Ideas Shoot
Bullets: How the RICO Act Became a Potent Weapon in the War Against
Organized Crime
Mark Gordon
Department of Criminal Justice
Before there was ever a Tony Soprano or a Don Corleone there was Caesar Enrico
Bandello, also known as Rico or Little
Caesar. Rico was the
magnetic mafia character in the popular 1931 film Little
Caesar. Based loosely on the life of real mobster Al Capone,
Rico Bandello was everything a
post-prohibition
mobster had to be: Ruthless, violent and ambitious.
In addition to ushering in a new genre of
mob-flicks, Little Caesar inspired a young boy named
G. Robert Blakey to dedicate his life to
fighting the
real-life Mafia. As an adult, Blakey would
say Rico,
played by Edward G. Robinson in the movie, captivated him. He wanted to
be a
part of that world, but on the side with the ‘good guys,’ fighting
organized
crime.
Blakey grew
up to have a lengthy career in academia and the law, and became one of
America’s most-well known experts on organized crime. His teaching posts
included stints with prestigious law schools at Notre Dame and Cornell
universities. His law enforcement career included high-ranking posts in
the
U.S. Department of Justice’s Organized Crime Section and serving as
chief
counsel to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures (Wallance)1.
Still, many experts consider Blakey’s
greatest accomplishment to be a law he wrote in
1970. Blakey’s goal with the new law was
simply
defined, yet to actually accomplish the task has been one of the
greatest law
enforcement struggles ever. The mission: To wipe out the Mafia and all
other
forms of organized crime.
The
new law was aptly named, too, when considering Blakey’s
favorite childhood movie: The law he wrote was called RICO – Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. (Like the good student of Mafia
culture Blakey is, he has consistently kept
his silence on how much
of a coincidence the acronym RICO was in relation to Rico, the Little Caesar lead character. In a 1990
article, Blakey said the theory that there
is a
connection between the two is a “matter of speculation.” He did not
elaborate).
For all its Elliot Ness and Untouchables-like
glory,
though, the RICO Act has not been without its share of trouble. For
starters,
the act languished for almost a decade unused. Law enforcement agencies,
from
the FBI to local police departments bickered with each other over turf
wars,
and bickered inside each agency as to how powerful the Mafia had become,
and if
there was even a Mafia at all.
Even when the value of RICO was discovered and
it had
became the “A-bomb” for police and prosecutors nationwide, it spurred
new
problems. Those included constitutional questions like whether the law
opened
up defendants to double jeopardy concerns. Also, the act, which can
carry both
criminal and civil penalties, has grown into a treasure chest for
lawyers, some
looking to right legitimate wrongs, others looking to make a buck off
the now
widely used law. Some legal experts and
defense lawyers have called RICO “draconian, as a measure that carries
considerable potential for abuse” (Calder)2.
The RICO Act, now 32-years-old, has led an
interesting
life. Highlights include coming to an understanding of exactly what the
act is
and how it is used in court; tracing back the history of the statute,
such as
the battle within law enforcement circles to even use the act in the
first
place; and cases that made the law a star of the war against organized
crime,
because once federal agents got an understanding of the act and began
applying
it, the floodgates opened. After several
top Mafia officials in New York were convicted of various criminal
offenses
under the RICO Act in 1985, one FBI agent said the law was “the atomic
bomb of
organized crime and the darling of the Department of Justice” (Tuohy)3.
One of the first indictments obtained under
RICO was
handed down to ‘Lefty Guns’ Ruggiero and his organized crime related
crewmembers. ‘Lefty’ was the mobster made famous in the mid-1990s when
Al Pacino portrayed him in the movie Donnie Brasco. Other well known
mobsters
who were taken down by RICO, in a host of 1985 indictments include
Genovese
family head Anthony Salerno, Gambino family
boss Paul
Castellano, and Bonanno
family chief Phillip Rastelli.
What is RICO?
The RICO Act is a small piece of Title IX in
the
federal Omnibus Crime Control Act, which Congress enacted in 1970. The
law
sailed through both houses of Congress, which to many, proved how
clear-cut the
mission to corral the Mafia had become. The Senate approved the law by a
73 to
1 margin, while the House overwhelmingly passed an amended bill, too, by
a 431
to 26 margin.
