King of Pain
Paul Silverman’s face is all over Kansas City — beaming over late-night TV, rolling by on the sides of metro buses, taking up three full pages in the Yellow Pages. In one ad, Silverman is dressed in a gaudy royal getup: a silver cardboard crown and a red-green-and-white-striped suit with flared sleeves and puffy shoulders. With raised eyebrows, a gleam in his eyes, a slightly open mouth and a finger pointing straight out, the skinny, gray-bearded man looks eager to deliver some really good news.
Even if your credit is wrecked, you’re recently divorced and you just declared bankruptcy, he will give you a loan.
“Call the King of Kash,” the ad urges. You can get approved in ten minutes with no credit check. You can take out $100 or $3,000 or any amount in between. You don’t need to sign over your gold chain or your engagement ring as collateral. In fact, Silverman will pay you to take out a loan from him. In a half-page Thrifty Nickel ad offering “Instant Cash,” Silverman, done up to look like Andrew Jackson, stares out from a $20 bill, which is what he’ll give you to sign on as a first-time borrower.
Silverman’s ads tout sixteen businesses at eight locations all over the metro — several in Kansas City, as well as in Gladstone, Independence, Grandview and Raymore. The Bob’s Loan Company ad shows a photo of a stogie-sucking bald man with $10 bills sticking out of the pocket of his plaid sport coat. The ad for Uncle Bucks features a cartoon cowboy shouting “Hey Buckaroos! Need Xtra Cash?” In the ad for Dr. Dollar, a grinning whitecoat holds up a stethoscope with a dollar sign on it.
In case anyone might have trouble finding Silverman’s main office, at 83rd Street and Wornall Road, a giant yellow billboard across the street — with his picture on it — points the way with a big red arrow. Outside the office, a sign reads “A-1 Premium Acceptance” — one of three business names Silverman has registered at that location. (He also calls it the King of Kash, Brookside Loans and Signature Loans Inc., according to records on file at the Missouri secretary of state’s office.) A small sign next to a mailbox instructs, “Drop Payments Here.”
One Wednesday morning this summer, a wispy 71-year-old woman emerged from the office, squinting in the sunlight. A retired phone operator for the Jackson County Courthouse, Lucille Mallory said she had gone inside to pay off a balance of $89 that her daughter owed.
“They kept sending notices to the house,” she said, “and I didn’t want them to keep saying we owed money no more, so I came and paid it.”
Mallory told the Pitch she had taken out other loans from the King of Kash after seeing his ads in the Thrifty Nickel — she once borrowed $100 so she could gamble at the casinos. “It was so I could have a little extra cash to take to the boats. I only take out money if I really, really want to do something,” she said as she opened the door of a waiting friend’s car.
Then a woman drove up, two fuzzy, pink hearts dangling from her rearview mirror. Shouldering a hefty backpack, she walked into the office, traversed the stained, gray carpet and slumped in a seat along the wall. She looked glum as she jangled her keys.
The room smelled of Lysol, mildew and bubble gum; its only noise was the ringing of phones and the constant whirring of an adding machine. Three windows were labeled: Loans, Loans, Collections. A clerk dressed in a baggy blue sweatshirt stood behind the first window, watching while a pale woman in shorts and a tank top rested her bony elbows on the counter.
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A phone was ringing on the desk behind the clerk. “Yes, we have a branch office on North Oak Trafficway, right next to the Harley-Davidson shop,” the clerk told the caller. At the next window, a large clerk with a gold tooth popped her gum while she waited on a slender man in a neat, striped shirt and Dockers, a cell phone clipped to his belt. He was taking out a new loan and asked the clerk to check the balances of his other loans. “You owe $90.32 on one, and you’re on your third payment,” she told him, pointing at a computer screen. “Then on these three, you owe $64.16 each, and you’re on your tenth payment.”
Finally, the person behind the second window called the waiting woman in the sweat suit. She made a $60 payment, then hurried out, receipt in hand, toward her newish green Dodge Stratus. She told the Pitch she had chosen the King of Kash because his ad caught her eye.
“He had the biggest ad in the phone book,” the 24-year-old said, shrugging. She had taken out a loan of $150 in August because her job as a security guard didn’t pay much and she’d come up short when it was time to make a car payment. “I’ll end up paying $15 for each $100 I take out,” she explained. She said she planned to pay off the rest of the money she owed next month. “They tell you you’re supposed to take the loan out for a year, but then the APR ends up being something ridiculous like 400 percent. And I’m definitely not stupid enough to do that.”
