"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations"

43 results back to index


pages: 455 words: 138,716

The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap by Matt Taibbi

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, butterfly effect, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, company town, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Edward Snowden, ending welfare as we know it, fake it until you make it, fixed income, forensic accounting, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, information retrieval, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Michael Milken, naked short selling, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, regulatory arbitrage, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, social contagion, telemarketer, too big to fail, two and twenty, War on Poverty

One former prosecutor I spoke to joked that he could have rolled any of a hundred different robo-signers all the way up to the CEO level. Others insist that the mortgage scandal was precisely the kind of difficult-to-prosecute, highly organized scam that the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (or RICO) laws were designed for. In fact, there was one mortgage fraud case in which federal prosecutors did employ the RICO laws—but in an awesomely telling detail, the main target was a black street gangster named Darnell “D-Bell” Bell, who later pleaded guilty to ripping off banks and mortgage lenders by buying homes with no money down using straw buyers.

One was that it was where Crum & Forster was located. Second, a corporate citizen based in New Jersey like Crum & Forster had a perfect legal avenue to pursue—a private racketeering claim. Unlike the state of New York, which doesn’t allow such lawsuits, New Jersey allows plaintiffs to file lawsuits under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute. A RICO suit is a powerful tool for a company in Fairfax’s position, because it theoretically prevents short sellers from dumping the whole of their legal responsibility on a low-level middleman like Contogouris. Under RICO, the leaders of a criminal syndicate are responsible for the actions of the people they hire to do their dirty work.

Throughout the Fairfax case, this seemed to be the main preoccupation with the judges. Were the Fairfax lawyers engaged in some elaborate ambulance-chasing effort, trying to use the civil code of the state of New Jersey as a weapon to take down their target? The fact that the democratically elected state legislature of New Jersey had in fact passed a tough civil RICO law for, quite possibly, precisely this sort of case seemed secondary to the possibility that someone was trying to use a New Jersey judge to suck money out of a bunch of New York hedge funds. It was obvious that the latter possibility greatly troubled Hansbury as he repeatedly interrogated Bowe. “Isn’t that a significant policy difference,” he asked, “that in New York you can’t bring a private RICO claim, but in New Jersey you can?”


pages: 423 words: 92,798

No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane F. McAlevey

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, antiwork, call centre, clean water, collective bargaining, emotional labour, feminist movement, gentrification, hiring and firing, immigration reform, independent contractor, informal economy, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Naomi Klein, new economy, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, precariat, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, The Chicago School, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Court of Appeals ordered the company to cease and desist on more than an alphabet’s worth of listed illegal behavior, ten months after a third ICE immigration raid that led over 2,000 Latino workers to stage a wildcat strike and shut the plant down as they quit en masse in a defiant action,58 Smithfield filed a racketeering lawsuit against the union and the union’s allies, opening up yet another new legal front on which to defeat the workers. Smithfield had found an unusual angle, deploying a set of laws originally devised to prosecute organized crime and the Mafia: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. The company asserted that the national consumer boycott of their products amounted to “economic warfare.”59 Smithfield further alleged that the union had mounted this war in an attempt to “extort” from the company a card check and neutrality agreement. With the help of discovery and subpoenas, the union deduced that the plan had been hatched by Richard Berman of the website The Center for Union Facts, which later became a leading proponent of the effort, begun in 2013, to legally label worker centers and other community-based organizations essentially as “unions.”

See citizens/public public sector, 72–73, 219n65 race in Chicago’s education reform, 127 in CIO compared to AFL, 30–31 of CORE candidates, 115 homecare worker unionization and, 79 incarceration and, 45 LeDuff’s writings on, 157, 163 of MRNY staff, 192t, 230n29 New Left and, 49 strikes and, 20, 86 in union and SMO membership, 27, 28, 49, 191, 199, 211, 230n29 of women actors, 20, 27, 49, 86, 191, 199, 211 workers aligning across, barriers, 165, 167–68 racism, 7, 12, 31, 204 in CPS, 103, 111 at Smithfield Foods, 24, 157–58, 162–63, 165 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 172–75 rallies, 118–19, 134–35, 136 Rathke, Wade, 122, 223n46 Rauner, Bruce, 200 Reagan, Ronald, 106, 146–47 recruitment, 58–60, 181 Reece, Tom, 105, 106–7 religious leaders Alinsky’s use of, 42–43 community collaboration and, 29 CTU working with, 135 in Smithfield Foods unionization fight, 164–65, 166–68, 177 Research Associates of America, 174, 226n22 Restoring the Power of Unions (Getman), 50, 153 Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union (RWDSU), 184–85, 189–90 Reuther brothers, 31, 52 Reveille for Radicals (Alinsky), 43, 47 RICO.

See citizens/public public sector, 72–73, 219n65 race in Chicago’s education reform, 127 in CIO compared to AFL, 30–31 of CORE candidates, 115 homecare worker unionization and, 79 incarceration and, 45 LeDuff’s writings on, 157, 163 of MRNY staff, 192t, 230n29 New Left and, 49 strikes and, 20, 86 in union and SMO membership, 27, 28, 49, 191, 199, 211, 230n29 of women actors, 20, 27, 49, 86, 191, 199, 211 workers aligning across, barriers, 165, 167–68 racism, 7, 12, 31, 204 in CPS, 103, 111 at Smithfield Foods, 24, 157–58, 162–63, 165 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 172–75 rallies, 118–19, 134–35, 136 Rathke, Wade, 122, 223n46 Rauner, Bruce, 200 Reagan, Ronald, 106, 146–47 recruitment, 58–60, 181 Reece, Tom, 105, 106–7 religious leaders Alinsky’s use of, 42–43 community collaboration and, 29 CTU working with, 135 in Smithfield Foods unionization fight, 164–65, 166–68, 177 Research Associates of America, 174, 226n22 Restoring the Power of Unions (Getman), 50, 153 Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union (RWDSU), 184–85, 189–90 Reuther brothers, 31, 52 Reveille for Radicals (Alinsky), 43, 47 RICO. See Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act risk, 4, 16, 30, 36–37, 208 Rivas, Amador, 179 Rogers, Ray, 50 Rolf, David, 73, 77–80, 81, 86, 95, 98 Rosenblum, Jonathan, 96–97 Rosenfeld, Jake, 68, 219n65 Ross, Fred, 50 Rosselli, Sal, 83, 97, 220n18 Rules for Radicals (Alinsky), 41–42, 43, 45–48, 216n23, 217n27 Russell, Bertrand, 3 RWDSU.


pages: 359 words: 113,847

Siege: Trump Under Fire by Michael Wolff

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, gig economy, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Potemkin village, Quicken Loans, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, WikiLeaks

In the 1980s, when Giuliani was the federal prosecutor—and when, curiously, James Comey had worked for him—the Southern District became the premier prosecutor of the Mafia and of Wall Street. Giuliani had pioneered using a draconian, and many believed unconstitutional, interpretation of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act against the Mob. He used the same interpretation against big finance, and in 1990 the threat of a RICO indictment, under which the government could almost indiscriminately seize assets, brought down the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. The Southern District had long been worrisome to Trump.

