Interestingly enough, a subcontracted enforcer (?), “hired by a private company under contract with the city”, was caught on video getting rough with an elderly street vendor. What happened to using the police to enforce the law? The Joongang article is here.
Instead of Police, Why Not Subcontracted Muscle?
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Bucheon uses hired goons (gangster looking thugs in matching black track suits) each year to try to evict the vendors and food stall operators in front of Bucheon Station. There are some violent scuffles – the police, of course, doing nothing as they stand and watch from the steps of the police station across the square – and ultimately the vendors are kicked out and barriers put in to keep out their carts. The goons stay around for a few days. Once they leave, the barriers are torn up and the vendors and food stall operators are back in business for the next 50 weeks or so.
I’ve always wondered to what extent hired thugs are used in the debt collection industry. I know that anyone trying to collect on a debt in Korea gets little help from the court system. I always figured hired goons are what keeps the economy from collapsing.
Does anybody know anything about this?
Hired thugs are used extensively throughout the economy as a supplement to make up for the illegitimacy of the Korean state.
Lord help him if her relatives find out where he lives.
Down in Busan on Texas Street, the security situation is handled not by the police but by some big white guys. Wonder what their visa status is?
Knock knock…
Who is it?
Goons.
Who?
Hired goons!
Oh, ok.
Does anyone else remember that Simpsons episode?
Who goes to texas street to look at the men?
But on second thought, you’re right. That strip has some of the toughest-looking motherfuckers I’ve ever seen anywhere. Some of the toughest-looking women too, come to think of it…
#6 – Yep. Wasn’t that the episode when Homer became union rep at the plant?
I’ve been trying to get more information on these hired goon companies.
It seems that often the companies hire homeless people, put them in a uniform, and give them a job to do. Ideally they must receive a day of training but not always. A force of 500 goons was used to evict the flea market from Dongdaemoon Stadium recently.
Basically they’re poorly trained security guards who are expected to use force, and the police almost never stop them.
Any link to the video?
Considering the repeated reports in the press, first about LMB having to go down to a police station and demand that the police do their job — after having seen the report on the police failing to investigate the attack on a girl in an apartment elevator — the failure to handle the Chinese running amok during the torch relay and recently the reluctance to investigate the mysterious death of a 14-year-old boy in a sauna, the Korean Government needs to deal with this on-going problem of non-enforcement of law and lack of professionalism that occurs too often when something should be investigated but is not.
Legal reform is also needed since civil suits are a joke here too.
I for one am glad that the long arm of the law is limp-wristed here. These hired goons are the face of private law enforcement. They are on the city budget. The police are on their side, not ours.
Here’s the video:
http://tvpot.daum.net/clip/Cli.....6%F8%C7%E0
Thanks a lot for the link to the video.
That guy doesn’t look homeless: too young in my opinion.
He sure is a weakling. I would have knocked her out for touching my collar!
Seriously, the company has a nightmare of a P.R. moment with this, maybe they should hire the granny to work as a goon. She is certainly tough enough!
They’re not all homeless. I’m sure they only hire homeless people when they need to raise an army to do evictions.
If the hired goon company could possibly have a PR crisis, it would have been shut down long ago. But it has protection from the government, the cops, and the chaebols. Does anyone even know its name?
The street food vending business here is a bit funny. It’s illegal and everyone knows it but it is such an important part of the daily culture there is virtually no way to get rid of it. And it is, without a doubt, virtually controlled by thugs and gangsters. Not only that, but if one vendor makes their food better than the others or sells it for a better price, they have to deal with attacks and threats from other vendors.
A family member of mine sells toast from a street stall and last year tried to change her product and sell for different prices and the next stall vendor woman came over and started making trouble and geting in my sister-in-law’s face. Then the other woman suddenly fell to the ground claiming that she had been pushed and feigned a back injury which made everyone go to the police station and cost almost a full day’s wages not to mention the legal troubles. It is actually pretty good money if you are dilligent about it but you have to put up with a lot of this kind crap from a lot of different directions…drunk customers at night, pollution, traffic, rude people, bad weather, area gangsters, city beautification thugs like in the video and then some.
