Short Stuff: RICO Act

the real girl. You dressed up as that for Halloween? Yes, yeah, that was pretty pretty good. That was all you mean. She came up with that one. That was good, very nice. And I love a good obscure Halloween costume. Yes, so, speaking of obscure Halloween costumes, Chuck, you could do worse than dressing up as John Gotti the Teflon don, couldn't you have? You got the hair for it, you, Yeah, that's the main thing. You gotta have the hair. But you also have to have the attitude, you know, Yeah,

like I can do whatever I want and nothing sticks. Yeah, that's close. That's pretty close. I was to get more, just like, you know, almost unprovoked violence to to the to the end of as a means to the end of gaining money and power. Yeah, I mean that's our generations, like real life Vito Corleone type stuff. Yeah. Yeah, he was like kind of, as far as I can tell, like the last of the real mob bosses exactly. He went down. Man, we're gonna get like a letter from

the Italian American Anti Defamation. Yeah, they're gonna say, dear Chuck Gobbagon isn't a thing, right, So yeah, I mean he he went down in and I would say that golden Age, the heyday of mafios in the United States was in the sixties. But the way he went down was thanks to uh a law that got asked about twenty years prior to him going down, called the Rico Act, which is one of those things that like everybody has heard of, but it doesn't necessarily know exactly how it works,

you know what I mean. And that's what we're here to explain how the Rico Act works. Yeah, it's I mean, the Rico Act is something that if you are in our generation or even a little younger, and you've watched any sopranos or any sort of modern day Mafia movie. You're gonna hear RICO thrown around a lot, because that is the kind of the only thing that they found

that has teeth with these cases. It stands for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, And you know, it's you know, a racket is like you hear in those movies on the street, like you got a numbers racket or protection racket. And I just think it's kind of funny that racketeering became the official word, you know, I know. And it's also it made the whole thing way more muddy than it has to be, I think, you know

what I mean, Yeah, racket and racketeering. If they just call it like the Organized Crime Act, it would be a perfect umbrella that would be far more understandable because a lot of people do think of rackets as like a numbers racket or a prostitution ring or something like Underworld, you know what I mean. And RICO has been extended successfully to boardrooms and um, you know, to white collar crime as well, and all of that would be considered

organized crime. That's the point. It's some people working carrying out business and the business is illegal. Um, it's using illegal activities to gain revenue, to gain income. That's a racket, and it doesn't just have to be something like shady and underworld like a numbers racket, right, And racketeering specifically is anytime a person is is managing a situation or an enterprise or a company or a corporation or a crime family where there is a pattern of activities like

this going on. And people like John Gotti and so many before him, you know, they called him teflon Don for a reason because nothing would stick like they would just they weren't the trigger people. They weren't the person, you know, stabbing someone in a trunk in a hayfield, Joe Pecci style man that was violent, or carrying out the numbers game or having the meeting about the protection. Sometimes they were so high level that they didn't actually

commit technically any of these crimes personally. No. So they could get the guy who was stabbing the guy in the trunk in the hay field, they could get him for murder, no problem, you know what I mean, But they couldn't get the person who was genuinely at its core responsible for that murder, the person who was organizing

this enterprise or managing the enterprise. And that's what the Recoact is all about, is creating a law that the FEDS used to go after the c suite level people in organized crime, whether it's a legitimate business where like though it's white collar crime, or whether it's organized crime family like a carteller, cind kidder, mafia, mafia. Boy. That that stuff was just rolling off your tongue until the

very end, until the end I clarked it up. That's the that's the rarely used second definition of Clark, where you just completely screw something beautiful up at the end. It's not like a great thing where you give someone a candy bar, right, Clark bar. If you clarksonone at Clark Bar, I think the universe would fold in on it. All right. I think we should take a break and we'll talk a little bit more about what the RICO

Act and what it isn't right after this. That's why s game a little bit that you should know, why game should knows but Clark alright, so we're back. The first thing about the R I c O Rico Act is that we should say is that I think a lot of people are under the impression that they built out the RICO Act to make it super easy just to go after like a crime boss. And all you have to do is basically say, you know, it's the

reco Act in your racketeering. It's um. It is broad language wise, but the Supreme Court and appeals courts have all come together to sort of nine, Yeah, they did. They sort of narrowed down that language to make it, um, not tougher, but just a little more specific. Yeah, but

I think in doing so they definitely did make it tougher. UM. And the Feds apparently use a racketeering charge or they use the reco act when there's when there's nothing else, Like if they have somebody caught red handed, you know, directly ordering a murder or committing the murder or delivering you know, fifty keys of cocaine or something, there's a lot they got that person on that on that broken law like that crime. Uh, they don't need anything else.