Oprah magazine Opus Dei Orbán, Viktor O’Reilly, Bill O’Rourke, Beto Oslo (Rogers) Oswald, Lee Harvey Page, Carter Page, Lisa Palestinians Palm Beach police Palm Beach real estate deal Papadopoulos, George pardon power Parscale, Brad Pecker, David Pelosi, Nancy Pence, Karen “Mother” Pence, Mike Philip, Prince, Duke of Edinburgh Pirro, Jeanine Playboy Podesta, John Pompeo, Mike populism Porter, Rob Posner, Eric Pottinger, Matt Pottinger, Stan Powell, Dina Powell, Laurene Preate, Alexandra Priebus, Reince Provigil Putin, Vladimir France and Helsinki summit and Manafort and proposed White House visit by Qatar Qatar Investment Authority Rabin, Yitzhak racism Raffel, Josh Raspail, Jean Reagan, Ronald Reno, Janet Republican National Committee (RNC) Republican National Convention (2016) Republican Party “Anonymous” op-ed and Bannon and Barr and budget bill and college educated and congressional leadership and deep state and dog whistles and donors and elections of 2016 and elections of 2020 and Fox News and government shutdown and Haley and Helsinki summit and Hillary Clinton’s emails and immigration and Ivy League and Kavanaugh and McCain funeral and midterms and Mueller and Senate control and Short as legislative director and Syria and tax cuts and Trump’s relationship with Wall and Whitaker and Rhee, Jeannie Rich, Marc RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 1970) right wing Rolling Stone Romania Romney, Mitt Rosen, Ira Rosenstein, Rod Roth, Steven Rove, Karl Rowan, Marc Rubio, Marco Ruby Ridge standoff Ruddy, Chris Ruemmler, Kathy RUSAL company Russia China and Congress and deep state and Don Jr. and Europe and Flynn and hacking indictment and Haley and sanctions vs.

His meeting with Bharara was unsatisfactory: Bharara was unwilling to humor him—or, shortly, even to return his calls. In March 2017, Trump fired him. Now, said Kushner, even without Bharara, the Southern District was looking to treat the Trump Organization as a Mob-like enterprise; its lawyers would use the RICO laws against it and go after the president as if he were a drug lord or Mob don. Kushner pointed out that corporations had no Fifth Amendment privilege, and that you couldn’t pardon a corporation. As well, assets used in or derived from the commission of a crime could be seized by the government. In other words, of the more than five hundred companies and separate entities in which Donald Trump had been an officer, up until he became president, many might be subject to forfeiture.


pages: 389 words: 136,320

Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent by Harvey Silverglate

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Berlin Wall, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, Julian Assange, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, national security letter, offshore financial centre, pill mill, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technology bubble, urban planning, WikiLeaks

Recently, I found the key to answering this question while reading a Supreme Court brief filed in an important free speech case. The case was Scheidler v. National Organization for Women (NOW), decided by the high court in February 2006.17 The question before three felonies a day 273 the Court was whether anti-abortion protesters could be punished as “racketeers” under the incredibly loosely worded Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act. RICO was originally enacted to prosecute “organized crime” and to deprive its members of their illgotten gains. It was eventually turned against a wide spectrum of citizens: business executives, political activists, and others. In Scheidler, NOW tried to adapt the civil provisions of RICO as well as the federal extortion laws to obtain a ruinous money judgment against national anti-abortion groups.

Prosecutors alleged that the donations constituted a bribe of a public official.24 Out of this one act, they alleged a violation of the federal bribery statute,25 a criminal conspiracy,26 a violation of the honest services mail fraud statute,27 and extortion.28 To top it all off, because the indictment fashioned the conduct as a racketeering enterprise, the defendants were subject to the draconian penalties of the federal Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization (“RICO”) law.29 There were numerous problems with the indictment. For one thing, as Horton points out in Harper’s,30 Scrushy gained nothing from the alleged bribe. He had already served in this uncompensated position on the CON Board under three former governors. He testified, without contradiction, that he did not even want the position, but considered it a public service.

., 54–55 Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), 151 post-publication prosecution, 196, 198–199 public sector extortion, 8–9 Powell, Lewis, 204–205, 208 Putin, Vladimir, xxiii powers balance of, 11, 37, 189, 266–267 separation of, 183, 265–267 qualified privilege, 208 Powers, Francis Gary, 219 qui tam law, 88 Puritanism, 49 Quattrone, Frank P., 106–114 pregabalin, 64 pre-market approval (PMA) application, 78–79 Racketeer-Influenced Corrupt Organization (RICO) law, 30, 273 PRESCRIPTION PAIN MEDICATIONS: Frequently Asked Questions and Answers for Health Care Professionals, and Law Enforcement Personnel, 51–52, 59 racketeering, 6, 30, 75, 99, 167, 273 prescriptions, off-label, 63–67 presidential signing statements, 183 the press. See news media pre-trial publicity, 269–270 Pricewaterhouse Coopers, 139 “Principles of Federal Prosecution of Business Organizations” (DOJ), 144 prior restraint, 195–200, 205–207 Radio Farda, 223 Rakoff, Jed S., xx Reagan, Ronald, 241 real tax losses, 104–105 recall of medical devices, 79 red flags, for abuse of controlled painkillers, 51 Reno, Janet, xxx Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, 209–210 retention and destruction of documents.


pages: 314 words: 88,524

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Dizard, “Lamberth finds EPA in contempt for e-document purge,” GCN, July 25, 2003, https://gcn.com/articles/2003/07/25/lamberth-finds-epa-in-contempt-for-edocument-purge.aspx (April 25, 2021). 67 Melissa Quinn, “21 states sue Biden for revoking Keystone XL pipeline permit,” CBS News, March 18, 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/keystone-pipeline-21-states-sue-biden/ (April 25, 2021). 68 Teny Sahakian, “NY Times ignores 18 deaths, nearly $2 billion in damage when bashing GOP bills targeting rioters,” Fox News, April 23, 2021, https://www.foxnews.com/us/ny-times-ignores-18-deaths-nearly-2-billion-dollars-in-damage-when-bashing-gop-bills-targeting-rioters (April 25, 2021). 69 Josh Gerstein, “Leniency for defendants in Portland clashes could affect Capitol riot cases,” Politico, April 14, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/14/portland-capitol-riot-cases-481346 (April 25, 2021). 70 “Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Hallmark Anti-Rioting Legislation Taking Unapologetic Stand for Public Safety,” Office of the Governor press release, April 19, 2021, https://www.flgov.com/2021/04/19/what-they-are-saying-governor-ron-desantis-signs-hallmark-anti-rioting-legislation-taking-unapologetic-stand-for-public-safety/ (April 25, 2021). 71 “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Law,” Justia.com, https://www.justia.com/criminal/docs/rico/ (April 25, 2021). 72 Meira Gebel, “The story behind Thousand Currents, the charity that doles out the millions of dollars Black Lives Matter generates in donations,” Insider, June 25, 2020, https://www.insider.com/what-is-thousand-currents-black-lives-matter-charity-2020-6 (April 25, 2021). 73 Morrison, “AP Exclusive: Black Lives Matter opens up about its finances”; “Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation,” Influence Watch, https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/black-lives-matter-foundation/ (April 25, 2021). 74 N’dea Yancy-Bragg, “Americans’ confidence in police falls to historic low, Gallup poll shows,” USA Today, August 12, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/08/12/americans-confidence-police-falls-new-low-gallup-poll-shows/3352910001/ (April 25, 2021). 75 John R.


pages: 706 words: 206,202

Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, creative destruction, deal flow, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, fixed income, fudge factor, George Gilder, index arbitrage, Internet Archive, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, margin call, Michael Milken, money market fund, Oscar Wyatt, Ponzi scheme, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, South Sea Bubble, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, walking around money, zero-coupon bond

He arrived for the session wearing casual clothes and a baseball cap emblazoned with the words, shit happens. He listened to the tapes and left without showing any reaction. His lawyers told the prosecutors to go ahead and file charges. Baird threatened to indict Princeton-Newport under RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, aimed at organized crime and providing for heavy damages. Regan seemed unfazed, vowing to fight to the end, Regan told colleagues that he was innocent, that he was being pressured only because he knew Freeman and Milken, and that his case was "too complicated" to be understood by a jury.

