Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

RICO Explained: How the Law That Broke the Mafia Became America’s Most Elastic Statute

The man who drafted RICO died in May. The statute he built to reach mob bosses now reaches rappers, record executives and a sitting president’s campaign operation. New Hampshire never adopted its own.

George Robert Blakey died on May 1 in Chicago at 90. Notre Dame Law School, where he taught for 37 years across two stints, called him the country’s foremost authority on a statute he drafted as a Senate committee counsel in 1969. That statute is RICO. It did the job he built it for. It broke the American Mafia. Then it kept going.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act has been federal law since 1970. In that span it has been aimed at mob bosses, union locals, street gangs, a record executive, a self-help guru, international soccer officials and the operation that tried to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election result. Very little of that was in the design brief.

The reason is not that courts misread the law. RICO’s text was always wider than its stated purpose, and the things keeping it from swallowing ordinary criminal and civil litigation are mostly not in the statute at all. They live in internal Justice Department policy that binds federal prosecutors and nobody else. Not a county district attorney working under a state racketeering law. Not a private lawyer filing for triple damages.

The three moving parts

Congress passed RICO as Title IX of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. Richard Nixon signed it on October 15, 1970. It sits at 18 U.S.C. sections 1961 through 1968, and the machine has three parts: an enterprise, a pattern of racketeering activity, and a defendant who runs the first through the second.

A “pattern of racketeering activity” under section 1961(5) requires at least two qualifying acts, the last falling within ten years of a prior one, with any time the defendant spent in prison excluded from the count. The qualifying acts are drawn from a long list: murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion and drug dealing chargeable under state law and punishable by more than a year, plus dozens of federal offenses including mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering and witness tampering.

Section 1962 sets out four prohibitions. Subsection (c) is the workhorse: it is unlawful for a person employed by or associated with an enterprise to conduct its affairs through a pattern of racketeering. Subsection (d) makes it unlawful to conspire to do any of it, and that subsection carries more weight than its length suggests, because it reaches people who never personally committed a predicate act.

The penalties are heavy. Twenty years per count, or life where a predicate offense carries life, plus forfeiture that reaches the defendant’s interest in the enterprise itself. And section 1964(c) opens a civil door: any person injured in business or property by a section 1962 violation may sue and recover threefold damages, costs and a reasonable attorney’s fee.

Before 1970, a prosecutor charged the man who did the thing. RICO let the government put the organization on trial and hold the boss accountable for what the organization did. Blakey, who had started at Justice as a special attorney in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, understood the gap he was closing. In a 1990 foreword for the St. John’s Law Review he wrote that whether the acronym came from the 1931 gangster film Little Caesar was a matter of speculation, but that “the statute was designed to change the ending of the movie.” In the film, police shoot the gangster. The respectable figure standing behind him walks away clean. RICO was built for the second man.

The decade almost nobody used it

For most of the 1970s the statute sat close to idle. The first significant organized-crime convictions came at the end of the decade. Anthony Scotto, a Brooklyn longshoremen’s union leader and a Gambino family captain, was indicted in January 1979 on federal racketeering and bribery charges and convicted that November. Frank Tieri, the Genovese family’s front boss, went down at the turn of the decade in a case the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation traces back to its own 1972 public hearings.

What changed was training. Blakey left Congress for academia and ran an institute on organized crime on a federal grant, teaching prosecutors at every level how to break the statute into its elements and build a case around an enterprise rather than an incident. Colleagues who worked alongside him described him afterward as the person who taught a generation of prosecutors how the thing worked.

The Commission

On February 26, 1985, U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani’s office in the Southern District of New York returned a 15-count indictment on a theory that sounded audacious and turned out to be exactly what section 1961(4) allowed. The Commission itself, the governing body through which New York’s Five Families settled disputes and divided contracts, was the enterprise.

The trial ran about ten weeks in the fall of 1986. On November 19, 1986, the jury convicted all eight remaining defendants. At sentencing on January 13, 1987, Judge Richard Owen gave seven of them 100 years apiece. Anthony Salerno, Carmine Persico and Anthony Corallo all died in prison.

The point was not the sentences. The point was that prosecutors never had to prove that any one boss personally committed any one murder. They proved the enterprise existed and that each defendant conducted its affairs through a pattern. That is a different burden, and it is why the case is still taught.

The civil side did comparable damage

The prison terms got the headlines. The structural damage came from section 1964, which lets the government sue rather than prosecute.

