Dec 26 2006
CREATOR EXPECTS MOB STATUTE TO SURVIVE RECENT LOSSES
NEW YORK - For more than two decades, the federal RICO law was a pitiless tool in the fight against organized crime - corralling, convicting and incarcerating a long string of mob bosses once considered untouchable.
But in 2006, federal prosecutors lost a pair of major RICO cases: Second-generation mob boss John A. “Junior” Gotti walked after three mistrials, and the most corrupt officers in NYPD history - “Mafia Cops” Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa - had their convictions overturned.
Are these nothing more than legal oddities? Or, mother of mercy, is this the end of RICO - the statute that allows prosecutors to jail mobsters for decades by tying them to as few as two crimes linked to a criminal enterprise?
“It’s not the end,” insists Notre Dame law professor G. Robert Blakey, the creator of the law. “A good RICO is virtually impossible to defend.”
In both cases, defense attorneys used the statute of limitations to fend off the feds. Gotti’s lawyer employed a withdrawal defense, claiming his client had quit the mob more than five years before his indictment, putting him beyond the reach of RICO.
Attorneys for Eppolito and Caracappa argued the defendants’ crimes while on the payrolls of both the NYPD and a murderous Luchese family boss had occurred long before the five-year statute of limitations expired. Those crimes between 1986-90 included participation in eight murders; a federal jury found both men guilty.
A federal judge - who had just three weeks earlier said the two detectives had committed “the most heinous series of crimes ever tried in this courthouse” - agreed with the defense lawyers, and reversed the cops’ convictions in June.
Defense attorney Edward Hayes was part of the legal team that persuaded U.S. District Court Judge Jack B. Weinstein to overturn the convictions of the “Mafia Cops.” And Hayes believes their triumph could provide a blueprint for other defense lawyers: “Bruce [Cutler] and I made a very good team. … It’s likely other lawyers [would] use us as a model.”
Other attorneys, from both sides of the aisle, disagree.
“I don’t think the statute of limitations defense is terribly appealing to juries, because there’s almost an implicit statement - even if the defense attorney is careful - that ‘I did it, but …’,” said Jim Walden, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice.
“I think what you had were some talented lawyers and cases with problematic cooperators,” continued Walden, who spent nine years as an assistant U.S. attorney. “The arguments were successful, but I don’t think it’s a trend.”
Defense lawyer Ron Kuby agreed that there’s no “huge lesson here for the defense.”
Blakey has never explained the origin of his acronym for the law known officially as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act. But it’s often theorized the name was chosen in homage to the 1931 mob flick “Little Caesar,” where Edward G. Robinson played a crook named Rico Bandello whose dying plea to “mother of mercy” is cinematic legend.
The law was initially designed not only to take down the mob, but also to target white-collar criminals. RICO was passed in 1970 - and then largely ignored for years by shortsighted prosecutors.
It wasn’t until 1985 that federal Prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani seized on the RICO act as a way to indict the Mafia’s ruling Commission, the heads of New York’s five families.
Convictions came back against Genovese crime family boss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Colombo boss Carmine “Junior” Persico, and Luchese boss Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, along with five other top-level mobsters.
More devastating for the mob were the stiff penalties with RICO: 20 years, minimum. A parade of mobsters became government witnesses, trading information for reduced sentences or a walk.
The racketeering cases also allowed authorities to use new informants to win convictions for ancient crimes, as long as prosecutors could demonstrate an ongoing enterprise. In the case of La Cosa Nostra families, that was rarely a problem.
Walden successfully prosecuted Bonanno family consigliere Anthony Spero for racketeering in 2001 - a charge that included three murders dating back as far as a decade.
A RICO indictment “was an enormous advantage,” he said. “A couple of cooperators and surveillance got you pretty far down the road. It produced spectacular successes, but the failures this year were spectacular, too.”
| Posted on Tue, Dec. 26, 2006 By Larry McShane - The Associated Press http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/news/nation/16319811.htm