., 125-26 Piper & Marbury, 257 4«9 Pitt, Harvey, 238, 246^7, 249, 250-53, 255, 279, 280, 281, 282-83, 287, 290, 312, 320 Bank Leu visit of, 240-^1 Boesky debriefed by, 275-78 Meier's meetings with, 239-40, 243-44 SEC negotiations of, 246-47, 250-52 Pletscher, Bruno, 237, 239, 241, 242, 243-44, 247, 251, 252, 253, 255 "point," explanation of, 47 "poison pill," 142 PoUack, Milton, 394 Pomerantz, Mark, 315 Posner, Steven, 102, 394 Posner, Victor, 102-9, 113, 114, 202, 295, 312, 353, 394, 456ra background of, 102 Engel and, 103, 111-12 Fischbach takeover and, 104-8 National Can deal with, 108-9, 111 SEC suit against, 102 Powell, Adam Clayton, 311 Pownall, Thomas, 13 Predators' Ball, 15, 190, 218, 354-55, 372, 379, 381, 410, 424, 427 evolution of, 114-17 Predators' Ball, The (Bruck), 381-83, 399 Prime Computer, 426 Princeton-Newport Partners, 165, 166, 347-49, 371, 372, 384-S5, 413, 418-19, 422, 445-46 government raid of, 350-52 incriminating tapes of, 352, 395 Pritzker family, 103 Pritzker, Jay, 222 Pritzker, Robert, 222 Puccio, Thomas, 434--35, 438 Queen Elizabeth II, 225-26 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) (1970), 372, 384-85, 399, 402, 404, 408, 409, 417, 445 Milken on, 417 Raiders of the Lost Ark (film), 393 Rainwater, Richard, 155 Rakoff, Jed, 234, 302, 303-6, 308, 312, 331, 333, 339, 341, 344, 371, 420, 424, 440 Rapid-American Corporation, 38 Rather, Dan, 30 Rattner, Steven, 75 Ranch, Michael, 240, 241, 243, 244, 250, 252, 253, 276, 278 Ray, Johnny, 38, 291 Reagan, Ronald, 82, 83, 1%, 234, 375 Regan, Donald, 82 Regan, James, 165, 266, 347, 349, 352, 371, 372, 385, 413, 419, 422, 433,447 Reich, Ilan, 77, 125-28, 131, 216, 217, 265-69, 300, 303 American-Jewel deal and, 124-25 background and personality of, 70-71 Clabir-HMW takeover and, 122, 123, 124 guilty plea of, 272 Levine's relationship with, 69-74, 78-79, 123-24, 126, 127, 270 in prison, 446 SEC subpoena of, 271-72 sentencing of, 272 suicidal episode of, 260-61, 270 Reich, Yaron, 70-71 "restricted lists," 149, 160 Revlon, 32, 190, 209, 211, 256, 313 Revson, Charles, 32 R.

., 183 MCI Communications, 378, 411 MDC Corporation, 286 Mead Corporation, 137—38 Meier, Bernhard, 134, 135, 236, 237, 247, 249-51, 255 Levine named by, 245 Levine's cover-up plan and, 238-39, 241-43 Pitt's meetings with, 239-40, 243-44 Merger Mania (Boesky), 193-94, 274 Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, 21, 22, 81, 82, 84, 161, 201, 209, 212, 236, 309, 310, 324, 402, 447 Caracas letter to, 231-34, 320 Princeton-Newport and, 348 Metromedia, 190 Metropolitan Correction Center, 256, 325, 367-68 Metzenbaum, Howard, 219 MGM/United Artists, 185 Milken, Gregory, 49 Milken, Lori Anne Hackel, 44, 51, 101, 191, 417-18, 436, 442-43 Milken, Lowell, 182-83, 109, 202, 205, 220-21, 286, 292, 311, 313, 314, 317, 391-92, 394, 400, 407, 408, 412, 413, 414, 415, 425, 429, 435, 436, 441 Boesky disUked by, 101-2 Michael's hiring of, 55-56 Otter Creek partnership and, 109-11 Milken, Michael: in agreement to leave Drexel, 413 altered lifestyle of, 190-91 apologists for, 449 army of lawyers of, 313-15 background and childhood of, 43-44 Beatrice deal and, 192 black support sought by, 399-400 blue book of, 220-21, 292-93, 391-92 Boesky's arrangement with, 183-85, 187-90 Boesky's indebtedness to, 202-6 Boesky's indictment and, 292-93 Boesky's relationship with, 98, 100-101, 200-201, 224, 227, 316 Boesky's "wired" meeting with, 287-«9 bonus taken by, 208 captive clients of, 219-20 confession of, 437 congressional testimony of, 379-80 Crash of 1987 and, 357-58 customer network of, 56-57 Dahl and, 50-53, 182-83, 292, 311 Dahl's plane ride with, 393 Diamond Shamrock deal and, 180-83 487 Drexel-SEC settlement and, 425 Drexel's media blitz and, 356-57 early career of, 44-48 Engel and, 103, 112-13, 354 fainting episode of, 56 Fischbach takeover and, 104r-8, 456n "genius" myth of, 45 guilty plea of, 436-37, 456n Harris Graphics deal and, 186-87 high-yield conferences and, 115-17 hiring practices of, 191-93 Joseph's bonus dispute with, 208-9 Joseph's doubts about, 397-98 Joseph's final phone conversation with, 413 Joseph's introduction to, 41—43, 45 lack of remorse of, 312, 448 legal expenses of, 429 Lowell hired by, 55-56 loyahy to, 373 marriage of, 44 Maultasch as mole for, 53 Maultasch's meeting with, 293 MGM deal and, 185 move to California by, 49 "national treasure" image of, 355, 376 nickname of, 55 obsessiveness of, 52 Otter Creek partnership and, 109-10 Pacific Lumber-Maxxam deal and, 185^86 personality of, 52, 56 personal wealth of, 221 plea bargain of, 435-36, 472-73/1 plea negotiations and, 414-15 in prison, 448 public relations campaign mounted by, 375-79 on RICO law, 417 sales methods of, 45-46 Sandler and, 313, 315 sentencing of, 441-43 Siegel's meeting with, 212-13 Storer deal and, 184 Texas International and, 48 Turner and, 185 U.S. Attorney's indictment of, 415-17 Viacom and, 369-70 Wall Street Journal parody reaction of, 192-93 Williams hired by, 311-12 at Williams's funeral, 384 Winnick and, 48-49, 52, 191-92 workday methods of, 49-57 Millstein, Ira, 353, 381, 393, 407, 408 Mizel, Larry, 286, 289 Mobil, 83-84 Montgomery, Walter, 379 Monzert, Pamela, 394 Mooradian, Rusty, 189 Mooradian, Setrag, 37-38, 88, 89, 09, 106, 145, 177-78, 188-90, 203, 204-6, 224, 273-74, 279-80, 288, 290, 319-20, 323, 361, 386, 395, 446-47 as cooperative witness, 321-22 "DBL" file identified by, 346-47 Moran, John, 78 Morgan, J.


pages: 493 words: 132,290

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

A statement of goodwill you can wipe your ass with? I knew what it was: a crime. The crime was racketeering. RICO: The federal crime named after Johnny Rico, the movieland mobster played by Edward G. Robinson, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. I had to convince a judge and jury, as well as our own lawyers, that Exxon and its partners were a mob equivalent to the Cosa Nostra, to the Mafia, against which the RICO law was aimed. There is a difference of course. Unlike the Mafia, Exxon and partners had a huge advertising budget and a Texas oilman named Herbert Walker Bush in the White House. But I had this: Exxon and its partners had suckered the Natives into giving away something valuable in return for a lie.


pages: 465 words: 134,575

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces by Radley Balko

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, call centre, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, desegregation, edge city, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, moral panic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh

Kennedy’s Justice Department, conceived of a way to extend the government’s reach. Under Blakey’s idea, once the government convicted someone on charges related to organized crime, prosecutors could go after everything the guilty party had bought and earned with the proceeds of the criminal enterprise. Blakey called the law RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), after Rico Bandello, the fictional gangster in the 1931 movie Little Caesar. Originally conceived to target organized crime, by the time the law passed in 1970 it had become so broad that even Nixon’s hard-liners were concerned. In opposing the law, Nixon’s Justice Department told Congress that its broad reach “would result in a large number of unintended consequences.”2 Reagan’s Justice Department had no such reservations.