In March 1982 the government filed a civil RICO action against Teamsters Local 560 in New Jersey. Judge Ackerman found that a racketeering group had dominated the local for more than a quarter century, and in March 1984 he removed its executive board and imposed a trusteeship. Five years later, on March 14, 1989, Judge David Edelstein approved a consent decree resolving the government’s civil RICO claims against the International Brotherhood of Teamsters nationally. It installed court-appointed officers, required one-member-one-vote elections for international officers under independent supervision, and created a three-member Independent Review Board with power to investigate and charge wrongdoing. Federal oversight of the union ran for decades; the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan moved to begin winding it down in January 2015.

Nobody went to prison in that action. The remedy was structural, and it reshaped a union of more than a million members.

The Supreme Court kept widening the door

Every serious attempt to narrow RICO has run into its text. In United States v. Turkette (1981) the Court held that “enterprise” covers wholly criminal organizations, not just legitimate businesses that organized crime has infiltrated. In Sedima, S.P.R.L. v. Imrex Co., decided July 1, 1985, the Court held that a civil plaintiff needs no prior criminal conviction and no distinct “racketeering injury” beyond the harm the predicate acts caused. That decision turned section 1964(c) into a general-purpose commercial fraud weapon and the filings followed.

The Court has drawn some lines. H.J. Inc. v. Northwestern Bell (1989) held that a pattern requires both relatedness among the predicate acts and continuity, or a threat of it. Reves v. Ernst & Young (1993) held that a defendant must have taken part in the operation or management of the enterprise, which kept outside accountants and lawyers from being swept in for doing their jobs.

But the wider rulings have outnumbered the narrower ones. In Boyle v. United States (2009) the question presented was whether an association-in-fact enterprise must have “an ascertainable structure beyond that inherent in the pattern of racketeering activity” it engages in. The Court said such an enterprise must have a structure, but rejected any requirement of a hierarchy, a chain of command, fixed roles, a name, regular meetings, dues, written rules or an initiation ceremony. A loose crew of bank thieves with no leader qualified.

The most recent expansion came on April 2, 2025. In Medical Marijuana, Inc. v. Horn, a 5-4 Court held that a civil plaintiff may recover treble damages for business or property loss even when that loss flowed from a personal injury. The plaintiff was a commercial truck driver who lost his job after a product marketed as containing no THC produced a positive drug test. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority; Justice Brett Kavanaugh dissented, joined by the Chief Justice and Justice Samuel Alito. Defense lawyers reading the opinion warned clients to expect a new wave of civil RICO filings out of claims that used to belong to tort and employment law.

Where RICO lives now

Federally, gang prosecutions are the volume business, and the department pairs RICO with 18 U.S.C. section 1959, which criminalizes violent crimes committed to join or advance in a racketeering enterprise. Beyond the gang docket, the statute reached R. Kelly, convicted of racketeering in Brooklyn in 2021; Keith Raniere of NXIVM, convicted in 2019; and the FIFA officials indicted in 2015.

It also fails, visibly. On July 2, 2025, a Manhattan jury acquitted Sean Combs of racketeering conspiracy and of sex trafficking, convicting him on two Mann Act counts of transporting people for prostitution. Judge Arun Subramanian sentenced him on October 3, 2025 to 50 months. The jury heard the government’s enterprise theory and would not take it.

The louder story of the past three years has been at the state level, where Georgia’s racketeering act is broader than the federal one and Fulton County prosecutors have used it hard. The YSL case charged 28 defendants in 2022 on a theory that a rap label doubled as a criminal street gang. Jury selection began in January 2023 and consumed roughly ten months. It became the longest criminal trial in Georgia history. Young Thug pleaded guilty and no contest on October 31, 2024 and walked out on probation. In December 2024 the last two defendants were acquitted of racketeering and murder. The case ended without a single murder conviction.

The other Georgia case ended the same way, for different reasons. On August 14, 2023, District Attorney Fani Willis charged Donald Trump and 18 others under the state RICO statute over efforts to overturn the 2020 result. The Georgia Court of Appeals disqualified Willis over an appearance of impropriety arising from her relationship with a special prosecutor she had hired, and she lost her final appeal in September 2025. Peter Skandalakis of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia took the case over after no other prosecutor would take it, then moved to drop it, writing that “the federal government is the appropriate venue for this prosecution.” Judge Scott McAfee dismissed the case in its entirety on November 26, 2025.

