Really interesting article about RICO
An Offer You Can’t Refuse? | How a Mob Statute Metastasized
PIPER FRENCH
For Shani Robinson, an activist and former educator in Atlanta, the ongoing racketeering trial against the rapper Young Thug and his record label YSL has occasioned a strong sense of déjà vu. Robinson has been ensnared in her own RICO — Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations — case for a decade now. Along the way, she has become a reluctant expert on the statute, but back when she was first charged in 2013, she remembers marveling: What, like Sons of Anarchy? “That was the only thing I knew about RICO,” she told me. “I was thinking, I know they don’t think I was part of some cartel.”
You could be forgiven for wondering what exactly Robinson, an idealistic first-grade teacher who had been at the job just three years when she was indicted for allegedly changing answers on standardized tests, has in common with Young Thug, a famous rapper and fashion maven who stands accused of participating in a criminal street gang. A comparison of the two indictments yields few answers. The alleged conspiracies: the Atlanta public school system is, well, a school system, but Fulton County prosecutors painted it as a criminal enterprise involved in the systematic manipulation of students’ test scores in order to garner bonuses from the state; YSL is a rap label, but prosecutors say it is also a gang involved in drug distribution, theft, and occasionally murder. The leaders: Superintendent Beverly Hall, alleged orchestrator of the cheating scheme, who created “unreasonable pressure” to hit testing targets that caused her employees to resort to fixing exams; Young Thug, born Jeffery Williams, who cofounded YSL and elevated its profile through his music. The charges: Robinson was accused of violating Georgia’s RICO Act, while Young Thug is merely charged with conspiracy to violate it; each possesses one count on top of that. Most striking, however, is what they have not been charged with: the indictments associate Robinson and Young Thug with a laundry list of other crimes allegedly committed by their respective “organizations,” of which neither has been directly accused. By the logic of the teacher case, “anyone who receives a paycheck from Atlanta public schools can be classified as a racketeer,” Robinson said. “A lot of people don’t realize how easily anyone could have been involved in this.”
RICO seems to be everywhere in the news lately, and if you are a fan of rap, HBO, or the films of Martin Scorsese, you’ll likely notice it everywhere in pop culture, too. Most people associate RICO with the Mob, for good reason: the statute is best known as the silver bullet that finally took down the New York Cosa Nostra in the 1980s, allowing federal prosecutors to connect crimes committed by its low-level henchmen to its uppermost echelon. And though the law’s exact scope and intent has always been contested, RICO’s principal author, the legal scholar G. Robert Blakey, maintains that it wasn’t crafted purely to target the Mafia, but rather a wide array of crimes that would otherwise slip beyond the reach of the state. In the half century since RICO became law, that aim has been realized beyond his wildest dreams.
Besides the aforementioned targets, the statute has been applied variously to labor unions, tobacco companies, MS-13, abortion protestors, the Hells Angels, corrupt politicians, white-collar criminals, R. Kelly, FIFA, NXIVM, and Major League Baseball. Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, who led the case against the Atlanta teachers and is currently prosecuting YSL, may be RICO’s number-one fan; in March, CNN reported that she was considering using the the statute against Donald Trump. As of this writing, there are whisperings that RICO may be deployed against the protesters opposing a police training facility known as Cop City in Atlanta as well.
It is hard to imagine that Blakey intended his act to apply to someone like Shani Robinson. He’s 88 years old now; when I emailed him, he responded from a smartphone inviting me to send a list of questions, then never replied, so we can’t know for sure. But many of his thoughts are a matter of public record. Blakey has said that he designed RICO as a score settler, “the slingshot the Davids of this world can use to have a fair fight with the Goliaths.” To him, the Cosa Nostra, which was siphoning money and resources off from practically every industry in New York City and could neutralize powerful enemies without repercussion, looked an awful lot like a Goliath. But because the legal system was so exclusively focused on individuals, whenever mobsters did get their day in court it was always the little guys, the ones who actually did the dirty work, who ended up taking the fall. The people with real power could afford to keep their hands clean. And Blakey wanted RICO to be marshaled against corporate bigwigs, too. “We don’t want one set of rules for people whose collars are blue or whose names end in vowels, and another set for those whose collars are white and have Ivy League diplomas,” he told Time in 1989.
In reality, RICO has for the most part exacerbated these imbalances, rather than rectifying them — more atom bomb than silver bullet. Its passage into law in 1970, just as Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on crime” gave way to Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs,” coincided with the start of a vast evolution in the criminal legal system. Over the past 50 years, that system has grown far more sophisticated, interconnected, and well-resourced. It reaches farther into people’s lives than ever before: not just within the thousands of prisons and jails and detention centers that span the country, but in predictive policing technology, court-ordered electronic supervision, social-media surveillance, and increasingly complex charges and cases. RICO has been both a metaphor for that transformation and an engine of it.
Like that of many well-educated strivers of his time, Blakey’s involvement in the major flashpoints of latter twentieth-century American history can appear almost Gumpian. He cut his teeth in Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Justice and later served on the House assassinations committee that retrod the Warren Commission’s steps, eventually writing two books arguing that JFK was killed by the Mob.
You can read the rest of the article here:
https://www.thedriftmag.com/an-offer-you-cant-refuse/
