Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: RICO Act

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

If you’re even passingly interested in mobsters you’ve heard of the RICO Act, but most people don’t know how it actually works. Make your Goodfellas fandom more well-rounded with this explainer episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey and welcome to the short stuff.

I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's lurking in the background sitting in for guest producer, but real producer Dave and this is short stuff. Guest but real. Yeah. Not like the blow up doll guest producers. Well, they're real in a, I guess a material way, but that's it. Yeah. Sometimes emotional.

I guess. You could get wrapped up in that kind of thing, I suppose. I've seen Lars and the real girl. You dressed up as that for Halloween. Yes. Yeah, that was a pretty good one. That was all you. She came up with that one.

It was good. Very nice. I love a good obscure Halloween costume. Yes. So speaking of obscure Halloween costumes, Chuck, you could do worse than dressing up as John Gotti, the Teflon Don, couldn't you? Not bad. If you got the hair for it.

Yeah, that's the main thing. You got to have the hair, but you also have to have the attitude, you know? Yeah. Like I can do whatever I want and nothing sticks. Yeah, that's close. That's pretty close. I was thinking more just like almost unprovoked violence to the end of, as a means to the end of gaining money and power.

Yeah. I mean, there are generations like real life, veto Corleone type stuff. Yeah. Yeah. He was like kind of as far as I can tell, like the last of the real mob bosses. The real Gabba Goons? Exactly. He went down, man, we're going to get like a letter from the Italian-American Anti-Defamation

League. Yeah, they're going to say, dear Chuck, Gabba Goon isn't a thing. Right. Yeah, I mean, he went down in like 1991 and I would say that Golden Age, the heyday of Mafioso in the United States was in the 60s. But the way he went down was thanks to a law that got passed about 20 years prior to him going down called the RICO Act, which is one of those things that like everybody has heard of, but it doesn't necessarily know exactly how it works, you know what I mean?

And that's what we're here to explain, Chuck, how the RICO Act works. Yeah, I mean, the RICO Act is something that if you are in our generation or even a little younger and you've watched any Sopranos or any sort of modern day mafia movie, you're going to hear RICO thrown around a lot because that is kind of the only thing that they found that has teeth with these cases. It stands for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. And you know, a racket is like you hear in those movies on the street, like you got a numbers racket or a protection racket.

And I just think it's kind of funny that racketeering became the official word, you know? I know. And it's also, it made the whole thing way more muddy than it has to be, I think, you know what I mean? The use of that word? Yeah, racket and racketeering. If they just call it like the organized crime act, it would be a perfect umbrella that would be far more understandable because a lot of people do think of rackets as like a numbers

racket or a prostitution ring or something like underworld, you know what I mean? And RICO has been extended successfully to boardrooms and, you know, to white collar crime as well. And all of that would be considered organized crime. That's the point. It's some people working, carrying out business, and the business is illegal. It's using illegal activities to gain revenue, to gain income. That's a racket.

And it doesn't just have to be something like shady and underworld like a numbers racket. Right. And racketeering specifically is anytime a person is managing a situation or an enterprise or a company or a corporation or a crime family where there is a pattern of activities like this going on. And people like John Gotti and so many before him, you know, they called him Teflon Don for a reason because nothing would stick. Like they would just, they weren't the trigger people.

They weren't the person, you know, stabbing someone in a trunk in a hayfield, Joe Pesci style. Man, that was violent. Or carrying out the numbers game or having the meeting about the protection sometimes. They were so high level that they didn't actually commit technically any of these crimes personally. No. So they could get the guy who was stabbing the guy in the trunk in the hayfield. They could get him for murder, no problem.

You know what I mean? Right. They were genuinely at its core responsible for that murder. The person who was organizing this enterprise or managing the enterprise, and that's what the RICO Act is all about, is creating a law that the feds use to go after the C-suite level people in organized crime. Whether it's a legitimate business where like though it's white collar crime or whether it's an organized crime family like a cartel or a syndicate or a mafia mafia boy that stuff

was just rolling off your tongue until the very end. Till the end. I clarked it up. That's the rarely used second definition of Clark where you just completely screw something beautiful up at the end. Yeah. It's not like a great thing where you give someone a candy bar. Right.

Or a Clark bar. If you clark someone a Clark bar, I think the universe would fold in on it. All right. I think we should take a break and we'll talk a little bit more about what the RICO Act is and what it isn't right after this. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn?

So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. You might think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so we're back. The first thing about the RICO RICO Act is that we should say is that I think a lot of

people are under the impression that they built out the RICO Act to make it super easy just to go after like a crime boss. And all you have to do is basically say, you know, it's the RICO Act in your racketeering. It's, um, it is broad language wise, but the Supreme Court and appeals courts have all come together to sort of, um, nine. Yeah, they did. They sort of narrow down that language to make it, um, not tougher, but just a little more specific.

