Countrywide Leader Named in 'Hustle' Suit Now a JPMorgan Exec

Updated with JPMorgan declining comment.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- A Countrywide executive mentioned in the U.S. lawsuit against Bank of America (BAC) Wednesday for allegedly ignoring warnings about the firm's defective loan origination process is now a home lending executive at JPMorgan Chase (JPM).

Rebecca Mairone was Chief Operating Officer at Countrywide's Full Spectrum Lending Unit, which implemented a new origination process called "Hustle" to fast track the underwriting and processing of loans to boost volume and revenue.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Mairone has been with JPMorgan since March 2012. Her title is listed as Home Lending Executive, Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase.

Calls to Mairone's office at JPMorgan were directed to the bank's communications office. JPMorgan declined to comment.

According to a complaint filed by the U.S. Department of Justice Wednesday, the "Hustle" origination process resulted in billions of dollars of defective loans.

Internal quality control checks at Countrywide revealed that the origination process was creating highly defective loans that would not meet GSE standards, but Mairone and Greg Lumsden, President of the unit, allegedly ignored those findings.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued Bank of America on Wednesday for over $1 billion for alleged multi-year mortgage fraud against government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The complaint alleges that from at least 2007 to 2009, "Countrywide and later Bank of America, following the acquisition of Countrywide in 2008, implemented a new origination process called "Hustle", which was intentionally designed to process loans at high speed and without quality checkpoints, and which generated thousands of fraudulent and otherwise defective residential mortgage loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that later defaulted causing over $1 billion dollars in losses and countless foreclosures."

Manhattan attorney Preet Bharara called the fraud "spectacularly brazen" in scope, but he fell short of naming individual officials as defendants in his lawsuit, much to the chagrin of critics yearning for some accountability from Wall Street execs who fueled the crisis.

However, the complaint does allege that two former officials at Countrywide's Full Spectrum Lending (FSL) unit, President Greg Lumsden and Chief Operating Officer Rebecca Mairone, were repeatedly warned that the unit's "Hustle" origination process would produce defective loans that were ineligible for sale to the GSEs and that the executives ignored these warnings.

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