., 281 Reforms, 31–32, 34, 162, 242, 269, 309–332 Regulatory laws, 284, 285, 289, 322, 332 Rehnquist, William, 101–102 Renner, Ross (Lt.), 256 Reno, Janet, 193, 200, 202, 204 Republicans, 66, 70, 247, 295, 330 Reynolds, Glenn, 331 Ribicoff, Abraham, 68 Richards v. Wisconsin, 196–197, 198 Richmond, Paul, 219, 220 Richmond Times-Dispatch, 55 RICO law, 140–141 Rights, 4–5, 9, 10, 15, 18, 23, 25, 29, 31, 95, 124, 143, 152, 161, 165, 166, 251, 262, 267, 268, 326, 331, 333, 335 of police officers accused of crimes, 328–330 Riots, 2, 3, 18, 25, 28, 35, 40, 51–53, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 80, 188–189 riot squads, 234–237 Robberies/burglaries, 27, 61, 68, 71, 91, 136, 137, 157 bank robberies, 65, 126, 168, 228–229, 230 Robbins, Gary (Sgt.), 278 Roberts, John, 56 Robinson, Herb, 179 Robinson v.


pages: 479 words: 102,876

The King of Oil: The Secret Lives of Marc Rich by Daniel Ammann

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, book value, Boycotts of Israel, business intelligence, buy low sell high, energy security, family office, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, peak oil, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, Yom Kippur War

You tell me, that’s legal? Bunch of nonsense!” The prosecutors definitely did not view these transactions as a legal form of tax optimization. To them it was more, much more: organized crime. Prosecutors Go Nuclear The law designed to combat organized crime was intentionally named the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in order to obtain the acronym RICO, after the ambitious gangster played by Edward G. Robinson in the 1931 film Little Caesar. The act was intended to make it easier to prosecute organized crime figures and strike a devastating blow against their economic structures. Under RICO the defendant’s assets can be seized before the case comes to trial or even before an indictment.

Five Flaws Their conclusion is based on the following five points, which do indeed raise serious doubts about the charges presented in the indictment. Years later, Jack Quinn would list some of these arguments in the petition made to President Clinton for Rich’s pardon (see chapter 18). 1. RICO. Rich’s was the first case in which RICO—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—and RICO forfeiture statutes were employed in a case of white-collar crime that had nothing to do with the Mafia, the drug trade, kidnapping, or murder. Rich’s lawyers were critical of the fact that Rudy Giuliani and Sandy Weinberg had transformed a relatively straightforward tax evasion case into a draconian RICO prosecution.

., 168–71 October Revolution (1917), 61 Oil nationalizations, 57–58 Oil price per barrel Marc Rich on future, 264–65, 270–71 38.5 to 55.1 , 81 2.00, 14 2.50 to 3.00, 56–57 5.00, 71 8.00, 192 10.75 to 13.39, 95 11.60, 73 13.34, 95 28.00, 95 38.00 to 50.00, 97–98 Oil trade (trading), 53–74, 79–86, 174–75 embargo, 54–55, 81, 99–101, 117 globalization of, 89–91 Marc Rich on future of, 264–65, 270–71 nationalizations and, 57–58 price controls, 117–20 secret pipeline in Israel, 64–70, 79–80 Seven Sisters oligopoly and, 55–57 shock of 1974, 81–82, 86 shock of 1979, 97–102 spot market, 1–2, 13–14, 56, 70, 71–73, 82, 83–86, 101–2 Oil transport, 59–61, 69, 84–85, 189–90 Oligopoly, 56, 84–85 Olmert, Ehud, 11, 246 OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), 57–58, 67, 70–71, 72 oil price per barrel, 95, 97–98 Operation Magic Carpet, 205–6 Operation Moses, 204 Ortega, Daniel, 179 Oslo Accords, 247–49 Otford Project, 154 Outsider status of Marc Rich, 32–33 Pahlavi, Ashraf, Princess, 217 Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza (Shah of Iran), 64–67, 90–91, 92, 94, 96, 102–3, 190–91 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 50 Palestinians, 94, 247–49, 259, 270 “Paradox of plenty,” 15 Paribas, 80 “Peak oil,” 14, 278n Peres, Shimon, 103–4, 247–50, 258–59 Perkins, Richard, 100–101 Permissible average markup (PAM), 118–19 Persian Gulf, 54–55 Petty Gem Shop, 34 Philanthropy of Marc Rich, 237–38, 270 Philip IV of France, 39 Philipp, Julius, 38 Philipp, Oscar, 38 Philipp Brothers, 36–51 apprenticeship at, 37–38, 40–41 creating a market, 42–43 Cuba assignment, 45–47 departure of Marc Rich and Pinky Green, 73–74 Madrid assignment, 48–51 oil trade, 53–54, 55, 58–59, 63–64, 71–72, 73 sensitive assignments, 44–45 vendetta against, 78–79 Playboy, 108, 241 PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), 50 Pogroms, 39 Poland, 25, 26 Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), 183–85 Prestige, 231 Price per barrel Marc Rich on future, 264–65, 270–71 38.5 to 55.1 , 81 2.00, 14 2.50 to 3.00, 56–57 5.00, 71 8.00, 192 10.75 to 13.39, 95 11.60, 73 13.34, 95 28.00, 95 38.00 to 50.00, 97–98 Princeton University, 106 Private life of the Riches, 209–24 Przemy l, Poland, 26 Publicity and Marc Rich, 139–41, 230–32 Pyrite, 46–47 Qaddafi, Muammar, 17 Querub, Isaac, 14, 42, 194, 211 Quinn, Jack, 5 Clinton pardon and, 239–41, 243–46, 249, 251–52, 254, 255–56, 258–59 flaws in Marc Rich Case, 135–39, 142 negotiations about Marc Rich case, 170–71 Quirós, Antonio, 48–49 Qurei, Ahmed, 248 Rabin, Yitzhak, 103, 204–5, 208, 249 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO), 110, 122–23, 135–36, 139–40 Rand, Ayn, 180–81 Ras Burqa attack, 197–200 “Rational egoism,” 180 Ratliff, David, 107 Ravenswood Aluminum Corporation, 230–31 Reagan, Ronald, 118, 141, 158 Realpolitik, 203–8 Regulations, 118–19, 267 Reichmuth, Karl, 18 Religious fundamentalism, 270–71 Renationalization, 268 Renewable energy, 264–65 “Resource curse,” 15, 279n Rezai, Ali, 67–68, 79–80, 92 Rhodes Preparatory School, 36 Rich, Danielle (daughter), 4–5, 21, 209–12, 215, 220, 237 Rich, David (father), 25–36, 76, 212–13, 217 Rich, Denise Eisenberg (ex-wife), 5, 209–24 blind date with Marc Rich, 213–15 Clinton pardon and, 250–54, 258 daughter Gabrielle’s cancer and, 209–12 divorce from Marc Rich, 21–22, 221–24 family values of, 215–17 flight to Switzerland, 109–10 in Madrid, 48 songwriting of, 217–18 Rich, Gabrielle (daughter), 11, 209–13, 215 Rich, Ilona (daughter), 4–5, 210, 215 Rich, Marc ambition of, 16–17 apprenticeship at Philipp Brothers, 37–38, 40–41 birth of, 27–28 case against.


pages: 268 words: 76,709

Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bernie Sanders, biofilm, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, low interest rates, McMansion, medical malpractice, old-boy network, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

Brown said that growers feared they would be open to lawsuits from workers who were treated unfairly. “Workers also could allege that there is/was a scheme to defraud them and each check issued [allegedly in an incorrect amount] could be a separate bank or wire fraud. This is by definition a RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act] case. What’s more, RICO allows plaintiffs to bring additional grounds to allege fraud-based activities on whatever size enterprise they seek to attack.” The exchange’s members, said Brown, were also concerned that the extra-penny-per-pound program constituted an attempt to restrain trade.

