www.harpers.org/archive/2009/04/0082451 -
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Published on: 1/1/2009
Last Visited: 5/23/2009
W. Allan Jones, the jet-setting visitor, went on to found Check Into Cash, the first of the national payday-lending chains.
With a knack for marketing, Jones rechristened the transaction Eaton called "check cashing" as "the payday advance.
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It was Jones who saw the potential to expand someone else's business concept into a coast-to-coast empire.
Jones saw how payday lending could be to finance what McDonald's is to food.
In the early 1990s, there were fewer than 200 payday lending stores in America; today, there are over 22,000, serving 10 million households each year-a $40 billion industry with more U.S. locations, in fact, than McDonald's.
Today, Jones's company, based in his hometown of Cleveland, Tennessee, is the second or third largest of its kind.
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Allan Jones and his family donated more than $29,000 to state legislators during the run-up to the vote.
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Like just about everything in Cleveland, Tennessee-a city of 40,000 that is either in the middle of nowhere or, as the locals say, "halfway to everywhere"-the Bald Headed Bistro is owned by Allan Jones.
And as with his other holdings, the Bistro is not an anonymous line on some enormous balance sheet but aspires to be a projection of the man's very essence.
Its decor purports to channel the rustic ambience of Jones's ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and its name pays homage to Jones's hairless pate.
The men's room walls are decorated with framed photos of the regulation-sized football field he built in his back yard.
I climbed atop an itchy cowhide barstool and asked the bartender, a student at a local evangelical college, if this was the nicest place in town.
By far, he told me. "The next closest place is Outback.
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Whether or not they are Check Into Cash employees-or customers-everyone in Cleveland, Tennessee, is indebted to Jones.
Anyone who patronizes the library, which resides in a converted Victorian that Jones donated to the city, has him to thank.
Jones paid to renovate the bandstand on the courthouse square, and he also owns and maintains Cleveland's most historic building, Craigmiles Hall, a Gilded Age opera house where, Clevelanders will proudly tell you, John Philip Sousa played once.
Even Ron Haynes-a local legal-aid lawyer who refuses to eat at the Bistro and swears he would sue Jones, if Jones hadn't gotten Tennessee's legislature to write the payday-lending law in such a way that made it impossible to do so-cuts him a check at the end of each month; like the rest of downtown, his legal-aid office is a Jones-owned property.
Jones himself resides on a 400-acre horse farm on Anatole Lane, out at the northern edge of town.
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For decades Cleveland's elite lived on Centenary Avenue, a block of stately homes quite close to downtown, but after Jones began building his estate in 1993, Cleveland's entire executive class relocated to Anatole, ideally situated between the airstrip for private planes and the Cleveland Country Club.
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Cleveland had very little to do with the old inequality; Allan Jones has ensured that it will have everything to do with the new inequality.
The Check Into Cash headquarters are near downtown, in a former shopping mall that Jones bought out of bankruptcy in 1998.
When I walked into the corporate reception area, the first thing I saw was a photo montage, shaped like a United States map, from which Allan Jones's face stares out amid piles of cash.
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From customers in such straits, Allan Jones has amassed a fortune, which in 2005 was valued at half a billion dollars.
The profit margins are similar to those in conventional banking, but as with fast food, payday lending derives those profits from innumerable small-value transactions taking place at thousands of outlets.
The business works according to the classic logic of deregulation.
Profits on loans of a few hundred dollars can be significant only in a regulatory environment in which anything goes.
If customers weren't trapped-if they really paid off their $20 or $30 finance fees at the end of one pay period-payday lending wouldn't be profitable at all.
When I finally had the opportunity to sit down with Allan Jones in his office, he immediately sized me up.
"Did you wrestle?
he asked.
I did not, as it happens, despite my low center of gravity-my height and weight are (I would later learn) almost precisely those of Jones himself during his high school glory days on the mat.
Today, he is rotund and neckless, like a snowman.
