In the murky world of unpaid-bills, a banker and an ex-con can make a fortune — if they don’t run into too many crooks. So how, Siegel wondered, had he gotten into his current predicament? His career started with such promise. He earned his M.B.A. from the highly regarded Simon Business School at the University of Rochester. He took a job at HSBC and completed the bank’s executive training course in London. All he had to do was keep moving up the corporate ladder. Instead, he decided to take a gamble. Siegel struck out on his own, investing in distressed consumer debt. The scale is breathtaking. From 2006 to 2009, for example, the nation’s top nine debt buyers purchased almost 90 million consumer accounts with more than $140 billion in “face value.”

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