Chapter 98: Honoring the Virtuous and Humble
Allen Zhang thought long and hard before immediately waking Dominic to ask if he had heard about the Moden Brothers, the Irish, and the Short-tailed Dog.
Dominic woke up groggy and rubbed his eyes, "Why are you asking about this? The Moden Brothers? They seem to be a team formed by local scavengers. They are all gamblers and smokers, true street toughs, often arrested for Zero-Dollar Purchase or insurance fraud."
"The leaders are two white men who came from poor communities, evolving into a family-run model, with over a dozen streets and several ordinary communities under their control. Outsiders looking to join the Moden Brothers are required to change their last name. At most, they used to have about thirty people. Later, wanting to step into drug trafficking, they offended other street gangs, leading to violent conflicts, now only seven or eight are left. One of the Moden Brothers even got crushed to death by a garbage truck."
"The Irish are scavengers living in abandoned sewers, without much fixed territory, but often they use their numbers to cross boundaries and snatch up and hoard cans on other people’s streets, mainly dominating the automatic recycling machines on the streets and in stores."
To prevent malicious competition, the City Government’s can recycling machines are limited to dispensing 200 US Dollars per day, but basically, that all goes to the Irish because no one else can beat them to it, and using the automatic machines also avoids the profit margin taken by the recycling stations.
"Many of them are illegal immigrants and criminals from Europe, with all sorts of eye and hair colors, I don’t know why they always call themselves Irish." Dominic felt puzzled.
"The Short-tailed Dogs are a group of unemployed Mexican workers who settled in unfinished buildings after failing to get their wages, often engaging in petty theft. The police can’t drive them away during sweeps because they stick around like chewing gum."
"There was an incident where the police accidentally injured an unemployed worker, and they blocked the entrances of the City Government and the police station to demonstrate and protest, refusing to leave and causing quite a stir. The construction site contractors shirked responsibility, and the City Government turned a blind eye, so as time went on, no one wanted to deal with them anymore. Many of the local Zero-Dollar Purchases, including the one from the day before yesterday, were proposed and organized by them. They have the most people, over thirty."