and grab whatever we could for the sake of profit, but also just or the sake of building things and making things that are bigger and better. and i think that we need to step back and think about our emphasis on more money, more production its own. i think you can think about a thing like that and be a feminist while you think about it. [applause] >> i would just say i think the way i respond to people who disagree with me has changed enormously over the course of my life last night and that when i was in the women's liberation movement i was not known as a particularly diplomatic person, and it felt like, i mean, i had

a lot of rage against the war in vietnam. i have a lot of rage against male supremacy. i had a lot of rage about injustices around race. and all of those things rushed into my mind and my politics in the fall of 1969 when i was a freshman in college. that's what i met all those problems and almost issues and recognize them as problems, people disagreed with me were just wrong. and so either they had to be convinced or the words worth talking to. and then, of course, as you get older, you realize some of the things you thought might have been wrong and they might not even the best strategies, and that you really do need people coming at issues from different perspectives, and that there other ways to deal with the problems in the world than just raging against them. it is a sort of perspective,

give me a sort of perspective that allowed me to hear what other people were saying that, when they disagreed with it, and to actually incorporate some of that thinking into my own ideas. so it's been a very long learning curve for me to try to think about how you actually -- and i found teaching one of the most useful way to think about that, because when your students as he questions and they disagree with you, you can't rage at them. you are there to teach them. you have to try to explain what you think and get a listen deeply to what they think. so that's being a professor has helped me a lot in that part of my life. >> i would just add to that, because i want to the same thing and i think when i was young i didn't really listen to other people very well. and i think that listening and really trying to understand where people are coming from and what their reasons are for disagreeing with you is just extremely important.

>> if i could just say something quickly about the question about why we didn't feel like they would have these privileges. i think several of us on the panel are historians at the one of the things that industry realizes is studying the past is how uncertain the world operates so that the people living in that world see things as normal, things that we now don't see as normal we see as unjust. they kind of see. so how did people decide to take it, you know, history into their own hands and show that something doesn't have the normal. not normal for whites to have more power than blacks or men have more power than women. site think that part of it is, part of the mission of the past is how do people think exactly what you said, how did people think these things are okay? and then how do people get the idea that they could show me and it wasn't okay. >> i think that question was

great but i'm so glad you do somebody totally doesn't understand something that really didn't make any sense anyway. and look forward to the day, why do people think either one has to speaking osha why do people figurtake it was weird to be ga? i don't know. i'm hoping for more of this in my classroom. >> i think that probably means it's time to wrap things up and to thank her panel, and to invite all of you to join us in the reception. [applause] >> every weekend, booktv authors programming focus on nonfiction authors and books to keep watching for more here on c-span2, and watch any of our past programs online at booktv.org. >> here's some of the latest news about the publishing industry. the national book foundation announced its nonfiction finalist which includes age of

ambition -- look for live coverage of the awards on november 19. amazon is opening kiosks in december system and sacramento. and according to the "washington post," the chinese government ordered the removal of books by authors perceived to be sympathetic to protests in hong kong. stay up-to-date on news about the publishing world by liking us on facebook and facebook.com/booktv or followers on twitter at booktv. you can also visit our website, booktv.org, and click on news about books. spent our camp in 2014 coverage continues with a week full of debates. on c-span monday night at eight eastern, the georgia coast debate -- governor's debate. the montana u.s. senate debate.

tuesday night at nine on c-span from the south carolina governor's debate. and thursday night live at eight eastern iowa's fourth district debate between stephen king and joe maurer. c-span campaign 2014, more than 100 debates for the control of congress. >> book tv asks bookstores libbers around the country about nonfiction books their most excited about being published this fall. here's a look at the titles chosen by the people bookstore in austin, texas. ..

up next on booktv, "after words" with guest host, author nomi prins. this week this american life contributor jake halpern and his latest book "bad paper chasing dead from wall street to the underworld." it tells the story of a bank executive and a former bank robber going into business together to collect unpaid bank debts by often on questionable means. the program is about one hour.

