Korean Job Discussion Forums

[humanuspneumos]

It seems that threats from owners are on the rise regarding the Korean Mafia. I wonder how many people out there are experiencing this.

I recently heard of two threats where an owner wants to off a teacher (via the mafia) if the teacher continues dissing him and another where the owner made it clear that he was a "dangerous man."

Also- to what degree does the Korean mafia exist in Korea? It's not like they are a never ending highway of ants stretching from/controlling one airport to the another and then to the tips of the earth- right?

Great W of Whiner made a post where he said he gets emails that make threats of the mafia offing him.

[The Great Wall of Whiner]

Sure.

I have had two threats made against me while in Korea. The first one was by the son of my hagwon owner in Ilsan (Kim Lynn's Kids English). That school no longer exists, but the lastest escapade in Andong also included threats to my life.

I have never heard of a foreign English teacher being "offed" by the Korean mafia. But I have heard the threats many times over made both to myself and to others.

The more I think about it, the more I think they are just empty threats. Although my last place of employment did have some underground connections...

[beast]

About two years ago four of us were in a room salon in a smaller town down south. The Korean guy who took us there (an adult student) passed out on the table after three bottles of whiskey so the attendants put him in a cab. We finished the last of the bottle and got up to leave. They said that the bill hadn't been paid. We thought that the Korean guy put it on his card. We offered to leave a tip of a hundred grand (the bill was supposedly 1.2 million), but they said that the Korean guy hadn't paid a dime.

Well we didn't have a million on us so we tried pushing past the girls and the ajuma and made our way to the street. Before we could get into a taxi three or four so called "mafia" types appeared in cheap skin tight suits sporting spikey haircuts. They came up to us and thought that they'd intimidate us by yelling loudly and pushing us around. We are all pretty big body building steroid using boys so that didn't go too far. Both parties realized quite quickly that this was going to turn into an all out street brawl ending with nobody standing. I can speak passable Korean and my buzz was wearing off by then and since I'd had a previous encounter with the law here in Korea I decided to play Mr. Peacemaker and negotiated that we go to the Korean guy's apartment and he can pay for at the very least a fifth of the bill and each one of us will chip in an equal sum when the bank machines open up again in a couple of hours.

The mafia boys agreed that this sounded much better than pounding eachother senseless. So we spent the next two hours in a bone soup restaurant slamming soju (the mafia boys paid) and then we went to the ATM's and paid them our shares and they went to the Korean guy's house and he put on a screaming fit and refused to pay and claimed that he didn't know us. The so called gangsters roughed him up a little (pushed him around his apartment, kicked his legs out from under him) and evidently ended up putting the guy on some kind of payment plan. All this while his mother and father looked on dumbfounded from the kitchen.

The thing about it is, I don't think any of us ever felt scared or even worried about these guys. We were all willing to pay our fair share and so we did. The threat of violence was there, but these guys didn't have guns or weapons of any kind for that matter. The impression that I got from them was that they probably were the tough guys in the playground most of their lives and naturally gravitated towards a profession of this nature. Most of them probably still lived at home with oma. On the other hand I wouldn't want to make it a habit of pissing off the Korean underworld.

I find it hard to believe that any hogwan would ever resort to using these kind of guys against foreign teachers. If word ever got out to the parents, what kind of impact do you think that would have on the school?

[Juggertha]

yeah, I have to agree. The only "Auk-geh" (big shoulders) I have seen here are basically tough guys from around the way.

I really don't worry about them and for the most part stay out of their way. However, if they came to my door... it wouldn't be a pleasant "anyoung!"