by Gary Rivlin
Jones is bald with a round face and a full beard—Rob Reiner, but more dyspeptic and bulkier and without the liberal politics. He stands about five feet, eight inches tall and has the round shoulders of a former fullback. On our first day together, he wore scuffed cowboy boots and a monogrammed white dress shirt and his large belly hung over frayed jeans. He was likable enough, friendly and self-deprecating; noticing my pages of interview questions, he cracked, “You’ve done more homework on me than I did at Cleveland High in four years.” But mainly he was a man looking for an argument. Where payday’s critics such as Eakes live in the realm of theory, he said, his customers live in the real world, where a quick cash advance can mean the difference between the kids going to bed fed or hungry.
“They try and stop check-cashing operations,” Jones said of the consumer advocates he’s battled over the past few years. “They try and stop the tax refund business. They try and stop the rent-to-own industry. They try and stop the auto title loan industry. I guess as far as Martin Eakes is concerned, it doesn’t make a difference if regular people have access to cash when they need it.”
In our initial phone conversation, Jones had practically insisted I travel to Cleveland to let him expound on the magnificence of the payday loan. “If you’re a’gonna write about payday, you gotta get down here and see me,” Jones said. “I created the industry and the rest of ’em just copied me.” I was convinced, but then, after dozens of emails and phone conversations with the assistant in charge of his schedule, I received a curt email message from the company’s communications director informing me that Jones had changed his mind. I decided to go to Cleveland anyway to see for myself this improbable birthplace of the modern-day cash advance business, a town of thirty-five thousand that had given rise to payday’s first two big chains, Jones’s and a local who copied his business. A few days before my arrival, I sent Jones an email informing him that I’d be coming to town to talk with people who knew him. An hour later Jones phoned. He’d be happy to make time to see me while I was in town, he told me—and that weekend Allan Jones and I became BFFs.
We attended a wrestling match on the campus of the University of Tennessee, in Chattanooga an hour’s drive away, and then had lunch. Back in Cleveland, he showed me the hospital where he was born and drove me by the house where a childhood friend lived who would talk with him late into the night over their CB radios. He pointed out where one of his sisters lived and confided in me that his weight had grown so out of control that he had recently had gastric bypass surgery. He drove me up the hill to show me his house and invited me to watch the Super Bowl with him and his sons, but I declined because we had already spent more than five hours together and had plans to meet the next morning so I could see his operations and then talk again over lunch. Even best friends need time apart.
Destiny, as Allan Jones sees it, was awaiting him even as he exited the womb. The big news in Cleveland in the fall of 1952 was the opening of a new hospital and he was the first baby delivered there. “The day I’m born and I’m already in the newspaper,” Jones said shaking his head in amazement. Is it any wonder, he asked me, that he had accomplished “great things” in his life? A few years back he had the idea of building a “First Mother’s Garden” on the grounds of the hospital in honor of his mother. “There was all this attention on me,” Jones reasoned, “but it was her who gave labor.”
Jones figures he was no older than ten when he started collecting dried-out Christmas trees for a giant community bonfire. It became an annual post-holiday tradition in Cleveland, and in time he required kids to be at his house by 8 A.M. sharp if they wanted to participate. He was goal oriented even then, eager to beat his number from the previous year. “I’d get furious at a kid if he didn’t show up,” he said. He admits to harboring a visceral dislike all these years later for a kid whose mother wouldn’t let him start collecting trees until 10 A.M.
“Looking back, there were a lot of firsts in my life,” Jones said. “I was the first person to collect all the Christmas trees. I was the first person to buy a fax machine in Cleveland. I was the first to have a cell phone. I was the first in Cleveland to have a Segway.”
Jones was never much of a student. He always remembered being kept back in sixth grade but after his mother died he found paperwork reminding him that he had been held back a second time. In high school, his accounting teacher told him he would fail her class if he didn’t buckle down. “It doesn’t matter,” he remembers telling her. “What you can’t do yourself, you can hire to get done.” He described his family as “regular middle class” but also mentioned a housekeeper who refused to enter his room because of the snakes and other small animals he kept there. By his account, he was a boy’s boy, into sports and outdoorsy things. His teacher would describe a fungus or a species of plant—and the next day he would show up with a sample.
“I always wanted to be a biological teacher—or a wrestling coach,” Jones said.
Wrestling was his life in high school except during football season. To a certain extent wrestling is still his life. “I was a great high school wrestler,” he boasted, second in the state in his weight class by his senior year. He had been a pretty good football player as well, he told me, starting fullback, but then the school was integrated and after that he did nothing but block for a much speedier tailback who was black. He wasn’t resentful, Jones said—but he was also sure to mention that his former teammate is on skid row. In high school, he and his girlfriend were named “best-looking couple” but he was disappointed. “I wanted ‘most likely to succeed,’” he said.
