The next time you see three guys wrestling a chair out of a Dumpster, take a good hard look — they might be the stars of Discovery’s “Dirty Money.”
The series, premiering Tuesday at 10 p.m., follows brothers John and Jimmy DiResta (along with John’s son, Rat-Boy a k a Matthew) as they show off their passion for picking up junk, customizing it and turning a profit at the Hell’s Kitchen Flea Market on Sundays.
Thanks to shows like “American Pickers,” “Storage Wars” and “Pawn Stars,” we can’t seem to get enough of other people’s junk.
Part of the appeal is that “people want to save money in today’s [economy],” John says, “a lot of people have an interest in old, cool, rustic, antique-y stuff.”
The rest can be attributed to “the sickness.”
Simply defined, “it’s the love of other people’s junk,” says John, clarifying that “hoarding is for weirdos, the sickness is pre-hoarding.”
Separating “Dirty Money” from the other shows, John says, is the fact that items featured are shown at every stage, from curbside refuse or forgotten antique-store finds to one-of-a-kind art.
It’s something that the Long Island-raised brothers picked up from their father, and something they’ve been doing on and off for the past 30 years.
“The best episodes are the ones where we spend no money,” Jimmy says. With a little ingenuity, “all of a sudden, you can get $1,000 for a couple pieces of wood we found in the Dumpster — it’s literally found money.”
Sometimes you have to spend money to make money, though, like when they refurbished a $200 broken neon sign and banked $2,500 for it.
Bargaining down prices is funnyman John’s job — the former transit cop-turned-stand-up comic starred in his own UPN sitcom, “DiResta,” in 1998 — while the tinkering falls to younger brother Jimmy, a professor of 3D design at the School of Visual Arts, who holds 20 toy patents.
“It looks like two mutts and their son running around picking up stuff,” John says, “but there’s a level of intelligence that goes into this, and I would hand that all over to Jimmy. He knows his stuff.”
In the series, Jimmy applies his craft to do things like turn a boring bass guitar into a Gene Simmons-inspired buzz-saw bass and reinvent a kid’s bike as a chainsaw-powered Evel Knievel bike.
The rise of eBay and Craigslist has “equalized the price of things,” Jimmy says. “Things that used to be mysterious and hard to find aren’t that hard to find anymore . . . There’s a very well-educated consumer base, and that’s why I like to make something that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”