The passing of Angelo Mozilo on July 16 at age 83 inspired me to recall my in-person coverage of the former Countrywide CEO as the real estate's reigning entrepreneur in the early 2000s. I also witnessed up close the damage wrought by his reckless lending practices in stories examining the desperate campaign waged by Countrywide's acquirer Bank of America, and its new leader Brian Moynihan, to rescue the mega-bank from the wreckage. The Mozilo I knew boasted both the genuinely brilliant promotional skills that built what was once a outstanding company, and the unbridled hunger for size and profit, risk be damned, that brought it to grief.
In the summer of 2003, this writer was mining our Fortune 500 list for overlooked companies attaining spectacular feats when a little-known California mortgage lender caught my eye. Countrywide Financial, a comer I'd never heard of and wasn't even a bank, had jumped from outside the 500 club to the 209th spot in just four years. Its stock was surging even faster than its sales, leading me to examine its long-term performance. To my amazement, that exercise unearthed a heretofore unnoticed achievement: Countrywide had notched the highest shareholder returns of any financial services enterprise since the start of the great bull market in 1983.
