I keep seeing references to RICO in the Trump Georgia stuff. What is it and how is it relevant to that case?
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) laws. These were originally made to go after organized crime bosses.
Crime bosses will have layers of minions directly committing crimes. This lets the boss say it wasn’t them. RICO provides laws to go after an entire criminal organization, including the bosses who direct the minions to commit crimes.
They are using the law in the Trump case because many of the direct crimes were done by minions. If they can prove that there was an organized series of crimes that were under the direction of boss Trump, they can hold him accountable for the crimes of the organization.
Thank you for the simplified explanation and for giving me the mental Image of Rudy Giuliani as a minion. (I can even hear him babbling in minionease…)
It’s a law that was used to bring down mob bosses. It makes it illegal to have other people commit crimes for you.
Hopefully that link works, the text of the law is fairly clear as far as legal texts go.
Basically RICO allows the government to go after the leaders of an organization for a pattern of criminal activity, rather than just going after the members for individual acts. It was created to make it easier to prosecute the Mafia and other organized crime.
I keep seeing references to RICO in The Sopranos. Was too lazy to google. Makes a lot of sense now, reading these explanations.