July 21, 2021 • 12 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you 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 guests but real Yeah, not like you blow
up doll guest producers. Now they're well, they're real in
a I guess a material wave, that's it. Yeah, something
(00:25):
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 pretty pretty good. That was all you mean.
She came up with that one. That was good, very nice.
And I love a good obscure Halloween costume. Yes, so,
(00:47):
speaking of obscure Halloween costumes, Chuck, you could do worse
than dressing up as John Gotti the Teflon don, couldn't
you have? You got the hair for it, you, Yeah,
that's the main thing. You gotta 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 to get more,
(01:10):
just like, you know, almost unprovoked violence to to the
to the end of as a means to the end
of gaining money and power. Yeah, I mean that's our generations,
like real life Vito Corleone type stuff. Yeah. Yeah, he
was like kind of, as far as I can tell,
like the last of the real mob bosses exactly. He
(01:35):
went down. Man, we're gonna get like a letter from
the Italian American Anti Defamation. Yeah, they're gonna say, dear
Chuck Gobbagon isn't a thing, right, So yeah, I mean
he he went down in and I would say that
golden Age, the heyday of mafios in the United States
was in the sixties. But the way he went down
(01:56):
was thanks to uh a law that got asked about
twenty 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 how the Rico Act works. Yeah, it's I mean,
the Rico Act is something that if you are in
(02:19):
our generation or even a little younger, and you've watched
any sopranos or any sort of modern day Mafia movie.
You're gonna hear RICO thrown around a lot, because that
is the 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, it's
(02:40):
you know, a racket is like you hear in those
movies on the street, like you got a numbers racket
or 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, Yeah, racket and racketeering. If they just
(03:01):
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 um, you know, to white collar
crime as well, and all of that would be considered
(03:22):
organized crime. That's the point. It's some people working carrying
out business and the business is illegal. Um, 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 is managing a situation or
(03:48):
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,
(04:08):
you know, stabbing someone in a trunk in a hayfield,
Joe Pecci 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
(04:28):
could get the guy who was stabbing the guy in
the trunk in the hay field, they could get him
for murder, no problem, you know what I mean, But
they couldn't get the person who was genuinely at its
core responsible for that murder, the person who was organizing
this enterprise or managing the enterprise. And that's what the
Recoact is all about, is creating a law that the
FEDS used to go after the c suite level people
(04:51):
in organized crime, whether it's a legitimate business where like
though it's white collar crime, or whether it's organized crime
family like a carteller, cind kidder, mafia, mafia. Boy. That
that stuff was just rolling off your tongue until the
very end, until the end I clarked it up. That's
the that's the rarely used second definition of Clark, where
(05:13):
you just completely screw something beautiful up at the end.
It's not like a great thing where you give someone
a candy bar, right, Clark bar. If you clarksonone at
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 and what it isn't right after this. That's why
s game a little bit that you should know, why
(05:36):
game should knows but Clark alright, so we're back. The
(06:00):
first thing about the R I c O 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
reco Act in your racketeering. It's um. It is broad
(06:22):
language wise, but the Supreme Court and appeals courts have
all come together to sort of nine, Yeah, they did.
They sort of narrowed 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
(06:42):
use the reco 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, fifty keys of cocaine or something, there's a
lot they got that person on that on that broken
(07:02):
law like that crime. Uh, 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,
(07:26):
and it wasn't just like I think if it's just
like one murder and and it's not a racketeering thing,
that'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,
(07:50):
who was making those calls and directing that operation. Yeah,
you you have to like really really prove you can't
just be in corpy, like, come on, it's Sjohn got
come on that. She couldn't be more shiny, right, So yeah,
you gotta prove that. But if you got those two parts,
and that's how they got Gotti. They they had one
(08:12):
of his underbosses, Samy the Bull, Gravano turned states on him,
um and uh, he informed on him. He said, yeah,
I killed a lot of people under John Gotti's direction.
And they also had a wire tap. I don't know
if it was from Gravano or not, but they had
wire taps of of Gotti like issuing orders to other people.
