Attorney General Loretta Lynch said Thursday that she is looking at “finding ways to bolster” crackdowns under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
In a back and forth at a senate appropriations subcommittee hearing with a lawmaker who represents a city seen as a hotbed for violent crime, Lynch noted that Justice Department Criminal Division head Leslie Caldwell and Deputy Chief for Policy and RICO Review Doug Crow “are committed to this as well.”
She also commented that she had spoken to the US Attorney in Chicago, Zach Fardon, about the matter, in response to questions from Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill.
Sen. Kirk had pressed Lynch about how to combat “crime gangs which are taking over some of our cities.” He lamented what he described as “about zero” RICO prosecutions going on Illinois out of more than 1,500 ongoing cases around the country.
Violent crime has plagued the residents of certain neighborhoods in Illinois’ and the Midwest’s largest metropolis. Its overall crime rate–at 21st in the country in 2012–is often, however, mistakenly thought of as the highest in the country.
Kirk had noted, in the appropriations subcommittee hearing, that “RICO is the particular statute that we should go with” in gang crackdowns. Lynch replied that she “could not agree with you more.”
“The importance of taking out the leadership of a gang, both from a law enforcement perspective and from a community perspective, cannot be overstated,” she said.
RICO prosecutions have been described by G. Robert Blakey–the law professor who wrote the first version of the racketeering statute signed into law by President Nixon in 1970—as a tool for officials targeting organized crime to “take all these people off the street at one time.”
Kirk also claimed that federal agents, under the US Marshals Service’s task force in Chicago, have arrested “about 344 people” in gang-busting activity, and goaded Lynch “very strongly” to work with Fardon.
In September 2013, the FBI indicted nine members of the south side-based Hobos Enterprise under the RICO Act (the defendants, the Feds noted in a press release, “used gang-related terminology, symbols, and gestures, including the slogan ‘Hobo or Nothing’ and a hand sign known as the ‘Hobo Horns.’”) In August, one of the men who was facing murder charges and the death penalty agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors. Capital punishment was taken off the table by the Justice Department in exchange.
In 2012, Illinois passed its own RICO Act. The legislation was described by Al-Jazeera as “arguably the strictest state law in the country aimed at gang violence.”
