0 a criminal system of taking money from people in exchange for agreeing not to hurt them or damage their property:
1 a situation in which a criminal group demands money from a store owner, company, etc. in exchange for agreeing not to harm them:
run a protection racket These thugs ran a vast protection racket with which all property-owners had to co-operate if they hoped to survive.
Consider the protection racket-organized crime's practice of providing "protection" for restaurants, shops, and other businesses in return for regular payments.
Examples like that of the protection racket are difficult to reconcile with the claim that practices (and motivating reasons to participate in them) necessarily generate normative reasons.
Second, stamp trading resembles the protection racket, since the threat is always there that another trader will use stamps.
The protection racket of the stamp trading firms is one of the sinister aspects of this stamp trading development.
There may well be a danger that this might become, as he described it, a type of minor protection racket.
It has become the largest protection racket ever invented.
Naturally the protection racket flourishes, particularly where gaming takes place, and as gambling has increased so has the protection racket.
The protection racket has been aggravated by the clubs but it is not new.