>> hello and welcome. i'm nomi prins here today with jake halpern, the author of the fascinating and horrifying new book speed "bad paper" chasing dead from wall street to the underground." this book is incredible and so there's your story. and i think that they really mirror each other. this takes place in buffalo new york and you are from there are and you? >> guest: my dad and his wife still live there and i go back fairly often. it's kind of how i find my way into this world. >> host: you talk about a particular and of many unsavory characters that are scrambling to make their own peace of the world and often have prison records and have been regulars and so forth. there is a fellow named jimmy that comes out here that needs to be one of the main characters of this nonfiction story.

can you talk about how you connected with him? >> guest: the way that this got started, talking to my mom a few years back she told me she was being pounded by a debt collector and i don't over the money that he's saying i go but i think i'm going to pay him just so he will stop her asking me, which my mom, i thought i started googling it and i saw that there was a lot of this kind of going on and that i should be at the center of the debt collections in general of the united states was buffalo or that was one of the big hugs. i had it in my head that i was going to be the story actually from the collector's perspective is that like to collect data and what are the challenges you face and what's the lifelike. i pitched the story to the new yorker just kind of bare bones. i could probably get someone to talk to me. the manager said great when can you give me a get me a copy. so i kind of panicked.

i had nothing. so i went to buffalo once and no one would talk to me. i went a second time and i had nothing so i started to panic because i was on the hook from the story. i went on facebook and send messages to everyone in the two high school with and when my brother went to high school with and i got one message back from this guy and i got jimmy on the phone and he said to me basically you better get down here quick if you want to talk to me because my business is struggling and i don't know how much longer i will be open. okay. but if you can show folks how hard my day-to-day life is, i will be satisfied. so, i hopped on the bus to buffalo, showed up and jimmy was amazingly one of these characters as oakland and mobile and i'm driving around meeting his family and that becomes kind of my entry point to this world. >> host: and he had a

struggle. you knew him growing up and got to the set of correspondence and through facebook. tell me a little bit about your history in buffalo and what is the atmosphere and how it changed from what you knew growing up in your title to the kind of place that it's one of the capitals of data collection in the united states. >> guest: buffalo was once the state industrial powerhouse and starting a late 70s and 80s basically when i was a kid, that oil starts to fall apart. and unemployment goes through the roof and in place of these jobs, collections kind of fill the void. someone told me that the load is so good at collections because even though the country has been in a recession since 2008, buffalo has been since 1979 and people can connect with people having a hard time. when i was kind of a teenager this was starting to take form.

but i don't think i really knew about it and even though i went to high school with jimmy and it was supposed to be an integrated high school became from opposite sides. buffalo is a segregated city and i didn't have any sense of what's really life on the east side of buffalo was like or with jimmy was going through and even though we could talk about having the same english teacher it's like we were from totally different worlds and i started reporting in the story that all of a sudden i learned when he was in high school whose father was a heroine addict and after getting out of high school he became a cocaine dealer who he had a gun possession and the gun possession in our lives couldn't have been more divergent. >> host: so in the entry points to the rest of this or he has a very interesting component for something that you call the package which seems to be the crux of what they are chasing and with the debt collectors are changing and evolving in the book. can you talk about his relationship into the package is

and how that opened up the rest of this amazing story? >> guest: it is this one piece of data by following the book and when i talk about things bought and sold we are talking about in excel spreadsheet. we have the big banks or creditors and they'd try for six months to collect on a debt that isn't paid they will typically sell it off for pennies on the dollar to the debt by years and they will collect whatever they can and sell it to the next and they are selling a spreadsheet with the bare-bones information. >> host: is it going to it on the ballot does or where they live? >> guest: the spreadsheet will have their name, social security number, address, balance, date back to the account was opened, they get into other fields but that's basically about it. they are being bought and sold and e-mailed and that is the

paper. that's really all that it is. and if you can imagine it doesn't take much for something to go wrong to get fixed up. the amount of the names to get confused or someone to be so the same spreadsheet to the the unsuspecting buyers that are all collecting on it at once. in my book i follow the package, what i call the package in this one piece of debt is about $40 million into its face value but its buffer pennies on the dollar. and what happens is it gets stolen. somehow he finds out from his collectors and they start calling and saying something is going on with these accounts. it appears that someone else has access this information into selecting money on the package before we get to them. so at that point he calls the fixer named brandon wilson who

is kind of his unofficial partner is a former bank robber, helps him buy and sell debt and he goes and tracks down those that have gotten a hold of the the debt and retrieved it and we can talk about how it is a crazy showdown and if they get it back but the world in which he must go to retrieve that data is a gray area of liberality kind of underworld of buying and selling that that exist in buffalo and other places. >> host: . they have these three large extent at the bottom getting some of this paper that has been sold and resold and not to talk about how paper has been stolen as well. and then you have a sort of level up through.

