Meet Homeless Joe Liberty & his Rat Runners, combating crime in high places and using pigeons & abandoned cell phones to send his latest information to friendly hackers. He has a tin cup, a bag of birdseed, an artificial leg, eye patch, baseball hat, plastic shopping bag and a spiritual amulet necklace given to him by an Indigenous elder that he met in a hospital. He had overdosed on booze after losing his job to a corporate merger. He still has amnesia with short flashbacks to an earlier time when he had worked on Wall Street stealing from the ordinary folk who invested in his junk bonds. He has a pet dog called Scruffy, a pup he had found abandoned in a garbage can, outside the apartment he had been forced to leave. No job, no money, nowhere to go, every man needs a friend.
The Rat Runners are his army of street people, who use their survival skills to collect information on crime and corruption in the city. On street corners, outside corporate office towers, City Hall, newspaper & publishing headquarters, in the neighbourhoods, watching the politicians, judges, lawyers and cops 24/7, outside the museums, theatres, churches, night clubs, in the subways, ball parks, arenas & hotels, in the parks, they use trashed cell phones and local carrier pigeons to report on keeping the city safe and Homeless Joe informed. They always carry a bag of birdseed, a notebook, pen & a pocket purse with change, some ID. They are drug free and are divided into customized brigades by age, gender, race, skills and physical appearance… to be continued