But the King of Kash knows plenty of people who are too desperate to be smart.
Paul Silverman has been in the high-interest loan business in one form or another since the late 1970s. Over the decades, he’s been a consistent presence in an industry that’s taken advantage of countless money-strapped Kansas Citians — despite the best efforts of religious activists, consumer lawyers and state legislators to get the payday-loan racket under control.
Silverman officially became a payday lender in the late 1990s. That was when the Missouri legislature legitimized the industry by regulating it — among other things, the state passed a law limiting loans to $500 a customer. Payday lenders typically accept a broke customer’s postdated check, holding it as collateral to be cashed on or after the borrower’s next payday. Such lenders charge between $15 and $50 for each $100 borrowed; because their customers usually borrow the money for less than two weeks, that makes the average interest rate around 400 percent. (The customer frequently has the option to “roll over” the loan by paying another fee, thus buying more time to pay.) Since the late 1990s, though, other types of lenders have been able to charge interest rates that high as well; under Missouri laws that regulate traditional lending, small loan operators can lend any amount at any interest rate.
“Paul’s been around forever,” says Steve Geary, consumer credit supervisor for the Missouri Division of Finance, which regulates small loan companies. Geary tells the Pitch that, more than three decades ago, when Silverman was just starting out, state law allowed businesses to charge a flat $10 interest on any loan — and no amount was too small. “I believe that Paul was in on this, loaning 25 and 50 bucks,” Geary says, though he can’t confirm this recollection because the Division of Finance no longer has Silverman’s old license on file.
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Unlike the Division of Finance, the secretary of state’s office keeps records dating back several decades; files there show that Silverman registered his first business, A-1 Insurance Agency Inc., at the corner of 72nd Street and Wornall Road, in 1978. He started out providing auto insurance by paying the premiums for high-risk customers — people whose records were cluttered with DWIs, suspended licenses, tickets or accidents.
At the time, the Missouri Small Loan Act’s 26-percent interest cap made payday lending impossible; the business thrives on short-term loans at exorbitant rates. But high-interest lenders skirted the cap by calling their astronomical interest rates “brokerage fees,” says Dick Halliburton, now executive director of Legal Aid of Western Missouri.
In the late 1970s, Halliburton and Dale Irwin, a lawyer who practices consumer law, filed a class-action suit against four loan businesses operating in Kansas City. They were owned by an area man, J.R. Milner, and his partners in Oklahoma. The loan businesses were charging high brokerage fees, claiming they were payment for locating a lender.
“The loans they were ostensibly using brokerage fees to obtain were all gotten from the same shadowy figure in El Paso, Texas, named Morris Rubin,” Irwin says. “We never did determine whether Mr. Rubin was an actual person or not.”
Halliburton and Irwin settled the case, winning enough money to distribute nominal amounts to the plaintiffs. Then they turned their attention to the Missouri legislature in the early 1980s, convincing lawmakers to make it a crime to charge brokerage fees for loans of less than $1,000. Payday lenders challenged the law in a case that went to the Missouri Supreme Court, where judges upheld the legislation. But that didn’t scare lenders who preyed on the people least able to pay them back.
“No prosecutor would prosecute [the lenders], because they had murders and rapes and robberies to prosecute,” Halliburton explains. “Nothing ever happened, and the loan brokers soon figured they could operate with impunity.”
By the mid-’80s, Silverman was becoming a bigger player in Kansas City’s high-interest loan market. In 1985, he registered new businesses with the secretary of state’s office: King of Kash Inc., as well as Paul’s Loan Company, Midstates Acceptance, and Midtown Adjustment Inc. In 1986, he added Mike’s Loan Company and Signature Loans Inc. In 1988, he tacked on A-1 Premium Acceptance, Uncle Buck’s Inc., and Checkmate Inc.
It was common for small lenders to have more than one business, each with its own set of books and telephone number, operating at a single address. That way, payday lenders could get around regulations limiting the amount of money a business could lend to a single customer at one time. A customer who wanted more than $500 could simply step to the next window and take out the loan from the lender’s other company. Silverman listed his headquarters at 8304 Wornall on all of his registration documents.
In the late 1980s, Halliburton filed suit against Silverman on behalf of a Legal Aid client Silverman had threatened with prosecution. The suit was settled.