and he's an interesting character. talk about how you got to have and also he wasn't a thug. he grew up on the good side of buffalo. he had a wealthy family of bringing. he lived in a mansion. so how did he come into the same business? >> guest: so the story of the way that i tell the told the story in the book it starts with this guy aaron siegel who grew up in a wealthy and very well-known and respected family in buffalo. he goes to wall street for a while as a banker and sometimes he wants to come home and be closer to his family and he ends up working at an office as bank of america in buffalo but around the time he comes back what is happening is that throughout buffalo the entrepreneurs are buying some debt and opening up a shop where where they hired a bunch of collectors and the profit margin, this is right before the kind of great recession happens.

the profit margins initially when he gets in the business are through the roof. he's buying a portfolio for 30 grand and in three months he's making 90 grand. so, he realizes that he has kind of found this amazing little niche of the finance world. in his supply -- the key is much of the success he has this supplier supplying him with the paper at a really good price and it's really lucrative. the weird thing about suppliers to use a former robber who's done ten years in prison but has reinvented himself as a desk broker that disk broker that has this kind of genius for finding paper that's very collectible and isn't that expensive to buy. and so, even though he kind of comes from this very verified world and he's got this kind of thing in duty to -- banking past he realizes it isn't unusual to have a shady connection or those that are rough around the edges and so they formed this friendship and partnership and that is a starting point for the

book and the story. >> host: do talk about how when they are looking for this paper and they are looking through he actually also plays a portfolio for his old firm from bank of america that you talk about as being not so great a portfolio but for other reasons like that it's been stolen and moved around the block many times. >> guest: the irony is the key to making a profit margin in this world is getting good paper. everyone is hunting for good paper. and when he dies from the former employer bank of america you would think that this would be kind of respectable and as dependable as it could be he feels that bank of america pulls a fast one on him because he spends all this money millions of dollars buying this piece of data from bank of america and it turns out that almost all our senior citizens that have the smallest amount of disposable income. he feels that if bank of america feels fails him, the former armed robber that he does

business with kind of comes through for him anyway that his employer doesn't. >> host: what does he do? >> guest: so when he buys the bank of america paper and it is all the senior citizens, he feels that he can't -- he is unable to return a profit because he is invested with this money in them and so he goes to back brandon and his specialty is finding what he calls crap and that his old debt everyone thinks is worthless because it's been around the block a few times and it is ten to 15-years-old, but it still pays because maybe it was in was any call center in brazil for five years or maybe it comes from a debt by here that is about to go under and needs to off cheaply. so he was finding little deals on this paper and after he buys this stuff from being of america that really puts him behind the eight ball he says you have to come through for me and really helped me find the deals on this

other stuff that you find anything in the package that we talked about before that gets stolen, the package is actually fantastic paper. it's really good. he doesn't pay a lot for it. it is paying off for him and then of course it gets to win. and he's like all right, you know, go fix this. >> host: and how do you and erin even come up with the money to buy the package? he did okay comedy has a banking job in buffalo. who is behind the funding of the initial purchases of the packaging at that level? >> guest: he is a banker in new york, comes back to buffalo, said that his own small collection agency and with his help he's getting this paper that's paying huge dividends is a good financier he starts thinking what if i get this on a much larger scale. so he makes a few phone calls and he finds eight investors who give him $14 million to do a trial run at the thinking is if

he can do with this what he's done with his own, the 300% returns and whatnot then he will do it even bigger for the 14 million you'll been doing a second round. the problem is there are several problems one in which the great recession occurs and then he encounters problems along the way. >> host: key is how to some amount. he's got investors on the other side squeezing them from day one their money back you visited a couple of these investors. what was their stake in this and how much were they pressuring him and how much was it a portion of their own money and how much do they even care about what happens really? >> guest: i did want to get

their take on this. we went to dinner one night with one of them and the first thing you have to understand that there is a strange sequence of events. they are owning branded that is collecting on it and he is getting the money that he owns air in and he then goes the investors that gave him the money so everyone is beholden and connected. so when he goes to meet one of these investors a fellow named joseph, he is anxious because he feels he's going to fail and owe him money but it turns out it's just he's put the money into tanning salons and bars and for him he said he was hoping it would pay off but it's almost like an amusement and when we were having dinner with joseph i said do you ever think about basically the people whose data you are buying and he said no, why should i.

