The second part of the story, "As Thousands of Taxi Drivers Were Trapped in Loans, Top Officials Counted the Money", is online [0].

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/nyregion/taxi-medallions....

I don't understand how a person can look at the 1.7M pricetag for a medallion and think they can survive against all the shady, entrenched middlemen and bankers?

These characters are straight out of the Wolf of Wall Street.