The clueless CEO is so 2002. Instead, Countrywide had a whistleblower-in-chief.

Just over a year ago, Angelo Mozilo, the head of Countrywide—in the boom years, the country's biggest mortgage lender—appeared before Congress to plead his case. He put on an undertaker's look of thoughtful concern and patiently explained that "no one could have predicted the severity and force of the housing market downturn." He talked about how he'd devoted his life to "providing homeownership opportunities for all Americans" and about how Countrywide's toxic loan products "played an important role in assisting borrowers with home purchases and helping them manage their finances."

The performance was worthy of Enron's Kenneth Lay, folksy and soothing, so if you squinted your eyes, you could almost believe that Mozilo was as shaken and confused by everything happening around him as anyone.

It was inevitable that Mozilo's turn in the Capitol would be just a warm-up to the main event. It's taken a little while, but yesterday the Securities and Exchange Commission charges that everyone knew would eventually be filed against Mozilo came down. Unsurprisingly, the SEC's 53-page complaint detailing how he sold $260 million in stock while watching his company hurtle to disaster paints a very different picture of Mozilo than the one he presented himself. But it also presents a very different picture of him than you might have expected if you've been following the ups and downs of this era of corporate malfeasance.

In the last few years we've seen chief executives in Mozilo's boat over and over play the role of hapless ingénue. When they are hauled into court, the claim—Ken Lay is the prime example—is that they were blissfully disengaged while their subordinates ran amok. They didn't see the numbers. They didn't use e-mail. To argue against this is to push sand, a constant struggle against the dunes of "I didn't know" and "No one told me."

Not so with Mozilo. What makes this case unusual is the clarity and comprehensiveness of Mozilo's objections to the shenanigans at the company he himself was running. The man that emerges from the SEC's complaint isn't the willfully disengaged chief executive we've seen in so many other corporate corruption cases. On the contrary, Mozilo systematically sets down a record of everything that is going wrong and how it's likely to end. Over and over again, he casts himself as the worrier-in-chief, always just on the verge of changing things. To read over the SEC charges against Mozilo is to see in action a grandmaster of the most cynical of corporate arts: the cover-your-ass memo.

The heart of the civil complaint is a series of e-mails from mid-2006, around the time that the subprime mortgage market started falling apart. In April 2006, Mozilo shoots off a series of missives to his subordinates, tackling one by one the issues that soon after were to bring down the rest of the mortgage market. First, Mozilo tackles the now infamous "pay option" loans, which let borrowers make payments that didn't even cover the interest on their mortgage until, after a period of time, the mortgages reset with sharply higher payments. Mozilo points out that with 70 percent of borrowers sending in only the monthly minimums, "it is only a matter of time [before] we will be faced with much higher resets and therefore much higher delinquencies." (These, it should be noted, are the very loans that Mozilo flogged to Congress as playing such an important role in helping borrowers manage their finances.)