who wrote about the Gloria Thorpe case.
The University of Dayton’s Center for Business and Economic Research conducted the study that found that at least 30 percent (and as many as 40 percent) of all refinancings had been initiated by the lender and also provided the data showing that subprime home equity loans had quadrupled in the Dayton area between 1997 and 1999. Lee Schear declined several requests for an interview, though in 2002 he sat down with Caleb Stephens of the Dayton Business Journal for a profile under the headline “Classic Entrepreneur.”
The best account I found of Senator Grassley’s hearing into predatory lending was written by the New York Times’s Richard W. Stevenson, which is where I first learned about Ormond and Rosie Jackson of Brooklyn and Helen Ferguson of Washington, D.C. Critical to my portrait of Phil Gramm was the terrific piece Eric Lipton and Stephen Labaton wrote for the Times in 2008 as part of “The Reckoning” series the paper ran that year. The Times article was my source for the revelation that the country’s banks gave Gramm more in campaign contributions than any other senator and it was through this impressive in-depth piece that I first learned about Florence Gramm.
Eight
Richard A. Oppel, Jr., wrote that great piece investigating Associates for the Dallas Morning News—and then, after moving to the New York Times, he did an admirable job (along with fellow reporter Patrick McGeehan) covering the ongoing battle over Citigroup’s decision to purchase this controversial subprime lender. Julie Flaherty was the reporter who interviewed Eakes for the Times’s Sunday business section and Robert Julavits was the author of the American Banker article that accurately predicted that Citigroup was going to have an enormous fight on its hands with its proposed purchase. Also useful were reports by Kathleen Day in the Washington Post and Paul Beckett in the Wall Street Journal. At the website of the Inner City Press, run by activist-lawyer Matthew Lee, I first learned about a pair of former CitiFinancial employees named Michele Handzel and Gail Kubiniec and also about Kelly Raleigh, who went to work for Commercial Credit in 1990.
There are any number of good sources on Sandy Weill, including a terrific and memorable profile written by Roger Lowenstein that appeared in the Times’s Sunday magazine in August 2000—just weeks before the Associates purchase. Monica Langley, the author of Tearing Down the Walls, a lively and informative account of Weill’s rise to the top, was the source for two anecdotes in this chapter: the displeasure expressed by Weill’s personal assistant, Alison Falls, when she learned her boss, post–American Express, was thinking of getting into the consumer finance business, and the reaction of James Calvano, the former president of Avis, who also expressed his incredulity. Weill, it turns out, was one of the few subprime lenders who declined to speak with me. Also of note: Mike Hudson’s piece appearing in Southern Poverty, in the summer of 2003, “Banking on Misery: Citigroup, Wall Street, and the Fleecing of the South,” winner of the prestigious Polk Award. And Lawrence Richter Quinn’s 1998 article for Mortgage Banking documenting the purchase of subprime lenders by brand-name banks.
Nine
In a 2007 interview with Jonathan D. Epstein of the Buffalo News, John Hewitt spoke at length about getting into the refund anticipation loan business. He described the working poor as “low hanging fruit,” and described himself as a mathematician so good “I was the best I ever met.” The homegrown Virginian-Pilot did a diligent job covering Jackson Hewitt and served as the source for Keith Alessi’s quote about needing to “find ways of attacking entire metropolitan areas.” Details about Jackson Hewitt’s tax loan business—the costs associated with a RAL and its revenue figures in 1997—were culled from a well-done feature by Jerry Knight at the Washington Post. Also helpful was a Jackson Hewitt feature written by Len Strazewski for Franchise Times.
The Dayton Daily News profile of Fesum Ogbazion and his company, Instant Tax Service, was written by Jim Bohman. Geert DeLombaerde profiled Ogbazion in 2001 in the Business Courier of Cincinnati shorly after he sold his first business. And for the brief section about Andrew Kahr and the birth of the subprime credit card, I’m indebted to my former colleague Joe Nocera for his wonderful book, A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class.
Ten
The Ohio Department of Commerce generously provided me with a town-by-town, store-by-store listing of every payday enterprise in the state that included the date each was granted a license and each one’s location.
Eleven
Again, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution proved an invaluable resource. Especially impressive was the work of Maureen Downey, a columnist and editorial writer who for my money deserves a retroactive Pulitzer for her outrage over subprime mortgage lending in the early 2000s and the lengths the lenders went to foil the state’s attempts to check their mortgage business. The Journal- Constitution was my source for historical foreclosure data in Atlanta. Glenn R. Simpson, one of the Wall Street Journal’s star investigative reporters wrote about Ameriquest and Wright Andrews at the end of 2007, and Clark Howard was the consumer reporter who declared Atlanta under siege by predatory lenders. Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh wrote a nice coda about the Georgia bill that almost was, and BusinessWeek took John D. Hawke, Jr., to task in a memorable piece written by Robert Berner and Brian Grow, published in October 2008.
Dennis Hevesi of the New York Times wrote a revealing and in-depth 2002 feature looking at predatory lending in New York City. That piece included data from the Federal Reserve showing a sevenfold jump in subprime mortgages between 1993 and 2000 and the 68 percent spike in foreclosures. John Sugg was the author of the Creative Loafing article, also appearing in 2002, that featured the Iveys of Atlanta and quoted Fort.
Twelve
The annual reports on the payday industry produced each year by Stephens, Inc. were my source for the growth of the payday lending industry through the decade. The 2005 “like bears on a trout stream” study was conducted by Steven Graves, an assistant professor of geography at California State University–Northridge, and Christopher Peterson, an assistant professor at the Levin College of Law at the University of Florida. There were several good sources on subprime credit cards, including a study by Chi Chi Wu and Rick Jurgens at the National Consumer Law Center titled “Fee-Harvesters: Low-Credit, High-Cost Cards Bleed Consumers.”
The BusinessWeek article about what the magazine dubbed the “medical debt revolution” ran on its cover in November 2007 and was written by Brian Grow and Robert Berner. At the American Banker, Jeff Horwitz’s research into World Savings, the Sandlers, and option ARMs proved invaluable. Victoria McGrane wrote the Politico profile of the Center for Responsible Lending that declared the organization the main intellectual engine driving the Democratic response to the housing crisis, and a BusinessWeek writer named Eamon Javers wrote both the “pit bull of public relations” profile of Eric Dezenhall and the piece examining the stealth sponsorship of commentators such as Tom Lehman of Indiana Wesleyan University. An article by Jenny Anderson at the Times as well as Alpha magazine—and of course Gregory Zuckerman’s writings about John Paulson in the Wall Street Journal and his book, The Greatest Trade Ever—were the sources for John Paulson’s extraordinary success.
Thirteen
Dayna Baird, the chief lobbyist for large lenders like Household and CitiFinancial, was quoted as praising the Ohio legislature’s 2002 bill in a Dayton Daily News article written by Laura A. Bischoff. The article covering the Predatory Lending Study Committee’s visit to Dayton was written by the Daily News’s Ken McCall. The lengthy profile of Faith that the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran when naming him its 2003 “Ohioan of the Year” was written by Bill Sloat. In that piece I found the quote from Barb Poppe, Faith’s wife, about her husband’s intensity and ability to get into “the zone.” I found the Joy Padgett quote in the August 2007 volume of Stateline Midwest, a newsletter published by the Council of State Governments.
