This book is based primarily on interviews—with the people I write about as well as with their confederates and their critics. But as the text melds journalism with history, I also build on the work of others who began investigating the subjects before I did. I mention some fellow writers and publications in the body of this work but largely I waited until this section of the book to make reference to my aids. I did this to help the flow of the narrative, just as I often wove statistics into the body of the book without full sourcing for the sake of readability. I offer credit and citations below.
Prologue
Caseload statistics for the Dayton area’s Predatory Lending Solutions Project were culled from the annual reports the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center assembled for county officials. For the cases that helped to spur Christine Gregoire, then Washington state’s attorney general, to action I relied on an article in the Seattle Times written by Peter Lewis. Data on Household Finance—its revenues, profits, and the number of people included in its $484 million settlement—were obtained from public filings and also news stories about the company.
One
My sketch of Jack Daugherty, the pawn pioneer, relied largely on a terrific profile of him written by Bill Minutaglio and published first in the Dallas Morning News and then, in 1996, in Mike Hudson’s anthology, Merchants of Misery. The National Pawnbrokers Association estimated that the average size of a pawn loan in 2009 was $90 and also helped me to estimate the size of the pawn industry; the early history of rent-to-own was courtesy of its trade association, the Association of Progressive Rental Organizations, which also placed the size of the rent-to-own industry at $7 billion. Every year the investment bank Stephens, Inc. publishes an annual report about the payday industry. That report and Stephens analyst David Burtzlaff served as my primary sources for data about the size of the U.S. payday market. FiSCA, the trade association for the country’s check cashers, provided data on its industry. To help me estimate the size of the various Poverty, Inc. industries, I spoke with several financial analysts who monitor what they tend to call the specialty finance sector, including Burtzlaff, Richard Shane of Jefferies & Co., and John Stilmar of SunTrust Robinson Humphrey.
Edmund Andrews’s book is called Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown.
Two
A quartet of reporters did stellar work investigating Fleet Finance: Mitchell Zuckoff and Peter S. Canellos at the Boston Globe, Jill Vejnoska at the Atlanta Journal- Constitution, and Mike Hudson, then a research fellow for the Alicia Patterson Foundation. The work of all four helped to inform my reporting on Fleet. Profiles of Bruce Marks that appeared in BusinessWeek (by Geoffrey Smith) and the Wall Street Journal (by Suzanne Alexander Ryan and John R. Wilke) shortly after the Fleet fight helped in my characterization of his role in that battle. An article by James Greiff in the Charlotte Observer at the start of 1993 provided me with a snapshot of Chrysler First at the time of the NationsBank purchase and alerted me to the two- hundred-plus lawsuits this subprime lender faced at the time.
Three
Allan Jones was my primary source for information about the early days of Check Into Cash but the “red herring”—the S-1 every company must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission when announcing its intentions of going public—it filed at the end of the 1990s also proved a rich source of information. It was while reading the company’s S-1 that I discovered that Jones paid himself $360,000 a month for use of his own jets (plus extra for flying time), for instance, and also found many details, financial and otherwise, of Check Into Cash through the 1990s. At Check ’n Go, Jared Davis would give me as much time as I wanted but David Davis, his brother, would not so much as say hello to me even when he walked into the room to ask Jared a question. Daniel Brook wrote a lively account of James Eaton and the earliest days of payday in Harper’s in an article titled “Usury County: Welcome to the Birthplace of Payday Lending.” Rodney Ho authored the early profile of the payday lending industry that appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
Four
The Marshall Eakes quote about his brother’s refusal to give up appears in a terrific profile of Eakes by Jim Nesbitt of the Raleigh News & Observer, published when the paper named him its 2005 “Tar Heel of the Year.” Eakes’s “we beg for it” quote appeared in the Durham Herald- Sun. Any number of publications, including the News & Observer, the Winston-Salem Journal, the Triad Business Weekly, and Southern Exposure, which all published early profiles of Self-Help that also proved helpful. Also notable was the column that Tony Snow wrote about his old friend in USA Today in 1996.
Five
Freddie Rogers’s case was featured in articles appearing in both the Durham Herald- Sun and the Raleigh News & Observer, written respectively by Christopher Kirkpatrick and Carol Frey. Jeff Bailey wrote the 1997 Wall Street Journal article about Bennie Roberts, the retired quarry worker who ended up owing $45,000 on a $1,250 loan. An in-depth account of the fight Peter Skillern and his allies waged against NationsBank appeared in 1998 in the Independent Weekly, based in Durham. That piece was written by Barry Yeoman and proved helpful in my depiction of Skillern, as did a profile of him written by Frank Norton that appeared in the News & Observer in 2006. The tidbit about Eakes handing out seven thousand copies of Associates videotape appeared in an entertaining and informative profile of Eakes written by Chris Serres for the News & Observer in 2000.
Six
As was the case with Allan Jones’s Check Into Cash, Advance America’s S-1 offered up a trove of information about the company’s early growth and its financials. Also helpful were Susan Orr’s lengthy profile of Billy Webster that appeared in the Spartanburg Herald-Journal in 2005, and C. Grant Jackson’s profile of George Johnson in the State, Columbia’s primary daily newspaper. “Strife inside the family”: Eventually the tensions between the Davis brothers and their father prompted Allen Davis, in February 2005, to sue his sons for control of the company. “Passed the 10,000-store mark by 2001”—that is according to a study of the payday industry conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Mark Anderson was the Sacramento Business Journal reporter who noticed all these cash advance stores in his midst in 1998.
Seven
The Dayton Daily News proved an excellent resource in the re-creation of the fight over subprime lending in its city. At the end of the 1990s, reporter Marcus Franklin wrote an excellent piece on the impact of the payday loan business on Dayton. Franklin also reported on the hearing where Pam Shackelford and Suriffa Rice both spoke. Jim Bebbington’s in-depth profile of Dean Lovelace in the Daily News helped me round out my profile of Lovelace, and Bebbington, among others at the Daily News, did a commendable job covering the debate over Lovelace’s proposal to curb high-cost home loans inside the city limits. That list also includes Eddie Roth, who, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, wrote a series of editorials for the Daily News decrying subprime abuses and calling on elected officials at all levels of government to do something about this festering problem, and Ken McCall,
