“Friends of Angelo” Mozilo will mourn favor master’s death. Revelations began Dodd downfall.

Angelo Mozilo’s Countrywide Financial was a central actor in the 2007 mortgage meltdown and the wider 2008 crisis that it caused. There was another side to the mortgage maestro. In the competitive and often furtive world of subprime mortgages, Mozilo created an accommodating niche for the powerful and privileged: Friends of Angelo.

Mozilo’s foundation announced that he has died at age 84.

Former Senator Christopher Dodd was a prominent member of the Friends of Angelo club, as first reported in a blockbuster Conde Nast Portfolio June 2008 expose. Dodd maintained he knew nothing about sweetheart deals from the doomed mortgage maestro. Former Countrywide loan officer Robert Feinberg told a different story to Portfolio’s Dan Golden.

The Friends of Angelo story and much that followed from it caused Dodd to draw a bitter end his 2010 campaign for a sixth term. The mortgage meltdown and the bundling of subprime mortgages was a complicated, technical story. That a central actor in the global calamity had curried the goodwill of the powerful with special attention and better terms than others similarly situated could get when they borrowed money was easy to understand.

What’s the good of all that influent and power if you can’t get a mortgage with the fees reduced or the interest shaved? Angelo understood.

Published July 17, 2023.