jobbery

jobbery \JOB-uh-ree\, noun:

The conduct of public or official business for the sake of improper private gain.

To a large portion of the people who frequent Washington or dwell there, the ultra fashion, the shoddy, the jobbery are as utterly distasteful as they would be in a refined New England City.
-- Mark Twain, The gilded age and later novels

Casting about for some way of breaking through this vicious circle, he saw but one expedient - to wit, some great service to be rendered to the government, or some profitable bit of jobbery.
-- Honoré de Balzac, The Unconscious Mummers

Jobbery combines the sense of job and robbery and reflects the historically negative connotation of job, whose definition may derive from gob, as in "a mass or lump."