Bribing the Homeless

"Look, Mr. Homeless Guy, if you don't wanna buy us tickets, and not get your ten bucks, and not go buy yourself a bottle of vodka, then be my guest."

— Stan Marsh, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut

So you're someone who wants to do something like commit a risky (and possibly illegal) task, or go somewhere forbidden, or buy something not easily accessible if you're under the minimum age (a more likely occurrence if you're part of a group of Free-Range Children), or even fix something around the house, but that's not even remotely possible by your own self.

Your parents/friends obviously know better and you're sure they'd turn up their noses at your little request, so, you turn to another solution: pay the hobo right around the corner to help you out, of course! After all, they are pretty common and easy to find, especially in populous cities, and they'll do pretty much anything for quick money.

Success varies, especially dependent on how functional the Crazy Homeless People (already almost Always Male) are capable of acting. If the payer has ill intentions toward the homeless person, the target could end up Kidnapped for Experimentation or treated as a Disposable Vagrant.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Played with in Chapter 149. Momoha, who lives in a tent at the school where she works, is offered money by Hahari if she doesn't drink. The bribe comes about not because she's homeless, but to stop Momoha from engaging in underage drinking and garner the wrath of the Big Cheese since she's in Mimimi's body at the time.
• Black Paradox: Dr. Suga, researching the Spiritual Portal where the Paradoxical Orbs are located while trying to keep a low profile, decides to pay a homeless man to take the plunge. The homeless guy, having nothing to lose, accepts without a second thought, and... the results aren't pretty, to say the least.

Comic Books

• Rubine: While chased by goons through the alleys of the city, Rubine's brother runs into a homeless man at a three-way intersection. Cut to the goons arriving on the scene.
  Goon: Did you see someone run past here?
  Hobo (pointing): Sure did, man, he even gave me 20 bucks to tell you he went that way!
  Goon:And which way did he go?
  Hobo: Ah, man, he didn't pay me to tell you that.
  (The goons run off in the other direction, then Rubine's brother emerges from behind the hobo's pile of junk.)

Films — Animated

• South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut: The boys pay a homeless man (entitled "Mr. Homeless Guy") ten dollars to help them sneak into the Canadian R-rated movie Asses of Fire.

Films — Live-Action

• Dirty Work: Mitch tries to bribe some homeless men into disrupting the theater owned by the Big Bad. They initially refuse, saying they're more the beaten down by life, sad sort of homeless people rather than crazy disruptive homeless people. Mitch simply increases the bribe and they promptly start disrupting the theater.
  Mitch: Hey, homeless guys! I'll tell ya what. I'll give you a dollar each if you'll go into this building here and run around yellin' and screamin'.
  Homeless Guy #1: Uh, that's very nice, but I think what you probably need are, like, some psycho, out-of-control homeless guys?
  Homeless Guy #2: Yeah, we're more the broken, spiritless, I've-lost-the-will-to-live type homeless guys.
  Mitch: How about for two dollars? [cut to the homeless people running into the building screaming]
• Subverted in John Wick: Chapter 2. John drops a gold coin in front of a homeless man in a subway station and hides among his belongings from the assassins pursuing him. When the assassins approach, the vagrant suddenly stops muttering gibberish and shoots them both dead, because he's actually part of the Bowery King's mafia.
• My Man Godfrey: The two sisters pay a homeless man $5 (around $113 in today's dollars) to get him to show up at their party.
• The Lifetime movie Psycho Daughter. Mentally ill 18-year-old group home resident Samantha has stolen the identity of her roommate Danica and escaped after Danica's birth mother Kate (who gave her up for adoption) contacted her. After "Danica" meets Kate and Kate offers to let her stay at her house, Kate asks to speak with the director of the group home to help arrange things. Obviously not wanting Kate to know that she's not really Danica, Samantha gives Kate the number for a burner phone, then pays a homeless woman to pose as the group home director. The homeless woman then asks for extra money, but Samantha didn't think she was convincing enough in her portrayal of a group home director, so she says no (but Kate was still fooled anyway).
• Se7en: After Detectives Somerset and Mills find John Doe's apartment with the aid of an illegal FBI program they're not even supposed to know exists, they pay off a homeless woman to pretend she called in a tip about Doe so that they'd have probable cause to have been there.

Literature

• In Angela and Diabola, when the titular twins are christened, none of Mr. or Mrs. Cuthbertson-Jones's relatives are willing to be godparents to the Evil Twin, so they pay a homeless couple to fill the role.
• Sherlock Holmes was an early proponent of this technique — he had a wide network of homeless people and street urchins (or "street Arabs") that would perform surveillance and relay messages for him.

