Every gangster film or documentary I watch mentions it, even the “Dark Knight” mentioned it! But when I tried to google it, all the information that comes up is very long and complicated. Can someone explain it in very simple terms, what is it and why is it so important? Because it feels like I’m missing something watching stuff about organized crime if I don’t understand what RICO is.
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Racketeering laws that got put in place that made building cases against mafia easier and had huge jail times behind them for even small offenses. Huge deterrent.
Imagine a group of bullies keeps stealing lunch money from kids at school. Each bully does different bad things—some threaten, some take the money, and some hide it—but they all work together.
The RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) is like a special rule that lets the principal (the government) punish the whole gang at once, not just one bully at a time.
RICO
Is a law that was designed to go after organized crime. It stands for:
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act
Before RICO, if you were a mafia boss and ordered someone to kill someone else, there was nothing the authorities could do unless they got a confession. With RICO, they not just had to prove that you’re the boss of the crime family and the killing was done in service of the family, and they could arrest the boss. Same thing with other illegal activities.
Basically, the law was designed to prosecute mafia members more effectively. Many higher-ups in the mob didn’t get their hands as dirty as the underlings, but the FBI wanted to cut off the head. They made the “organized” part of organized crime have a better definition and made it more legally lethal. The article I posted makes it pretty clear. I don’t think it can be explained any better than the wikipedia page. Makes it pretty clear with historic examples. “A RICO-related charge is considered easy to prove in court because it focuses on patterns of behavior as opposed to criminal acts”.
It stands for “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act”, it was basically a tool to fight “organized crime” aka the Mafia.
The ELI5 is we wanted draw a line between doing a crime (which is bad) from being part of a criminal organization like the mafia (which is super bad).
Saw a law was written (the act above) that basically says here’s a list of crimes that are bad, commit one and go to jail. But if we see a habit of you breaking some of crimes more than once we’re going to say you aren’t just a criminal, you’re “organized crime”, and that’s much worse.
It’s a way to go after high ranking organized crime members by holding them accountable for things their organization does even if they didn’t personally do it.
RICO stands for “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations.” Effectively it’s laws against being members of corrupt organizations, mobs, gangs, cartels, etc. It gives expanded punishments for crimes done as part of a criminal organization. It also allows the people who run organizations that do crime to be charged with said crimes, even if they don’t directly take part in them. Finally, it allows the government to seize assets from organized crime groups before they are even convicted. It’s basically a broad set of powers given to the government to fight organized crime and go after the people running the orgs, not just the low level guys actually doing the crimes.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) allow for civil and criminal proceeding at the federal level that were originally targeted at organized crime. Most states also have a version of the law at the state level. They allow the prosecution to go after the entire organization especially including those in charge who often manage to benefit from crimes without getting their hands dirty in more direct criminal actions.
From my basic understanding, higher up crime members used to protect themselves from any serious legal ramifications by being able to claim that they never directly carried out any of the crimes. It let criminal organizations stick around forever, because low level members might get sent to prison, but the upper level people rarely did. RICO made it to where if a racketeering case could be built, it could lead to actual charges that would stick to heads of criminal organizations, even if they didn’t directly commit crimes, because they were proven to have been directing others to commit those crimes.
There’s a lot more to it than that, and I’m certainly no lawyer, but I believe that’s the biggest reason it was so impactful.
RICO was created in order to combat crime groups. Instead of going after individuals for crimes they committed you could go after an entire group under RICO. If you keep going after those who commit crimes, you aren’t pinning any crimes on the leader and will never take down the whole organization. It lowered the requirements to link a leader to illicit activities in order to take down criminal organizations from the top.
This is a little bit of an oversimplification, but generally, you cannot be charged with things you did not do. Makes sense right? Person A commits a crime, Person B cannot charged with the crime Person A did.
So the mafia would put a lot of layers between the boss and the goons who commit the crimes, so the boss cannot be charged because they have no knowledge of the crime and did not participate in the crime.
RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) makes it so that if a crime is committed on behalf of a criminal organization (a mafia family) everyone in that organization can be charged with that crime, even if they have no knowledge of it.
RICO is the acronym for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act of 1970. It’s a law intended to fight organized crime. Before RICO you could only charge individuals for individual crimes they committed, with RICO the government can charge all members of the organization for crimes committed by members of the organization, within some limits.
Is he your cousin?
RICO refers to laws that target criminal organizations. Before RICO laws were passed, the bosses of criminal gangs could very easily avoid jail time by having other people do crimes on their behalf. It made crime difficult to control as gangs like the Mafia gained a lot of power. RICO is meant to issue huge criminal penalties for people engaged in organized crime.
Before RICO(Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) it was very difficult to deal with organised crime as you only had legal grounds to charge the person who commited the crime.
So, if you were a mob boss you would just have goons do all the actually dirty work as you weren’t directly involved and would therefore be clear of any blame.
