More atom bomb than silver bullet
Piper French on RICO
In October 2022, when our editorial team first started talking about commissioning a piece on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the Atlanta rapper Young Thug had been in custody for five months. He had just been hit with another round of charges and denied bail. The indictment against him and over two dozen other associates of his label, YSL Records, read like a book report on rap by humorless nerds who’d never heard the music. The Fulton County prosecutors pitched YSL as a sprawling criminal enterprise, a claim they substantiated with a smattering of disparate allegations, blurry screenshots of Instagram posts, and lyrics close-read with breathless paranoia. “Defendant states ‘Red just like Elmo but I never fuckin giggle,’” they wrote, “an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.”
By the following summer, rumors had started circulating that Georgia might bring similar charges against the protesters opposing Atlanta’s proposed police training facility, Cop City. To many on the left, the two investigations looked like signal cases of prosecutorial overreach. The mainstream media, on the other hand, was infatuated with RICO, which Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was leveraging to investigate something more obviously mob-like: Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. When a grand jury finally indicted him and eighteen others, it was under the same statute Willis’s office had wielded against Young Thug.
RICO occupies a unique space in the public imagination: a rare federal law recognizable to anyone who’s seen a mafia movie, yet simultaneously inscrutable — a vague legal scaffolding connecting thirty-odd crimes from murder to mail fraud. In half a century, this Nixon-era legislation has been deployed, at both the federal and state level, against defendants as varied as the Hells Angels, the Los Angeles Police Department, Major League Baseball, Atlanta Public Schools, and the junk-bond financier Michael Milken.
No one was better suited to the task of demystifying this headspinning statute than Piper French, a veteran Drift contributor with a firm grasp on the complex stupidities of the American legal system. As French concluded in her essay, RICO was designed to be vague. Its architect, G. Robert Blakey, wanted to cast a wide enough net to catch the big fish with the small — not just the mafia henchmen who did all the dirty work, but also the bosses who ordered them to do it. And yet, “everything that made RICO useful against the Mob makes it ripe for abuse in the contexts in which it is now being applied,” French wrote. It became “more atom bomb than silver bullet.”
As RICO enters its 56th year on the books this fall, French’s piece looks more and more prescient. While Young Thug was subjected to an error-ridden trial, the longest in Georgia history, Trump has been granted near-total immunity by the country’s highest court. An attempt to use RICO to send dozens to prison for protesting Cop City was stymied by a judge in December after a years-long legal battle, but the president has since publicly toyed with the idea of charging other protesters under the act. With mainstream legal opinion set against this strategy, at least for now, the administration has recently found success using Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), issued last year, which expansively redefines the criteria for prosecution under anti-terrorism law. Eight people were sentenced last month to decades in federal prison for their participation in a protest outside a Texas immigration detention facility at which one activist discharged a firearm. Another defendant, who did not participate in the protest, received a thirty-year sentence on the grounds that he transported zines, which he did not write, that discussed anarchist ideas; his wife got seventy years for printing them.
NSPM-7 has created a regime of guilt by association that takes the logic of RICO to new extremes. The result is a legal system that has become something like the opposite of what Blakey once hoped RICO would create. “We don’t want one set of rules for people whose collars are blue or whose names end in vowels,” Blakey said in 1989, “and another set for those whose collars are white and have Ivy League diplomas.” French’s essay illuminates the history that brought us to this point and supplies an apt parable about the current president, who was endorsed in 2024 by, of all people, Gambino underboss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano. “I’m gonna call him a gangster,” said the man behind at least nineteen known murders. “We need a gangster.”
Sincerely,
Tarpley Hitt
An Offer You Can’t Refuse | How a Mob Statute Metastasized
PIPER FRENCH
The story of RICO is the story of the American criminal legal system’s metamorphosis; the two can’t be separated from one another.
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Image credit: Emma Kumer
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