they've made bad financial choices. is it my fault for wanting to profit and he makes at the baseball game if they pitcher pitches a bad one and the picture knocks a triple, is that matter somehow wrong for taking advantage of the pitch and that was his feeling about the whole situation. but it was kind of crazy to think that i met some of the debtors and they are a poor single woman living in st. louis connected to this former armed robber from boston connected to this investor and older lives connected to this chain of death but none of them really know one another. that whole aspect fascinated me. >> host: the way that you write about it is so clear. you are there in the writing and you really are and on the ground a journalist as well. and that really helps to bring alive the characters and also the locations and you've got

around to meet from the top of the chain with joseph on down to the bottom of the chain, the individuals that could really hurt and all of those are in this process and you actually talk about some specific individuals that are just members in this package. you mentioned a woman named teresa and joanna who was paying and got involved in this. >> guest: you're absolutely right what is being bought and sold it is easy to think of it as a sort of commodity like coffee shares or something because you are looking at a string of numbers and there are thousands of them and this one paid into this one did and you pause for a second and think this is several hundred lines on this exile spreadsheet and its thousands of stories who have fallen into financial ruin.

so i managed to get ahold of the spreadsheet for the package that costs to win and i was looking at him i thought to myself these are stories. these names and numbers represent something that happened. that's happened. so i started reaching out to some of these people and explaining i'm a journalist. i'm looking for this particular piece of data that was stolen and i went to hear the story. but a few that i profiled profiled and talked and what they said, teresa, the woman that you mentioned she's a former marine. she defies whatever stereotypes we have. she worked right through high school helping her parents pay off the mortgage and her life comes apart after she gets out of the marine corps she finds out that her husband is cheating on her and she kicks him out of the house and all of a sudden goes from one income to two incomes but she is on the hook for the mortgage and falls behind on her bills. at that point the fees start kicking in on this card.

late fees and over the limit fees, and eventually she just can't pay anymore. so, and announced to her washington mutual sells off the data straight into my ear and it ends up in his hands in buffalo and then it ends up being stolen and in the hands of these guys that don't actually own it. so one day she gets a call and she says you over this money and you need to pay this right now or there will be legal repercussions. this is your chance to do it. and the calls get increasingly threatening. teresa has a job working at border patrol in the southwest and if she doesn't have a credit in order, it's hard to have a job like that because you can be blackmailed or there is a liability. so she's thinking i'm going to lose my job. i'm going to pay them off. so she agrees to peace $2,700 off.

she feels good about it but she's getting on top of it when she is expecting to get some sort of receipt for which he paid, there is nothing. when she checks the credit reporting agency there is no record of her pain. she assumed she was paying people. why would you assume otherwise when they had all of the information that she's paying people that stole her dad and these are some of the people that erin and brandon realized they are paying the wrong guy so you're absolutely right. each one of the names on the package are real people and the mistakes couldn't be hired for what this means their to their lives. >> host: it seems there are such few rules were ability for the regulators to cover all these different points that you talk about on the individuals moving back and forth. and people like teresa don't know what's going on. they are just afraid they are paying what tactics are coming from the focus was almost a

third of americans have that right now and are in collections the talk off is the collector on the one hand trying to persuade you to open your wallet and pay your bill. so there is a legal talk and a legal and a gray area. this is the information that the page. this is your social security number, how can we arrange this, you have to do this. he legal tactics are when you are basically threatening and lying to the consumers saying we are going to take legal action. we are going to a rest. seize your property. why is and coercion and threats.