Lawmakers passed the law to “strengthen the
legal
tools in the evidence-gathering process, to establish new penal
prohibitions
and to provide enhanced sanctions and new remedies” in the fight against
organized crime. Congress found that the ‘sanctions or remedies
available’
under the current laws in 1970 were “unnecessarily limited in scope and
impact”
(Blakey)4.
Enter RICO. The main theory
behind the law was to
combat the influence of organized crime in interstate and foreign
commerce, and
to remove those activities from the legitimate business community.
According to
Blakey, the RICO author, the law covers
“violence,
the provision of illegal goods and services, corruption in labor or
management
relations, corruption in government and criminal fraud.” And Blakey bluntly states that those goals do not
begin and end
with “those whose names end in vowels,” a reference to the stereotype
that
Italians are the only people participating in illegal organized crime
activities.
When handling criminal
violations, the law is designed
to go after anyone connected with organized crime. It states: “It shall
be
unlawful for any person employed by or associated with any enterprise
engaged
in, or the activities of which affect, interstate commerce, to conduct
or
participate, directly or indirectly, in the conduct of such enterprise’s
affairs through a pattern of racketeering.”
By racketeering, the law is covering any act or threat involving
serious
offenses, such as murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery and
bribery.
The word ‘pattern’ has become the lynchpin of
the law;
pattern is loosely defined in the courts, and can mean more than one
crime to
dozens of criminal activities. The definition of a pattern has been
challenged
in courts nationwide and debated by legal scholars.
Another key to the law is that it separates
organizations from individuals. Before RICO, the only way for
prosecutors to go
after organized crime was to charge the individuals with individual
crimes.
RICO, however, “outlawed enterprises,” Gregory J. Wallance
described those types of enterprises in a 1994 article in the American Bar Association Journal, as
“any association of individuals that engaged in racketeering
activities.” In
other words, if prosecutors prove that an organized crime outfit
committed
murder and bribery, a person found to be associated or a member of that
outfit
can be convicted of RICO violations, even if he didn’t pull the trigger,
even
if he had nothing to do with the bribery, and even if he was otherwise
obeying
the law while the offenses were taking place. The RICO violation in that
case
would stem solely from being a member of the criminal organization. RICO
convictions carry a prison sentence of up to 20 years (Wallance)5.
In general, when prosecutors are
looking to prove
someone committed RICO violations, they are looking for a pattern of
racketeering activity. That essentially means the defendant has
committed two
or more crimes from a wide-ranging list of general criminal violations.
The FBI
lists 16 federal crimes and eight state crimes under the heading
“predicate
criminal acts which are chargeable under RICO.” On the federal side,
those laws
include embezzlement of union funds, sexual exploitation of children,
alien
smuggling, prostitution and sports bribery. State laws covered under
RICO
include murder, extortion, gambling, arson and robbery.
RICO violations, though, do not only arise
when a
criminal defendant is accused of crimes found on the RICO list, and that
can be
a source for some of the current confusion over the law’s true purpose.
Jeffrey
Grell, a nationally known civil and defense
attorney
specializing in RICO cases, said there are four additional ways someone
can
violate RICO: Grell spoke about the law in
an article
by John William Tuohy in Gambling
Magazine:
(a)
You
can violate
RICO by investing the proceeds of racketeering activity in an
enterprise. These
are usually money-laundering cases. For example a drug ring owns a
legitimate
car dealership, but in addition to selling cars the drug ring launders
its cash
through the car dealerships books.
(b)
You
can violate
RICO by obtaining or maintaining control over an enterprise through a
pattern
of racketeering activity. For example, a small business has borrowed
money from
a loan shark; the businessman cannot repay the loan, so the loan shark
demands
that the business be signed over to him or he will kill the businessman.
(c)
You
can violate
RICO by participating in an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering
activity. A stereotypical example of such a violation occurs when an
outsider
bribes the employees of a company to get favorable terms under a
contract with
the company.
(d)
You
can also
violate RICO by conspiring to commit any of the substantive offenses
described
in [the first three] paragraphs. The examples provided are merely
examples.
There is an endless variety of conduct that may constitute a violation
of RICO.
The “term” enterprise also does not mean only businesses or
corporations. It
can mean just about any group of people.
