Usually when I’m talking about Thomas Montag (the ex-$GS trader now heading global and i-banking matters at $BAC) I subject you guys to these horrible pictures of Heidi Montag instead because Tom doesn’t seem to have posed for many photos. Maybe now that he’s found his way into OMG TEH GOLDMAN SCANDAL I’ll get some better shots to work with, but for now I’ll give you a picture of Senator Carl Levin, chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who’s been reading some emails and caught Tommy being honest (and making me think of Triumph The Comic Insult Dog):

Thomas Montag, the former head of sales and trading in the Americas at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., called a set of mortgage-linked investments sold by his firm “one shi**y deal,” according to an excerpt from internal e-mails released by Senate lawmakers.

The transaction was Timberwolf Ltd., a $1 billion collateralized debt obligation holding pieces of other CDOs, according to a statement from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The CDO also included optimistic side-bets on the performance of CDOs, derivatives in which the firm took the opposite pessimistic side in “many” cases, the panel said.

“Boy that timberwo[l]f was one shi**y deal,” Montag, who is now Bank of America Corp.’s president of global banking and markets, said in a June 22, 2007, e-mail to Daniel Sparks, who ran Goldman Sachs’s mortgage business at the time, according to the statement yesterday. Within five months of Timberwolf’s debut, the CDO had lost 80 percent of its value, and it was liquidated in 2008, according to the panel.

The CDO was among securities that Goldman Sachs sold to clients after deciding the New York-based firm needed to reduce its mortgage holdings, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who leads the panel, said in the statement. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and six other current and former executives will testify today in front of the panel about practices in mortgage securities markets before they collapsed.

At first I was thinking he was talking about an investment in owning the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, who finished 15-67 this year, which is also a roughly 80% loss rate.

Bloomberg says the Timberwolf CDO was issued in March 2007, following a quarter where $GS shifted from $6 billion of bets that mortgage bonds would perform to $10 billion they would default. Neither Triumph the Comic Insult Dog nor Thomas Montag nor Heidi Montag were available for comment.

Also, it’s difficult to find good embeds of Triumph videos but I think this one works: