This article appears in the June 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here. Mike Lindell has been neck-deep in debt more times than you have probably been to a doctor. The beleaguered founder of Minnesota bedding manufacturer MyPillow still has a Hardee’s bag that a Mafia-connected loan shark left on his car windshield back in 1981, after he wagered $25,000 on bad sports bets. “MIKE: CAME TO GET OUR MONEY—Book was with me—Physical Force May Be Needed. CALL ME!” In 2003, Lindell took out a loan with 50 percent interest, secured by a promissory note on the bar he owned, from a friend of his bookie’s stepson. He planned to use the proceeds to launch a card-counting business that would dig him out of debt he had amassed becoming addicted to crack, but he could never accurately count the cards enough to make it work. By 2023, he owed his various lawyers so many millions of dollars in fees that he was forced to essentially replace them with AI. But until last summer, Mike Lindell had never borrowed money at a 441 percent interest rate. Was that even legal? (No, but neither is unilaterally dismantling the federal agency charged with enforcing the Truth in Lending Act, and yet here we are!) Lindell desperately needed money to—among other things—hire a few lawyers to whom he didn’t already owe money to explain to the various institutions and individuals suing him that he was too broke to pay them. He met a broker at an event who said he could help. Suddenly, companies he’d never heard of were offering to advance him large sums without credit checks or balance sheets, so long as he agreed to allow them to deduct daily payments from his bank account. Lindell ended up borrowing more than $4 million from close to a dozen lenders that all seemed indistinguishable from one another, in transactions hashed out with men who sometimes seemed like they each had two or three different names. Mike Kandhorov of Lifetime Funding, for example, was speculated in a lawsuit Lindell later filed to be the same person as Mike Kand, a different funder. Yellowstone introduced its own revolution to 21st-century loan-sharking: the “confession of judgment.” “It was a classic bait and switch,” Lindell said during a brief conversation in early May, while he was walking through an unidentified airport. A broker told him he could obtain a large term loan secured by some of MyPillow’s real estate, or possibly some of its pillows. There was just one condition: He had to take out a short-term cash advance, “kind of like a bridge loan,” while they underwrote the larger loan. “Naturally, the second one never materialized. It’s a whole corrupt industry!” he exclaimed. “They prey on companies that are struggling, and you’re never gonna get that real loan. But if you tell them you’re going to default, how about another [advance]?” The mustachioed Minnesota pillow magnate, who owes some of his legal woes to a $5 million bet he made that a 23-gigabit file furnished by a serial con artist contained data suggesting Chinese interference in the 2020 election, seemed borderline impressed by the audacity of his lenders. “I mean, the Mafia has much cheaper interest rates.” Lindell, admittedly not the most sympathetic character, had stumbled into the world of “merchant cash advance,” a form of small business loan-sharking that emerged just before the financial crisis and exploded in the years following it, surpassing Small Business Administration loans in volume in 2014. Like just about everything else involving merchant cash advance, the industry sometimes goes by an alias: “revenue based financing,” as one of Lindell’s lenders, Shine Capital, uses. In recent years, these ultra-high-interest, thoroughly unregulated loans, projected to be a $25 billion business in 2025, have become a major profit driver for Silicon Valley middlemen. But they were pioneered by convicted criminals and appear to still be dominated by organized crime–adjacent networks of operators who exploit archaic practices, obscure laws, and labyrinthine networks of shell companies to unilaterally seize and freeze the bank accounts of small businesses and extract triple-digit interest rate returns, often without so much as revealing their names. The first Trump administration worked in concert with Democratic state attorneys general to investigate and sue the most abusive MCA lenders, in actions that won broad bipartisan support. But then the father of the single most notorious of all the loan sharks, a scrawny chain-smoker from Staten Island known for pushing interest rates into the quadruple digits and facing long-awaited accountability for his drug trafficking past, hired Alan Dershowitz to put in a good word with Trump’s pardoning committee. In the last week of Trump’s first term, as Mike Lindell paced the White House floors, urging the president to declare martial law to avoid ceding the White House to Joe Biden, Trump issued pardons to a cornucopia of privileged deplorables, including a nursing home boss convicted of kickbacks and known for opening understaffed nursing homes to psychiatric patients and ex-cons who would physically abuse the seniors, and a bank fraudster who would soon resurface in another MCA scandal. Among them was Jonathan Braun, the chain-smoking Staten Islander, who at the time was serving a ten-year sentence for trafficking 110 tons of marijuana on behalf of Canadian organized-crime syndicates. What looked from a distance like an ad hoc act of petty corruption now seems like a microcosm of Trump’s maximally Darwinian second term. The Braun pardon derailed a nascent federal investigation of the MCA industry, and restored to his perch the biggest loan shark in the game, just in time for COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program funds to run out for small businesses. MERCHANT CASH ADVANCE TRACES its origins to a guy named Shmuel “Sam” Chanin, an Orthodox Jewish central Brooklyn entrepreneur who spent the Bush administration selling credit card processing machines to small businesses as an affiliate of a Long Island City firm called Cynergy Data. At that point, credit and debit card interchange fees were not capped, and Cynergy enabled Chanin and his sales reps to take a small cut of every fee that was processed on the machines they sold. In 2005, Chanin decided to start offering his clients small loans that could be clawed back over time by siphoning a portion of their credit card transactions. He wasn’t the first to have this idea: Another Brooklynite named Melvin Chasen offered cash advances to restaurants as part of a loyalty club business as far back as the 1980s, and centuries before, Jews circumvented the Torah’s strict prohibition against charging interest for loans by pioneering a concept called “heter iska,” in which moneylenders bought stakes in companies in exchange for a share of the profits later on. But Chanin’s was the training ground for a great post-crisis MCA boom, headquartered in some of New York’s least desirable office space. Chanin called the business Second Source Funding, and back when it was the only game in town, the cost of its loans was usually double the amount borrowed for a four- or five-month repayment schedule, or well over 200 percent interest. Crucially, none of the paperwork codifying these transactions referred to them as “loans”; they instead represented them as the discounted “purchase” of future accounts receivable, language that theoretically enabled the operation to ignore anti-usury laws and strict caps on consumer interest rates. This was a dubious proposition to bring into a courtroom. When Chasen’s company used this argument in a 2005 class action lawsuit filed by a few of its restaurant clients, the judge deployed the company’s own logic from earlier lawsuits to ridicule the notion that its advances weren’t usurious, and the company soon negotiated a settlement of around $30 million. And where Chasen’s company was a publicly traded loyalty program with millions of members it touted as a valuable asset to its restaurants, Chanin’s shop was much more like a classic boiler room—in fact, one of his trainees was the real-life stock scammer on whom Giovanni Ribisi’s character in the movie Boiler Room was based. An Orthodox rabbi warned that merchant cash advance posed as great a threat to the Jewish community as secularism and intermarriage. Yet throughout the subprime mortgage boom and bust, Chanin’s sales floor bustled with mostly Chabad-affiliated teenagers and twentysomethings, who spent their days making small fortunes hawking small-business payday loans and returned to their parents’ homes every night. For a couple of years, Second Source was the place to be for a certain kind of rebellious, grindset-addicted Orthodox youth. But Cynergy Data fell on hard times in 2008, and its bankruptcy ended up screwing over hundreds of merchants, distributors like Chanin and ambitious sales reps alike. In a nostalgic 2014 thread about Second Source on the MCA message board DailyFunder, many former employees still voiced bitterness about the commissions they were shorted after Cynergy went bust. Perhaps the most bitter were two inseparable twentysomething Second Source loan gurus named Meir Hurwitz and Abe Zeines, whom friends sometimes called “Meyer and Bugsy” after the legendary mobsters Lansky and Siegel. According to a profile of the duo published years later, Chanin and Cynergy had stiffed them out of millions of dollars in commission. So they started their own MCA venture, with fundraising from David Glass, the aforementioned Boiler Room figure who had just pled guilty to participating in a sprawling insider trading conspiracy, and Hurwitz’s brother-in-law Jonathan Braun, who had just pled guilty to conspiracy charges to import massive amounts of marijuana and launder the proceeds. Eventually, there were conflicts over profit-sharing and the optics associated with all those felonies, and the four men split their operations into three companies: Hurwitz and Zeines’s Pearl Capital, Glass’s Yellowstone Capital, and Braun’s Richmond companies. It was Sam Chanin’s turn to be bitter; in 2014, he sued Glass and Yellowstone for “orchestrat[ing] a scheme to steal SSF’s revolutionary business model.” A judge ultimately dismissed the suit with prejudice. Yellowstone introduced its own revolution to 21st-century loan-sharking, in the form of a draconian 19th-century contract called the “confession of judgment” it began requiring most borrowers to sign around 2013. In a confession of judgment, a guarantor essentially agrees to not only pay for their loan sharks’ legal fees in the event of default, but waive all of their own legal protections and essentially designate their lender as their legal representative if a conflict arises. A signed confession of judgment is all a lender needs to obtain a court order freezing a borrower’s bank accounts and seizing funds far in excess of what they owe; judges rarely even look at the documents, allowing their clerks to sign off on them. In the early 1970s, the plight of Nellie Swarb, a bedridden septuagenarian in Philadelphia who almost had her house foreclosed upon after she missed one payment to a debt consolidation service whose sales representative had physically guided her hand while she signed such a document, shamed many states, including Swarb’s own, into curtailing the use of the contracts. But the Legal Aid Society of Philadelphia hit a wall when it asked the Supreme Court to deem confessions of judgment unconstitutional. That was a determination, the Court ruled, better left to Congress—which, to be fair, had just passed the Truth in Lending Act and could have easily amended it to explicitly ban the practice. Instead, Congress left the issue to the agency charged with enforcing TILA, the Federal Trade Commission, which embarked upon a robust effort to research consumer credit abuses and issue detailed new rules laying out what it did and did not determine to be predatory and deceptive behavior. That effort stretched on for more than a decade, but in 1984 the agency finally announced it would be banning confession of judgment clauses from all consumer credit agreements. Which meant that small-business agreements were fair game. SOMEHOW, NO ONE NOTICED the loophole until a lawyer for David Glass brought up the idea, and Yellowstone Capital made them a fixture of their cash advance agreements. In 2018, Bloomberg Businessweek published an entire issue dedicated to the booming new industry of small-business loan-sharking; the magazine found all of 14 confessions of judgment used to obtain default judgments in New York courts from the years prior to 2014; in 2015, they found about 1,000, and in the three years that followed, more than 25,000. The stories behind the court filings were grim. A Florida couple who owned a real estate agency lost hundreds of thousands of dollars despite making every payment; an Irish bar owner was forced to move in with his in-laws and work retail after two advances swallowed his bar, house, and livelihood; an always-busy Union Square bakery disappeared overnight to a plague an employee likened to “quicksand” in a hasty Instagram post. And yet the state’s courts often proved alarmingly resistant to interpreting merchant advances as loans that definitionally violated New York usury laws, even as their rulings created a cottage industry of minor millionaire state marshals who spent their days collecting debts on behalf of the loan sharks. But all was not well inside the boiler rooms. As early as 2016, an MCA sales rep on DailyFunder was wondering how the industry would stay afloat if it continued burying its customers. “Most merchants I speak to have taken the cash advance under the pretense of a … Lie that they will get Progressively better pricing and Better terms, yeah right you will get stacked on until you go bankrupt how is this business sustainable or scalable if your [sic] killing the life line of the business the merchant,” wondered a user named bigrnyc. “I’ve been in this business for a year and I can say this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done from a business perspective.” An Orthodox rabbi with 70,000 YouTube subscribers began posting monologues lamenting the moral ills of merchant cash advance brokers, and warning his followers that the industry posed as great a threat to the Jewish community as secularism and intermarriage. “People are just completely robbing people blind believing it’s permitted,” Rabbi Yaron Reuven, who is also known as something of a cryptocurrency evangelist, mused in one sermon. “They say, but Rabbi I’m only charging 50 percent, oh so you’re only taking half his life? But Rabbi he’s a goy—that’s even worse! … But rabbi, you’re allowed to charge the goyim interest …” He shook his head, urging followers to read Mein Kampf before they became predatory lenders, or at the very least, look to the Mafia. “This business of merchant cash advance is so horrible, the Mafia shut down. Do you know how they lend money today? They open up a merchant cash advance. If the Mafia is your co-worker, that’s a good sign you’re not in a good business.” The rabbi was not exaggerating. Another MCA empire, Par Funding, was giving Yellowstone and Richmond a run for their money. As with the latter two, Par’s founders had grown up in Staten Island. But Joseph and James LaForte were not Yeshiva boys gone bad; they were the grandsons of a well-known soldier in the Gambino crime family who’d been nicknamed “Joe the Cat.” (Lawyers for Par Funding deny this.) A Staten Island