Despite many attempts to contact Silverman, the King of Kash would not speak to the Pitch.
Halliburton recalls that Silverman was surprisingly mild-mannered. “He didn’t seem like a typical loan broker who would be macho and bullying. He seemed very reasonable,” Halliburton says. But he adds that Silverman was using tactics similar to those Halliburton had tried to halt with the class-action lawsuit and subsequent legislation.
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“He had a slightly different scheme,” Halliburton says. “It had to do with writing postdated checks with interest attached. And he would say that it wasn’t interest — it was some sort of administrative fee.”
Small loan companies had to twist laws and take advantage of lax enforcement to charge their criminally high interest rates and fees in the 1980s, but the 1990s brought friendlier legislation that allowed payday loan companies to set up shop everywhere and operate essentially unchecked. As a result, hapless consumers became trapped in scary cycles of debt, shelling out huge amounts of cash just to keep from being prosecuted on bad-check charges.
By the early 1990s, small loan operators were sending state and national lobbyists to Jefferson City to push for regulations that would legitimize payday loans. “They lobbied for several years for a law to make their business legal, under the guise of saying, CERegulate us, regulate us,’ which is what all the sleazy businesses do if they want to be made legal,” Irwin says.
The payday-loan concern succeeded. A bill that passed in 1991 legalized payday lending and exempted those lenders from the 26-percent interest rate cap that applied to other types of lenders.
“We tried to get [then Governor John] Ashcroft to veto it, but our pleas fell on deaf ears,” Irwin says. After that, more payday loan companies started operating in Missouri.
But it wasn’t until 1998 that they really proliferated. That was when Jim Mathewson, a Democratic state senator from Sedalia, tried to remove the 26-percent cap on all loans. It had been imposed in the 1950s under the Small Loan Act in an effort designed to protect poor and middle-class consumers against loan sharking. Mathewson’s legislation repealed interest rate caps for loans in Missouri, allowing all small loan operators to charge annual percentage rates as high as they wanted — 1,000 percent or even higher.
That helped Missouri earn a reputation as one of the worst states in the country for protecting consumers from predatory lenders. “It’s near the bottom,” says Jean Ann Fox, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America. Fifteen states impose strict rules limiting payday-loan activity; New York and New Jersey, Fox says, have virtually no payday loan companies. Kansas has fewer than 150. Missouri has more than 1,000 payday lenders.
In 1999, Silverman registered several new businesses — Dr. Dollar, Queen of Cash Inc., and General Dollar Inc. He now has eighteen active businesses listed with the Missouri secretary of state, with each location containing about three separate businesses.
However, the Division of Finance, which licenses and inspects payday and small loan companies, lists Silverman as the owner of only eight businesses, because he operates out of eight “locations,” according to Geary. And, he says, the Division of Finance conducts only one inspection for each license — not for each business advertised by the license holder. “I have no reason to believe that Paul would not be in compliance,” Geary says. But he adds that Silverman should have a license for each separate business name he is advertising.
If inspectors are overlooking additional businesses that payday lenders operate out of the same locations as licensed ones, payday lenders can choose which of their businesses they want inspectors to examine. That means scores of businesses can shuffle consumers back and forth to dodge loan limits.
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Near the end of 1999, some members They took their concerns to Kansas City’s multidenominational Church/Community Organization, an activist group that works on issues ranging from street repairs to crime. They discovered that in one six-month period, visits to the food pantry had increased by more than 50 percent, says Jerry Young, the CCO’s full-time paid organizer.
“The stories were unbelievable,” Young says. “It doesn’t make sense. It was like, don’t we have a law against that?”
At that time, Christ the King’s priest, the Rev. John Weiss, says interest rates of 400 percent were typical, and payday-loan operators could refuse to accept anything less than a full payoff. So consumers who didn’t have the full amount kept paying $45 or $50 every two weeks to renew their loans, often paying five or six times the loan amount and still owing the original balance.
CCO members spent months interviewing food pantry clients, collecting their stories for local and state officials. They found Mary Calhoun, for example, a retired schoolteacher with a master’s degree who had taken out a payday loan to cover living expenses after she’d drained her savings repairing flood damage that her homeowner’s insurance company had refused to cover. She had borrowed more than $4,000, then paid $1,200 in fees and interest without making a dent in the principal.
