The Rat Racket

A once-profitable import firm and other city businesses face an organized extortion campaign that uses staged rat infestations as leverage, driving owners to pay protection to avoid reputational and financial ruin. The narrative follows merchants and civic leaders as they debate paying bribes or exposing the scheme while hotels and warehouses suffer sudden rodent invasions. A wealthy buyer offers to purchase a targeted grocery firm to use it as a laboratory for studying the brown rat and to investigate the racket from within, setting the story toward a confrontation between criminal manipulation and scientific inquiry into the alleged pest problem.