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The Washington Post
March 15, 2004 Monday

SECTION: Financial; E01 HEADLINE: A Novel Approach to Predatory Lending

   The annual Washington meeting of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition isn't usually a load of laughs: Last week's meeting, "Bringing Economic Justice Home," had speakers such as Jesse Jackson and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and featured discussions of predatory lenders and competition-threatening bank mergers. But the opening reception offered a lighter side: New York activist lawyer Matthew Lee hawking "Predatory Bender,'' which he says he believes is the first novel about predatory lending. (It is subtitled, "A Story of Subprime Finance.") In it, a sleazy loan shark for a big New York bank finds a conscience. Turn the book over and you get another 100 pages of an essay on real-life predatory lending.

"In the last 12 months, the term has become much more a part of the national conversation," Lee said in an interview. "You can't always be dry. People's eyes glaze over."
He sold out his 12 books at $19.95 each the first day and had another box shipped in.

The Times (London)
April 15, 2004, Thursday

SECTION: Business; 27 HEADLINE: Novel approach    BYLINE: Dominic Walsh

Matthew Lee, the New York public interest lawyer who gave HSBC such a hard time over its $ 14 billion acquisition of Household International, the sub-prime lender to America's poor, has penned a novel.

The book, Predatory Bender (a pun on predatory lender), has a cast of colorful characters, not least Sandy Vyle, chairman of EmpiGroup, the world's largest bank. Vyle is a foul-mouthed monster, determined to screw the best terms out of his so-called customers.

Under no circumstances is Vyle to be confused with Sandy Weill, chairman of Citigroup, the non-fictional world's biggest bank. "This is a creative work. Resemblances to non-public figures, locales or institutions are coincidental," goes the blurb.

"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 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."

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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).

The American Banker

December 1, 2003, Monday

SECTION: WASHINGTON; Pg. 4    HEADLINE: Washington People

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

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

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