FDIC Going After WaMu Execs...and their Wives

Real Housewives hide things like their dignity, class, and their drinking problems (you can’t convince me that Ramona Singer hasn’t spent 76 percent of each season in a blackout). REAL real housewives hide things like cash and houses in order to shield those assets from inevitable legal claims, according to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Meet Linda Killinger (to be played by Naomi Watts in the movie I’m pretending to make) and Esther Rotella (who appears to be camera shy, but I’d like to see Patti Lupone in the role), wives of Washington Mutual executives Kerry Killinger and Stephen Rotella, respectively. While their husbands were (allegedly) hastening the largest bank collapse in U.S. history (“and all I got was this lousy t-shirt”), Linda and Esther spent their days squirreling away assets like the above-mentioned houses (in Palm Desert, CA; Shoreline, WA; and Orient, NY) and million-dollar cash gifts (“and still all I got was this lousy t-shirt”). Now, they’re being named as defendants in a suit filed by the FDIC.

The Wall Street Journal references an unnamed source who claims that the FDIC wants $900 million from the defendants. While it’s not entirely unprecedented for the government to name spouses in these kinds of suits – it’s also not so very commonplace. Mr Rotella, in a released statement, said, “[It is] almost beyond belief that the FDIC would take action against an effective, hard working bank manager who performed well under extraordinary conditions in an effort to save an important financial institution.”

All well and good, except maybe Rotella doesn’t quite know what the word “effective” means. Or remembers that the phrase “performing well” seems out of place in a statement referencing the collapse of a bank that helped set the world’s economies into tailspins.

The FDIC is being close-lipped about the suit at the moment, saying only that they’ll “initiate lawsuits against former officers, directors and other professionals of failed institutions when the case has merit and is expected to be cost effective.”

“And their spouses, too,” I guess, is implied.