For more than 50 years, prosecutors have relied on a powerful tool to take down people as varied as mafia capos, street gangs such as the Crips and the Bloods, and pharmaceutical executives accused of fueling the opioid crisis.
Now a prosecutor in Georgia is using the state’s version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO, to go after former President Donald Trump, who along with 18 of his allies was indicted Monday on charges of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.
One power of RICO is that it often allows a prosecutor to tell a sweeping story — not only laying out a set of criminal acts but identifying a group of people working toward a common goal, as part of an "enterprise,” to engage in patterns of illegal activities.