Marano worked at Bear Stearns for more than 25 years, becoming one of the firm’s central figures in its push to ramp up the sale of bonds backed by loans to low-credit borrowers. With Marano as head of its mortgage-backed securities unit, the bank was selling tens of billions of dollars of those investments each year.

But after real estate prices fell and mortgage defaults surged in 2007, lawsuits against Bear started to pile up, accusing the bank of false and misleading statements in securitizing loans made to borrowers with no ability to repay.

Comp Package
While it’s difficult to tally Marano’s total career earnings, some numbers are public: He was paid $5.6 million in his first full year at ResCap in 2009 while the company lost $7.3 billion. At Ditech he was hired with an annual compensation package of $2.25 million, not including stock options and potential bonuses, according to filings.

At Bear, a 2011 lawsuit said Marano received “stratospheric compensation,” without providing details.

Marano didn’t comment directly on his past earnings but said that he contributes to causes including cancer research and homelessness.

It took him only one month to land a top job at ResCap after Bear Stearns was sold to JPMorgan Chase & Co. in a fire sale in March 2008.

When he arrived, ResCap, once one of the largest subprime mortgage lenders, was already facing a rise in foreclosures that had left it on the brink of bankruptcy. It was subject to lawsuits from buyers of mortgage bonds who alleged the underlying loans were faulty.

Among the securities that followed Marano to ResCap was “SACO 2006-8.” That was the security that gained notoriety after it was disparaged by a Bear Stearns vice president, in an infamous 2006 email, as a “SACK OF S---.”

Ski Resort
Marano said that he didn’t know about the email at the time. “If I had been aware of a person intentionally originating bad loans, I would have terminated them. Period,” he wrote in an email.

ResCap filed for bankruptcy and sold its assets for $4.5 billion in 2012. The sale included servicing rights on $50 billion of mortgages to a company that would become Ditech, which meant, as fate would have it, Marano sold ResCap assets to a company he would wind up running several years later.