attributing it to a credit crunch.

Mozilo testified before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on March 7, 2008, calling reports of his pay "grossly exaggerated" in some instances and pointing out that he lost millions as well.

He defended the pay: The compensation was a function of how the company did ahead of the mortgage crisis.

Over many years, Mozilo sold hundreds of millions of dollars in stock, even while publicly touting the stock and using shareholder funds to buy back stock to support the share price.

It is the largest settlement by an individual or executive connected to the 2008 housing collapse.

Robert Khuzami, director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, said in a statement that "Mozilo's record penalty is the fitting outcome for a corporate executive who deliberately disregarded his duties to investors by concealing what he saw from inside the executive suite."

By settling the SEC charges, Mozilo avoided a trial that could have led to future criminal charges.

The terms of the settlement allowed Mozilo to avoid acknowledgment of wrongdoing.

Countrywide was to pay $20 million of the $67.5 million penalty because of an indemnification agreement that was part of Mozilo's employment contract.

On June 4, 2009, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged him with insider trading and securities fraud.

On October 15, 2010, Mozilo reached a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission over securities fraud and insider trading charges.

Mozilo agreed to pay $67.5 million in fines, and accepted a lifetime ban from serving as an officer or director of any public company.

In February 2011, the US dropped its criminal investigation into the facts behind the civil settlement.