Blakey, in speaking about the hassles of getting
prosecutors
and police to fully utilize the law, said the problem with just ‘going
after’
an individual who is part of organized crime is that it starts a
merry-go-round, where the person will get arrested, go to jail, and
quickly be
back on the street committing crimes again. “You’ve got to go after the
organization,” Blakey said in the 1994
article by Wallance about the rise of RICO.
“Individuals commit
organized crime, but organizations make it possible. You’re in it to
destroy a
family.”
Law enforcement has been
fighting organized crime in
one way or another for more than a hundred years, but the modern effort
can be
traced back to 1963, when mobster Joseph Valachi
testified before a U.S. Senate investigating committee. “Valachi
confirmed the existence of a secret organization known as La Cosa Nostra, a conspiratorial group known to, but
only
unofficially recognized by, the FBI since 1958,” James Calder wrote in a
2000
article in Criminal Justice Review. “Valachi said that La Cosa
Nostra
amounted to a ‘second government,’ a charge that grabbed the spotlight,
thus
allowing conservatives, liberals, and the general public to express
shock and
indignation.”
Even before the groundbreaking Valachi
testimony, the government had been aware of certain organized crime
activities.
The Department of Justice created the Organized Crime and Racketeering
Section
for the criminal division in 1954 and “action picked up,” Calder wrote,
when
Robert Kennedy was named Attorney General in 1961. Kennedy openly
challenged
some of the people known to be leaders in organized crime activities,
and along
with his brother, President. John F. Kennedy, he helped several
anti-gambling
pieces of legislation pass through Congress. But, the work Robert
Kennedy had
begun was curtailed during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency because in
1965,
Johnson signed an order canceling the use of all electronic surveillance
equipment, except for instances when national security was at stake
(Calder)6.
Several other factors brought
organized crime, and
specifically the Mafia, to the public’s attention by the end of the
1960s. The
novel “The Godfather” was published in 1969, boosting the mythology and
public
lore about the Mafia. Assassinations were attempted on high-ranking
mobsters
Joe Columbo Sr. and Joey Gallo. Another
high-level
mobster, Carlo Gambino, was arrested for
mob-related
crimes. “By 1969, organized crime ranked as an important political and
social
issue warranting policy action by the Congress and the executive branch.
Generalized concern took root in sustained congressional and executive
interest
in comprehensive legislation” (Calder)7.
Still, despite a growing
awareness of organized crime,
not much was being done in the way of proactive law enforcement to do
anything
about it. The General Accounting Office, in a report on the success of
RICO,
mentioned the pre-RICO years as an “awkward affair,” Blakey
wrote in an article about the myths of RICO, published in 1990 in the St. Johns Law Review. “Before the act,
the government’s efforts were necessarily piecemeal, attacking isolated
segments of the organization as they engaged in single criminal acts.
The
leaders, when caught, were only penalized for what seemed to be
unimportant
crimes. The larger meaning of these crimes was lost because the big
picture
could not be presented in a single criminal prosecution.” The problem of
figuring out how to take action against organized crime was so
widespread, that
one legal analyst compared the situation to putting out a forest fire
with a
garden hose (Calder)8.
A small, yet powerful, group of
congressman should be
credited with planting the first RICO seeds, Calder wrote. One in
particular,
Senator John McClellan, (D-Alabama) was determined to target La Cosa Nostra with the act, known in 1970 as the
Omnibus
Criminal Control Act (OCCA). “McClellan captured the essence of the
problem
when he wrote OCCA’s legislative history.
Statistics
reported to his committee on the low frequency of federal indictments
against
La Cosa Nostra members from 1960 to 1969
demonstrated
an ‘intolerable level of immunity’ from prosecution, a situation that he
wished
to change” (Calder)9.
So in 1970, with the backing of
lawmakers and President Nixon, many thought RICO would jump out of the
gate and
attack organized crime head on. Still, “for all the exuberance tied to
the new
OCCA, full and confident implementation was delayed by nearly ten
years,”
Calder reported. One reason for the delay, Calder wrote, was a “lack of
comfort
and skill in organizing and directing new types of investigative
strategies and
in mastering prosecutorial expertise.” That is somewhat typical in new
policy
experiments (Calder)10.
Specifically in regard to delays in
implementing RICO,
Calder offers two reasons: “First, former FBI investigators and U.S.
attorneys
have claimed that they were unprepared because they remained too
comfortable
with familiar approaches. They failed, according to this view, to take
advantage of key provisions of the law, especially new discovery
techniques
that allowed them to reach conspiratorial enterprises more efficiently.”