Live-Action TV

• Agent Carter: Agents Thompson and Souza are interrogating a homeless veteran about what he saw. Souza attempts to bond with the man over their shared experiences in the war, including him losing his leg. However, it's Thompson's promise of a fancy meal that gets the man talking.
• The Big Bang Theory: One episode has Sheldon crazily demand that Penny get rid of a chair she found on the street and paid a homeless man to carry up the stairs because he's convinced it must be filthy.
• The Colbert Report: One skit has a school district in Alabama suspending students who paid a homeless man to walk the halls of their school pantsless.
• CSI: In 'Anonymous', a Serial Killer pays a homeless man $100 to use the ATM card of one of his victims and then displays a series of cue cards in front of the machine's security camera, knowing the authorities will view the footage to try to identify him.
• Dr. Phil: One episode has a woman claim that she paid a homeless man fifty dollars to strangle her and her sister.
• Drop the Dead Donkey: In "Drunk Minister", Damien is interrupted by a homeless man walking into shot whilst he is trying to do a piece on the economic woes facing the British High Streets. He tries to bribe the man to go away, only for the man to return with a crowd of other homeless men, forcing Damien to pay each and every one of them to go away. Even so, it doesn't stop them from returning to the shot when the piece finally goes live, clearly thinking that he would bribe them once again to make them go away.
• EastEnders: After killing Tina Carter, Gray Atkins manages to cover up her death by, among other things, paying a homeless woman to shoplift and then claim to be Tina when arrested.
• ER: It's revealed, in "Alone in a Crowd", that three kids had paid a homeless man seven dollars to pretend that he was their dad. (Long story.)
• Grimm: Combined with Disposable Vagrant in "Star Crossed", in which someone trying to break a drought uses an ancient sacrificial ritual. They use homeless people to avoid notice and lure them to the sacrificial sites by pretending to hire them as cheap labour.
• Prison Break: Lincoln pays a homeless man to assault LJ after the latter is released from the detention centre so that he can be taken to the hospital in order for them to be able to escape together.
• Seinfeld: In "The Bookstore", Kramer and Newman get the idea of running their own rickshaw business. When Jerry asks who'll work as their rickshaw drivers, they try to hire homeless people as their drivers. However, they scrap that idea when one homeless person steals their rickshaw.
• Succession: Fifteen years ago, at Kendall's bachelor party, he and Roman had paid a homeless man to have Kendall's initials inked on his (the hobo's) forehead.
• S.W.A.T. (2017): In "Fire in the Sky", the team finds out that their suspect, an ex-military personnel, paid a homeless man to buy the drones that had been used as detonation devices.
• Veronica Mars: One episode has Veronica paying a homeless man to fish a plastic Easter egg (that had been used a rape device) out of a dumpster.
• Will & Grace: In one episode, Jack accidentally donates Karen's Chanel slingback pumps—her favorite shoes in the world—to a clothing drive. Karen heads to a shelter to get them back, but only finds one, while a homeless woman picks up the other. Karen offers "five"—as in hundreds—for it and starts counting out bills, but then overhears the homeless woman gratefully murmur that five dollars will mean the world to her. In a rare moment of conscience, Karen realizes how cruel she's being and gives the woman the original amount anyway.

Music

• Ninja Sex Party: In the original music video for "Dragon Slayer", the guy Dan meets at the bus stop and gives the dragon suit to is implied to be homeless because he's digging through trash. Dan bribes him with just a few bucks, and he gladly plays along as the dragon of his story.

Tabletop Games

• Shadowrun: 'Bribing a nearby SINless' is a very common tactic for Shadowrunners who do runs in areas where the homeless are common: With the right amount of nuyen (or some drugs) they can provide anything from a distraction at a vital point, local info, letting you surreptitiously scout out a location without tipping the locals off to the fact that some black ops mercenaries are casing out the joint, a cheap alibi, or access to someone's squat in order to lie low after making your escape. Considering people below the poverty line make up the majority of the population in large sections of the Sixth World and petty crime is rampant, most people consider them Beneath Notice.

