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Predatory Bender: A Story of Subprime Finance/Toxic Credit in the Global Inner City

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The American Banker

December 1, 2003, Monday

SECTION: WASHINGTON; Pg. 4

HEADLINE: Washington People, By Damian Paletta

A Novel Dig at Citi

   Who says there's no drama in financial services?  Matthew Lee, general counsel of Inner City Press/Community on the Move, has published a novel titled "Predatory Bender: A Story of Subprime Finance."

  Though the work is fiction (except for a 90-page afterword to the 360-page tale), Mr. Lee draws from his years of challenging bank mergers and lending practices, and appears to blend the images of companies such as Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. One section reads: "While ostensibly the fruit of three decades of community struggle, the land beneath the mall was owned by Anguilla-based EmpiBank. The anchor tenant, too, was a part of Empi's empire: a storefront office in the high-rate lender EmpiFinancial. Jack Bender had worked for EmpiBank on the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina, the so-called Queen City."

   Hitting his favorite target again, Mr. Lee said Tuesday that his group would fight Citigroup's deal, announced last week, to buy Washington Mutual Inc.'s consumer lending unit.

LOAD-DATE: November 28, 2003

The Pittsburgh City Paper of Dec. 11, 2003, says that the "novel Predatory Bender: A Story of Subprime Finance may, in fact, be the first great American lending-malfeasance novel... which simultaneously helps us understand why predatory lending goes on, and why there’s hope that it might be curbed." (Click here for that review).

"Critics' Choices for Christmas," by Paul Elie, in Commonweal magazine, December 5, 2003

"In our time, the equivalent of the Dickensian novel is the well-wrought thriller, and it is through such a book that Matthew Lee now seeks to upbraid corporate society. A one-time Catholic Worker in New York, Lee left St. Joseph's House to 'homestead' abandoned apartments in the South Bronx for the working poor; he went on to earn a law degree, using it first to defend the rights of the people in the neighborhood, then to file lawsuits charging Citigroup and other banks with 'predatory lending.' Now, in his storefront office, he was written a novel featuring a lawyer-agitator much like himself. Predatory Bender (self-published by his Inner City Press: www.innercitypress.org) is as vivid an account of life in the Bronx as you are likely to read; more than that, it is a brilliant act of subversion, for within the thriller plot is found a dramatic account of the ways corporations prey on the poor while the rest of us aren't looking."

Predatory Bender / Toxic Credit in the Global Inner City

ISBN 0-9740244-1-4, 456 pages, endnotes

Library of Congress Control Number: 2003111283

Price: $19.95, trade paperback, 6 x 9

Available for sale on  AtlasBooks.com, Amazon.com, InnerCityPress.org, etc.

Distributed by Ingram Books Contact: 718-716-3540, books@innercitypress.org

    This website has sub-pages on a variety of issues, including a Citgroup Watch, a Bank of America Watch, and more generally, weekly reports on community reinvestment, environmental justice, global / human rights; insurance redlining, telecommunications advocacy, arts and culture. We welcome your suggestions or comments on this website, or on our work. for five different ways to contact us, click here.

      Thank you for your interest.

To order, click here (secure online credit card orders), or call 800-247-6553, or mail payment directly to Inner City Press (address here) -- or (slower), order through Amazon.com (click here, directly to Amazon's Predatory Bender page), or through Powell's Books, or other booksellers.  From Inner City Press, each book is $19.95,  add $3.85 shipping & handling for first book and $1 for each additional book

   A portion of the sales from each copy of this book goes to the Fair Finance Watch, which advocates for consumers' and human rights. So buy it already, why don't you?  Whew...

For ongoing, up-to-the-minute advocacy journalism, click here for Inner City Press, and a map

Off-site:  "New Haven Savings Bank Changes Merit Students' Attention," by Matthew Lee, Yale Daily News, October 23, 2003

Off-site and stuffy: U.S. Banker, May 2001: Federal Reserve - Big Talk, Little Action, (incl. on predatory lending)

On a lighter note, click here to view  poem (doggerel) on Citigroup, "Song of Solomon [Brothers]," on the WallStreetPoet.com site...

Campaign Finance Reform in The Bronx (Gotham Gazette, April 3, 2000)

Community Reinvestment Act Weakened by Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (Shelterforce, Dec. 1999)

   Click here for news on Inner City Press / Fair Finance Watch campaigns against predators

Inner City Press -- we've written (and published) the book on fighting predatory lending


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These pages copyright 1999 - 2003 Inner City Press/Community on the Move, Inc. and Inner City Public Interest Law Center.   All rights reserved.  For further information, or to request reprint or other permission, contact: Permissions Coordinator, Legal Administration, Inner City Press, P.O. Box 580188, Mount Carmel Station, Bronx, NY 10458.  Phone: (718) 716-3540.  Fax: (718) 716-3161.  E-mail: mlee [at] innercitypress.org