The only good Lawyer

Cosentino, “but bear with me a minute, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    He 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 landscaped 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 you’re going.”
    “Larry’s point,” said Velez, “is that now we’re starting to notice some cooperation among the different Asian groups. Makes it even harder for us to trace who’s doing what if a Vietnamese gang knocks over a business or home owned by a