Vultures and their defenders say that’s the kind of government expenditure their lawsuits can expose. Kensington’s lawyers dug up persuasive evidence of presidential profligacy in Congo to bolster their claim that vultures serve an important role. While these sorts of arguments don’t necessarily relate to the debt debate, they help the vultures’ case. Among the damning details in the Kensington case: During a United Nations conference in 2006, Congolese president Denis Sassou Nguesso and his entourage ran up a $100,000 bill at Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel. The room-service bill for Sassou Nguesso alone came to $20,000 and included many bottles of the finest champagne. Kensington’s investigators also unearthed credit-card bills of one of the president’s sons, who ran the state oil company, showing large purchases at Christian Dior, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton.

Even in Congo, some nongovernmental organizations have reluctantly embraced the vultures as the only forces capable of effecting change in the country. Some opposition groups regret that the Congolese government settled the Kensington suits, because the government will no longer be forced to reveal financial records that expose corruption. World Bank economist Mark Thomas calls Elliott’s claim that it is helping root out corruption “self-serving” and, at best, “marginally relevant.” He points out that the Congolese government has never denied Kensington’s main charge: that it sought to hide oil profits in shell companies. But Congo did so, he says, only to avoid paying off the vulture funds. Moreover, many countries targeted by vultures, such as Nicaragua and Peru, operate with relative transparency. But they are being asked to pay dearly for the sins of regimes from the 1970s and 1980s. Call those sins the gifts that keep on taking.

Spurred in part by the Donegal case, world leaders are moving to help impoverished countries fend off the vultures. Led by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the British government announced a plan, in cooperation with the World Bank, to help poor countries buy back their commercial debt at a discount; more than $8 billion has already been canceled under this program. Britain is also working to ensure that countries have access to legal advice to help them fight vulture fund suits.

Debt-relief advocates say the notoriety of Sheehan and Singer might make investors think twice before shaking down destitute countries. But they also say that there’s plenty of distressed debt out there waiting to be exploited. “The debtor countries have to be very careful. If something is lying dormant somewhere, forgotten in somebody’s books, they have to know about it,” says Vivienne Apopo, the African Development Bank’s representative in Lusaka.

Indeed, vultures can still take advantage of government malfeasance and a bribe-friendly environment to ferret out long-buried loan agreements and work them to their advantage. The vultures “go around and find a junior civil servant, who lets them photocopy an old agreement in the files,” Debt Relief International’s Martin says. “They find evidence that such a debt existed, and they pounce.”

And sometimes the prize is dropped right into the vulture’s nest: A few years ago, D.R.I. uncovered distressed debt that Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president, allegedly gave to a crony as a wedding present. According to Martin, Milosevic was handing out secondary loans as gifts to people, telling them, “Here, you can sue on this.”

And Milosevic is hardly the only late, unlamented strongman who accumulated a basket of bad loans ripe for grabbing and litigating. In the 1970s and 1980s, Saddam Hussein, then awash in oil wealth, was a major lender to impoverished countries. The 2003 invasion of Iraq and the subsequent chaos threw decades’ worth of records into disarray—but the material may still be out there. “If somebody in Iraq knows where those documents are, who the hell knows what could happen?” says one debt-relief analyst.

It’s a pretty safe bet that Paul Singer—or some other shrewd vulture—is already circling.