Calder
cites several FBI initiated organized crime investigations that stalled
in the
early 1970s. One case, known as “Gold Bug,” involved alleged Brooklyn
mobsters,
but the FBI’s efforts failed there in part because of “a continued
distrust of
local police,” Calder wrote. Another case, an investigation into Tony Spilotro’s criminal operations in Las Vegas in
1972 and
1973 was put on hold because state prosecutors in Illinois opened a
separate
investigation into Spilotro’s alleged
criminal
activities. And the case against Anthony Accardo,
who
became the Chicago Mob boss in 1975 after Sam Giancana
was killed, could have been aided by using RICO, FBI agents would later
say,
but nothing was ever put together. Accardo
was never
charged under the RICO statute, despite numerous organized crime-related
arrests from 1975 until he died in 1992 (Calder)11.
And even when cases were brought from FBI
field agents
to the Department of Justice prosecutors for trial, there was another
problem,
Calder contended: “Because each agency operated under significant
pressure to
win every case pursued to a jury trial, it was necessary to pursue only
cases
that could survive legal challenges by prepared defense counsel.”
A second reason for the delay in a boom in
RICO
arrests stems from FBI investigative methods. The FBI under J. Edgar
Hoover had
remained distant from mob contacts and that strategy made sure many
agents were
out of touch with sophisticated mobsters and organized crime groups.
Outdated
investigative methods were being used to try to infiltrate simple
gambling and
low-level racketeering operation and the results were minor arrests,
mostly of
people with little connection to mainstream mob power.
Still, there was more to blame than a
slow-moving FBI behind
the molasses like pace of the first decade of RICO. American presidents
and
other top-ranking officials in the executive branch also played a role,
some
unwittingly, in thwarting RICO and another organized crime fighting
efforts in
the 1970s. In a 1994 book by law professor James Jacobs, which Calder
quotes,
the law professor said “the attitude, politics, priorities and polices
of
presidents and the attorneys general have surely had an impact on
federal
organized crime control initiatives.” He added that the three Presidents
in
office during the first decade of RICO – Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and
Jimmy
Carter – had eight attorneys generals and that caused some disarray in
the
entire justice department.
The RICO statute, Blakey
hoped, would counter the confusion. But in 1979, almost a decade after
the act
was passed, Blakey’s goal of wiping out
organized
crime was languishing, despite writing what he thought was the
preeminent law
on tackling the problem. In writing the law, Blakey
thought he was giving law enforcement a gift – “previously unimagined
possibilities for organized crime prosecution,” wrote Wallance.
Instead, the law became a stack of paper gathering dust.
While the RICO act lingered on the sidelines
of the
fight against organized crime, Blakey looked
for a
way to show-off the virtues of the law to an unimpressed law enforcement
community. In the late 1970s, Blakey, a law
professor, traveled the law enforcement training circuit, going from
courses at
the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., to the U.S. attorney’s offices in New
York
City, according to Wallance, who is a
private lawyer
today. Wallance served as an assistant U.S.
attorney
from 1979 to 1985 in New York City, assigned to an organized crime
strike force
for two of those years. Wallance said at Blakey’s stops, the RICO author was greeted with
bored
politeness or just simply ignored.
“In one appearance at the U.S. attorney’s
office for
the Southern District of New York, Blakey, a
man of
modest height, angelic countenance and receding hairline, launched into
his
standard lecture on [RICO,]” Wallance wrote.
“Blakey had been invited to the office by
the head of the
Southern District’s Organized Crime Task Force to talk with senior staff
about
RICO. After 15 minutes, one of the ranking lawyers, a man of probity,
conventional legal talent and Wall Street respectability, stood up, told
Blakey that ‘you don’t know what you’re
talking
about…you’re wasting my time,’ and ended the meeting. These
self-confident
prosecutors dismissed Blakey as a crazy
academic” (Wallance)12.