Yeah. But I think in doing so, they definitely did make it tougher, um, and the feds apparently use a racketeering charge or they use the RICO Act when there's, when there's nothing else. Like if they have somebody caught red-handed, you know, directly ordering a murder or committing the murder or delivering, you know, 50 keys of cocaine or something, which is a lot. That's a lot of keys. They've got that person on that, on that broken law, like that crime, uh, they, they don't

need anything else. The RICO, they go to when there's nothing else, but they have some sort of evidence that that person is directing, calling the shots of this business, where those kind of activities are being carried out. Right. And it's really sort of a two-part, um, proving process. You have to prove that there is a pattern of this stuff going on and it wasn't just like, I think if it's just like one murder and then it's not a, a racketeering thing,

it's just hiring somebody or directing someone to carry out a murder, but you have to prove that it's a pattern of criminal activity within an organization. And then you need to prove, like really, really prove that Gotti, or whoever it is, is the person who was managing that stuff, who was making those calls and directing that operation. Yeah. You have to like really, really prove you can't just be in court and be like, come on, look at this guy's suit. This John guy, come on.

Right. That suit couldn't be more shiny. Right. So, yeah, you got to prove that. But if you got those two parts and that's how they got Gotti, they, uh, they had a, uh, one of his underbosses, Sammy the Bull Gravano, turned states on him. Um, and, uh, What a rat.

He informed on him. He said, yeah, I killed a lot of people under John Gotti's direction and they also had a wiretap. I don't know if it was from Gravano or not, but they had wiretaps of Gotti like issuing orders to other people. So they're like, this guy's testimony plus this recording of Gotti shows that he is the boss of this criminal enterprise. Hence they got him on a racketeering charge and he died in prison.

And I saw also Chuck that the other families in New York didn't send any representatives to his funeral, which was surprising to me. Oh, like out of respect or whatever. Yeah. I guess out of disrespect, they didn't send anybody. Yeah. This, this is the part that's kind of funny to me because it's kind of a catch 22 because I feel like if you're at least in the movies, uh, all like it seems like these people want

it's for everyone to know who's in charge. And then what they get them on is the fact that they're in charge, which is what they deny in court. Right. Like I'm not in charge of anything. Well, wait a minute. I thought you were in charge of everything. Right.

Right. Yeah. Well, they, they, well, some of them have very famously like played, you know, kind of like doddering out of their minds, elderly men, like who couldn't possibly. Yeah. You know, tie their own shoe, let alone run a crime family and they'll like play this in court even. Yeah.

It's really something to see. So Rico cases for a little while, and you can still have a civil lawsuit, but they for a while they were ordering triple damages if you were injured by a Rico violation. And so in the 80s, obviously this is going to lead to just a groundswell of attorneys coming after people trying to get that triple money. And so they had to tighten that down a little bit. I think they put in a four year statute of limitations. And even the Catholic church, they came after the Catholic church with the Rico civil suit.

Yeah, they did. They said that the, all the way up to the Pope, I think the Pope was implicated in the civil suit that they, there was an organized criminal enterprise to obstruct justice and to keep, to avoid prosecution, basically, of priests and others who had like sexually abused parishioners, which is, I mean, I don't know how that one ever ended up. I don't know if it's still ongoing, do you? I'm not sure about that actually. We'll have to look that one up.

But that was, that's, if it's not ongoing, it was fairly recent. There's some other recent ones too that are far more recent than Goddy that have nothing to do with the mob. Right. And then in Atlanta, the Atlanta school's cheating scandal of 2015, the people who organized that were indicted on racketeering charges and some of them got like 20 years in prison for sentences. Yeah.

That was basically when they were saying, hey, we can get more federal government juice if we have better standardized test scores. So why don't you go in there and fudge these numbers a little bit? Yeah. And even worse than that, when people said no, they would get fired, they would be, they would get like bad write-ups and reviews and they would miss out on like promotions and raises because it was the people at the very top were organizing this cheating scandal. And so like they were, there was like, it was a criminal enterprise basically.

They were trying to build the federal government out of money, I guess is what they went after them on. But they got a bunch of people and apparently it's one of the biggest criminal enterprises ever prosecuted. Wow. Right here. I mean, it just gets across like it doesn't have to be a mob boss. It can be white collar, public school teachers, obviously not to be trusted.

No, no, no. That's what the RICO Act has taught us. No, we're not saying that people. So are you got anything else? I got nothing else. I got my hands are clean and I didn't do anything. You can't prove nothing copper. And since we said that everybody, short stuff is out.

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