contractor who sued Joe LaForte Jr. over an investment fraud in 2000, then mysteriously retracted his allegations in a letter claiming he had made up the whole thing, told Philadelphia magazine last year that his lawyer, also an indicted loan shark, had forced him to sign the retraction letter, which he believed had been drafted by a mobster, saying, “You gotta sign this or I can’t guarantee your safety.” When the LaFortes first hatched the idea for Par they were both serving time in prison: Joe for orchestrating a complex mortgage fraud scheme and operating an illegal gambling enterprise; James for multiple acts of loan-sharking and extortion and one audacious automobile arson. Upon their release, the LaFortes hooked up with a Main Line Philadelphia financial adviser who was a ubiquitous presence on AM radio, airing dubious commercials that promised free dinners at Ruth’s Chris and guaranteed double-digit returns. Together they solicited more than a half-billion dollars in funds from retail investors to put to work peddling cash advances to struggling businesses, and quickly made a name for themselves as willing to fund just about any loan a broker sent their way. The industry had already established a reputation for extralegal enforcement mechanisms: According to multiple published reports, Jonathan Braun had allegedly whipped a deputy in his weed-smuggling business with his belt, his co-defendant was murdered execution-style and burned alive in his car in 2014, and he regularly threatened delinquent borrowers with promises to have their kids kidnapped and such. A rabbi who had taken out an MCA to renovate his synagogue’s nursery said Braun had warned him: “I am going to make you bleed.” In 2018, a pair of lawyers who have been some of the industry’s most persistent courtroom foes found little “messages” in the mail: a piece of paper with the word “prey” cut from a magazine and pasted onto it in the mailbox of Shane Heskin, a dead rat on top of the mailbox of Justin Proper. The Par Funding guys kept an aging bodybuilder and ex-con named Renato “Gino” Gioe on hand to run its robust intimidation efforts. Gioe made unannounced visits to homes, offices, retail stores, barbershops, and even a beach house, to threaten clients with physical harm when they fell behind on payments. In 2018, Gioe told Bloomberg he had made 700 borrower visits on Par’s behalf. How effective those threats were is hard to say, given the underlying economics at play. Gioe’s indictment documents some of the businesses he showed up to hector: a barbershop owner who borrowed $8,000 that somehow turned into well over $100,000. A tech firm that took a $118,000 advance and ended up owing $3.6 million. A plumber with a terminally ill wife in Roanoke, Virginia, who took out about a quarter-million dollars in MCAs from six different companies, including Braun’s Richmond and Glass’s Yellowstone, and paid back $600,000 before he gave up completely and decided to take the advice of Yellowstone rep Steve Davis, who had advised him to win the lottery or commit suicide if he wanted to liberate his children from the debt. The plumber overdosed on pills and passed out in the woods near his house, but was found alive after a friend saw his farewell message on Facebook and called the police. He later told his story to Bloomberg, and at a congressional hearing to discuss a possible national confession of judgment ban. The Small Business Finance Association, the MCA industry’s official lobby, which had theretofore mostly showed up in the media attempting to distance itself from the antics of the Staten Island gang, quickly endorsed an official ban; alas, only New York ended up banning the practice. But both regulators and law enforcement authorities got to work after Bloomberg published its findings. The Federal Trade Commission, late in Trump’s first term in 2020, sued both the Richmond and Yellowstone empires, while the SEC and FBI zeroed in on Par Funding, and the New York and New Jersey attorneys general launched comprehensive investigations into the broader industry. Over and over again, investigators and regulators made the same determination: MCAs, at least the ones being peddled by the giants of the business, were definitionally fraudulent. The contracts brokers furnished to merchants claimed that funders “advanced” an “investment” to borrowers in exchange for a fixed percentage of their sales, which could be interpreted as an equity investment or an asset purchase. But everyone knew they were loans. Brokers secured them by filing legal claims on clients’ assets, repayments deducted from a merchant’s bank account had no relationship whatsoever to the business’s sales, and most of all Gino Gioe doesn’t get sent to break the legs of CEOs whose stock prices go down. Merchant cash advances were loans, subject to all the relevant state and federal restrictions, and if David Glass and Joe LaForte wanted to sidestep New York’s 16 percent usury caps, shouldn’t they at the very least have to move to South Dakota like the credit card companies? Jonathan Braun didn’t think so, and he had established a pretty impressive track record of impunity since being mysteriously released from