In 1970, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (commonly referred to as the RICO Act) became United States law. The RICO Act allowed law enforcement to charge a person or group of people with racketeering, defined as committing multiple violations of certain varieties within a ten-year period. The purpose of the RICO Act was stated as “the elimination of the infiltration of organized crime and racketeering into legitimate organizations operating in interstate commerce.” However, the statute is sufficiently broad to encompass illegal activities relating to any enterprise affecting interstate or foreign commerce.
This is a good article from The Columbia Law Review that outlines RICO’s evolution and some of its bizarre applications.
Below are excerpts from a number of academic articles on the unconstitutionality of RICO, its disproportionate application to people of color, and its implementation as a union-busting statute. We will continue to update this site as we are learning more about the ways in which this Act has been used, similarly to conspiracy and terrorist charges, to delegitimize and dismantle organized resistance.
On RICO’s racist application and the unreliability of RICO investigations:
“Although federal RICO prosecutions of gangs are increasing, not
everyone sees this as a positive development. Critics are concerned
that the threat of long federal sentences may lead to coerced guilty
pleas, false confessions, and unreliable incrimination of third
parties. Some commentators have also expressed concern about the
inequitable impact of these prosecutions across races. According to
one public defender, these prosecutions can be “perceived as
heavy-handed use of force against the poorest in our community,” such
as African-Americans and Hispanics. Indeed, during protests of the
‘Jena 6′ incident, at least one speaker referenced RICO prosecutions
as an instrument of government persecution of African-Americans”
(Blumenstein, 2009, p.218).
On RICO’s unconstitutionality and its role in dangerous/unethical
Federal overreach:
“Federal prosecutions of noneconomic street gangs with de minimis
effects on interstate commerce exceed the bounds of the federal
government’s authority under the Commerce Clause. In addition to
running afoul of Supreme Court doctrine, these prosecutions also run
the danger of altering the fragile balance of power between the state
and federal governments that the Constitution requires. Courts should
require that RICO prosecutions against noneconomic street gangs only
proceed against gangs that have had a substantial effect on interstate
commerce” (Blumenstein, 2009, p.236).
On the Supreme Court Case of the National Organization of Women vs. Scheidler in 1994:
“RICO is a ghastly law. Two minor illegalities committed over a
10-year period can trigger a RICO application. G. Robert Blakey, who
helped draft the statute, says that if one protester trespasses on the
grass and another protester in another city throws a rock through a
window nine years later for the same cause, their constitutional right
to demonstrate could be redefined as ‘extortion’ under RICO. To avoid
this, demonstrations would have to be flawless, but, as he says,
‘perfect demonstrations aren’t possible.’ Groups and individuals
across the political spectrum got the point and filed briefs backing
the abortion protesters. They included People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals, Martin Sheen, and Concerned Women for America.
In its brief, PETA said its members had been sued under RICO for
actions in an animal testing laboratory. Some civil rights activists
believe that if RICO had become law a decade earlier, segregationists
would have used it to quash the movement. The American Civil Liberties
Union has had a hard time coping with RICO. It came out against the
law early, then waffled for years in response to abortion-rights
lobbying both outside and inside its structure. Harvey Silverglate, a
board member of the Massachusetts ACLU, said sympathy for abortion
rights caused the ACLU to drop its guard on a serious violation of
political freedom. In 1990, Lynn Paltrow of the ACLU Reproductive
Freedom Project told me: ‘It’s ACLU policy to oppose application of
RICO, but there are those on staff who feel that as long as RICO
exists, this kind of behavior [aggressive antiabortion tactics] does
sort of fit.’ I wrote here at the time: ‘In other words, RICO is
totally bad, but sort of useful.’ Now that the court has forbidden the
abortion lobby to use RICO as a club, the ACLU might feel free to
return to a principled position” (Leo, 2003, p.52)
On RICO and labor, specifically the impact of interventions like RICO on democratic unions:
“Government oversight of the Teamsters has been pursued with twin
objectives: root out corruption and promote democracy. There also has
been an implicit expectation (at least on the part of academics in the
field of industrial relations) that a by-product of democracy and
reduced corruption would be institutional transformation. The results
have been mixed. Quantitatively at least, the effort to reduce
corruption has had a major impact. … Effective democracy, on the
other hand, has proved to be more elusive. The imposition of a model
of public electoral democracy unintentionally provided incentives to
import questionable fund-raising practices as well. This kind of
impropriety is widely viewed as unacceptable but prevalent in our
public electoral process; it is even less acceptable in the union
environment. Union elections are more vulnerable to manipulation than
are elections for governmental office because so much of unions’
influence lies in the private sphere inhabited by workers and
employers as individuals. The net impact has been to increase barriers
to transformation both inside and outside of the Teamsters” (Belzer &
Hurd, 1999, p.362)
References
Belzer, M. H., & Hurd, R. (1999). Government Oversight, Union
Democracy, and Labor Racketeering: Lessons from the Teamsters
Experience. Journal Of Labor Research, 20(3), 343-365.
Blumenstein, M. (2009). RICO Overreach: How the Federal Government’s
Escalating Offensive Against Gangs Has Run Afoul of the Constitution.
Vanderbilt Law Review, 62(1), 211-238.
Leo, J. (2003). Protection for protesters. U.S. News & World Report,
134(7), 52. Chicago/Turabian: Author-Date
