Ditech.com Parent Sending Executive Reinforcements
A day after federal agents arrested three of Ditech.com’s top managers, the mortgage lender’s parent company said Tuesday that it has dispatched several officials from its East Coast headquarters to oversee the troubled operations in Costa Mesa.
“We’ve committed additional resources . . . and brought in some senior-level and middle-level people to assist Ditech on an interim basis,” said Rick Gillespie, a spokesman for GMAC Residential Holdings, a unit of General Motors Corp. that last year bought Ditech.
Gillespie said Ditech received a small number of anxious telephone calls from borrowers. But he said he was unaware of any cancellations arising from the arrests. Ditech is one of the Southland’s leading mortgage lenders, having made $4.3 billion in loans last year.
The spokesman, however, declined to say whether there would be an immediate replacement for Ditech’s founder and chief executive, J. Paul Reddam, who resigned abruptly Monday amid the federal investigation. Reddam has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
The investigation, which is ongoing, became public Monday when FBI agents raided Ditech’s offices in Costa Mesa and arrested Gregory Kenneth DeLong, 41, and Vincent Pozzuoli, 36, both of Newport Beach. A third manager, Jay David Marx, 36, of San Juan Capistrano, was arrested late Monday at an Arizona resort area, authorities said.
According to a grand jury indictment, the three managers were involved in a plot to extort kickbacks from a Pittsburgh real estate services firm. The indictment accuses the three men of threatening to stop using ATM Corp. of America unless the firm agreed to pay them and to put Marx’s father-in-law on its payroll as a “ghost employee.”
Pozzuoli, listed as vice president of loan originations in Ditech’s 1998 financial statement, and DeLong, who oversaw escrow services, were released after posting $25,000 bonds, said Thom Mrozek, spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.
It was unclear late Tuesday whether Marx, who worked as Ditech’s operations manager, was released after his arrest in Lake Havasu.
None of the three former managers could be reached Tuesday for comment.
But an attorney for Pozzuoli said that his client would plead innocent. “This does not appear to be a very serious matter,” John Riddet said. “I fully expect him to be exonerated.” Efforts to reach lawyers for DeLong and Marx were not successful.
GMAC’s spokesman Gillespie said that GMAC officials would help run Ditech over the next two weeks. Among the GMAC executives sent to Costa Mesa from its Pennsylvania headquarters was the company’s chief operating officer, David Applegate.
Ditech, a 5-year-old company, has earned a national reputation for aggressively marketing higher-risk home-equity loans. More recently the company has come to be known for its presence on the Internet, where it offers quick loan approval, and for its widespread advertising, perhaps most notably freeway billboards that display the company’s daily mortgage rates.
In its television ads, Reddam took center stage. A former philosophy teacher with a passion for horse racing, the 44-year-old Reddam built the company with a scrappy style and aggressive advertising and cost-cutting.
Last year, he sold the company to GMAC in a deal valued at as much as $265 million, according to estimates. Reddam did not return telephone calls this week.