prison in 2011, just a few months after he was indicted and locked up for the marijuana trafficking. He fled to Israel, presumably to cooperate with the government in investigations of co-conspirators that supposedly included the Hells Angels and three of the leading Canadian organized-crime syndicates. Braun still had not been sentenced when Bloomberg published its issue on the MCA industry in late 2018, and massive chunks of the criminal case remain sealed in spite of the efforts of FOIA attorneys working for The New York Times and Bloomberg; what little is public is heavily redacted. During the headiest days of the MCA business, the docket was all but abandoned; a year and a half passed between his business partner’s gruesome murder in 2014 and the DOJ’s motion to dismiss him from the indictment in 2016. But after Bloomberg’s investigation, the case got rolling again. Sealed anonymous letters about Braun’s abuse of delinquent borrowers were filed with the court, as was a sealed letter from Yellowstone Capital. The judge, whom Braun had reportedly expected to go easy on him given his years of service as an informant, finally sentenced him, eight years after he’d been released: ten years in prison. His family “looked shocked,” according to a dispatch from the hearing, but they also had a few aces up their sleeves. Braun’s sister had gone to high school with Jared Kushner, whose family put his dad in touch with Alan Dershowitz, the unofficial ringleader of the Trump clemency effort. Just a year into his sentence, it was commuted, and Braun was the guest of honor at a triumphant “Freedom Bash” welcoming him back to Brooklyn. Almost immediately, Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux caught him parking his Bentley at an MCA boiler room in Brooklyn. For reasons that remain a mystery, while the Biden DOJ made attempts to re-indict certain Trump pardon recipients, the agency made no attempt to charge Braun criminally for any of his actions. An acquaintance surmised to Faux that Braun was being somehow “protected” by the feds, and the prosecutor who showed up to his sentencing hearing did nothing to throw cold water on that presumption. Meanwhile, Braun dug in for a long legal battle to defend his right to do legalized loan-sharking, appealing a federal judge’s decision in favor of a golf course contractor that had spent more than $117,000 paying off a $50,000 “advance” over a five-month period. But in 2023, the Second Circuit upheld the lower court’s ruling that the contractor’s advance was indeed a loan, and Richmond’s elaborate attempts to claim otherwise nothing more than a fraudulent racket. LOAN SHARKS ARE AN INVASIVE SPECIES that can eradicate decades-old small businesses in a matter of weeks. A 2018 McClatchy analysis found 700 bankruptcy filings over the preceding decade by debtors who had borrowed from a list of major MCAs featured on the website deBanked. But the absurd profit margins in MCA also poisoned the entire landscape of small-business finance. Just as regulators had finally begun to clamp down on 400 percent APR small-business payday loans, investment banks and private equity firms became eager to conquer their virulent strain of “fintech.” A private equity firm called Capital Z Partners bought Braun’s brother-in-law’s company Pearl Capital, and American Express bought a venture-backed small-business lender called Kabbage that used a Utah-chartered bank to make merchant advances at interest rates of 95 percent. Around the same time, the pandemic and its attendant bailout programs triggered a mass liquidity crisis and subsequent frenzy to accelerate cash to struggling businesses to offset the damage. Underwriting standards plunged. Shopify, DoorDash, Square, and Amazon have all announced their own MCA products, aptly called “embedded finance.” For many industries like restaurants and gyms and barbershops, the government’s PPP loans were woefully insufficient to offset the hit to their revenues. It was the pandemic that sent attorney Barbara Berens, the owner of a Minneapolis law firm best known for representing the NFL players union in various legal disputes, into the throes of the MCA scam back in late 2020. “Litigation just fell off a cliff. The courts were closed, and there weren’t any cases,” she said, in part because of the sweeping pandemic liability shields swiftly enacted in most states. After hearing about MCA from an employee, Berens quickly found herself well over $10 million in debt to a half dozen mostly Florida-based MCA shops. Finally, she confided in a friend who had read some of the Bloomberg stories and advised her to stop paying and sue. “It probably should have occurred to me that the loans were illegal, but when you’re in this kind of situation it’s hard not to become preoccupied obsessing over how stupid you’ve been.” Before long, small business–oriented marketplace platforms began dabbling in the space, with Shopify, DoorDash, Square, and Amazon all announcing their own MCA products, as part of a new phenomenon aptly called “embedded finance.” One of the biggest small-business payment platforms in the country, the insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, even