It’s well known that Buffalo has been a hotbed for debt collecting practices for quite some time. Along with a few other niche industries, debt collecting businesses have flourished. Other than what is read in papers, and maybe even having the occasional interaction with a debt collector, most Buffalonians couldn’t tell you much about the relatively seedy world of debt collecting.
Now New York Times Magazine has published an article on the unsavory practice, that seems much more like fodder for a best selling crime thriller than real life business dealings in Buffalo. The star of the article, written by Jake Halpern, is Aaron Siegel, whose name recently popped up on BRO in a much different scenario (see Big Deal).
In the New York Times piece (see here), Siegel’s dealings in the lucrative yet hairy collections business unfold in a crazy tale of greed and deceit unlike anything that any of us would ever be privy to (yet is easy to imagine considering the racket).