The law meant that you could go after organised groups of criminals who worked together and weren’t necessarily directly involved in any crime.
So the mob boss couldn’t avoid blame, as they were still part of the organisation doing the dirty deeds, the ‘enterprise’.
So, when you hear shows refer to RICO, they’re referring to racketeering or similar organised crime that fall under that act.
It’s a law that allows a group of people acting together to all be found guilty of, and punished for, the crimes other group members commit.
Example:
You go to the grocery store and buy a pack of steaks. It’s illegal.
RICO would allow the government to charge the store manager, the butcher, the janitor, the cashier, the stock person, and the buggy guy with violating the no steak law.
Why? Because each of the separate things that they did helped you, and them individually, to commit the crime.
Manager runs the store, schedules the employees
Butcher cut the steak and packaged it
Janitor keeps the store clean so it’s visually appealing
Stock person unloaded the meat from the truck
The cashier effectuated the transaction of steak for money
Buggy boy made it convenient for you to transport the steaks inside the store and your car
The manager can be charged with the crime that she committed, and can also be charged with the crime the butcher, stock person, janitor, cashier, and buggy boy committed. And vice versa.
As an old judge I know used to say, “in for a penny, in for a pound.”
In the U.S., we enacted the RICO Act, in essence, to enable the prosecution of organized crime. (“RICO” stands for Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations.)
The problem with organized crime is that it can be very easy for a well-insulated criminal leader to avoid guilt or even prosecution under traditional “conspiracy to commit X” laws. The Big Boss doesn’t plan the heists and scams. He doesn’t participate in them. He’s probably not even aware of all the details. That makes hauling in the Big Boss virtually impossible.
But he does have control over the individuals who conspire on his behalf (his “enterprise”), and he benefits from them. He also exercises significant influence both within his organization and without–all for the purpose of furthering the criminal enterprise.
So what RICO does is it creates an explicit prosecutorial framework for how these sorts of criminal enterprises can be brought to justice (which didn’t really exist before under common law).
That’s really as far as I can take it as an ELI5. The reason you keep getting long and complicated search results is because the law is…long and complicated. Even with the RICO framework in place, these types of prosecutions are extremely complex and hard to make. It requires marshalling a LOT of disparate evidence and convincing a judge/jury that it all fits together. (This can usually only be accomplished with the assistance of an inside informant at some point, which is…challenging.) Also, there’s more than one way to run a criminal organization, so there are different types of theories for pursuing racketeering organizations.
RICO is a US law (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act). It’s the law that makes running organized crime illegal. Imagine a usual mob movie. The lower level guys are assaulting people, murdering people, buying and selling drugs. If they get arrested, that’s an easy case because they got arrested doing clearly illegal stuff.
However, the guy at the top, the boss, isn’t doing much of the assault or murder. He’s not extorting people for money. He’s not buying the drugs, selling the drugs, etc. If the boss goes to court, he can say “I didn’t murder anyone! I just said ‘I wish that guy was dead’, and my friend Vinny went and killed him. But I didn’t do it! Vinny did it!” and similarly try to dodge responsibility for all the stuff that he didn’t directly do. And who cares if the low-level guys get arrested, they boss makes most of the money and will hire new goons.
The RICO Act makes the entire enterprise illegal, and means anyone working for it–especially the boss–can be prosecuted. To qualify for RICO, there has to be a “pattern of racketeering activity”. It’s not organized crime if you just do it once. But if that pattern of behavior can be proved, there are heavy jail sentences, and you can prosecute the boss for organizing things, even if he didn’t do any of it himself.
It’s a law that allows the feds to charge members of a criminal group for crimes committed by the group even if the member himself didn’t do it.
For example, a mafia boss can be charged for a murder committed by a henchman, as long as the murder was committed to advance the goals of the organization.
RICO stands for “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act”, a US law passed in 1970 to try and tackle the rise of organized crime. If someone commits two acts of “racketeering activity” (a list of 35 specific crimes) within ten years, then they can be charged with “racketeering”. The penalties for this are very severe (20 years in prison), all of the things you gained from the crime are seized, and assets related to the crime can also be seized. The idea was to severely punish criminals in large operations AND make sure any fake companies/businesses they were running couldn’t be used to hide stolen wealth.
Let’s break it down because this is ELI5! Billy is the head of a mafia operation. One of Billy’s underlings is arrested for smuggling drugs into the US by using a boat owned by Billy’s company. Normally, the underling would go to jail and the boat might be seized (and Billy doesn’t really care. He’s got lots of boats!). But now authorities charge Billy with racketeering! He didn’t commit the crimes himself but used his underlings and various company assets (boats, planes, bank accounts, houses) to help commit those crimes. RICO allows ALL the company assets to be seized by the authorities. This means not only does Billy lose a lot (all of his companies and assets), he can’t use money he got from his crimes to buy things and then sell them later to get the money back in a spendable form.
