Excerpt from Bad Paper by Jake Halpern, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Shafeeq spent his early teenage years at a boarding school for Muslims, run by Arabs, in the suburbs of Buffalo. He eventually earned his GED, got married at the age of twenty-four, and took a job working as a debt collector, which was a complicated choice of profession for a devout Muslim. He told me that, whenever possible, he tried to honor Islam's ban on usury by collecting only the principal that debtors owed. His faith and profession intersected in other interesting ways as well. According to Shafeeq, his branch of Islam allowed polygamy, which enabled him to take a second wife—a woman who was the administrative assistant at his small collection agency. It was a tempestuous relationship. They divorced and then remarried on multiple occasions. (Getting a divorce, he told me, was simply a matter of writing out a statement and having two witnesses sign it.) The divorces took their toll on him. "Polygamy in itself is a powerful, tough thing," he told me. "You know what I mean? And it's an emotional thing. Because women can act very jealous. You know what I'm saying?"

Shafeeq's stress managing his two wives was compounded by his business woes. By the standards of the industry, he was working very low-quality paper. At one point, it had gotten so bad that Shafeeq was collecting on Radio Shack credit-card debt, some of which dated back to 1983. Just before meeting Aaron, he had purchased two portfolios of bad paper—one for $10,000 and another for $14,000—which proved so beaten-up that they were virtually uncollectible. Whenever he prayed—unrolling his prayer mat, kneeling down, and making dua, a Muslim prayer in which the supplicant beseeches God for help—he asked for divine intervention with his business. As if in answer to Shafeeq's prayers, Aaron called, introduced himself, and offered to buy a one-third share in his company for $25,000. Shafeeq's shop was too small to handle a large volume of paper, but Aaron could fix that.

According to the terms of the deal, Aaron would provide all of the paper, process the credit-card payments, and do the accounting. Shafeeq's collection agency would take a 50 percent commission, a third of which would go to Aaron. In short, Aaron would be in control, while Shafeeq and his co-owner—another young black Muslim—would have the headache of running the place. Looking back, Shafeeq says: "I would probably have agreed to anything at that point."

Shafeeq filed for incorporation in April 2009 and began hiring employees rapidly until soon he had an office of thirty people. Most of these employees were white and some bristled at the prospect of working for a black man—and a Muslim at that. Shafeeq heard that a few of them occasionally referred to him as a "nigger" behind his back. And so Shafeeq eventually decided that operations would run most smoothly if he told his employees that Aaron was, essentially, the sole proprietor of the business and he was merely the supervisor. "The world is crazy and screwed up," he said. "People think in screwed-up ways and people are racist. They don't even know they're racist. People hate. They're angry. And instead of trying to change it, you know, it's better to just learn how to maneuver inside of it the best way you can."

What made it all worth it was the quality of the paper that Aaron began to deliver. In the past, Shafeeq never had the resources or the connections to buy high-quality paper, which is typically sold in bulk—either directly by creditors or by the big debt buyers. He was simply too far down the food chain. Aaron transformed that. He was soon providing credit-card debt with fairly recent charge-off dates; and, according to Shafeeq, the money started pouring in. Shafeeq began taking home $10,000 a month, which was far more than he had ever earned in the past. "It was a whole new world," he said.

Now that he was flush with cash, Shafeeq eventually decided that he wanted a third wife. He consulted his first wife and she suggested that he marry a woman whom she knew—a single mother with four children. Shafeeq agreed and, in so doing, felt he was doing something charitable: "Paying somebody's bills is really a big deal in the 'hood when you're dealing with African-American women." The truth was, he said, there just weren't enough responsible African-American fathers and husbands to go around. "If you can get one man who's going to help the children—be there, teach them, give them guidance, leadership, show them how to do it, invest in them—and he does that same thing with another family, some other children, you're duplicating that. You know what I mean? You're Xeroxing righteousness." Shafeeq felt so optimistic about the situation, in fact, that he began "interviewing" women in the hopes of finding a fourth wife.

Excerpted from Bad Paper by Jake Halpern. Copyright © 2014 by Jake Halpern. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.