The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act is a law well-known enough to inspire T-shirts.
“A Freako Is Not a RICO” was the slogan emblazoned on shirts worn by supporters of the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs outside the Manhattan courthouse where jurors on Wednesday rejected the government’s arguments that his ritualized drug-fueled sex marathons, or “freak-offs,” were part of an organized lawbreaking operation.
But former prosecutors and other lawyers who have followed Mr. Combs’s case said his acquittal on a federal RICO conspiracy charge, which carried a potential sentence of life in prison, was an aberration and unlikely to discourage the authorities from continuing to rely on the 1970 statute.
The law is best known for helping dismantle criminal syndicates, like the Mafia, but has been employed against an ever-expanding variety of criminal groups, including violent street gangs and narcotics traffickers.
Since the #MeToo movement, RICO has been used to prosecute high-profile men for sexual abuse. In 2019, Keith Raniere, the leader of the Nxivm sex cult, was convicted in Brooklyn federal court on charges of conspiring in a racketeering enterprise that victimized women through sex trafficking. Two years later, R. Kelly, the R&B artist, was convicted in the same court on charges that he participated in a decades-long racketeering scheme to recruit women and underage girls for sex.
In addition to the racketeering conspiracy charge, Mr. Combs was acquitted on two counts of sex trafficking, which also carried potential life sentences. He was convicted on two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution; each carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.
Elizabeth Geddes, a former Brooklyn federal prosecutor who was part of the team that won Mr. Kelly’s conviction, said she did not think the Combs verdict would dissuade the government from deploying the statute.
“I think that it will be treated with the sort of one-offness — my technical term — that it is worth,” she said.
Federal and state prosecutors call RICO an essential tool against many kinds of malfeasance.
Between the 2018 and 2022 fiscal years, about 98 percent of RICO cases ended in a conviction, according to Department of Justice data. About 60 percent of the RICO investigations conducted in that period were of individual people.
The measure, signed into law with little fanfare by President Richard M. Nixon as part of a broader crime bill, has its roots in the decades-long effort to stop the mob. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor, Trump adviser and U.S. attorney in Manhattan, had a reputation-making triumph using RICO in the 1980s to prosecute members of a so-called commission that united the Mafia’s five families. It was one of the most notable uses of the law in its history.
But G. Robert Blakey, a University of Notre Dame law professor who helped draft the measure, has said it was never meant to be used only against mobsters.
“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 magazine in 1989.
What gives RICO its power, legal experts say, is that it allows prosecutors to pull together allegations of misconduct that may stretch back years, even beyond the statute of limitations, or to include state offenses or crimes committed in other jurisdictions.
Daniel C. Richman, a Columbia Law professor and former Manhattan federal prosecutor, said the government often uses RICO to knit a sprawling case into a single narrative — “a way to provide a legal framework for putting together a sustained pattern of behavior.”
But some defense lawyers, particularly after the Combs verdict, argue that prosecutors have used the statute to prop up weak cases and give the government an unfair advantage.
“The trial was the talk of the town for lots of reasons,” said Julia L. Gatto, a longtime Manhattan defense lawyer, noting Mr. Combs’s celebrity and the salacious allegations. But she said members of the defense bar who care about the law were also discussing what the acquittals mean, and “how they will impact, if at all, the way the government continues to prosecute cases.”
Arthur L. Aidala, a lawyer for Mr. Raniere, said he hoped Mr. Combs’s acquittals would have a “chilling effect” on the Justice Department’s use of RICO.
“This is a good example of how the government tried to use a tool in their arsenal and they misused it,” Mr. Aidala said.
Outside the federal courthouse on Wednesday, Mr. Combs’s lead lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, called the jury’s verdict “a victory of all victories” for his client.
“You saw that the Southern District of New York prosecutors came at him with all that they had,” Mr. Agnifilo said. “They’re not stopping. But one thing stands between all of us and a prison, and that is a jury of 12 citizens.”
Jay Clayton, the interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Ricky J. Patel, who heads the New York field office of Homeland Security Investigations, did not address the verdict in a statement issued Wednesday. But the statement made clear that the government would continue to aggressively use all available laws to pursue cases like Mr. Combs’s.
“Prosecuting sex crimes requires brave victims to come forward and tell their harrowing stories,” the statement said. “We and our law enforcement partners recognize the hardships victims endure and have prioritized a victim-centered approach to investigating and prosecuting these cases.”
Throughout an eight-week trial, prosecutors argued that Mr. Combs, 55, had coerced two women — both of whom he had engaged in yearslong relationships with — into taking part in sex marathons with hired men. Prosecutors had sought to prove that Mr. Combs used violence, threats and financial control to keep the women compliant; the women said they had worried he would humiliate them by leaking sex tapes.
The women — Casandra Ventura, who started dating Mr. Combs when she was a 21-year-old singer on his record label, and a woman known by the pseudonym Jane — testified for a combined 10 days. Prosecutors called other witnesses to testify about a pattern of violence against one of the women and about how the sex sessions were orchestrated.
Jurors also heard testimony about how the car of a romantic rival of Mr. Combs was set afire with a Molotov cocktail not long after the mogul flew into a jealous rage. (Mr. Combs’s lawyers have vigorously denied any involvement by their client in the arson.)
Moira Penza, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn who led the team that won Mr. Raniere’s 2019 conviction, said RICO remains a critical way to prosecute high-powered people who are able to commit sex crimes over long periods, often because they have an entourage of people who help recruit victims or cover up the deeds.
Ms. Penza said the issue of whether RICO was an appropriate charge in the Combs case “always has to be a question that you ask if you get an acquittal.
“But I still think we’re going to see other cases going forward where racketeering will be exactly the right charge,” she said.
Benjamin Weiser is a Times reporter covering the federal courts and U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and the justice system more broadly.
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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