In 1979, Blakey
changed his
game plan. Instead of taking his traveling RICO show from office to
office, he
would have the agents and the prosecutors come to him. He opened a
summer law
enforcement-training seminar at Cornell Law School, with weekly seminars
for
FBI agents, assistant U.S. attorneys and state prosecutors. The idea was
to
isolate the troops in the war against organized crime, and make sure
they
understood how to use their greatest weapon. “To Blakey,
the FBI agents and assistant U.S. attorneys were like oil and water, a
form of
natural enemy that had yet to realize they could not operate
independently,” Wallance wrote. “As he later
put it, he needed to find a
way to make ‘salad dressing,’ and the Cornell Institute on Organized
Crime was,
among other things, designed to do that.”
The seminars were crash courses in organized
crime
fighting techniques, with RICO leading the way. According to Wallance, Blakey
captured the
imaginations of the attendees, when the RICO author spoke about his
ultimate
dream prosecution, one in which “the entire Mafia would be indicted as a
racketeering enterprise on the theory that it was an association for the
purpose of committing murder. Every member would be a defendant, since
taking
the oath was a vow to commit murder in furtherance of the enterprise’s
activities.”
At the seminars, Blakey
went
over the basics of what constitutes a pattern on racketeering behavior.
He also
taught the classes about how to get wiretap warrants, and how to use
information
once a house, bar or organized crime hangout was targeted for the
wiretaps. (In
addition to writing the RICO Act, Blakey
also wrote
Title III of the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which
authorized court-ordered electronic surveillance at the federal and sate
levels). Blakey
even had the classes watch Little Caesar,
the movie that motivated a young
Blakey to devote his working life to
fighting
organized crime. At the end of each class, Blakey
usually wrapped up by saying “I dream of an indictment of every boss” (Wallance)13.
The seminars worked. FBI agents began to
understand
the powerful tool in front of them, and prosecutors began to see the
path Blakey had constructed. The challenge
now was to go use the
RICO act on the streets, and go after Blakey’s
original goal, bringing down organized crime.
· As a result of meetings in April 1982,
Goldberg and
others conspired to murder a rival gangster.
· Goldberg crime group associates traveled
across state
lines to carry out an extortion of the owners of a seafood company.
· The organization sold drugs, particularly
cocaine,
between 1982 and 1984.
· In 1983, the organization planned an
assassination
attempt on Evsei Agron,
at
the time a Soviet crime kingpin.
· Goldberg and other associates with the
organization
conspired to take property by force from Ira Hershey, an employee of the
Zale Corp. The property was jewels and
precious metals, and
the force used was violence and fear of physical injury.
Another well-known
RICO case involved the
arrests and convictions of some of the most notorious and high-ranking
members
of the Mafia. The charges alleged that the New York Mafia Commission
directed
the relationship among the Mafia families that were active in New York,
and
they also authorized the 1979 murder of Carmine Galante,
head of the Bonanno crime family. According
to Tuohy, in the article in Gambling
Magazine about RICO, the indictments, which were handed
down in 1985, also alleged the commission was running a multi-million
dollar
extortion scheme later known as the ‘Concrete Club’ (Tuohy)14.
The list of the defendants, all
of whom were alleged
to be high-ranking members of the Commission, made up a who’s’
who for the Mafia. The defendants included Genovese family head Anthony
Salerno; Gambino family boss Paul Castellano;
Bonanno family boss Phillp
Rastelli; Lucchese
family boss
Anthony Corallo; Gambino
underboss Aniello
Dellacroce; Lucchese
underboss Salvotore
Santoro; and
Ralph Scopo, a member of the Colombo family
and the
president of the Concrete Workers District Council.
The case, which operated under the
code name GENUS, was designed to build a case against the five New York
families, using RICO as the main weapon. The case took about five years
to come
to fruition, and according to Tuohy, about
200 hundred
federal agents were assigned to it. “Its big break came after a
microphone
placed inside the dashboard of Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo…picked
[him]
explaining a series of schemes run by New York’s five ruling Mafia
families. In November 1986, the defendants were convicted of 17
racketeering
acts and 20 related charges of extortion, labor payoffs and loan
sharking. All
of the defendants were sentenced to serve 100 years in prison with no
possibility of parole (Tuohy)15.