Jones spent a year at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro before dropping out to work at his father’s credit agency. By then, his father, increasingly incapacitated by emphysema, was only able to work a few hours each day, and a rival credit agency had recently opened in town. “Come home and save the business,” his mother asked him, “so we can afford to send your two sisters to college.” Jones didn’t need much convincing. He had married his high school sweetheart, who was pregnant with their first child. They were living in a trailer near school. Even before his mother’s call, he had taken a summer job with a nearby collection agency. That firm had five offices, compared to his father’s one—and Jones was already looking ahead to the possibility of going into the family business. “I copied every form,” he said. “I got copies of their collection letters. I studied how they hired their lawyers. I studied how they did everything.” He was eager to prove to people back home, he said, that he was more than just a star wrestler.
In Cleveland, people know Jones’s name if for no other reason than that they see it everywhere. The local high school is home to a million-dollar Jones Wrestling Center and there’s an Allan Jones Intercollegiate Aquatic Center on the campus of the University of Tennessee. He seems to own half of downtown, and when one is driving the main highway that cuts through town, it’s hard to miss the giant, department-store-sized lettering spelling out JONES MANAGEMENT on the side of his headquarters. Then there are all the smaller reminders, such as the granite marker that stands prominently in the plaza in the center of Cleveland with an inscription: “These Courthouse Trees Are Planted in Memory of W. A. ‘Bill’ Jones By His Son W. A. ‘Allan’ Jones, Jr., and Dedicated to All Citizens of Bradley County.” The joke in Cleveland is that W. Allan Jones, Jr., has never planted so much as a tree in town without simultaneously issuing a press release and striking a bronze commemorative.
Jones doesn’t seem very well liked in his hometown, at least if the sampling of people I met with is any indication. In recent years, Jones has donated property to the city for the expansion of the local public library and he built an attractive white bandstand on the town square to replace the old one. But the city councilman I spoke with didn’t seem to care for Jones, nor did the retired publisher with whom I met while in town. Even Jones’s generosity served as a target of their derision. Sure, he rebuilt the old bandstand but then he seems to have spent ne
arly as much money throwing a big party in his honor, flying in Tony Dow, Ken Osmond, and Jerry Mathers (Wally, Eddie Haskell, and the Beav) for the occasion. A woman who has known Jones since grade school brought up that same party when describing Jones as a man “who lives totally and completely in the past.”
My companions for lunch my first day in town included a teacher, a local businessman, and a corporate attorney. All of them had been raised in the area and all seemed to share a distaste for Jones. For the teacher it was the secondhand stories she’s heard about what it’s like to work with Jones and the strings he’s attached to the money he’s given to the schools. “He’s not one to just make a donation,” she said. “He puts on all these restrictions.” Most of the money has gone to the school’s wrestling program. The lawyer was from a moneyed background and seemed to look down on Jones as a man who did not know how to handle his wealth.
The businessman offered perhaps the most interesting perspective. Early in our meal he took a call on his cell phone that he took care of in a rapid, mumbly code like a bookie or a stock trader. After a couple more of these staccato conversations he explained that while he owns a legitimate business, he earns extra money providing cash advances to those who don’t have the checking account or regular paycheck a person needs to take out a payday loan from a firm like Jones’s. For years he’s been watching Jones. He was impressed by what he’s accomplished, he said, but not the way he’s handled success. It offends him that Jones is “not a man capable of doing anything quietly.”
When I told my luncheon companions that I was scheduled to have dinner that night at the home of a local attorney named Jimmy Logan, it provoked laughter. Allan Jones might want to be known around town for his philanthropy and his business accomplishments but he seems most famous for an incident that occurred shortly after he dropped out of college and moved home to Cleveland. Separated from his wife and suspecting she was unfaithful, he spliced into the phone line of his old home to record her conversations. That’s how he found out she was carrying on with Logan. Unhappy that Jones was playing tapes of his pillow talk around town, Logan used his influence to get Jones convicted of federal wiretapping charges. Eventually Jones would be exonerated by an appeals court in Cincinnati that ruled that since Jones paid the bill, he could not be guilty of recording a conversation on his own telephone. But that was only the start of the feuding between Jones and Logan that entertained the community for years. From the perspective of my lunch friends, I was stepping into a favorite story line from a popular old soap opera.
“He’s a sleaze,” Jones would say of Logan the next day. “He’s a scumdog.” Logan, however, proved more magnanimous, at least in front of an out-of-town journalist sitting in his study with a tape recorder. His left eye squinted, he curled his lip, he leaned in close as if he were about to impart some great considered wisdom, and said, “Allan Jones has done many fine, fine things for this town.”
Logan might not have offered much in the way of insight into Jones but over dinner that night he helped to explain why payday lending had taken hold in the soil of Cleveland. This corner of the world has long been the kind of place that gives a man the elbow room and the ethical leeway to make a living any way he sees fit. Grundy County, to the west, had long been known throughout the region as the car-stripping capital of the South, and there was a time when Cleveland was renowned throughout the United States for a related business. Locally they tended to call them “shade-tree mechanics,” men who made their money rolling back odometers for unscrupulous auto dealers looking to jack up the prices of used cars. Dating back to the 1950s and through most of the 1980s, Logan said, you’d see cars up on lifts in front yards and backyards all over town, their wheels spinning backward for hours at a time so that tens of thousands of miles would disappear from the odometer. But don’t sell these hardworking souls short, Logan counseled. You’d see them working at 5 A.M. and they’d still be at it until midnight. They would bang out dents and install new upholstery—whatever it took to make a car with 90,000 miles on it plausibly look like one with 40,000 by the time an out-of-town dealer came to pick it up. The dealers got their money’s worth, Logan seemed to be saying, but the U.S. Department of Justice didn’t see it that way, nor did the state officials who finally beefed up the odometer tampering laws and Tennessee’s auto fraud division starting in 1986.