Two enormous racketeering prosecutions, years of court time, and between them almost nothing to show. The charge is easy to bring and hard to land.

The guardrails are policy, not law

Here is the part most coverage skips. Federal prosecutors cannot bring a RICO case on their own authority.

The guidelines are blunt about what will not be approved. The division says it will not sign off on imaginative prosecutions far afield from what Congress had in mind, and warns that adding a count “solely or even primarily to create a bargaining tool for later plea negotiations” would violate the Principles of Federal Prosecution. A RICO charge built only on state-law predicates gets approved in narrow circumstances: where local officials are unlikely to prosecute a meritorious case, where significant organized crime is involved, or where prosecuting a political or government figure would put a local prosecutor in an impossible spot.

Then comes the sentence that undoes the comfort. The guidelines state that they are internal Department guidance only, that they create no rights enforceable at law by any party, and that they place no limit on the Department’s litigating prerogatives. A defendant cannot enforce them. And they reach exactly as far as the federal Criminal Division does.

A Georgia district attorney is not bound by them. Neither is a plaintiff’s lawyer filing a treble-damages complaint. The centralized review that has kept federal RICO relatively disciplined for more than half a century simply does not exist on the two tracks where the statute has grown fastest.

New Hampshire’s RICO that never was

Notre Dame’s account of Blakey’s career says he helped draft and implement racketeering laws in 22 of the more than 30 states that adopted them. New Hampshire is not one of them.

Title LXII of the Revised Statutes Annotated, the state criminal code, contains no racketeering chapter. Chapter 640, Corrupt Practices, runs from 640:1 to 640:7 and stops at bribery, improper influence, compensation for past action and gifts to public servants. There is no state pattern offense, no state enterprise liability and no state treble-damages action.

One legislature tried to change that. In the 1998 session, Rep. Cobbin of Grafton 11 filed “AN ACT establishing the New Hampshire racketeer influenced and corrupt organizations act.” HB 1557-FN would have inserted a new RSA chapter 640-A tracking the federal statute closely. Same enterprise definition. Same two-acts-in-ten-years pattern. Same four prohibitions, backed by a class A felony carrying up to 20 years and forfeiture, treble damages for injured parties, and civil investigative demands run out of the attorney general’s office.

It also went somewhere the federal statute does not go. The bill’s definition of racketeering activity included abuse of office under RSA 643, and use of legal process to defraud or violate any person’s civil rights. A New Hampshire RICO, as drafted, would have reached public officials operating as an enterprise.

The consequence is structural and it holds today. A racketeering case arising in New Hampshire is a federal case or it is no case at all. County attorneys and the attorney general charge the underlying offenses one at a time, in the order they happened, against the people who committed them. The organization is not a defendant, because state law gives them nothing to charge it with.

Whether that is a gap or a safeguard is a real argument with real people on both sides. A state racketeering statute would give New Hampshire prosecutors a tool against trafficking networks and organized fraud that they currently have to hand to the U.S. Attorney. It would also hand a county prosecutor the most elastic charging theory in American criminal law, with no equivalent of the Criminal Division’s approval memo standing between an indictment and a grand jury.

What Blakey left behind

Blakey spent decades defending his statute against reform bills, narrowing constructions and the argument that it had escaped its purpose. He titled that 1990 symposium foreword “Debunking RICO’s Myriad Myths,” and he kept making the case until he retired from teaching in 2012.

His law is not going anywhere. What has changed is who holds it. The Commission case took a five-year federal investigation, a squad of agents, court-authorized surveillance and a U.S. Attorney’s office to assemble. Today an elected county prosecutor can bring a racketeering case with a state analog and a grand jury, and a private lawyer can file one in federal court seeking triple damages, and the only mandatory review of a RICO charge in the United States sits inside a federal department that supervises neither of them.

That is not a scandal. It is a design consequence, and it has been visible since 1985. The statute was written to reach the man standing behind the gangster. It reaches a great deal more than that now, and the decision about how far is made almost entirely by whoever files the charge.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was checked against the sources listed in the fact-check table before publication. Claims marked ATTRIBUTED rest on named secondary reporting or case records rather than a primary document read in full. Where sources disagree on a date, the article states no date. HB 1557-FN is quoted as introduced; it did not become law. This article describes how a criminal statute operates and is not legal advice. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.