Another famous RICO arrest and conviction
was also one of the first cases to be brought after Blakey’s
1979 RICO seminar at Cornell. The case was made over six years, off of
the
legwork of Joseph Pistone, an undercover FBI
agent
who would ultimately penetrate deeper into the Mafia then any agent has
ever
gone. Pistone, using the street name Donnie Brasco, had become an associate member of a Bonanno family crew. In 1981, the captain of that
crew was
ready to propose him to be a ‘made guy,’ which in Mafia lingo means
informally
being inducted into the organization. Being a ‘made guy’ comes with a
heavy
responsibility of having to earn money for the superiors in the family,
but
being a ‘made guy’ also carries a lot of weight in the world of the mob –
he
cannot be killed unless captains and other top officials agree in
advance to
kill the person. Having an FBI agent go undercover so successfully that
he got
close to being ‘made’ was unprecedented in the FBI, and most law
enforcement
experts agree it will likely never happen again. Wallance,
the former U.S. prosecutor who worked on an organized crime task force,
set up
the drama of how federal prosecutors were brought into the Donnie Brasco loop in 1981: Richard Guay,
a young prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Eastern
District of New
York, had been working on small pieces of several mob investigations,
but
feeling like he was getting nowhere. Guay
was
surprised when FBI agent Jerry Loar came to
him one
day in 1981 and asked for wiretap warrants – Guay
had
never worked on a wiretap warrant application, as had few other
prosecutors,
since the practice was not widely thought of has productive. In his
article, Wallance recounted the conversation
between FBI agent and
prosecutor.
Better tell me what’s going on,” said Guay.
Loar was plainly
uncomfortable. Reflexively, he glanced around. “I got a guy. He’s in.
I’m not
going to tell you his name.”
Guay had no
idea what Loar was talking about. “What do
you mean in?” There was more glancing around by Loar, who looked impatient. He lowered his voice
even more.
“He’s part of the mob.”
Pistone had been putting pieces
together for Loar since 1976. Posing
originally as a small time jewel
thief, he had grown close to several mobsters, such as Sonny Black and
‘Lefty
Guns’ Ruggiero. The information Pistone supplied to Loar
was used
to get wiretaps, and recorded information from those devices was used to
gather
more incriminating evidence. The culmination was a RICO charge against
Black
and Ruggiero and several other Bonnano
crewmembers. All
the defendants were convicted and Ruggiero was sentenced to 20 years in
prison.
Black was never tried. He disappeared before the trial. A
year-and-a-half later
his decomposed body was found near Staten Island; authorities believe he
was
killed for retribution for letting Pistone
into the
crew (Wallance)16.
After
the Ruggiero trial, dozens of agents and prosecutors began utilizing the
RICO
Act, which was exactly what Blakey had hoped
for when
he taught his RICO classes. “All of the famous mob
prosecutions…[including] the
case against Matthew ‘Matty the Horse’ Ianniello, United States v. Salerno, and the
multiple
prosecutions of John Gotti all can be traced
to Blakey’s lectures in the summer of
1979,” Wallance wrote. “It was truly the
beginning of the demise
of the Mafia, which discovered that ideas shoot bullets.”
The RICO Act is not just a criminal
statute. It also covers civil law, and violators can be subject to
having their
assets taken away by the federal government. While on a criminal basis,
the
majority of RICO violators are connected to organized crime, on the
civil side
that is not always the case. The act has
been used to wage battles against the Catholic Church; to sue companies
accused
of running false advertisements; and spouses have been sued under the
RICO Act
for allegedly concealing the value of marital assets in divorce
proceedings. To some scholars and legal
experts, the wide range of RICO is justified by its original intent;
when Congress
passed the law, it mandated that the law “be liberally constructed to
effectuate its remedial purposes (Barry)17. To others,
however, the
extension of RICO has brought questions about the government becoming
overzealous, and possibly abusing some defendant’s Constitutional
rights.
Other Constitutional questions have
been raised by RICO. The ‘pattern requirement’ has been challenged for
vagueness, and it is possible the definition can become more narrowly
defined
in the future. In a 1988 opinion in a non-RICO case, four Supreme Court
Justices
– Scalia, Kennedy, O’Connor and Chief
Justice
Rehnquist – hinted “that the pattern requirement…was unconstitutionally
vague
and would likely not survive a further vagueness challenge” (Van Houten, et. al)18. Another legal
challenge
raised by defendants convicted of RICO violations is double jeopardy, or
being
tried for the same crime twice. That problem can arise when a defendant
faces
RICO charges after he is already convicted of pattern type activities,
such as
extortion and murder. Up until 1990, the consistent view of the courts
had been
that double jeopardy did not preclude a RICO prosecution. A non-related
organized crime case in 1990 brought the case to the attention of the
Supreme
Court, which ruled that there could be some double jeopardy situations
when
using RICO, but the narrowness of the ruling has meant that it has had
little
effect on past or current cases (Van Houten,
et. al)19.