On his first day on the job Jones thought his father might have lost his mind. He had recently hired a new manager but he let him go and announced to Jones, then nineteen years old, “You’re in charge, son.” But the son gamely settled in and began to crack the whip like an old pro. He figured out the average collection agent made twenty-five calls a day, but by his reckoning a person should reasonably make a new phone call every five minutes. So he imposed a quota of at least one hundred calls per day per person.
“After that the company really took off,” Jones grinned.
His father had been a glad-handing, good-time Charlie who had served as the president of both the Kiwanis and the local Chamber of Commerce. It was important to the senior Jones to be well liked. His son, by contrast, was single-minded and impatient, a young bull who muscled his way into an account when he had to. “He was averse to controversy,” Jones said of his father. “I wasn’t.” Angry that they had no share of the collections business at the local hospital where he had been born, Jones, still in his early twenties, demanded a meeting with the hospital’s board of directors. He wanted his father to join him to lend his support and the weight of his name, but the old man wouldn’t do it, Jones said. “Dad was so nervous, he went home.” Jones drove by the family house on his way to the hospital. His father was sitting out front in a lawn chair reading the paper. Jones was twenty-four when he bought out his father for $100,000 and named himself the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Credit Bureau Services, Inc., a company that in time he would sell for more than $10 million.
Success prompted Jones to start dreaming big. At the start of 1993, shortly before visiting James Eaton in Johnson City, he began accumulating land in the hills just north of Cleveland. After work, he would drive to his property, light a cigar, sip a Scotch slushie, and dream about the grand home he would someday build on his hill. “I was always fascinated with the Beverly Hillbillies’ house,” he told me. He wanted to build an equally impressive home so that people would remember him long after he had passed.
“Most homes were designed to last a hundred years, maybe,” he said. “Mine I wanted to design to last a thousand.”
Driving me around Cleveland, Jones was grousing about some of the more ludicrous things people say about him. At the Home Depot he overheard two men talking about him. “I’m telling you,” one man said to the other in a voice of utter certainty, “the fixtures are made of solid gold. Solid gold!” Jones shook his head. He has pewter, stainless steel, and perhaps porcelain faucets in his new house on the hill, but none, he assured me, are made from gold.
“There’s a price that I never realized I’d pay for fame,” Jones said. “People think the worst of me.”
His son attends public school. His home number is listed in the phone book. Jones told me both these things the first time we spoke and then repeated them not ten minutes into the start of our two days together. He mentioned this pair of facts a third time during our driving tour. He pointed out that he was driving a Ford pickup. He could afford something much more expensive, he said, but that’s not him. He pointed out that his jeans are frayed and his boots scuffed. He buys his suits from a local clothes store. He was intent on convincing me that he’s still a regular Joe, despite all his riches.
That is no easy task. His home is still reachable through directory assistance but it also sits behind a locked gate on a hill high above town and includes two working elevators. His youngest child does attend Cleveland High School but while I was there he was driving a $300,000 Maybach, a loaner from his father while his car was in the shop. Jones, a self-described “car nut,” had
an air-conditioned garage built on his property to house a collection that includes both a vintage Rolls and a vintage Bentley. And then there are the planes and yachts he owns and the $12.3 million he spent in 2002 buying a dude ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, because, he explained, “We really enjoy being out in nature in my household.”
People talk about his jets as if they are proof that he’s just another nouveau riche entrepreneur who indulges every whim despite the cost. But that’s only because “the common person,” Jones said, “just doesn’t understand business.” The three big jets he’s bought over the years have been purchased through an airplane leasing company he calls Jones Airways. His payday company leases the jets from Jones Airways (in 1999, Jones was charging himself $360,000 a month for the jets plus extra for flying time), which has allowed him to claim the jets as a business expense. Jones Airways was briefly a three-jet airline but he tells me, “I sold the big one. Had it eight months but sold it for a $10 million profit.”
Jones only wishes he could say the same about the 157-foot yacht he bought a few years back after the previous one, a 136-footer originally owned by Spain’s King Juan Carlos, was destroyed in a fire. “In the last two years I owned it, I was on it maybe fourteen days,” he said. It was a gem, he said—a vessel with “an abundance of exquisite and highly detailed woodwork,” marble tiling, and ten big-screen TVs, according to Yachting magazine—but also a royal headache given that it required a staff of nine. To pick up extra cash, he would rent it for $200,000 per week but then he sold it in March 2008. “I was lucky,” he said. “A guy called me and offered me what I paid for it.” Now when he feels like getting out on the water, he uses the forty-four-footer he still owns. “People say I’m making all this money off of payday,” Jones said, “but even I’m cutting back.”
