59 of
the 98
pages of the George
indictment are 60% of the total concerns.
Just one of the 41 charges listed
that's the RICO
a racketeer influenced
and corrupt organizations act.
It's a charge whose federal version
has been made
famous in TV and film
ironically by one of the 19
defendants, Rudy Giuliani,
who used it as a U.S.
district attorney
against the New York mob and others
in the 1980s.
Jason Carroll has more about it.
This is the 11th RICO indictment.
The racketeer influenced
and corrupt organization Act.
Rico for short
was originally passed
in 1970
as a tool to help
wipe out organized crime.
The verdict was like a bullet puncturing
John Gotti's
long time
image of invincibility from the law.
At the time,
it was dubbed the trial of the century,
the U.S.
versus John Gotti,
the boss of the Gambino
crime family, was found guilty today
on all 13 counts of murder
and racketeering.
In the early nineties,
prosecutors took down
Gotti and charged him with racketeering.
Extortion and murder.
The law also used to take down
the Lucchese family
and Mafia underlings
throughout organized crime.
RICO laws allowed prosecutors
to connect multiple crimes
among multiple defendants
to tell a story of corruption.
This case charges more Mafia bosses
in one indictment than any ever before.
The prosecutor credited
for using RICO to take on
the mob was a young, ambitious U.S.
attorney for the Southern District
of New York.
Rudy Giuliani
this is a great day for law enforcement,
but this was a bad day,
probably the worst for the Mafia.
And now, in an ironic twist.
Giuliani is among
those charged in the Georgia case,
now having to defend himself
against a charge he once prosecuted.
This is a ridiculous application
of the racketeering statute.
This is not meant for election disputes.
It's not just for people
who are in organized crime.
It's also for people
whose collars are white
and who may have Ivy League degrees.
And so that's what we've seen
in a variety of cases.
Rico sent shudders throughout Wall Street
after jurors
sent American
financier
Michael Milken to prison in 1990
for fraud
related to insider
trading and tax evasion.
And while RICO is a federal law,
many states,
including the state of Georgia,
have developed their own versions.
And prosecutors
have used these laws to prove
racketeering conspiracies.
In other words.
They string together
separate allegations of misconduct
committed by different people
towards a common goal or purpose
into a single indictment.
Fulton County, Georgia's D.A.
Fani Willis is well known for using RICO
as an assistant D.A.
She used the law
to prosecute a case
against Atlanta public school
educators accused of scheming
to inflate standardized test scores.
In her current position, she again
used Rico against rapper
Geoffrey Lamar Williams,
known as Young Thug
alleging he oversaw crimes
ranging from armed robbery to murder.
He pleaded not guilty.
His trial is still underway.
Legal experts
say the RICO case involving Trump
and the other 18 defendants
is faced with many legal challenges.
The length of the trial
is taxing on a jury.
And this will be a long trial.
And the jury instructions at the end
are hard to follow.
They're complicated.
And the jury will have
to really pay attention closely.
Jason Carroll, CNN, New York.
Joined now
by our chief law enforcement
and intelligence analyst, John Miller.
He's a former NYPD deputy commissioner
who covered organized crimes
demise in New York
under RICO as a reporter
back in the 1980s,
I was saying
I always expect to see you and do
see you often in those old mob films.
That's my Hitchcock. It's exactly.
So how in your experience
as a prosecutor, benefit from a RICO?
You know, the RICO law was written
by Robert Blakey, a professor at Notre
Dame Law School,
who was trying to tackle the problem
with,
you know, cases
involving organized crime,
the mob,
where the boss was insulated
from all the crimes
which were done by people at the bottom
or the middle.
And he said,
what about we charge the organization
So the organization is the enterprise.
And anybody who works
within the enterprise,
including those
who run it,
are equally guilty
for all the enterprises crimes.
So Rico gave prosecutors a way
to tell a story to a jury
that this is about a corrupt enterprise
and it's run by a boss.
And these henchmen do these things,
and they're all responsible.
And Giuliani, how did he use it?
I mean, was he
the first to rule against them?
That's a great question,
because, Anderson,
Robert Blakey was sitting there
writing this law trying to figure out
how to make it interesting
because it's complicated.
And he was, you know,
watching the Edward G.
Robinson movie,
Little Caesar, where in the end,
the screaming, is this the end of Rico?
And he said, Rico,
we'll call it getting really?
And then he had to fit the words
to actually fit the letter.
That's amazing.
You know, racketeering
influence, corrupt organization.
It sounds awkward because it is
the acronym came before the words.
But the point is,
it sat dormant for ten years from 1970
to the late 77 88 79 1980.
But Giuliani revolutionized it
because he took it and he said
we're going to charge the
bosses of all five organized crime
crime families of New York City.
The leadership of La
Cosa Nostra
who sit on a board of directors
called the commission
The Enterprise is going to be
the commission
that is the board of directors
for the Mafia.
And we're going to charge all the leaders
and not any of the little henchmen
or anything.
And he got convictions
across the board in that case.
And after that, people looked at Rico
and said,
this is a real tool
to take down
criminal organizations, cartels, gangs
and and applications
that are strange where you see
the corruption in the police department.
So the Key West
Police Department
was identified
as a racketeer an organization
and put out of business
in a RICO prosecution,
the Hells Angels, street gangs and so on.
Just very quickly,
there's this
person now
who's been charged in Texas
for making a threat against Judge
Tanya Judkins and others.
I guess
no surprise, given the climate
that we're in and the rhetoric
that is being thrown around.
So we've seen threats
to the Manhattan D.A.
since Alvin Bragg brought
the first Trump indictment,
threats to Fanny Willis in Atlanta
and even to the sheriff
and now to this federal judge
who was particularly
tough on Donald Trump
in the first hearing.
This arrest is basically
a a signal from the federal government
that if you make these threats,
we're going to find you,
we're going to track you down
and we're going to charge you.
It's a measure of behavior modification.
You can't get away with this
just by doing it
and thinking nobody's going to follow up.
John Miller, thank you so much.
Appreciate it.