It’s both a “who” and a “what.”
Well, sorta.
The story — if not the precise facts — goes like this. Sometime in the 1960s, at the direction of U.S. Sen. John Little McClellan (D-Arkansas), the distinguished Notre Dame law professor, J. Robert Blakley, was working on a little something. Since 1955 McClellan had served as Chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Famously — as both were televised — McClellan led two investigations, both of which uncovered spectacular law-breaking and corruption and both of which dealt with organized crime.
The first, under the United States Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management, also known as the McClellan Committee, investigated union corruption and centered on Jimmy Hoffa and lasted from January 1957 to March 1960. The second, known as the Valachi hearings, investigated the operations of organized crime and featured the testimony of Joseph Valachi, the first American mafia figure to testify about the activities of organized crime.
So, Blakley?
At McClellan’s direction, the distinguished professor was asked to come up with something, a proposed law — a federal Act — that would help to pop the balloon of the mafia and other corrupt criminal organizations.
While Blakely had his head down, working on what would turn out to be his chef-d’ oeuvre, eventually coming up with the act which I will describe below (and which is all the buzz now that the ex-president and his associates have been charged under the Georgian version of the act), he was apparently distracted by a gangster movie.
What is suspected, if perhaps not acknowledged, is that the acronym, RICO, preceded the name of the act for which it was supposed to stand, that since the mafia was a principal target of the law (and “Rico” is a well-known nickname for the Italian name “Enrico” and a popular name among Italian American immigrants), Blakley intentionally arrived at the acronym as a slight to Italian American ethnicity. To put the maraschino (yep, also a word of Italian origin) on the particular sundae of the act, “Rico” was the name of an Italian American mobster in the 1930 gangster movie “Little Caesar,” from which, whispers are, Blakey may have derived the name. The movie, starring Edward R. Robinson as the gangster, Rico, ends with Rico riddled with bullets and, in his death throes, utters the last line of the movie, “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?”
Now, Blakey had to come up with the somewhat awkward name for which the acronym would stand. What he pieced together is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (“RICO”) Act which all agree is quite a mouthful.
So what is it and what does it intend to do?
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 targets organized crime and does so by strengthening the legal tools of evidence gathering, specifically by establishing new penal prohibitions and providing enhanced sanctions and new remedies for dealing with the unlawful activities of those engaged in such crimes.
Speaking broadly, RICO allows prosecutors to charge multiple people who commit separate crimes while working toward a common goal.
RICO’s power lies in its conspiracy provision, based on an “enterprise rationale” that allows tying together apparently unrelated crimes with a common objective into a prosecutable “enterprise” or pattern of racketeering. In addition, RICO provides for harsher penalties and permits a defendant to be convicted and separately punished for both the underlying crimes that constitute the pattern of racketeering activity and for a substantive violation of RICO — in other words, it subjects one convicted under RICO to a potential double whammy of criminal liability. Sort of like the old Certs commercial, under RICO, it’s “two, two, two crimes in one.”
But wait, there’s more. Under RICO’s injunctive relief provisions, the act allows for the prohibition of further involvement of the convicted racketeering associates with the enterprise in which with they were corruptly involved. As such, RICO provides an effective method both for establishing the existence of organized crime’s penetration into certain organizations and for excising corrupt officials from positions of leadership.
So what about the Georgia prosecution? Aren’t the charges leveled against Trump and his alleged co-conspirators charged under Georgia law?
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Well, yes.
Within a few years of the federal law taking effect, states, Georgia among them, began passing its own RICO laws.
What all this boils down to is that the ex-president of the United States and his allies just got charged under a law that is literally and expressly designed to take town mobsters and organized crime, one of the ironies of which is that Trump’s alleged co-conspirator, Rudy Giuliani broadly, aggressively, and effectively exercised the RICO Act against the mafia in his days as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York and, in so doing, lent it muscle.
Mother of mercy, we live in historic times. Instead of the end of Rico, could this instead, be the end of Trump?