RICO was designed to destroy the entire criminal operation, rather than just the small bits and pieces that were used in particular crimes.
Basically RICO established a way to charge you for being involved with organized crime, rather than having to charge you for all of the individual crimes. So, you might have only been part of a few of the 100 crimes committed by your 10 person gang, but I want to take down the whole gang….so I can charge you all with racketeering vs 100 different things.
Rico laws, which vary by jurisdiction, allow prosecutors to go after organizations whose members have engaged in criminal conduct. Instead of going after the individual actor, the prosecutor in a Rico case may go after everyone who might have conspired to commit a criminal act or criminal acts, even if not all, those people did the deed.
They were designed to go after organized crime in the form of gangs and the mafia. In addition, some prosecutors have used them to go after political resistance groups when those groups organize civil disobedience or even violence. Examples of this use include going after the opponents of cop City in Atlanta when a police officer was shot at a protest and going after the KKK when someone burned a cross.
Others have offered a good understanding of what it was developed for originally, but I think to really grasp it you need to also get a feel for how it’s been abused since. In many people’s eyes, ‘ RICO’ sounds like you’re leveling up a criminal charge. It sounds more serious, heavier. For prosecutors playing to the cameras it is all too tempting: if more than one person is doing a thing, spin out a theory about how it’s some coordinated conspiracy, as though that makes you more hardcore about justice. Even if that leads to silly applications, like charging a bunch of teachers involved in cheating under RICO laws (Atlanta case from a few years back).
Because the lawyerly effort involved – to prove not only the acts but also the nature of the conspiracy – makes cases drag on, cost a lot more, and don’t often lead to better results than just charging things that are already criminal in their own right, without needing to reach for the complications of RICO. It’s job security for prosecutors, but very often not a great use of taxpayer resources.
It now seems that many invocations of RICO laws are performative, and not adhering to the spirit of the original intent. RICO is a particular style of prosecution for a particular set of circumstances, but it’s often just used as a kind of exclamation point: “They’re bad! RICO BAD!!”
Imagine Adam tells Bob to go rob someone. Bob gets caught and goes to jail. Adam then tells Charlie to go rob someone. Charlie gets caught and goes to jail. The root of the problem is Adam, but unless Bob or Charlie tells the police that Adam is orchestrating these robberies, It’s really hard to prove that Adam is involved at all. Adam will just say he never told Bob or Charlie to go rob anyone and as long as Bob and Charlie don’t say anything either Adam stays out of jail.
That’s where RICO comes in. It basically says if one person in a criminal organization commits a crime, everyone in the organization can be charged for the crime.
So now Adam tells Bob to go rob someone. All the police have to do is prove that Bob robbed someone, and that Adam is part of the same criminal organization as Bob, now Adam goes to jail too for the robbery.
The first thing that came to my mind – a popular mod for the video game Cities: Skylines. Stands for Residential, Industrial, Commercial, Office.
Another commentor referred to the prosecution of a group of bullies, which is a good analogy. However, RICO also enables prosecution of the “enablers” of the crimes, such as the boss of the organization.
For example, if I profit from all the illicit activity, and the operation works in my best interest, and yet my participation is through the use of euphemisms and proxies, then I’m TECHNICALLY not doing anything illegal. “My, my, that individual is pesky. It would be terrible if anything were to happen to them.”
Without RICO, the individual crimes committed by the underlings could be prosecuted under existing laws, but now the group working in collusion, as well as the leadership of the organization, become responsible for operating together.
TLDR: It’s “guilt by association for mobsters”. Even if you didn’t do all the things, you were a part of the thing that did all the things, so you are considered responsible as well.
Rico was a short man, wants to live with a long haired girl in Cosa Meda. Rip off fruit stands, during the getaway she will drive the Vespa…
A relative of Tony Soprano, if I had to guess.
It’s a law that allows the prosecution of an entire criminal organization for the crimes committed by any member. It was written to make prosecuting mafia bosses easier, since they rarely did the crimes themselves, and it was hard to prove that they directly ordered the crimes.
So I haven’t seen anyone mention specifically why the Dark Knight uses it, so I’ll give it a try:
Basically the police knew the heads of all the criminal organizations (everyone at the table in the room talking to the tv when the Joker introduces himself). RICO is about legally connecting people who work together to commit crime, and sharing money in a single pool is considered proof of working together. So in essence, by trying to keep their money safe by putting it in one big bag they wanted to give to the Chinese fellow they had also told all of the police they were a single massive organization, and because of RICO anything that anyone in that room was found guilty of could be extended to the others. It would have made any case against any crime boss in Gotham a grand slam of legal winning against every crime boss in Gotham at once.
RICO allows the government to pin the doings of lower level criminals to their bosses. Let’s say a mob boss orders a hit on a rival mob boss and one of his guys does the hit, RICO allows the government to go after the boss for first degree murder instead of the low level guy to be pinned for the murder