Another borrower, Miriam Baard-Kenyon, had a good job in advertising until back problems landed her in the hospital and her husband lost his job. Baard-Kenyon borrowed from payday lenders to cover food, utility bills and prescription drugs, soon racking up a debt of $2,600. On that amount, she had to pay $790 a month just in fees and interest; a little over a year later, she had paid $10,000 but still owed the $2,600 balance. “When I complained, I was threatened with prosecution, had my checking account invaded without my permission and incurred multiple overdraft fees that made my rent check bounce,” she wrote to the CCO.
In February 2001, when church leaders learned that the Jackson County prosecutor’s office was acting as a collection agency for payday lenders, they called a meeting in Christ the King’s basement and asked then Prosecutor Bob Beaird to attend.
At the time, Beaird tells the Pitch, he didn’t know payday lenders required borrowers to hand over postdated checks for their loan amounts plus interest — even though the lenders knew the money was not in the borrowers’ accounts. When they couldn’t collect, the lenders handed these “bad checks” over to the county for criminal prosecution.
Weiss remembers that Silverman and a few other payday lenders attended that meeting and mingled afterward, talking to CCO members and Beaird. Beaird agreed that the borrowers were not criminals, so he told his staff to stop prosecuting them.
“I just felt it was not something our office should be doing,” says Beaird, now a county judge.
After that, Young says, one of Beaird’s assistant prosecutors met with the CCO members and announced that the county had laid off one full-time employee who had done nothing but try to collect payments for payday-loan companies. (Beaird says he cannot recall the layoff.)
Counting Beaird’s decision as a major victory, CCO members moved on to state lawmakers. They sought help from Kansas City Representatives Marsha Campbell and Cathy Jolly and state Senator Ronnie DePasco, asking them to sponsor legislation they hoped would cap payday-loan interest rates, limit fees, lower the number of rollovers allowed, and require regular paydowns of the loan balance. Because payday-loan customers are often working-class and elderly people, the CCO also enlisted the AFL-CIO and AARP to help convince legislators to tighten payday-loan regulations (Joe Miller’s “Jaws of Debt,” January 3, 2002).
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Jerry Young first learned of Silverman while researching payday loans for the CCO. He had met one man who owed so much money to Silverman that he and his wife were on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. The man, who has since moved away from Kansas City, went to a meeting at Christ the King and gave videotaped testimony about his experiences with Silverman, explaining that he had begun borrowing after a car accident in 1995 left him bedridden and jobless.
He would borrow the maximum $500 from one of Silverman’s businesses, and when he needed more, the employees would send him to another one, telling him they’d help him out because he had been such a good customer. Within a year, he had borrowed $3,000. But he never had enough to pay down the entire principal on even one of the loans. He kept rolling over the loans, paying $15 on each $100 — $450 a month — to keep them from going to collection agencies. He spent his Saturdays driving from one Silverman-owned business to another, waiting in lobbies to roll over the loans.
“We knew the pitfalls,” he explained, but he and his wife borrowed anyway to pay for medication and living expenses. When the couple retained the services of a bankruptcy lawyer, Silverman finally sat down and negotiated a 25-cents-on-the-dollar settlement.
“Silverman is definitely a guy that we almost immediately identified as one of the major players,” Young says.
As the CCO began to build momentum and gain statewide support, the payday-loan lobby started to take them more seriously. Before the bill was launched in January 2002, Young counted only seven payday-loan lobbyists registered with the secretary of state’s office. Soon, dozens more were on the list, and national payday-lending companies, such as Quick Cash and American Payday Loans, were sending representatives to Jefferson City.
The CCO’s lobbyist was Larry Weber, a volunteer from the Missouri Catholic Conference, which usually pushes for school vouchers and right-to-life issues. CCO members say Weber told them they were going to have to settle on some key issues in order to get any legislation passed. CCO members wanted to put an end to 400-percent interest rates. They had hoped for a 35-percent cap on annual interest rates but had to settle for 75 percent. After compromises, their proposed bill also included a minimum 5-percent paydown of the loan principal at the first rollover, a maximum loan term of fourteen weeks and a maximum loan of $500 for each borrower at any given time. Also, the lender would have been required to allow the borrower to pay down the balance of a loan at any time. The bill would prohibit criminal prosecution of borrowers.