that happens a fair amount if you think about it, it happens towards the bottom of the dead food chain. if you have this piece of debt. they don't need to do that but when it's been bought and sold a six or seven times, what you are left with are the folks that haven't paid any of the previous owners and the people that get that debt are usually the people at the very bottom of the food chain. he yeah that's where they feel they have to make these threatening calls and tactics in order to kind of squeeze the money out of the folks and often those are the small agencies that open up and they do it and be close back down before they can be caught by the authorities and i want to make one other point which is that there is not a lot of regulation. it's changing. the state attorney generals are

starting to get more into this space but in the last bunch of years, there hasn't been much regulation. and that puts explain why a banker was team up with someone mike grandin because not only is he getting good paper but he's also offering a service that regulators and law enforcement can't switch is when something goes wrong i will solve this problem for you because call on the police and the state attorney general and the cfp b. isn't going to get it done and i think that erin saw the truth in that. >> host: of desperate people people on the website of trying to collect debts and desperate individuals that are getting these phone calls and are paying because it sounds scary and you have there little regulation their little regulation particularly at the bottom part of this chain. so, what recourse to some of these individuals have or what can they do besides where do

they complain and what do they do if they paid him a debt but it's gone too no one clicks it's going to basically some of these people. >> guest: i was sitting one day in buffalo. he gets on the phone and he's trying to collect and collect the pieces you old money on this payday loan. he says i just paid off three months ago, $900. i just paid off and he said while pam you send me written proof with a receipt from that agency showing proof. he turned to me and said that this is the only way that i know he's telling the truth because if i just forgave everyone that said they paid, i wouldn't be in business but you have a sense of the frantic mess from the guy on

the other line that sounded fairly earnest that you paid this off and he didn't sound like he had much recourse. i think the calls will continue until you pay kind of thing. there are one or two things helpful for the consumers to know. one of which is no statute of limitations in the state for when the debt is no longer enforceable in a various from three to six years but if you are getting a call on the desk that is 4-years-old and the statute of limitations is 3-years-old then you have no obligation to repay that debt and after seven years most negative reporting falls off your credit report. the credit reporting agency. >> host: is it fair to say that's interesting. if you get a call on any level after five or six years is it safe to say you should ignore the call? >> guest: as you may feel if you have a moral obligation to repay it but yes i would be very

-- if it were me i would think twice about repaying it since i know in the year it's been seven years or if there is no legal recourse because it is gone to the statute of limitation. the other thing i would say i would want to make sure the person on the other end of the phone actually own the bank. the problem is that there's not an easy way to figure it out you could get the name of the company and check them out on a better business bureau website and get the same like to hear a reputable company or not. >> host: in part of your research you are in one of the collection centers and you've got on the phone to sort of feel what it was to have that conversation at the other end. what was that like? >> host: i was at the collection agency and i was just observing and he said to me you've got to get on the phones.

you can observe all you want about you can't understand this unless you collapse and i was kind of reluctant for a few reasons. one of which i didn't want to help people come, but the other collectors that worked with him started saying you've got to try this and i said i sat in one of these terminals and they had it on an autodialer so that the contact information has been verified and the first call came to me and it was a woman that owned $450 on her cell phone bill and i said something like i see that you go this $900 now with interest that we can give you a reduced rate. would you consider paying this and i heard myself saying it and i thought i wouldn't pay me. that is a low opening gambit and eventually we are talking and i'm trying -- brandon is hoping that he's going to marry the debtor which is i have to have so much empathy of what's going

on with you in your life, you're working and we would have some sort of connection so she will feel like she can open up and trust me. and i'm trying to do this and at one point she says maybe i can write you a check that i don't want to seize on that right away because i'm trying to marry her and then she hangs up and brandon is right behind me playing the coach and he's like look, you failed at this not because you didn't collect because at the moment she offered to make that check you should have said okay so you're going to send me the check in the middle of the month? yes. because the minute that she promised to make the payment, we have kind of gotten her because she committed to this and now we can use that next time he calls her. i was a very bad collector but what i realized that the end was

i could afford to be a bad collector. i'm area to a doctor and i make a decent living as a writer but if i were desperate like some of these collectors i would have gotten wise quick. >> host: they are all like sharks and that's basically what you depicted here. >> guest: a lot of the collectors are desperate. i was at the one agency where one guy made $115 another and $85 that's who poor.