got into the act in 2023, offering a service called Optum Pay Advance to tide over physician practices navigating the enervating process of appealing claims it had denied. The verbiage was eerily familiar terms: Don’t think of it as a loan, but the purchase of future reimbursement revenues at a 35 percent discount to their future value. The insurance behemoth would relax the terms of those “advances” the following year after a ransomware attack on one of its subsidiaries brought huge chunks of the medical payment system to its knees for several months. But now, even though the debilitating problems from the attack still haven’t been totally ameliorated, it is aggressively collecting on those loans by, among other methods, unilaterally garnishing doctors’ reimbursements. Two medical practices in Minnesota, out of the 10,000 practitioners on the hook for about $9 billion, have filed suit in federal district court, and other providers have asserted that they’ve been asked to hand over hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of days, an impossible option that would lead to mass layoffs or bankruptcy if forced to do so. “Optum, in my opinion, is acting like a loan shark trying to rapidly collect,” Dr. Catherine Mazzola, a pediatric care specialist in New Jersey, told The New York Times. AS SKYROCKETING INTEREST RATES led more and more small-business owners down the same path, President Biden’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau began looking for a fix to spotlight and hopefully deter the worst MCA abuses. Last year, it told the industry it would have to comply with a provision of the Dodd-Frank Act requiring all lenders to collect and disclose extensive data on their small-business borrowers: industries, demographics, ZIP codes, revenue and loan amounts, and perhaps most relevantly, the interest rates at which they had borrowed the funds. That last disclosure crossed a red line for the CFPB. In an earlier disclosure battle with the California legislature, the MCA industry’s trade association had promoted an alternative annualized metric called “annualized cost of capital” that resulted in a claimed percentage of between 40 percent and 50 percent lower than the equivalent APR. So the MCA loan sharks, like the payday loan sharks and the rent-to-own sharks before them, sued the CFPB, claiming as it had before that its “advances” were not loans. At the time, it seemed like a Hail Mary pass. If anyone in the industry had any inkling that the Trump administration intended to nuke the agency within days of his inauguration, they weren’t telling their colleagues in the DailyFunder forums. But there was more. Trump’s newly appointed Federal Trade Commission chairman tapped a literal used-car salesman to lead the agency’s consumer protection division, which had banned Braun and Glass and their cronies from the business. His name is Christopher Mufarrige, and before getting his master’s in economics at the anarcho-capitalist hotbed George Mason University, he had owned a Houston used-car dealership that specialized in high-interest “Buy Here Pay Here” installment loans. A colleague who had worked with him at the CFPB during Trump’s first term had written a lengthy whistleblower memo detailing his attempts to undermine payday lender regulation and “advocate for conclusions based on presumptions.” Whatever remains of the federal government’s attempts to rein in the MCA sharks will be led by Mufarrige, who most recently served as general counsel of a fintech specializing in “embedded finance.” A recent FTC settlement with a subscription-based consumer cash advance company called Cleo AI provides a window into what is likely to come: While the agency convinced the company to offer a $17 million settlement, the accompanying complaint makes no suggestion that the sums Cleo advanced were actually loans; if the agency had made such an argument, the APR on many of the referenced transactions would rise to quadruple digits. Still, there are a few rays of hope for the victims of MCA loan shark extortion. Jonathan Braun is back in jail after assaulting a three-year-old at a Shabbat dinner, groping his nanny, pushing his father-in-law down the stairs, and assaulting a nurse at a hospital. It was Braun’s fourth arrest since having his sentence commuted by Trump in 2021, and along the way a New York judge actually banned him from operating a lending business, in a sign that someone in the judiciary still has a pulse when it comes to these products. And perhaps in Mike Lindell, the loan sharks have finally met a merchant with a deeper-seated sense of impunity than theirs. In a twist of fate befitting a man who has escaped death countless times, Berens agreed to take Lindell’s cases against the MCAs in spite of the well-documented credit risks involved, after the two connected through Shaya Baum, a Michigan financier whose Wing Lake Capital Partners specializes in restructuring MCA debt. If he has time while reviving his pillow business and defending himself in his multitude of legal disputes, Lindell intends to crusade against the industry, he told the Prospect. “I’m not going to give up, I’m going to fight for what’s right.”