Angelo Mozilo

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. Mozilo and Loeb cofounded IndyMac Bank, which was originally known as Countrywide Mortgage Investment, before being spun off as an independent bank in 1997. IndyMac collapsed and was seized by federal regulators on July 11, 2008. Mozilo did not hold any managerial, executive, or chair positions at any time leading up to this event.

After Countrywide was listed on the NYSE in 1984, Mozilo sold $406 million (~$1.03 billion in 2024) worth of its stock, mostly obtained through stock option grants. $129 million (~$187 million in 2024) 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. When subprime loans came onto the scene in the late 1980s (Guardian S&L) and 1990s (The Money Store), his company did not participate. 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. 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. 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, a theory further supported in Inside Job, an Academy Award-winning documentary on the 2008 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 married Phyllis Ardese in 1961. They had five children and were together until her death in 2017.

Mozilo was a resident of Montecito, California, where he died on July 16, 2023, at age 84, of natural causes.