See also birth defects Presbyterian Church, 1 preserving quality, 1 Procacci, Joseph, 1, 2 Procacci Brothers Sales Corporation, 1, 2, 3, See also Gargiulo, Inc.; UglyRipe base, 1 production, xii–xiii in Mexico, 1 railroad and, 1 Prowl, 1 pruning, 1 pulling beds, 1 R Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 1 Raghu, André, 1 railroad, 1 raised beds, 1 Ramirez, Romeo, 1, 2 Ramos, Jose Luis, 1 Ramos, Juan, 1 Ramos, Ramiro, 1, 2 Reading, Pennsylvania, 1 Red Pear, 1 Redlands Christian Migrant Association, 1, 2, 3, 4 regulations, 1 REI. See restricted-entry intervals Reigart, J.

See restricted-entry intervals Reigart, J. Routt, 1 rent, 1 reproductive disorders, 1 toxins and, 1 restricted-entry intervals (REI), 1 Revolutionary War, 1 Reyes, Geraldo, 1, 2, 3, 4 Crist to, 1 Rick, C. M., Jr., 1 Rick, Charlie, 1 RICO. See Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act ripeness, 1 ripening, artificial, 1, 2, 3, See also ethylene gas Roberts, John G., 1, 2 Roblero, Ariosto, 1 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 1 roots, 1 Rudo, Kenneth, 1 Ruiz, Raul Humberto, 1 Rural Neighborhoods, 1 S SAFE. See Socially Accountable Farm Employers salmonella, 1 accusations for outbreak of, xiv, 1 salsa origins, 1 Sanchez, Pascuala, 1 sand, tomato field, 1 concentrations of moisture in, 1 Sanders, Bernie, 1, 2, 3, 4 Sanibel Island, Florida, 1 sanitation efforts, 1 Santa Sweets, 1, 2 Santana, 1 Santorum, Rick, 1 Schell, Gregory S., 1, 2 Schleifer, Rebecca, 1 Scott, John Warner, 1 Scythe, 1 seasonal, 1 seed catalog copywriters, 1 seepage irrigation, 1 self-pollination, 1 Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, 1 Sequence, Pierre Robin, 1 Shafey, Omar, 1 shower program, 1 Six L’s Packing Company, 1, 2 Campaign for Fair Food and, 1 slavery, history of, 1 slavery, modern-day, xv–xvi, 1, 1.


pages: 352 words: 90,622

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security by Sarah Chayes

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Celtic Tiger, colonial rule, crony capitalism, drone strike, failed state, high-speed rail, income inequality, microcredit, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, structural adjustment programs, trade route, ultimatum game, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional

As part of such prosecutions, bribe payers should be encouraged to inform on bribe takers or other bribe payers. And their information should be collated and used as part of a strategized effort to reach targeted kleptocratic officials. Threat of prosecution to elicit such information should be part of that strategy. Prosecutions under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute could also be mobilized, along with prosecutions under national legislation of Western countries where members of kleptocratic networks hold dual citizenship. Prosecutions under U.S., U.K., and some other countries’ civil law that allow for the forfeiture of assets connected to a crime—even if no individual has been convicted or even apprehended for committing it—should also be directed in a more targeted fashion at the assets of specific kleptocrats.

., 147 Kwak, James, 209 Kyl, John, 27 Kyrgyzstan, 110 labor: child, 101, 114 forced, 113–14 labor laws, 81 land grabbing, 4, 11–12, 51, 81, 94, 111, 151 land mines, 4 land value, 94 Laruelle, Marlene, 110, 112, 115–16 Lauren, Fredrik, 108–9 law, 193–4: appeal to, 171 asset forfeiture, 193 circumvention of, 86, 98, 109, 210 Foreign Corrupt Practices (Act), 149, 193 in rem forfeiture, 149–50 as instrument of equity, 16, 17–18 Islamic (shari’a), 119, 129–30, 180 purpose of, 18, 166 violations of, 184 see also Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law enforcement, U.S., 51, 140, 142 leaders: accountability of, 14, 15, 16, 160, 164 advice literature for, see advice literature (“Mirrors for Princes”) connecting with people, 31–32, 103–4, 157 divine right of kingship and, 10, 157, 158–60, 162, 170, 237n as greedy and self-serving, 73–76, 79, 92–97, 107–10, 116, 157, 182 inaccessibility of, 26–27, 103–4, 157 intermediaries of, see intermediaries requisition of goods by, 9, 16 as tyrants, 16, 74 see also command responsibility Lebanon, 1982 Israeli invasion of, 181 legislative power, 167–69 Leo X, Pope, 174–75 Libya, 68, 77, 81, 91, 98, 100, 196 Lille, governor of, 178, 179 Lisitsyna, Masha, 102 Livy, 18 loans, 65–66, 74, 76, 93–94, 95, 97, 124, 141, 198, 207 Locke, John, 167–68, 171, 205 London, 83, 161, 163, 164 Louhichi, Murad, 96, 98 Low Country, 161, 183 see also Holland; Netherlands Loyd, Paula, 35, 36, 223n Luther, Martin, 173, 174–76 Lynch, John, 157 MacArthur Foundation, 123 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 8–9, 17, 18, 70, 75, 89 Madison, James, 169 Mafia, 60, 62 Magna Carta, 162, 170 Mainz, archbishop of, 174 Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF), 48–49, 50, 52–53, 56, 141–42, 143 Mali, 180 Maliki, Nuri Kamal al-, 224n Malinowski, Thomas, 191 Marines, U.S., 139, 186 Marshall, Ruth, 133 Marshall, Shana, 79 Marshall Plan, 76 Mary, Queen of Scots, 162 Massachusetts Bay, 181 Mattis, James, 139 McChrystal, Stanley, 29–30, 38, 39, 48, 54, 56, 58, 135–36, 141 McKiernan, David, 37, 38 McMaster, H.

