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The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) was originally created to combat organized crime, but a legal loophole in the 1980s allowed it to be used in civil court cases. Attempts to reform the law have been made, but it is still widely cited in court cases due to its broad interpretation and the fact that successful plaintiffs can receive triple the judgment amount. The law covers a broad definition of racketeering and has been used in cases ranging from the Hell’s Angels to anti-abortion activists.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) was an act passed into federal law by the United States Congress in 1970 to restrict the practices of organized crime in the country. It was used solely for this purpose until the 1980s when a legal loophole in the legislation was discovered. This has enabled the RICO law to be asserted as a defense in a wide variety of civil court cases, including mail fraud, product defects, and infringement lawsuits.
When attorneys began using the act to file civil claims for grievances covering everything from bank foreclosures to child custody battles, Congress embarked on attempts to reform the legislation. In 1995, one element of these reform efforts was successful in limiting the scope of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. This was the passage of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, which removed the liability provision from RICO. securities fraud. However, the attempted reform failed to otherwise shut down the law’s wide use for civil claims in U.S. courts, and as of 2011, it is still widely cited in court cases. One of the main reasons for this is that RICO awards a successful plaintiff three times the judgment amount in dollars that they would otherwise receive if the court case were won.
One of the main reasons the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act has loopholes is in how it is interpreted due to the fact that it is broadly written. It is designed to understand the embryonic or solicitatory nature of organized crime, where behaviors such as extortion are usually preceded by activities that are only marginally illegal. This includes provisions where the organized crime structure itself can be prosecuted when network authorities can be prosecuted for ordering others to commit criminal acts.
The definition in the deed of continuing criminal enterprise, which was intended to target organized crime activities only, can also be used to legally define topics such as ongoing medical malpractice cases in a hospital setting by surgeons who have performed botched surgeries. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was also intended to primarily protect businesses that had been targeted by organized crime under section 1951, which regulates interference with business. This, coupled with the RICO law which defines a “person” as “any individual or entity that holds a legal or beneficial interest in property,” has opened it up to wide-scale abuse in lawsuits.
The RICO Act was specifically written to cover a very broad definition of racketeering, or organized illegal activity, precisely because the Mafia in the United States has been involved in so many different types of crimes. The act covers detailed cause-of-action provisions for types of interstate, institutional, and governmental fraud, such as bank fraud, mail fraud, and untaxed and unregulated trafficking in goods. Where such provisions concerned the abuse or theft of property, the violation of personal rights and the coercion of individuals and businesses, they were open to the interpretation of lawyers in civil cases that had nothing to do with Mafia activity. Beginning in 2011, the RICO law has been invoked in lawsuits ranging from the prosecution of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club and Catholic sex abuse cases to alleged crimes in Major League Baseball and against the picketing practice of anti-abortion activists. – Pro-Life abortion clinics.
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