The RICO they go to when there's nothing else, but they have some sort of evidence that that person is directing, calling the shots of this business where those kind of activities are being carried out. Right, And it's really sort of a two part um proving process. You have to prove that there is a pattern of this stuff going on, and it wasn't just like I think if it's just like one murder and and it's not a racketeering thing, that's just hiring somebody or directing someone to carry out

a murder. But you have to prove that it's a pattern of criminal activity within an organization. And then you need to prove, like really really prove that Gotti or whoever it is, is the person who was managing that stuff, who was making those calls and directing that operation. Yeah, you you have to like really really prove you can't just be in corpy, like, come on, it's Sjohn got come on that. She couldn't be more shiny, right, So yeah, you gotta prove that. But if you got those two parts,

and that's how they got Gotti. They they had one of his underbosses, Samy the Bull, Gravano turned states on him, um and uh, he informed on him. He said, yeah, I killed a lot of people under John Gotti's direction. And they also had a wire tap. I don't know if it was from Gravano or not, but they had wire taps of of Gotti like issuing orders to other people. So they're like, this guy's testimony plus this recording of God, he shows that he is the boss of this criminal enterprise.

Hence they got him on a racketeering charge and he died in prison. And I saw, also Chuck that the other families in New York didn't send any representatives to his funeral, which was surprising to me, like out of respect or whatever. Yeah, I guess out of disrespect, they

didn't send anybody. Yeah. This this is the part that's kind of funny to me because it's kind of a catch twenty two because I feel like, if you're at least in the movies, ah, Like, it seems like these people want it's for everyone to know who's in charge. And then what they get them on is the fact that they're in charge, which is what they deny in court, like I'm not in charge of anything, Like well, wait

a minute, I thought you were in charge of everything, right, right? Yeah, Well they they some of them have very famously like played you know, kind of like doddering out of their minds. Elderly men like who couldn't possibly, you know, tie their own shoe, let alone run a crime family. And they'll like play this in court even it's really something to see, um so rico cases for a little while and you

can still have a civil lawsuit. But they for a while they were um ordering triple damages if you were injured by a rico violation and so in the eighties, obviously this is going to lead to just a ground swell of attorneys coming after people trying to get that that triple money. And so they had to tighten that down a little bit. I think they put in a four year uh statute of limitations and um even the Catholic Church. They came after the Catholic Church with a

recoaed civil suit. Yeah, they did. They said that the all the way up to the pope. I think the pope was implicated in the civil suit that they was an organized criminal enterprise to obstruct justice and to keep um to avoid prosecution basically of of priests and others who had like sexually abused parishioners, which is I mean, I don't know how that one ever ended up. I don't know if it's still ongoing, do you. I'm not sure about that. Actually, we'll have to look that one up.

But that was that that's if it's not ongoing. It was fairly recent. There's some other recent ones too, UM that are far more recent than Gaudi UM that have nothing to do with the mob, like here in Atlanta, the Atlanta UM School's cheating scandal of two thousand fifteen. The people who organized that were indicted on racketeering charges and some of them got like twenty years in prison

for inances. Yeah. That was basically when they were saying, hey, we can get more federal government juice if we had better standardized test scorer, So why don't you go in

there and fledge these numbers a little bit? Yeah, and and even worse than that, when people said no, they would get fired, they would be uh, they would get like bad write ups and reviews, and they would miss out on like promotions and raises because it was the people at the very top were organizing this cheating scandal scandal UM and so like they were there was like it was a criminal enterprise. Basically they were trying to build the federal government out of money. I guess it's

what they went after, mind. But they got a bunch of people and apparently it's one of the biggest um criminal enterprises ever ever prosecuted. Right here, and that I mean, that just gets across like it doesn't have to be a mob Boston. The white collar public school teachers obviously not to be trusted. Um no, no, no, that's what the RICO Act has taught us. No, we're not saying that people, so uh, you got anything else? I got nothing else I got My hands are clean and I

didn't do anything. You can't prove nothing, copper. And since we said that, everybody short stuffing out stuff you should know. Is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.