(NSS), 143, 149, 153, 234n NATO, 24, 31, 36–37, 48, 65, 186 natural disasters, 186 Nazarav, Obid Kori, 106 Netherlands, 157, 158–62, 164, 167, 168, 178–80 see also Holland; Low Country Edict of Abjuration of, 160 New York Times, 123, 151, 154 NGO (Qayum Karzai’s), 23–25, 27 accounting in, 25 fraud committed in, 25 Niger Delta, 123 Nigeria, 66, 118–34, 186, 200, 205 2012 Boko Haram attacks in, 119, 121–22 agriculture in, 124 banks in, 128 bribery in, 120, 129, 217 bunkering of oil in, 123–24 civilian rule in, 125 civil service in, 126–27, 129, 217 collusion with extremists suspected in, 125 corrupt medical system in, 128 distribution of national revenue in, 122 economy of, 122–25, 217, 217 education in, 119, 128, 129, 217 electoral process in, 125–26 Finance Ministry in, 122–23 food industry in, 124 Islam in, 118–19, 125, 130, 132, 133 justice sector reform in, 119 kleptocratic system in, 217 manufacturing in, 124–25 military in, 122, 124 missing oil revenue in, 122–23, 126–27 oil in, 122–24, 125, 217 police in, 119, 120–21, 125 political campaigning in, 125–26 poverty in, 125, 132, 133 public investment in, 124 puritanism in, 178n refineries in, 124 religions in, 118–19, 124, 125, 130–34 as synonymous with fraud and corruption, 120 Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation, 123 Nigerian Pentecostalism, 132, 133 Ninety-Five Theses (Luther), 173, 174–75 Nizam al-Mulk, 10–13, 14–15, 26, 27, 104, 112 describing land grabs, 11–13 overhauled military land-grant system, 11 recommending accessibility, 26, 27 recommending a ruler gather information on the conduct of his subordinates, 104 North Korea, 184 North Sea islands (Dutch), 157 North Vietnam, 139 Norway, 187 Nurallah (member of Arghand Cooperative), 3, 4–6, 11, 14, 43, 54 Nyberg, Lars, 109 Obama, Barack, 37, 42, 151, 155, 196, 210 Objective 2015, 153 Oddsson, David, 207 odious debt, 199 officials, see public officials Of the Royal Institution (Jonas d’Orleans), 15 oil, 73, 122–23, 125, 126, 200, 233n illicit siphoning of, 123–24 okadas, 120 Okenyodo, Kemi, 126, 129 Okonjo-Iweala, Ngozi, 122 Olcott, Martha Brill, 116 Open Society Foundations, 102, 106, 110 opium, 48, 62, 65–66 oppression, see exploitation Opusunju, Godsgift Nwoke, 129 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 187 Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, 199 Orléans, Jonas d’, 15, 104, 164 O’Toole, Fintan, 205–6 “overqualified unemployed,” 70, 71 Pakistan, 4–5, 13, 38, 83n, 117, 185, 186, 197, 214 Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, 184 Paris, 10, 67 Parliament, 162–164 Patriot Act, 192 patronage system, 58–59, 212, 213 Peace Corps, 68 Peck, Sarah, 50, 64 Pentagon, 37, 67, 92, 145, 146, 183 Pepin I, King of France, 15, 104 Petition of Right, 162–63 Petraeus, David, 135–36, 138–40, 142, 144, 145, 149, 154, 155, 234n Philadelphia, 168 Philip II, King of Spain, 157–62, 178–79 Philippines, 186 pistachios, 34 Plymouth, 181 police: in Afghanistan, 5–6, 11, 41, 54, 56 bribery by, 87, 120 in Nigeria, 119, 120–21, 125 in Tunisia, 98 in Uzbekistan, 111, 112 police checkpoints, 5, 112, 121 police corruption: in Afghanistan, 5, 11, 49, 53 in Egypt, 87–88 in Nigeria, 120–21 police extortion, 120–21 Policratius (John of Salisbury), 15, 35, 63 political Islam, 21–22, 75, 90 pomegranates, 33, 66 poppy, 65, 66n poverty: in Morocco, 70 in Nigeria, 125, 132, 133 powers, separation of, 172n Pre-Reformation Catholic church: bribery in, 176 corruption in, 133, 174–77, 179, 181, 218 extortion by, 174–77, 179, 218 as kleptocratic, 174–77, 178, 180, 183 kleptocratic system of, 218, 218 Prince, The (Machiavelli), 8–9, 11, 17, 18 Principals’ Committee, 145, 149, 152–53, 154, 234n privatization, 84–85, 125, 207 Privy Council, 163 prostitution, 109 Protestants (early) as extremists, 178n, 178–180 Protestantism, 158, 161, 172–81 jihadis compared with, 180–81 protests for, 179–80 repression of, 178 see also Huguenots protests, 101 in Algeria, 20 in Egypt, 78–79, 84 in Morocco, 68, 70, 71–72 in Nigeria, 128 in North Africa, 67 Protestant, 179–80 in Tunisia, 94–95 in Uzbekistan, 103–4, 105, 115 see also Arab Spring public officials: bribing of, 184–85, 193 criminal alliances with, 185 monitoring of financial transactions of, 192 see also Afghan officials; intermediaries; leaders; Nigerian officials; Tunisian officials; United States officials; Uzbek officials public resources, 73 see also corruption, development resources and public spending, as hijacked for private gain, 13, 33, 86–87, 127 public welfare, 128 puritanism, 178n, 180–81 Qaddhafi, Muammar, 98 Qatar, 74 Qatih, Matiullah, 5, 54 Raba’a Square, 90 Rabat, 69–70, 198 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, U.S. (RICO) statute, 193 Rades, 96 Rakoff, Jed, 210–11 Rassd, 90 raw materials, 122 Reagan-Thatcher era, 115 real estate, 94–95, 207 see also land grabbing; land value Reformation, 174, 177, 240n Regional Command South (RC-South), 28, 29, 36, 48, 135 Regional Command East (RC-East), 48 religion, 20, 102–3, 104–5, 171, 172–78 integrity and, 63–64, 75, 77 militant political, 75 morality and, 77, 130, 132–33 as recourse against corrupt government, 115–16 violence and, 133 see also pre-Reformation Catholic church religious conservatism, 102–3, 117 religious diversity, 118 religious extremism, 69, 83n, 117, 125, 172–83 iconoclasm and, 179–80 kleptocracy and, 66 see also extremism; jihadis; protestants as extremists; Salafis religious freedom, 101 Renaissance, 17 repentance, 173–74 Rescue and Counseling International, 129 resources, corrupt system and, 44, 45, 73, 122–23, 126–27, 186, 195 see also kleptocracies, in Nigeria, Reykjavik, 207 Robertson, Geoffrey, 164 Rome, 174–77, 218 Rosenberg, Matthew, 154 Russia, 115, 117, 192 Rustam (pseudonym of Uzbek trade union representative), 113 Ruth (pseudonym of Nigerian housekeeper), 126, 127, 128, 132, 133 Rwanda, 194 Sahara Desert, 118 Salafis, 89, 99, 119, 132, 181 Salehi, Muhammad Zia, 140–42, 143, 154 Salisbury, John of, 15, 35, 63, 87, 97, 111, 176 Samarqand, 111 Sanusi, Lamido, 122–23 Sayfullah (Afghan Border Police official), 53, 54–57, 59, 60, 142 scams, construction, 13, 33, 86–87 Schroeder, Christopher, 32 Scobey, Margaret, 32 Scotland, 163 Scotland Yard, 52 Sea of Precious Virtues, The, 27, 121 security, 184–86, 189–90, 192 problems of, fueled by corruption, 15, 192 see also international security; national security Sensitive Investigations Unit (SIU), 49, 140, 143 separation of powers, 172n September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, 22, 99, 181 as act of iconoclasm, 183 sex tourism, 95 sex trafficking, 109, 185 Shah, Malik, 11, 26 Shah Wali Kot, 17 shari’a (Islamic law), 119, 129–30, 180 Shebab bribe, 184–85 Shell, 124 Shettima, Kole, 123, 126, 132 Shikarpur Gate, 4 Ship of Fools (O’Toole), 205 Shirzai, Gul Agha, 137 Sicily, 94 Sigismund, Roman Emperor, 176 Sigmundsdóttir, Alda, 208 Silk Road, 111, 116 Siyasat Nameh (Treatise on Government) (Nizam al-Mulk), 10–12, 14, 15, 112 social welfare, 82 soft state, 88 Souidi, Intissar, 99 South Vietnam, 139, 147 Soviet Union, 68, 69, 80, 107, 109, 110, 111, 114, 115–16, 141 Spain, 157–58, 160 Spanish Armada, 161–62 Spanish Inquisition, 158 Spanta, Rangin, 142 Special Forces, U.S., 31 Spin Boldak, 22 Spirit of the Laws, The (Montesquieu), 168 spiritual warfare, 133 Srour, Fathi, 86 Stacher, Joshua, 79 Star Chamber, 162 State Department, U.S., 28, 48, 49, 119, 146, 149, 152 States General, 158–59 Stockholm syndrome, 51 Strömsund, 106n subordinates, see intermediaries Sufism, 118, 180 suicide bombing, 121 Sunmonu, Matiu, 124 Sunnis, 224n Switzerland, 108, 116, 175, 176 Syr Darya River, 102 Syria, 77, 226n Tabiu, Muhammed, 129–30 Tahrir Square, 68 Tajikistan, 64, 110 Taliban, 12, 138, 152, 222n abusive behavior of, 4, 30, 31–32 Afghan government corruption and, 6, 43, 152 in Afghanistan, 6, 42, 45, 50, 61, 64, 75, 119 fall of, 6, 22, 25 Tarnak River, 13 Tashkent, 101, 109, 111, 113, 116 taxes, 4, 18, 81, 88, 97, 113, 140, 162 collection of, 159 nonpayment of, 96 tax evasion, 187 tax fraud, 187 TeliaSonera, 108–9 terrorism, 46, 61, 68–69, 90, 102, 119, 155 enabled by corrupt government, 184, 185 funding of, 49, 140, 187 13 Bankers (Johnson and Kwak), 209 This Week (ABC), 141 Timbuktu, 180 “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation” (Luther), 174 tolls, 161 torture, 8, 9, 98, 101, 121, 160 tourism, 94–95 Tozeur, 96–97 Trabelsi, Belhacen, 93 Trabelsi, Leila, see Ben Ali, Leila Trabelsi Trabelsi family, 92, 95–96, 97, 108 trafficking, 185 of drugs, 51, 52, 64, 65–66, 110, 140, 151, 185 of medicine, 185 of migrants, 185 sex, 109, 185 of wildlife, 185 Transnational Criminal Organizations, 192 transparency, 195, 198 Treasury Department, U.S., 49, 149, 150 Treatise on Government, A (Siyasat Nameh) (Nizam al-Mulk), 10–12, 14, 15, 112 Tunis, 75, 91–92, 95, 99, 100, 102 Tunisia, 32, 73, 74–76, 91–100, 125, 175, 198, 207, 209, 227n, 241n 2011 rebellion in, 91, 95 Arab Spring in, 20 bribery in, 74, 96, 113 bureaucracy of, 91–100 civil service in, 91n customs enforcement in, 95–96, 98 finance ministry in, 96 horticulture in, 97 jihadi movement in, 99–100 judicial system in, 98–99 kleptocratic system of, 215 land grabbing in, 94–95 loans in, 93–94, 95, 141 police in, 98 protests in, 94–95 public water authority in, 97 revolution in, 67–69, 72 as secular, 92, 99 self-dealing ruling family of, 92–97, 108 taxes in, 96, 97, 98 tourism in, 94–95 Tunisian bureaucracy, 91–100 Tunisian officials, as corrupt, 99 Twin Towers, 183 Tyrannicide Brief, The (Robertson), 164 Ukraine, 107n, 184, 186, 187 ultimatum games, 44–45, 156 Umara b.


