It ain't who you know...

...it's who knows you.
(Via CJR' Ryan Chittum)

The Friends of Angelo scandal just keeps getting more interesting. Chittum's delving into a piece from Portfolio and just his summary is pretty riveting.

Beyond providing evidence of favor-peddling at all levels of government, the emails also helpfully reveal how top Countrywide officials, including Mozilo, describe the various loan-origination and other fees they charged millions of customers: “junk” and “garbage.” 

This would be the “junk” and “garbage”—Countrywide’s terms—piled up on account balances across the country, including the ones burdening non-V.I.P.s now in foreclosure. Gretchen Morgenson reported in The New York Times this weekend that the average mortgage loan has $700 of this “junk,” up half in the last few years. In December she reported those totaled $17 billion a year. What a waste. 

For the elite, however, life is good. A California appeals judge, for instance, asks country-club buddy Mozilo for $1.9 million in loans. Mozilo personally approves it, telling Robert Feinberg—the loan officer for the VIP program and Portfolio’s key source here— that it’s “golden” and the judge gets thousands of dollars in loan discounts from Countrywide. The judge just happened to have a class-action lawsuit against Countrywide before him at the time, and he and his two fellow judges ruled in favor of the lender.

  And that's just the intro. Read on, but don your hip waders. It's gettin' pretty deep.

After that, dive into the Portfolio piece.