A protection racket is an extortion scheme whereby a criminal group or individual coerces a victim (usually a business) to pay money, supposedly for protection services against violence or property damage. Racketeers coerce reticent potential victims into buying "protection" by demonstrating what will happen if they don't—they damage the victims' property. In most cases, the racketeers do not actually protect their client from anything but the racketeers themselves, and their "protection" is merely extortion. However, if their victim is seriously threatened by a third party, sometimes gangsters will protect their source of revenue.
Legitimate businesses are not the only victims of protection racketeers. Other criminals are also targeted, since they cannot ask police to stop the extortion. However, for that same reason, criminals sometimes actively seek to buy this "protection". Paradoxically, in a parasitic relationship, the parasite both damages the host and prefers that the host remain healthy. Thus, when criminals are cheated or abused (e.g., a cocaine dealer is swindled by his supplier) they cannot turn to the police and instead rely on powerful gangsters to protect the gangsters' income.
The person who periodically visits the victim to collect protection payments is called a "bag man".
Read more about Protection Racket: Territorial Monopolies, Providing Genuine Protection, Real-world Examples, Government Protection Rackets
Famous quotes containing the words protection and/or racket:
“Without infringing on the liberty we so much boast, might we not ask our professional Mayor to call upon the smokers, have them register their names in each ward, and then appoint certain thoroughfares in the city for their use, that those who feel no need of this envelopment of curling vapor, to insure protection may be relieved from a nuisance as disgusting to the olfactories as it is prejudicial to the lungs.”
—Harriot K. Hunt (1805–1875)
“To dine, drink champagne, raise a racket and make speeches about the people’s consciousness, the people’s conscience, freedom and so forth while servants in tails are scurrying around your table, just like serfs, and out in the severe cold on the street await coachmen—this is the same as lying to the holy spirit.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)