What motivated those Wells Fargo Bank loan officers to participate in an alleged company campaign to steer blacks in Baltimore and elsewhere to high-interest subprime mortgages?

In an interview with The New York Times  published over the weekend, Elizabeth Jacobson said the bank gave out bonuses to those who convinced prime borrowers to take out pricier subprime loans.

    Jacobson said she made $700,000 one year and used to joke “‘I’ll pay for your kids to go to private school if you give me clients,” according to the Times story.

Jacobson, who detailed her participation in the alleged “reverse-redlining” in an affadavit, knew it wasn’t right. She and her Wells Fargo colleagues, she said in the affadavit, used to joke that they  “rode the stagecoach to Hell.” 

Her remarks were among the vivid new details that emerged in filings last week in the city’s ongoing lawsuit against the bank, as reported in The Daily Record and The Baltimore Sun.

The federal lawsuit, filed last January last year, said the bank pushed hundreds of borrowers into loans that led to foreclosures, which in turn exacerbated the city’s problem with vacant houses, ultimately costing Baltimore millions in taxes and services.  

Another loan officer,Tony Paschal, said in an affadvit that the bank targeted black churches and zip codes in the city and in Prince George’s County and Southeast D.C. and that bank employees have referred to blacks as “mud people” and sub-prime loans in minority communities as “ghetto loans.”

 Wells Fargo has denied that it participated in the alleged “reverse redlining” and has vehemently denied the allegations in the suit. Arguing that the city is essentially scapegoating Wells Fargo for its own problems with foreclosures, the company has asked U.S. District Court Judge Benson E. Legg to dismiss the case. That question will be decided in a hearing before Legg later this month.