What Is the Meaning of Racketeer?

Racketeering is a crime.

Racketeering is a charge frequently listed among a criminal's offenses. Racketeering can take many forms, but all have to do with the manipulation of business practices for illegal purposes.

Dictionary Definitions

Dictionary.com defines a racketeer in two principal ways. As a noun, the word refers to anyone who obtains money through an illegal scheme called a racket. As a verb, to racketeer means to be involved in a racket for profit. According to David Witwer in an article in the 2004 book Corrupt Histories, the term racketeer was first used by the Employers' Association of Chicago to describe the use of the Teamsters union as a front for organized crime in the 1920's.

Rackets

According to Merriam-Webster Online, a racket is any illegal operation involving fraud and intimidation. Frequently, this means an organized crime unit using a legitimate business as a front for its operations and protecting that business's interests using bribery and extortion.

Historical Examples

One of the most famous historical cases of racketeering was the so-called "Fur Dressers Case," in which Depression-era mobsters Gurrah Shapiro and Lepke Buchalter used violence to frighten fur dressers into either paying them a percentage of their revenues or going out of business. Many other famous racketeers have been members of the Sicilian Mafia, which has manipulated a great many businesses into fulfilling its wishes through counterfeiting and fraud as well as through intimidation, such as the threat of arson.

References

• Dictionary.com: Racketeer
• Merriam-Webster Online: Racket
• Daniel Witwer: "'The Most Racketeer-Ridden Union in America': The Problem of Corruption in the Teamsters Union During the 1930s" Corrupt Histories, ed. Emmanuel Kreike and William Chester Jordan, 2004
• FBI History: Famous Cases - The Fur Dressers Case
• Federal Bureau of Investigation: Italian Organized Crime - Overview