It investigates the debt collection process, in particular the role of 'credit cops' (bailiffs); it demonstrates the coterminous character of legal and illegal organization. In addition, the paper analyzes the emergence of a criminal network within the organized day-to-day practices of debt enforcement, demonstrating how it grafts on illegal practices and functions routinely and with relative immunity. The debt collection racket is a middleman, power-broker unit, mediating legal institutions and unmonitored baillif-enforcement. While symbolically connected to legal organization, debt racketeers are able to institutionally detach themselves from their legal offices. The organizational impetus of the racket, however, is the configuration of roles and relationships defining the legal administration of collection and enforcement. Collection agents and legal personnel are able to obtain effective hold over a clientele of troubled consumers. Situational contingencies associated with the operations of seizure and sale coax and coerce low-income debtors to accept irregular extortionist arrangements. Fraud and the systematic recycling of personal effects result with low-income debtors being locked into a system of exorbitant repayments similar to loansharking. A total of 13 footnotes and about 60 references are included. (Author abstract modified)