Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, likening the subprime lending industry to armed robbers, said he wants to sue Wall Street firms because their bond sales enabled consumers to get mortgages they couldn’t afford.

Ohio has already won the right through a lawsuit to review foreclosures by New Century Financial Corp., the bankrupt Calif.-based lender. Mr. Dann may add investment banks and credit-rating firms to the case or bring new suits, perhaps using Ohio’s civil version of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, he said in an interview yesterday. The RICO law is used to target organized crime and drug rings.

“If somebody was buying guns and giving them to people to go and take people’s houses at gunpoint in Ohio, we’d be prosecuting them and throwing them in jail,” Mr. Dann said.

Ohio has the nation’s highest foreclosure rate, in part because manufacturing losses have left the state with the sixth-highest jobless rate. About 3.38% of Ohio homeowners with mortgages faced foreclosure as of December 31, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported, compared with 1.19% nationwide.

Securities firms encouraged “irrational loans” to be made, Mr. Dann said, by providing a liquid market in which mortgages were bundled by the thousands and sold as securities.

“I want to see the e-mails, I want to see the documents,” he said. “I’m guessing somebody at some or all of these places was predicting the bottom was going to fall out.”

The state may seek damages from mortgage companies and investment banks even for “purely criminal” situations in which borrowers committed frauds against lenders, Mr. Dann said. He cited the harm such schemes did to communities that could have been prevented if lenders had been more cautious.

Ohio probably will be ready to file cases by year-end, said Mr. Dann, a former state senator and lawyer who took office in January. American Banker, the industry newspaper, reported his plans Monday on its Web site.

“My clients are certainly taking Marc Dann’s comments extraordinarily seriously,” a partner at Dykema Gossett PLLC, which represents firms involved in home lending and securitization, including Irvine, Calif.-based New Century, Richard Gottlieb, said.