Seoul City taking hiring guidance from the U.S. Department of Defense
Probably explains the declining number of pochang macha (sp) since I came to the country in 2003. Man I miss those places.
All I can say is that it’s a good thing I wasn’t around to bear witness to that form of violence. This would likely be my last post.
What a f*cking snot nosed little coward!
You notice in the video when he punched/kicked the halmoni, he was wearing a black jacket thingy. Then, when they go to find him, he was wearing a red shirt.
Looks like he pulled off the jacket for his different colored undershirt in the hopes that he could blend into the crowd.
Apparently, we now know he was “on the job”, so he just couldn’t run away.
He deserves a good thumping for that stunt!
@ 9 – The Korea Herald reported on the Dongdaemun Stadium clearout:
“There were angry protests against the forced removal from the stadium, resulting in injuries during a scuffle with people hired by the city government.”
Of course, those people had gone through that before, when they were cleared out of Cheonggyecheon in November of 2003, as a Joongang Ilbo article titled “Outnumbered, merchants go down fighting” relates:
“Although violence was anticipated and 4,500 riot policemen were on hand, the battle was an uneven one. The roustabouts hired by the city government numbered about 3,500, facing 250 merchants.”
There’s a video here:
http://www.nodong.com/zero/vie.....amp;no=125
I guess “roustabouts” has given way to
“people hired by the city government”. There was a similar story from Ilsan a few months ago where a vendor committed suicide after being assaulted by one of these city government hirees.
@ 1: Bucheon’s thugs appear prominently in the 1988 documentary “Sanggyedong Olympics” after the people kicked out of Sanggye-dong bought land in and tried to build housing in the part of Gogang-dong south of the Gyeongin expressway. Their temporary housing was torn down because the Olympic flame was going to pass by there on the expressway. Most of the documentary can be viewed here:
http://video.mgoon.com/784407
My favorite part was where their possessions were guarded by gangsters so they couldn’t reclaim them, and then the city charged them with, essentially, ‘littering’. Bucheon, city of culture!
Only in Korea (well maybe not) would the men let other men beat women in public. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times over the years. That ain’t no BS either.
I’ve seen guys get the crap kicked out of them back home for doing a lot less than what that monkey did to her.
Very few of these goons appear outright homeless, at least from what I’ve seen over the years. Some of the security “managers” appear to be organized criminals – from the hairstyle to the attitude – and most of the others look like flunky crook underling/gangsta wannabes, with some day laborers thrown into the mix.
Anyway, I guess the police are too busy busting pot smoking foreigners – in between naps and coffee and smoke breaks – to play any sort of role, both when it comes to upholding laws pertaining to street vending and laws as they relate to people assaulting the vendors.
#21 – Thanks for the Bucheon thug link, bulgasari. I really like living in the city, but as the multitude of black sedans and tattoo-decorated guys at my gym might suggest, there are more than a few shady characters in the cultural mecca that is Bucheon.
As I stated before, they aren’t all homeless. You won’t see the homeless ones patrolling the public. When they cleared out Dongdaemoon the company needed to hire a large number of employees fast, so they turned to the homeless. They also failed to train these particular temporary employees, which would have gotten them in trouble if they weren’t above the law.
Jon,
These Korean “security” thugs are an integrated network of homeless hires, local criminals, churches, citizen watch groups, police, intelligence, corporations, and government. Korea is a Research and Development testing ground for Directed Energy Weapons, and COINTEL programs. There is alot of money to be made by this multi-leveled operation. It’s the new police of the Market State called Korea, Inc. The source of the infamous Korean micro-wave organized stalking teams. They will be the enforcers of the Eminent Domain disputes that will arise once the canal project commences.
Wow, I can only say( regardless of the legality of the whole street vendor situation ) if the little pri**k did half as much to an elderly lady in my home town he would be eating through a staw for a very long time.
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