Subprime mortgage king Roland E. Arnall, a politically connected billionaire whose philanthropy was overshadowed by investigations into alleged lending abuses at his Ameriquest Mortgage Co., died Monday. He was 68.
Mr. Arnall, a Holocaust survivor who co-founded the Simon Wiesenthal Center, had resigned as President Bush’s ambassador to the Netherlands on March 7, returning to Los Angeles to be with a seriously ill son, the family said. The senior Arnall was diagnosed with cancer Wednesday, a family spokesman said.
Born on the eve of World War II to Eastern European Jews who had fled to Paris, Mr. Arnall spent his early childhood in a French village where his family pretended to be Catholic. He wasn’t told he was Jewish until after the war, and his family soon moved to Montreal and then to the United States, where his first business was selling flowers in Los Angeles.
Mr. Arnall amassed huge interests in apartments and other businesses. But he was known chiefly as a pioneer of lending to high-risk borrowers, using databases to identify customers and partnering with Wall Street companies that provided funding and bundled his loans into mortgage-backed bonds — the business whose recent meltdown has shaken the global financial system.
His lending company, Ameriquest Mortgage, and sister companies including Argent Mortgage Co. had become the nation’s largest subprime lenders by the middle of this decade. Ameriquest advertised heavily on TV, sent blimps soaring above stadiums bearing the company’s name and Liberty Bell logo, and sponsored a Super Bowl halftime show and a Rolling Stones tour.
But the company that called itself the Proud Sponsor of the American Dream was dogged by allegations that Ameriquest ran “boiler rooms” of loan agents who socked borrowers with hidden fees and higher-than-promised interest rates while steering customers into loans they couldn’t afford.
Mr. Arnall, who with his wife, Dawn, had been the heaviest backers of Republican candidates and causes in the 2004 election cycle, saw Ameriquest Mortgage shut down its lending last year, an early casualty of the subprime meltdown.
