On brink of prison, another setback for Main Line’s ‘godfather of payday lending’

A federal appellate court on Friday denied Main Line payday lending pioneer Charles M. Hallinan's last-ditch request to stave off his 14-year prison sentence, leaving him few options — and even less time — to avoid a looming deadline requiring him to surrender to authorities next week.

In a one-page order filed Friday in Philadelphia, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit declined to hear Hallinan's challenge to a lower court's refusal to let him remain free while he appeals his 2017 conviction on racketeering charges.

Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno denied that request from Hallinan, whose lawyers claimed that sending the ailing 77-year-old to prison now — while he is undergoing treatment for two aggressive forms of cancer — would ultimately cost him his life.

But in its ruling Friday, the appellate court said Hallinan had failed to show that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons could not provide adequate treatment for his numerous medical conditions. Under orders issued by Robreno earlier this week, Hallinan must report to a medical center at the federal prison in Butner, N.C., by 2 p.m. Monday.

Hallinan's lawyers did not immediately indicate whether they would continue to press their case in a higher court.

Hallinan, of Villanova, is widely credited with developing many of the strategies and business tactics that turned payday lending into a multibillion-dollar-a-year juggernaut and which other lenders used to dodge state efforts to regulate them.

At his trial in November, prosecutors portrayed him as the "godfather of payday lending" and cast him as a predator who profited on the financially vulnerable by charging annual interest rates often approaching 800 percent.