Protection racket in the context of "Criminal organization"

A tributary state is a pre-modern state in a particular type of subordinate relationship to a more powerful state which involved the sending of a regular token of alliance, or tribute, to the superior power (the suzerain). This token often took the form of a substantial transfer of wealth, such as the delivery of gold, produce, or slaves, so that tribute might best be seen as the payment of protection money. It might also be more symbolic: sometimes it amounted to no more than the delivery of a mark of alliance such as the bunga mas (golden flower) that rulers in the Malay Peninsula used to send to the kings of Siam, or the Tribute of the Maltese Falcon that the Grand Master of the Order of St. John used to send annually to the Viceroy of Sicily in order to rule Malta. It might also involve attendance by the subordinate ruler at the court of the hegemon in order to make a public show of submission.

The modern-day heirs of tribute hegemons tend to claim that the tributary relationship should be understood as an acknowledgement of the hegemon's sovereignty in the modern world, whereas former tributary states deny that there was any transfer of sovereignty.

Danegeld (/ˈdeɪnɡɛld/; literally "Dane yield") was a tax raised to pay tribute or protection money to the Viking raiders to save a land from being ravaged. It was called the geld or gafol in eleventh-century sources. It was characteristic of royal policy in both England and Francia during the ninth through eleventh centuries, collected both as tributary, to buy off the attackers, and as stipendiary, to pay the defensive forces. The term Danegeld did not appear until the late eleventh century. In Anglo-Saxon England tribute payments to the Danes was known as gafol and the levy raised to support the standing army, for the defence of the realm, was known as heregeld (army-tax).

The Sicilian Mafia or Cosa Nostra (Italian: [ˈkɔːza ˈnɔstra, ˈkɔːsa -]; Sicilian: [ˈkɔːsa ˈnɔʂː(ɽ)a]; lit. 'Our Thing'), also simply referred to as the Mafia, is a criminal society and criminal organization originating on the island of Sicily and dates back to the mid-19th century. Emerging as a form of local protection and control over land and agriculture, the Mafia gradually evolved into a powerful criminal network. By the mid-20th century, it had infiltrated politics, construction, and finance, later expanding into drug trafficking, money laundering, and other crimes. At its core, the Mafia engages in protection racketeering, arbitrating disputes between criminals, and organizing and overseeing illegal agreements and transactions.

The basic group is known as a "family", "clan", or cosca. Each family claims sovereignty over a territory, usually a town, village or neighborhood (borgata) of a larger city, in which it operates its rackets. Its members call themselves "men of honour", although the public often refers to them as mafiosi. By the 20th century, wide-scale emigration from Sicily led to the formation of mafiosi style gangs in other countries, in particular in the United States, where its offshoot, the American Mafia, was created. These diaspora-based outfits replicated the traditions and methods of their Sicilian ancestors to varying extents.

Extortion is the practice of obtaining benefit (e.g., money, goods, or regular payments) from an individual or group through coercion, usually by threatening them with future psychological or physical harm. In most jurisdictions it is likely to constitute a criminal offence. Unlike extortion, robbery is the obtaining of goods using immediate personal violence, or the immediate threat of violence, usually in a one-off situation.

Extortion is sometimes called the "protection racket" because the racketeers often phrase their demands as payment for "protection" from (real or hypothetical) threats from unspecified other parties; though often, and almost always, such "protection" is simply abstinence of harm from the same party, and such is implied in the "protection" offer. Extortion is commonly practiced by organized crime. In some jurisdictions, actually obtaining the benefit is not required to commit the offense, and making a threat of violence which refers to a requirement of a payment of money or property to halt future violence is sufficient to commit the offense. Exaction refers not only to extortion or the demanding and obtaining of something through force, but additionally, in its formal definition, means the infliction of something such as pain and suffering or making somebody endure something unpleasant.

In the United States, racketeering is a type of organized crime in which the perpetrators set up a coercive, fraudulent, extortionary, or otherwise illegal coordinated scheme or operation (a "racket") to repeatedly or consistently collect a profit. The term "racketeering" was coined by the Employers' Association of Chicago in June 1927 in a statement about the influence of organized crime in the Teamsters' Union. Specifically, a racket was defined by this coinage as being a service that calls forth its own demand, and would not have been needed otherwise. Narrowly, it means coercive or fraudulent business practices; broadly, it can mean any criminal scheme or operation with ongoing or reoccurring profit, as defined in the 1970 U.S. RICO Act, which aimed to curtail the power of the Mafia and other organized crime.

Originally and often still specifically, racketeering may refer to a criminal act in which the perpetrators offer a service that will not be put into effect, offer a service to solve a nonexistent problem, or offer a service that solves a problem that would not exist without the racket. However, racketeers may also sometimes offer an ostensibly effectual service outside of the law to solve an actual existing problem. The traditional and historically most common example of a racket is the "protection racket", in which racketeers offer to protect a business from robbery or vandalism; however, the racketeers will themselves coerce or threaten the business into accepting this service, often with the threat (implicit or otherwise) that failure to acquire the offered services will lead to the racketeers themselves contributing to the existing problem. In many cases, the potential problem may be caused by the same party that offers to solve it, but that fact may be concealed, with the intent to engender continual patronage. The protection racket is thus often a method of extortion, at least in practice.

Ronald Kray (24 October 1933 – 17 March 1995) and Reginald Kray (24 October 1933 – 1 October 2000) were English identical twin brothers from Haggerston who were heavily involved in organised crime from the late 1950s until their arrest in 1968.

Their gang, known as the Firm, was based in Bethnal Green, where the Kray twins lived. They were involved in murder, armed robbery, arson, protection rackets, gambling and assaults. At their peak in the 1960s, they gained a certain measure of celebrity status by mixing with prominent members of London society, being photographed by David Bailey and interviewed on television.