But before the bill could get anywhere, it had to be approved by the House Banking and Finance Committee, which was well-known for supporting corporate interests. The chair of the committee, Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer, was a conservative banker from St. Elizabeth, Missouri, who opposed regulating payday-loan companies.
On March 19, 2002, three buses carried CCO members and their supporters from all over Missouri to Jefferson City for the hearing and committee vote.
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Luetkemeyer had persuaded the other Republicans on the committee to vote as a bloc against the bill. Knowing Luetkemeyer was Catholic, Young sent Weiss and another priest, both in full frock, to his office to lobby for the bill.
“He was adamantly opposed to this,” Weiss says. “It was very confrontational.”
Another Christ the King parishioner, Greg Crites, was with a small group lobbying another member of the committee. Crites and the committee member had both grown up in Cape Girardeau. Crites chatted with the committee member, and they found that they knew some of the same people. Their connections didn’t seem to change the committee member’s mind, though. “He said people should know what they’re signing up for, and he didn’t have any sympathy for those people who got into payday loans,” Crites recalls.
When it came time for the vote, the hearing room was packed with the bill’s supporters. At the last minute, a cadre of payday-loan lobbyists walked into the room. “The arrogance was amazing,” Weiss says. “You’re talking $300 shoes, $600 suits, Rolexes. And in our group we’ve got people in wheelchairs and ladies with babies.”
As the committee assembled, Young realized that Representative Mary Hagan-Harrell, a Democrat from Ferguson who had agreed to vote for the bill, was missing. Young says he found her seated in her office with a payday-loan lobbyist who was distracting her with photos of his family vacation. “He was showing her his kids, the whole bit,” Young says. “I walked her down there, with the lobbyist right behind us.”
With twelve committee members present, the vote was evenly split. The committee began rehashing the pros and cons of the bill to prepare for another vote. Finally, the representative from Cape Girardeau got up and walked out of the room, throwing the vote in favor of the bill without having to defy the Republican bloc. The bill went into effect in August of last year.
Meanwhile, Silverman began switching the loan licenses on his businesses, officially reclassifying himself from payday lender to small lender, Geary says.
As a result, Silverman is no longer required to follow the new payday-loan legislation. Instead, he can lend unlimited amounts of money at unlimited interest rates.
Such state-sanctioned leeway — allowing loan companies to choose their own classification and, therefore, their own regulation — was something State Auditor Claire McCaskill had urged state legislators to examine in 2000, when she released a scathing audit of Missouri’s payday-loan industry.
The fact that “instant loan” companies could simply pay $300 and get a new license if they didn’t like the laws governing their type of lending meant that consumers could not rely on consistent protection from the state, McCaskill wrote. She called for legislators to make loan programs “more consistent and less likely to cause additional hardships for consumers.” So far, however, elected officials in Jefferson City haven’t taken her suggestion.
The CCO activists had done a lot of research, but they’d missed loopholes like the one Silverman used after their legislation passed. Consumer advocate Fox says the Missouri law is still weak.
“I can’t imagine that the law they passed last year would cramp anybody’s style,” she says.
Two years ago, Brenda Lewis needed a loan. A subscription sales representative for The Kansas City Star, she had been spared in a round of layoffs that eliminated 500 of her coworkers, but her pay had been cut, and her utility bills were due. She had seen ads for the King of Kash. “I already had him in mind when I needed money. You see his picture everywhere,” she tells the Pitch. She drove to his office on Wornall and borrowed $100.
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Shortly afterward, feeling the strain of her salary cut, Lewis moved from a house on Holmes to an apartment at 93rd Street and Charlotte. She was also taking care of her sister, who had a form of muscular dystrophy and needed almost constant nursing. Then her financial situation grew even worse. Her car broke down and needed expensive repairs. She had signed up for technical classes so she could supplement her income with a home-based Internet business, but she had no money to pay the tuition.
Last October, Lewis went to A-1 Premium Acceptance to borrow $1,800. But Silverman’s employee split the amount into six separate $300 loans, adding a $780 finance charge to each.
The following month, with Christmas approaching, she went to the King of Kash again for an $800 loan, which a clerk divided into eight $100 loans with finance charges of $260 apiece.
In March, she went back again. This time she took out $300, which the clerk recorded as three separate loans with finance charges of $260 each.
