The Only Good Lawyer - Jeremiah Healy by Jeremish Healy

spoke more slowly. "Say you're an immigrant,
but you've saved your money or somebody loaned you a grubstake, and
you go into business for yourself. Restaurant, dry cleaners,
convenience store. Only in your home country, the banks and all are
kind of shaky, and the tax collectors are always shaking you down.
Now, your business is mainly a cash-and-carry kind of operation that
turns a nice profit. What do you do?"
    I said, "You carry the cash home so it's safe
and not reported as income."
    Velez said, "Gold star. But, let's say word gets
around among the workers at your restaurant or whatever that the boss
is pretty flush and keeps the take at his house. What happens next?"
    Pretty simple. “Home invasion."
    “ Exactly," said Cosentino. "The locals
get wind of a bank without guards or vaults, and all they got to do
is go into the boss's house with some guns and duct tape. Terrorize
the guy's family, and he gives up his stash."
    "And, because of the tax-dodge angle, the owner
can't turn to the police about the robbery."
    "Or won't, because back home, the cops were even
worse than the banks or the revenue service." Cosentino opened
his hands, a sermonizing priest asking the flock a question. "Result?
People over here are still leery of getting involved with the
authorities?
    I stopped to think about it. "I'm guessing that
a lot of the successful Asian immigrants move to the suburbs."
    Velez said, "Soon as they can. Bigger house,
better schools for the kids, a sense that all their hard work is
paying off."
    "So the crime against essentially a Boston
business gets pulled in a suburb, and nobody tells the police
anywhere about it."
    Cosentino nodded. "Yeah, except some of the
suburban immigrants now have real friends—their own kind or
neighbors—who tell them they're better off going to the police,
otherwise they'll just get ripped off again, over and over."
    "Which is how Woodrow Gant came to be involved
with the gang unit here in Boston."
    "Right. The D.A.'s office he worked for didn't
have an Asian-American prosecutor at the time, so Gant got assigned
by his boss to this task force I mentioned to coordinate with us, try
to nail some of these Boston guys before they hit another land-scaped
split-level out there."
    "And the task force was successful?"
    "Yeah," said Cosentino, "but mainly
against the Vietnamese gangs."
    "Why them?"
    He moved off the desk, went around behind it to look
out the window. "Bunch of reasons. Most of the Vietnamese gangs
have only five, six kids in them, so they're manageable to prosecute.
Also, they're pretty vicious. The kids in the Chinese gangs grew up
in a real family system. You do things a certain way, rules and
shit."
    Velez said, "Many of the Vietnamese came to the
States from refugee camps, got scattered all over the map without a
family support system in place. They didn't know much English, had a
lot of trouble in school .... "
    Cosentino turned back to me. "Home invasion, a
Chinese gang will say to the victim, 'Call the cops, we kill one of
your daughters.' The Vietnamese will say, 'We're gonna take a finger
off this daughter here right now, just so you know what'll happen to
the rest of her, you report us.' "
    "Also," said Velez, "the Vietnamese
gangs are more mobile. They go state-to-state in cars, kind of roving
bandits."
    I thought about that. "But if the gang members
aren't from the area, how do they know who to target?"
    Cosentino and Velez exchanged looks. Then he said to
me, "Traditionally, when you had a mixed neighborhood, you'd get
some mixing in the gangs, too."
    "Meaning?"
    Velez said, "Meaning, you have Irish, Latinos,
and blacks living in the same couple of blocks, maybe you have a
rainbow-coalition gang, too."
    Cosentino stayed by the window, cracked his knuckles
again. "That never used to be true with the Asians, though. The
Chinese hated the Vietnamese, the Cambodians hated the Koreans, and
vice versa all over the fucking place."
    "I follow you, but I don't see where