So they're like, this guy's testimony plus this recording of God,
(08:35):
he 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, 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
(08:55):
kind of funny to me because it's kind of a
catch twenty two because I feel like, if you're at
least in the movies, ah, 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,
like I'm not in charge of anything, Like well, wait
a minute, I thought you were in charge of everything, right, right? Yeah,
(09:17):
Well they they 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, you know, tie their
own shoe, let alone run a crime family. And they'll
like play this in court even it's really something to see,
um so rico cases for a little while and you
(09:39):
can still have a civil lawsuit. But they for a
while they were um ordering triple damages if you were
injured by a rico violation and so in the eighties,
obviously this is going to lead to just a ground
swell of attorneys coming after people trying to get that
that triple money. And so they had to tighten that
down a little bit. I think they put in a
(10:00):
four year uh statute of limitations and um even the
Catholic Church. They came after the Catholic Church with a
recoaed 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 was
an organized criminal enterprise to obstruct justice and to keep
(10:21):
um to avoid prosecution basically of 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 that's if it's not ongoing. It
was fairly recent. There's some other recent ones too, UM
(10:42):
that are far more recent than Gaudi UM that have
nothing to do with the mob, like here in Atlanta,
the Atlanta UM School's cheating scandal of two thousand fifteen.
The people who organized that were indicted on racketeering charges
and some of them got like twenty years in prison
for inances. Yeah. That was basically when they were saying, hey,
(11:03):
we can get more federal government juice if we had
better standardized test scorer, So why don't you go in
there and fledge these numbers a little bit? Yeah, and
and even worse than that, when people said no, they
would get fired, they would be uh, 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
(11:25):
scandal UM 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 it's
what they went after, mind. But they got a bunch
of people and apparently it's one of the biggest um
criminal enterprises ever ever prosecuted. Right here, and that I mean,
that just gets across like it doesn't have to be
(11:47):
a mob Boston. The white collar public school teachers obviously
not to be trusted. Um no, no, no, that's what
the RICO Act has taught us. No, we're not saying
that people, so uh, 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
(12:08):
we said that, everybody short stuffing out stuff you should know.
Is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, you 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 guests but real Yeah, not like you blow
up doll guest producers. Now they're well, they're real in
a I guess a material wave, that's it. Yeah, something
(00:25):
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 pretty pretty good. That was all you mean.
She came up with that one. That was good, very nice.
And I love a good obscure Halloween costume. Yes, so,
(00:47):
speaking of obscure Halloween costumes, Chuck, you could do worse
than dressing up as John Gotti the Teflon don, couldn't
you have? You got the hair for it, you, Yeah,
that's the main thing. You gotta 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 to get more,
(01:10):
just like, you know, almost unprovoked violence to to the
to the end of as a means to the end
of gaining money and power. Yeah, I mean that's our generations,
like real life Vito Corleone type stuff. Yeah. Yeah, he
was like kind of, as far as I can tell,
like the last of the real mob bosses exactly. He
(01:35):
went down. Man, we're gonna get like a letter from
the Italian American Anti Defamation. Yeah, they're gonna say, dear
Chuck Gobbagon isn't a thing, right, So yeah, I mean
he he went down in and I would say that
golden Age, the heyday of mafios in the United States
was in the sixties. But the way he went down
(01:56):
was thanks to uh a law that got asked about
twenty 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 how the Rico Act works. Yeah, it's I mean,
the Rico Act is something that if you are in
(02:19):
our generation or even a little younger, and you've watched
any sopranos or any sort of modern day Mafia movie.
You're gonna hear RICO thrown around a lot, because that
is the 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, it's
(02:40):
you know, a racket is like you hear in those
movies on the street, like you got a numbers racket
or 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, Yeah, racket and racketeering. If they just
(03:01):
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 um, you know, to white collar
crime as well, and all of that would be considered
(03:22):
organized crime. That's the point. It's some people working carrying
out business and the business is illegal. Um, 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 is managing a situation or
(03:48):
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,
(04:08):
you know, stabbing someone in a trunk in a hayfield,
Joe Pecci 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
(04:28):
could get the guy who was stabbing the guy in
the trunk in the hay field, they could get him
for murder, no problem, you know what I mean, But
they couldn't get the person who was genuinely at its
core responsible for that murder, the person who was organizing
this enterprise or managing the enterprise. And that's what the
Recoact is all about, is creating a law that the
FEDS used to go after the c suite level people
(04:51):
in organized crime, whether it's a legitimate business where like
though it's white collar crime, or whether it's organized crime
family like a carteller, cind kidder, mafia, mafia. Boy. That
that stuff was just rolling off your tongue until the
very end, until the end I clarked it up. That's
the that's the rarely used second definition of Clark, where
(05:13):
you just completely screw something beautiful up at the end.
It's not like a great thing where you give someone
a candy bar, right, Clark bar. If you clarksonone at
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 and what it isn't right after this. That's why
s game a little bit that you should know, why
(05:36):
game should knows but Clark alright, so we're back. The
(06:00):
first thing about the R I c O 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
reco Act in your racketeering. It's um. It is broad
(06:22):
language wise, but the Supreme Court and appeals courts have
all come together to sort of nine, Yeah, they did.
They sort of narrowed 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
(06:42):
use the reco 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, fifty keys of cocaine or something, there's a
lot they got that person on that on that broken
(07:02):
law like that crime. Uh, 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,
(07:26):
and it wasn't just like I think if it's just
like one murder and and it's not a racketeering thing,
that'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,
(07:50):
who was making those calls and directing that operation. Yeah,
you you have to like really really prove you can't
just be in corpy, like, come on, it's Sjohn got
come on that. She couldn't be more shiny, right, So yeah,
you gotta prove that. But if you got those two parts,
and that's how they got Gotti. They they had one
(08:12):
of his underbosses, Samy the Bull, Gravano turned states on him,
um and uh, he informed on him. He said, yeah,
I killed a lot of people under John Gotti's direction.
And they also had a wire tap. I don't know
if it was from Gravano or not, but they had
wire taps of of Gotti like issuing orders to other people.
So they're like, this guy's testimony plus this recording of God,
(08:35):
he 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, 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
(08:55):
kind of funny to me because it's kind of a
catch twenty two because I feel like, if you're at
least in the movies, ah, 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,
like I'm not in charge of anything, Like well, wait
a minute, I thought you were in charge of everything, right, right? Yeah,
(09:17):
Well they they 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, you know, tie their
own shoe, let alone run a crime family. And they'll
like play this in court even it's really something to see,
um so rico cases for a little while and you
(09:39):
can still have a civil lawsuit. But they for a
while they were um ordering triple damages if you were
injured by a rico violation and so in the eighties,
obviously this is going to lead to just a ground
swell of attorneys coming after people trying to get that
that triple money. And so they had to tighten that
down a little bit. I think they put in a
(10:00):
four year uh statute of limitations and um even the
Catholic Church. They came after the Catholic Church with a
recoaed 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 was
an organized criminal enterprise to obstruct justice and to keep
(10:21):
um to avoid prosecution basically of 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 that's if it's not ongoing. It
was fairly recent. There's some other recent ones too, UM
(10:42):
that are far more recent than Gaudi UM that have
nothing to do with the mob, like here in Atlanta,
the Atlanta UM School's cheating scandal of two thousand fifteen.
The people who organized that were indicted on racketeering charges
and some of them got like twenty years in prison
for inances. Yeah. That was basically when they were saying, hey,
(11:03):
we can get more federal government juice if we had
better standardized test scorer, So why don't you go in
there and fledge these numbers a little bit? Yeah, and
and even worse than that, when people said no, they
would get fired, they would be uh, 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
(11:25):
scandal UM 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 it's
what they went after, mind. But they got a bunch
of people and apparently it's one of the biggest um
criminal enterprises ever ever prosecuted. Right here, and that I mean,
that just gets across like it doesn't have to be
(11:47):
a mob Boston. The white collar public school teachers obviously
not to be trusted. Um no, no, no, that's what
the RICO Act has taught us. No, we're not saying
that people, so uh, 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
(12:08):
we said that, everybody short stuffing out stuff you should know.
Is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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