pages: 613 words: 181,605

Circle of Greed: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of the Lawyer Who Brought Corporate America to Its Knees by Patrick Dillon, Carl M. Cannon

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, collective bargaining, Columbine, company town, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, desegregation, energy security, estate planning, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, fixed income, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, illegal immigration, index fund, John Markoff, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, margin call, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, Michael Milken, money market fund, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, power law, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, the High Line, the market place, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

As in the Nucorp case, Fischel could be standing in the way of hundreds of millions of dollars in plaintiffs’ recovery and lawyers’ fees. By landing on the list of defendants in this landmark lawsuit, Fischel could instead be linked with Keating as a coconspirator under the civil arm of RICO, the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the same legislation that had allowed federal law enforcement to pursue criminal cases against the Hell’s Angels, organized crime figures, and international drug rings. That was Lerach’s hope, anyway. In addition, a judgment in a RICO case carried the possibility of tripling the award asked for by the plaintiffs.

their case against Lincoln Savings and Keating: Shields et al. v. Keating et al., U.S. District Court, Central District of California, June 1992. a prize among the hundreds: Kevin P. Roddy, interview by PD, August 26, 2008. That was Lerach’s hope: William S. Lerach, interview by PD, February 29, 2008. tripling the award: On RICO laws, see U.S. Code, Title 18, Crimes and Criminal Procedure. CHAPTER 12: A GIFT HORSE NAMED KEATING “Well, you’re not going to be able”: William S. Lerach, interview by PD, October 15, 2008. “We will not be blackmailed”: Ibid. These were fortuitous developments: Michael Manning, interview by PD, October 16, 2008.


pages: 400 words: 108,843

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, collective bargaining, cotton gin, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Trump, global pandemic, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, plutocrats, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois

Reid first made his mark in the late 1970s by squeezing the mob out of their control of the big casinos. The Martin Scorsese movie Casino, which Reid has never watched, revolves around a key moment in his career. The setting was a 1978 meeting of the Nevada Gaming Commission, which controls all gaming licenses. The passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as the RICO Act, had weakened the mob. In Las Vegas, corporations were pushing out the Teamsters pension fund and other sources of mob capital to secure control of the highly profitable casinos for themselves. Reid was chair of the Gaming Commission, and under his leadership, it voted to deny the license of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, who in addition to being tied to the mob was widely considered to be the greatest oddsmaker in America.

Wade, 130 Social Security privatization, 174 universal background check legislation, 18 public option, 245, 299 Puerto Rico, 253 Pulse Nightclub shooting (Orlando, Florida), 20 Quayle, Dan, 146 question time, 247 quid pro quo, 197, 198 Quinnipiac poll, 18 quorum call, 7 racism Jesse Helms and, 140, 141 and Republican obstruction of Obama, 126 Richard Russell and, 76–77 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, 157–58 Raleigh News and Observer, 145 Ramirez, Deborah, 231 Randolph, John, 48, 49 Rayburn, Sam, 87–88, 93 Read, James H., 58 Reagan, Ronald, 147–50 Roger Ailes and, 190 and Robert Bork nomination, 184–86 California abortion legislation, 130 Richard DeVos and, 193 election of 1976, 147–49 election of 1980, 149 election of 1984, 190 Jerry Falwell and, 150 Jesse Helms and, 147 and Heritage Foundation, 138 Anthony Kennedy and, 218 and Martin Luther King Jr.

Day bill, 151–52 and McCain-Feingold bill, 194–96 and Obamacare bill, 213–17 obstruction of Obama as rational, 120–21 and polarization, 121–22 as predominantly white, 129 and red state/blue state divide, 19 and Harry Reid’s control of amendment votes, 176–77 as representing minority of the population, 10–11, 126, 261 rewards from obstruction, 123–25 and Rule 22 fight, 96–99 Senate leader position created, 160 and small-state bias, 127–28 and Social Security privatization, 174 and Tea Party, 137–38 in Trump era, 232–37 and 2005 nuclear option battle, 198–203 and 2013 government shutdown, 134–39, 152–53 wealth of, 130 Republicans for Reid, 155 retreats, Robert Byrd and, 169 Rhode Island, 127 Richeson, Jennifer, 132 RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, 157–58 Roberts, David, 245 Roberts, John, 201 Rockefeller, Nelson, 144, 147 Roe v. Wade, 130, 149, 185 Rogich, Sid, 155 Roll Call, 223 Romney, Mitt, 214, 236 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 99 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 72, 87–88 Roosevelt, Theodore, 51 Rosenthal, Frank “Lefty,” 158–59 Rubio, Marco, 129, 137–38 Rule 22 and George W.


pages: 385 words: 118,901

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street by Sheelah Kolhatkar

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Carl Icahn, Donald Trump, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, fear of failure, financial deregulation, hiring and firing, income inequality, junk bonds, light touch regulation, locking in a profit, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, medical residency, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, p-value, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Predators' Ball

Traders at various hedge funds shorted the stock, making money each time it went down, dropping from $150 to below $110. On July 26, 2006, Bowe filed a lawsuit in New Jersey State Court, accusing SAC and a group of other funds of spreading false rumors about Fairfax in the market. The lawsuit accused the hedge funds of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, a criminal statute designed to target the Mafia by holding the leaders of a criminal syndicate responsible for the actions of its lower-level employees. Fairfax asked for $5 billion in damages. SAC and the other defendants denied the charge.* Just hours after Fairfax filed its case, Bowe got a call from the U.S.

