![]() You might imagine that it takes a lot of diligence to secure a RICO conviction- and you would be right. Like all other charges brought under the criminal code, all of this must be proven in a way that meets the prosecutor’s burden of beyond a reasonable doubt. The Challenge of Proving a Criminal Enterprise That the defendant has committed at least two prior predicate acts.That the defendant is a part of said enterprise.To take the predicate acts to the next level and define it as racketeering activity, the prosecution must then establish the following: Additionally, street crime, like robbery, might place a defendant at risk of RICO charges. There are plenty of white-collar crimes listed as predicate acts, including securities fraud, copyright infringement and the theft of union monies. The list goes on to include terrible crimes, from human trafficking to murder. These include several crimes that are often associated with the mafia, from gambling to bribery to embezzlement to money laundering. The 1970 law laid out 35 specific “predicate acts”, which is basically the original crime committed by an individual. The RICO law was aimed at breaking through those buffers. Senate that the family “has a lot of buffers” that insulate the top brass. There’s a scene of congressional testimony where a lower level “soldier” tells the U.S. ![]() This problem faced by law enforcement took its place in popular culture in the 1974 movie classic Godfather II. There was no way to get to the real criminal pulling the strings and giving the orders. The criminal penalties for bookmaking, taken on their own, weren’t severe enough to motivate the arrested person to give up any more information on a superior whose potential for intimidation likely outweighed the fear of a comparatively short prison sentence.įurthermore, even in the unlikely event authorities could tie the bookie, strongman, and accountant all together, they were still the lower-level players in the operation. ![]() A law enforcement official would have the power to offer a lesser sentence-or even none at all-in exchange for testimony. Getting the bookmaker to implicate their confederates was necessary. But there was no legal mechanism to tie them together. Police might know–at least on a commonsense basis–that the bookmaker was also connected to a person that had been arrested for extortion, along with an accountant under investigation for embezzlement and money laundering. Under pre-1970 law, someone might be convicted of bookmaking. But they couldn’t get at the entire organization.Ī hypothetical example can illustrate the problems law enforcement faced prior to RICO. They might make arrests and convictions of individuals operating at lower levels. Law enforcement officials faced a problem. The purpose of RICO was to take direct aim at organized crime, particularly the difficult-to-pin-down La Cosa Nostra gangs that were based in New York but ran lucrative operations around the country. RICO is the acronym for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, passed by the United States Congress in 1970 and signed into law by then-President Richard Nixon. What is RICO law? And how does it work in actual practice? The History of RICO It can leave people wondering the precise nature of this important law. But the law is also nuanced and filled with detail. It has a place in history as the legislative linchpin for helping bring down several organized crime figures. Under almost no state or federal regulation at the time, these early “ white collar crime” rackets ruined many companies along with their innocent employees and shareholders.The RICO law has a wide range of implications for both civil and criminal law. For example, after taking control of labor unions, racketeers used them to steal money from workers’ pension funds. As these early criminal organizations grew, racketeering began to infiltrate more traditional businesses. Often associated with the urban mobs and gangster rings of the 1920s, like the American Mafia, the earliest forms of racketeering in America involved obviously illegal activities, such as drug and weapons trafficking, smuggling, prostitution, and counterfeiting. The crimes of racketeering are punishable by the federal RICO Act of 1970. ![]()
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