Lewis knew that Silverman’s crew was splitting up the loans, but she figured it was probably so they could charge her a separate late fee for each loan if she ever paid after her due date. She says she discovered only later that Silverman’s employees had misrepresented the interest rates on the initial three loans. On all loans, the interest rate was disclosed as 260 percent; the actual interest rates ranged from 388 percent to 430 percent.
When Lewis went to her tax preparer in February, accountant Beverly McCann noticed the loans. McCann, who happened to attend church at Christ the King, told her fellow parishioners about Lewis’ situation. “The interest rate was extremely high, and I just couldn’t believe he was getting away with this,” McCann says of Silverman. “I thought I could help [Lewis] and maybe teach [Silverman] a lesson about taking advantage of people.”
When Irwin looked at Lewis’ documents, he realized he had a good case against Silverman — and that the case could help further statewide efforts to curb predatory lending.
In early May, Irwin filed a lawsuit on Lewis’ behalf, alleging that Silverman’s company had failed to accurately disclose the correct interest rate, the amount financed, the finance charge, the total number of payments, and the payment amounts on each of the original three loans, all of which violated the federal Truth in Lending Act.
In court documents, Silverman’s lawyer claims that Silverman’s employees had made an honest mistake in calculating the interest rates and fees on Lewis’ loans.
Lewis, who says she is still repaying her loans, owes $690 a month in interest alone. “This is really killing me,” she says. “It’s just killing me.”
When McCann told them about Lewis’ high-interest loan, CCO members were immediately suspicious. “It wasn’t a typical payday loan, but it looked terrible,” Betsy Weinzirl says. “And it was right there in black and white.”
CCO members learned through Irwin’s lawsuit that Silverman had simply switched his licenses, apparently to evade the new law they’d worked so hard to pass.
“We never saw it coming,” Young says, referring to the loophole. But now that they’ve seen how it works, CCO members can try to tighten the regulations.
“By Silverman’s very actions, he may have made a buck off of that, but now we’ve got a clear case of the industry working and manipulating the status quo, and we can bring that down to the Statehouse,” Young says. “So on some level, Silverman’s helped us out a great deal.”
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Last month, the CCO began to meet again to discuss further action on small-loan legislation.
Weiss says he sometimes sees Silverman in the neighborhood, usually at the QuikTrip at 72nd Street and Wornall, where the priest fuels his cravings for gas-station cappuccino.
If Weiss didn’t already know Silverman’s ubiquitous face, he’d likely recognize the King’s ride. Silverman drives a tan 1977 Oldsmobile Royale, covered with dents and rust spots, its rear bumper hanging half off. The car, which state records show is registered to Silverman, is rigged with a screwed-on metal strip and electrical cords with plugs held on by twist ties. Sources tell the Pitch that Silverman decorates it for holidays. He adorns it, they say, with strings of colored lights and, on the roof, a giant Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or pumpkin, depending on the season.
“I’ve run into him three or four times in the last six months,” Weiss says. “He averts his eyes.”
The Jackson County prosecutor’s office stopped acting as a collection agency for Silverman and other payday lenders in 2001.
Since then, Silverman has filed civil lawsuits in Jackson County Court against errant borrowers. The sixteen businesses he has registered with the secretary of state have filed hundreds of lawsuits against consumers in the past two years.
A Jackson County prosecutor’s office spokesman refused to provide records of how many cases its bad-check unit prosecuted for Silverman before Beaird called a stop to that practice. The spokesman could not say how much of Silverman’s income had been bankrolled by Jackson County taxpayers.
But Silverman apparently hasn’t told his employees to stop threatening delinquent borrowers with criminal prosecution.
One morning in his office on Wornall Road, borrowers were once again seated in plastic chairs along the wall, waiting for help. In the background, the adding machine kept whirring.
A collection agent, seated behind a divider, telephoned a late-paying customer. “Hello,” she said, her voice audible throughout the office, “This is Dee from A-1 Premium Acceptance.” There was a pause. “Oh, I see,” the clerk said curtly. “And could you tell me when you go to lunch or break or something, so I can call you back?” Another pause. “I have tried calling you there after five, and I have left several messages. We have not received a loan payment from you since April 9, and your balance right now is $459.60.” Another pause. “And I’ll tell you what’s about to happen is, your account is about to be forwarded to the prosecuting attorney’s office. Well, call me and we’ll see how serious you are about taking care of this.” She hung up the phone.
“Next,” called the bored clerk at the first window.
A gray-haired man in a blue work shirt stepped up to the window.
