What is the RICO law?

What has to be shown

• An enterprise — a corporation, partnership, union, or an informal association of people with a common purpose.
• A pattern of racketeering activity — at least two predicate acts within ten years, related to each other and posing a threat of continuing activity.
• Predicate offences drawn from a long statutory list: bribery, extortion, fraud, money laundering, drug trafficking, witness tampering and many others.
• A connection between the defendant's conduct and the enterprise's affairs.

Why the statute is powerful

It allows the government to charge an entire organisation and its leadership in one case, to use the pattern as the unifying theory, and to seek forfeiture of the assets and the interests acquired through the conduct. Penalties reach twenty years per count, and life where a predicate offence carries it.

Civil RICO

Section 1964(c) gives any person injured in their business or property by a RICO violation a claim for three times their damages plus attorneys' fees. That is why the statute appears in commercial litigation, franchise disputes and fraud cases that have nothing to do with organised crime — and why courts scrutinise these claims closely, dismissing many for failing the pattern or enterprise requirements.

State versions

More than thirty states have their own RICO or «little RICO» statutes, with their own predicate lists and, in several states, broader reach than the federal law.