The RICO Act has survived those
constitutional challenges, as well as questions about its widespread
use. While
infamous mobster John Gotti was sometimes
affectionately referred to as “The Teflon Don” because of his ability to
escape
several government attempts to lock him up, I believe the real Teflon in
the
world of organized crime should be the RCIO Act. The anti-organized
crime
statute sat dormant for ten years, rarely being used for anything
related to
mob prosecutions. Then investigators and prosecutors fought over how to
use it,
and who gets to use it where. And finally, the RICO Act has survived
several
legal and constitutional challenges.
Endnotes
1. Wallance, Gregory J. “Outgunning the Mob.” American Bar Association Journal, 1986, 80; p.63.
2. Calder, James D. “RICO’s Troubled Transition: Organized Crime, Strategic Institutional Factors and Implementation Delay, 1971-1981.” Criminal Justice Review, 2000, 25; p. 31.
3. Tuohy, John W. “A RICO Interview.” Gambling Magazine, May 2002, p. 3.
4. Blakey, Robert. “Debunking RICO’s Myriad Myths.” St. John’s Law Review, 1991, 64; p. 703
5. Wallance, Gregory J. “Outgunning the Mob.” American Bar Association Journal, 1986, 80; p. 62.
6. Calder, James D. “RICO’s Troubled Transition: Organized Crime, Strategic Institutional Factors and Implementation Delay, 1971-1981.” Criminal Justice Review, 2000, 25; p. 36.
7. Calder, James D. “RICO’s Troubled Transition: Organized Crime, Strategic Institutional Factors and Implementation Delay, 1971-1981.” Criminal Justice Review, 2000, 25; p. 32.
8. Ibid, p. 38-39.
9. Ibid, p. 40.
10. Ibid, p.66-68.
11. Ibid, p.69-70.
12. Wallance, Gregory J. “Outgunning the Mob.” American Bar Association Journal, 1986, 80; p. 63.
13. Wallance, Gregory J. “Outgunning the Mob.” American Bar Association Journal, 1986, 80; p 64-65.
14. Tuohy, John W. “A RICO Interview.” Gambling Magazine, May 2002, p. 9.
15. Tuohy, John W. “A RICO Interview.” Gambling Magazine, May 2002, p. 9.
16. Wallance, Gregory J. “Outgunning the Mob.” American Bar Association Journal, 1986, 80; p. 65.
17. Barry, J. P. “When Protestors Become ‘Racketeers.” St. John’s Law Review, 1991, 64; p. 904.
18. Van Houten P., Murphy, R. T., and Johnson, R. “RICO.” American Criminal Law Review, 1993, 28; p. 670.
19. Van Houten P., Murphy, R. T., and Johnson, R. “RICO.” American Criminal Law Review, 1993, 28; p. 671-673.
Sources
Barry, J. P. “When Protestors Become ‘Racketeers.” St. John’s Law Review 64; 899 to 916.
Blakey, Robert. “Debunking RICO’s Myriad Myths.” St. John’s Law Review 64; 701 to 724.
Calder, James D. “RICO’s Troubled Transition: Organized Crime, Strategic Institutional Factors and Implementation Delay, 1971-1981.” Criminal Justice Review 25; 31 to 76.
Finckenauer, James O. and Waring, Elin J. Russian Mafia in America. Immigration, Culture and Crime. (1998) Northeastern University Press, Boston, Mass.
Jones, Artie, Satory, John and Mace, Tyler. “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations.” American Criminal Law Review 39; 613 to 631.
Karwath, B. A. “Has the Constituency of Continuity Plus Relationship Put an End to RICO’s Pattern of Confusion?” American Journal of Criminal Law 18; 201 to 249.
Tuohy, John William. “A RICO Interview.” Gambling Magazine, May 2002.
Van Houten, P., Murphy, R. T., and Johnson, R. “RICO.” American Criminal Law Review 28; 637 to 677.
Wallance, Gregory J. “Outgunning the Mob.” American Bar Association Journal 80; 60 to 65.