Bad Paper: Chasing Debt From Wall Street to the Underworld by Jake Halpern
Author:Jake Halpern [Halpern, Jake]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780374711245
Google: T3pzAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00J6TUZFG
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2014-10-14T14:00:00+00:00
PART THREE
THE LAST COLLECTORS
8
TAKING CONTROL OF ASSETS
For all its roguish color, Las Vegas is the legitimate face of the debt-buying industry. It is the place where everyone—from the small operators to the big publicly traded debt buyers—comes to do business. Back on the streets of Buffalo, the rules are looser and the game is tougher. This is the other marketplace for consumer debt in America. It was here that the Package was stolen and here that paper of dubious origin is routinely bought and sold, no questions asked. For these reasons, it made sense to spend some more time in Buffalo. I still had a number of questions about the fate of the Package, and if I could answer them, I could understand what happened to debts—like Joanna’s and Theresa’s—when they dropped off the edge of the aboveground economy. I wanted to know just how far collectors would go to collect on the most “beaten-up” paper. In short, I wanted to know the inner workings of the financial underworld.
My usher into this realm was a Buffalo-based debt broker named Larry. I met Larry for the first time in the summer of 2012, at a bar on Chippewa Street, which was once the epicenter of Buffalo’s theater district. Nowadays, Chippewa is where twenty-somethings, often from the suburbs, come to get drunk and gyrate to the pulse of the city’s nightclubs—places with names like Bottoms Up, Bada Bing Bar & Grill, and Pure Night Club. Larry emerged from the crowd of revelers—a man dressed entirely in black. He wore dark sunglasses, black pants, a matching shirt, and a black Yankees cap, which gave him the air of a chic grim reaper. Larry was a youthful-looking African-American man in his mid-forties. He sported a diamond earring and a beard trimmed so finely that, if you saw his picture, you’d swear it was airbrushed.
Larry was, at heart, an artist. On and off, throughout his working life, he had survived on his art—making greeting cards, T-shirts, sculptures, and paintings. This was what he loved to do, but it never paid especially well; and so, when it came to making money, Larry had relied on buying and selling debt. He did this from wherever he was—in his house, in his car, or from a restaurant.
“You don’t have to have an office to buy and sell,” he told me, as we sat down at a bar with a sidewalk patio. “You just got to have a means to view the file. If you have a means to view it and pass it on, that’s all you need. I keep all my paperwork on an SD [secure digital] card and just slip it right into my phone.” He ran his fingers across his cell phone. “I got a virtual office in my hand.”
One of the many reasons that I was curious to talk with Larry is that he claimed to be a former partner of the notorious debt broker named Kenny. When Brandon confronted Bill at the corner
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