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:
“No: until I want the protection of Massachusetts to be extended to me in some distant Southern port, where my liberty is endangered, or until I am bent solely on building up an estate at home by peaceful enterprise, I can afford to refuse allegiance to Massachusetts, and her right to my property and life. It costs me less in every sense to incur the penalty of disobedience to the State than it would to obey. I should feel as if I were worth less in that case.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)