His office resembles somewhat the dark and sumptuous lair of a railroad baron circa 1889, channeling that bygone era when every square inch of a proper room needed urgently to be adorned with something, anything.
A palm-in-chinoiserie urn stood along one wall; in a corner sat a coffee table with a photograph of Jones and President George W. Bush.
Behind Jones's desk sat a scale model of one of his jets, a Cessna Citation II, alongside two faux Frederick Remington equestrian statuettes and an oil painting of a fox hunt.
Magnetic in his television ads, Jones was fidgety and disheveled in person.
His open-collar white shirt with monogrammed waj cuffs was splashed with a reddish-brown stain somewhere along the coffee-to-barbecue-sauce spectrum.
The downturn in the economy was weighing on him.
"I've laid off my horse trainer," he said.
"I've really had to cut back."
Jones needed to swap his son's Audi for his own Ford F-150 pickup truck, and he offered to bring me along.
As we drove through Cleveland, Jones mumbled a stream-of-consciousness narration-rattling off his acts of munificence as if they spoke for themselves.
Jones knew I wrote frequently about architecture, so he was particularly keen to show off his works of historic preservation.
The bandstand on the courthouse square, he told me, was renovated from the original blueprints at a cost of $75,000.
He bragged, of Craigmiles Hall, "I own one of the most photographed buildings in Tennessee.
A self-described "Cleveland State dropout," Jones didn't consider himself anything so lofty as an architect; but Jones as architect-as the hidden hand that designs the spaces in which people live-was everywhere evident on Cleveland's streets.
Jones pointed out all the trees he'd donated, often just a few years beyond spindly saplings, which lined many of the roads.
"I donated all these trees.
I hope they remember me when I'm gone," he said.
The intended highlight of my tour, I soon discovered, was to be the Jones Wrestling Center at Cleveland High School.
Inside this vast hangar of a building, two dozen boys sparred on mats, learning to master a new takedown.
"Move your leg like a windshield wiper," their coach instructed.
Jones gave me a brief tour, beginning at the Wall of Fame, where his own exploits-1972, second in state in the 155-pound weight class-were immortalized along those of others, including his son.
We continued on as he showed off the other choice features of the million-dollar facility: in the visitors' locker room, for instance, a flat-screen TV broadcasts a live feed of the Cleveland team warming up.
"We're gonna make you watch us warm up," Jones said.
"We're gonna intimidate the hell out of them."
For someone who lives in a gated 400-acre compound, Jones remains extremely accessible to the people of Cleveland.
He attends all the wrestling tournaments, the Friday night football games, and the annual Halloween block party.
Never, he says, has an irate customer confronted him-not once.
He called information in front of me, on speaker phone, to demonstrate that his home number was listed.
Jones and his family are so unaccustomed to criticism that when the Ohio state legislature recently cracked down on payday lending, delivering sharply worded speeches against the industry, his eldest son, age twenty, was deeply shaken.
"It's still affecting him," Jones said.
Being the son of Cleveland's richest citizen and leading philanthropist-the kid with the regulation-sized football field in his back yard-he had never seen anyone come out swinging at his father.
"He grew up here in the epicenter of it, and everybody is fine with it," Jones assured me.
Up in Ohio, Jones said, industry critics tarred him as a predatory lender who targets minorities, as if this were some kind of civil rights issue.
But Jones knows better.
"Black or white is immaterial.
Credit is green.
Capital is green."
During my afternoon with Allan Jones, one of the only times he betrayed any emotion was when he asked if I knew about Tall Betsy, the Halloween character he invented.
He began to recite a poem:
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Jones said his mother had told him about Tall Betsy when he was a child to teach him about the importance of punctuality, but he had embellished the tale.
He created a Betsy costume and wore it at his daughter's birthday party in first grade, and it was such a hit he began to dress up-in drag, on stilts-each Halloween in front of his Centenary Aven
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