Video Games

• In Batman: Arkham Origins, when he sneaks into the GCPD station, Batman can overhear one Dirty Cop (read: all of them except Gordon) bribing a homeless man with a warm meal at the homeless shelter in exchange for said homeless man joining Anarky's men and setting off a riot so the cops will be "allowed" to arrest them with as much Police Brutality as they want.
• In the Hitman 3 Chongqing level "End of an Era", various homeless people can be found muttering about voices in their head, and act all confused as you walk past them. While it may look like a case of crazy homeless people, it transpires that Hush, one of your targets, is conducting human experiments on them to test his neural relay machine by promising the homeless money, under the façade of giving them a home or better living by doing some experiments...and then discarding them if they do not meet his needs. Ironically, Hush is only a target for pragmatic reasons as he's part of the dual-authentication procedure required to access the ICA Archives required to whistle blow the ICA, but everything you see and get told about him paints him in a truly detestable light, and totally has it coming.
• Murder in the Alps: During The Dada Killer chapter, the eponymous serial killer pays a homeless man to go to Eure Tages one morning while wearing a sign featuring a new Dada poem to taunt Anna Myers with. Anna in turn gets him to tell her what he can about the Dada Killer by giving him money to buy breakfast with.
• Are you a member of Oblivion's Thieves Guild? If so, one of the easiest ways to get key info is bribing the homeless. If not, they can be bribed to tell you where to go to sign up. It's downplayed, however, as there are alternative methods (such as using the speech minigame or casting a Charm spell).
• Portal 2: Aperture eventually settled for hiring vagrants as test subjects, a clear contrast from the national heroes they had been using a decade prior.
• Sleeping Dogs (2012) has a sidequest in which you reclaim the various outstanding debts as part of the Sun On Yee's rackets. One mission involves collecting from the owner of a massage parlor^note A legit one, not one of the brothels you can visit.. The owner refuses to pay up, and flat out tells Wei that he has friends in the police department, so going shiatsu on his face isn't an option. Wei instead goes around, finds some drunken homeless men, and pays them ten bucks each to "be themselves" (read: very gross) in the parlor and to the masseuse's customers. All of a sudden, the owner changes his tune real quick and pays what he owes.
• Streets of Rogue: Slum Dwellers are among the first NPCs the player will encounter during a playthrough. If you give them some money, they will temporarily join your party and can be ordered to cause a distraction.

Web Animation

• The Most Popular Girls in School: In "Justice and a Slim Jim", this is discussed when Shay van Buren wonders if they can pay a homeless man to buy some Zinfandel wine (which she and her sisters are too young to purchase, not helping in the slightest that their mother Jayna is an extreme Lady Drunk) at a nearby convenience store for them. The idea is quickly scrapped when Deandra decides to literally take things into her own hands (well, her robot hand).

Web Original

• SuperMarioLogan: In one episode, Shrek clogs the toilet to a point where even an actual plumber refuses to clean up his mess. So, Mario turns to the homeless man he bumped into earlier that day to try and fix things. It backfires spectacularly, as the hobo is only interested in booze.

Western Animation

• Beavis and Butt-Head: In "Werewolves of Highland", the boys mistake a rambling homeless man to be a werewolf, and wanting to become werewolves themselves in order to become popular with women, they walk over and ask him to bite them. The hobo asks for a dollar, but Butt-Head only has a stick of gum. Nonetheless, he happily accepts the gum anyway and bites them—riddling them with many STDs and rendering them hospitalized (and it's revealed that it's not the first time he's ever bitten someone before...).
• BoJack Horseman: It's revealed that Diane's older brothers had played a rather cruel prank on her by pretending to be a pen pal named "Leo", and then paying a homeless man to pose as him asking her to the prom, and then filmed her crying reaction. In the "Cry-ane" video proper, the hobo himself looks very uncomfortable in partaking in all of this, but he desperately needed the money.
• Gargoyles: It's heavily implied that the test subjects for Xanatos' funded experiments, before they were turned into the mutates, were homeless people who were coerced into agreeing to do "lab work"... without being told what was REALLY going on.
• Gravity Falls: In "Double Dipper", Pacifica wins the vote for the party crown by bribing Old Man McGucket to vote for her.
• Paradise PD: Kevin bribes Hobo Cop to dress up in costume to scare his mother in a ploy to get his parents to fall in love again. Hobo Cop initially asks for ten grand in cash, but Kevin gets him to agree to a $12 bottle of liquor.
• Rick and Morty: In "Rickfending Your Mort", Rick shows footage of an Observer approaching two homeless guys around a Trashcan Bonfire and trying to get them to fight each other for money.

Real Life

• One incident in 2020 had Johnny Depp's security paying a homeless man three tacos, chips, and £335 to get the star's phone back after it was hurled off a balcony during a fight with Amber Heard.
• In 2023, rapper King Harris was once caught offering a homeless man $50 to try the much-criticized "One Chip Challenge".

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