Eideard

What does it take to hold your powerful bosses accountable if they try to bully you out the door?

Documents, e-mails, a former deputy district attorney as your lawyer — and a never-say-die approach.

Such was the lesson learned by Michael G. Winston, a former executive at the Countrywide Financial Corporation. Mr. Winston spent three years in a legal battle against Countrywide, the once-mighty mortgage giant, and its current owner, Bank of America, contending that he was punished and pushed out for not toeing the company line. On Feb. 4, he won: a jury in California awarded him $3.8 million in damages…

Mr. Winston’s story provides a glimpse into how business was done at Countrywide at the height of the subprime craziness — and how assiduously Angelo R. Mozilo, the company’s fallen leader, worked to quash dissent in the ranks. Mr. Winston had the audacity to question Countrywide practices. Mr. Mozilo was not pleased and, before long, Mr. Winston was marginalized and later dismissed.

Mr. Winston, a prominent executive in the field of organization management, is a rarity among corporate whistle-blowers. Most of them get run over by their former companies. A fascinating detail in his case: after providing to the opposition his list of witnesses, which included former colleagues who had also been let go by Bank of America, the bank hired several of them back. Then they testified against him.

Mr. Winston joined Countrywide in May 2005, when the lender was riding the mortgage wave. He was hired as an executive vice president in the leadership development area to help Countrywide grow even bigger and groom better managers. His boss, he recalled, told him that the lender wanted to become “Goldman Sachs on the Pacific.” Soon after, he was promoted to managing director and enterprise chief leadership officer…

It wasn’t long after he joined Countrywide that Mr. Winston began to worry about its business strategy, he said. He still recalls an episode from late 2005 that raised red flags for him. He found himself parked next to a man in the Countrywide lot whose car had vanity plates that read, “Fund’Em.” “I said: ‘I’m not familiar with that expression. What is this about?’ ” Mr. Winston recalled. The man replied that the term described the company’s growth strategy for 2006 — to fund all loans. “I was brand new and I said, ‘What if the person has no job?’ ” Mr. Winston said. The answer: “Fund ’em.”

“What if the person has no assets?”

Again: “Fund ’em…”

Testifying before the jury, Mr. Mozilo said he wanted Mr. Winston gone “because I concluded that he was not the type of individual that I wanted at a senior level at the company…”

Mr. Winston remained at Countrywide with two people reporting to him, down from 178 previously. When Bank of America took over in 2008, he was let go.

This is – in my humble experience – not an extraordinary tale. Excepting the part where Mr. Winston wins.

So, “Bravo!” for Mike Winston. For having the courage to dedicate every fibre of his being and penny he could scrape up to fight these scumballs. Personally, I hold Countrywide up as the poster-boy of sub-prime criminals. At least as responsible as Bill Clinton’s gullibility about redirecting Fannie and Freddie – and George W. Bush’s complicity and corruption in removing oversight and obscuring regulations designed to protect our economy.