She was shocked by the way he seemed to have treated Lurie, his former friend. She also found a list of other accounts and mortgage loans that she never knew existed. A few weeks after her call to Bowe, Patricia filed a lawsuit charging Cohen, SAC Capital Advisors, and Cohen’s brother Donald with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act by conspiring to defraud her over a period of years. She included everything she had found in her complaint: her interviews with Cohen’s former Gruntal colleagues, the Lurie deal that had gone so bad, the documents she had acquired from the SEC. She alleged that her husband had confessed to trading in RCA based on inside information that he’d gotten from Bruce Newberg, a Wharton buddy who had worked as a trader for Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert until he was charged with securities fraud.

Silverman drove sports cars: Lawrence Van Gelder, “Long Islanders: Driving Hard on Wall Street,” The New York Times, May 3, 1987. She and Cohen ended up talking for hours: Some details about Cohen and Patricia’s first meeting from Steve Fishman, “Divorced, Never Separated,” New York, March 28, 2010. But in fact there was a tiny wedding: Patricia Cohen v. Steven A. Cohen, et al., Complaint Under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, No. 09 Civ. 10230 (WHP), December 9, 2009; the date of marriage was December 7, 1979. Another divorce filing has the date of marriage as December 12, 1979. The pace of mergers and acquisitions increased: Between 1981 and 1988, more than 1,500 publicly traded American companies were taken private.


The Cigarette: A Political History by Sarah Milov

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist lawyer, affirmative action, airline deregulation, American Legislative Exchange Council, barriers to entry, British Empire, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate personhood, deindustrialization, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, G4S, global supply chain, Herbert Marcuse, imperial preference, Indoor air pollution, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Kitchen Debate, land tenure, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Journalism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, scientific management, Silicon Valley, structural adjustment programs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, Torches of Freedom, trade route, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce

In exchange for these modest concessions (all of which had appeared in stronger form in previous proposals), the manufacturers were relieved of all future litigation brought by the states. Individual and class-action suits, however, were not preempted. In 2006, U.S. District Court judge Gladys Kessler ruled that in hiding the health risks of smoking, tobacco companies were in violation of the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).33 As part of her ruling, Kessler ordered further disclosure of industry documents produced for litigation through 2021. Public-health advocates regarded the MSA as an utter failure for public health and a coup for the companies. Wall Street shared that assessment: tobacco stocks rallied upon the deal’s announcement.34 In many ways, it turned public-health victories of the past decades upside down.

And in the case of Proctor and Brandt, their scholarship has also served to regulate the industry, compelling further disclosure of once-secret documents that have provided the basis for subsequent research and litigation. Both historians testified against the companies in United States v. Philip Morris USA, Inc. (2006), which found that the companies had engaged in a “massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes” and had violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. See especially Robert Proctor, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Brandt, Cigarette Century; Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Knopf, 1996); Philip Hilts, Smokescreen: The Truth behind the Tobacco Industry Cover-Up (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1996); Stanton A.

Having made a rhetorical mark upon the anti-tobacco movement, Roisman would soon leave its orbit for the Justice Department. But Roisman’s early partner in public interest law, Gladys Kessler, indelibly shaped the history—and historiography—of tobacco. As a judge for the DC Circuit, Kessler issued a landmark 1,683-page ruling holding the tobacco companies liable for fraud under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. See U.S. v. Philip Morris, 449 F.Supp. 2d 1 (DDC 2006). As part of the remedy, Kessler required the online disclosure of internal industry documents produced by smoking litigation. These documents have formed some of the evidentiary trove for recent historians of tobacco.


pages: 279 words: 87,875

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare by Ryan Dezember

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, interest rate swap, low interest rates, margin call, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, rent control, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, sovereign wealth fund, transaction costs

Even worse, a lot of the condos that had been sold turned out to have been purchased by the developer, his ex-wife, and the sales agent. Sizemore hired his former Vision board member Buddy Brackin to try to get him out of the deal. Lawyers gathered other buyers, such as the older couple from Georgia, who also alleged they were misled about demand at Sunset Bay. One lawyer even pursued claims under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which was written to combat organized crime. He argued that the developer, sales agent, mortgage broker, and an appraiser were all in cahoots. Using the RICO Act didn’t work, but Sunset Bay sank nonetheless. In November, twenty-five of the building’s forty condos were auctioned off on the courthouse steps.

See also home prices asking collapse in ranges in stock prison time private-equity investments Progress Residential promotional borrowing rates property investors property taxes property value public beach access Public Storage purchase contracts purchase price, of Vision Bank Quonset huts Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act Raley, Scott Ranieri, Lewis real estate agents home prices influencing house hunt with oil spill influencing Shallow, B., as top-selling real estate crash real estate property Alabama’s Gulf Coast Blackstone Group investing in commissions on investment business in Orange Beach investments in prices rising of selling of Shallow, B., selling speculation in waterfront Realty, Joan T.


Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", crack epidemic, desegregation, Multics, Ronald Reagan, Steven Levy, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois

He also reasoned that the feds would specifically target the Black Kings if possible, considering that the gang ran what was probably the city’s smoothest drug operation. Reggie now told me that the feds were indeed working Chicago—and hard. They were hoping to indict the drug gangs under the powerful Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, which was instituted in 1970 to combat the Mafia and other crime groups that dealt in money laundering, gambling, and union shakedowns. RICO had been so successful in disrupting Italian, Irish, and Jewish crime gangs that the feds were now using it to go after street gangs, claiming that they, too, were organized criminal enterprises.

Bailey on in Robert Taylor sociologists on stereotypes of Price (gang member): Billy-Otis dispute and Boo-Boo and Brass beaten up by Johnny and pay of promotion of on recruitment drive shooting of student beaten up by at S.V.’s meeting as war planner Pride Princess prison T-Bone in prostitution, prostitutes drugs used by Ella Bailey as madam of fees paid by pay of regulars vs. hypes S.V.’s interviews of Provident Hospital psychics psychologists Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act () rappers Reagan, Ronald Reemes, Ms. Reggie, Officer Dorothy Battie freed by on guns at Mayne and J.T. negotiations at police officer bar with S.V. S.V.’s car robbery and on S.V.’s dissertation Taneesha incident and regulars restaurant workers Robert Taylor A Robert Taylor B Robert Taylor Homes absence of men in barbecues and parties in candy store in Clinton’s visit to clothing drive for as community crime in demolition of drive-by shootings in elevators in former tenants of gardens in history of illicit earnings in J.T.’s move to J.T.’s survey of monthly meetings of neighborhoods around police fear of poverty and danger in Robert Taylor Homes (cont.)


pages: 434 words: 114,583

Faster, Higher, Farther: How One of the World's Largest Automakers Committed a Massive and Stunning Fraud by Jack Ewing

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 1960s counterculture, Asilomar, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, business logic, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, crossover SUV, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Kaizen: continuous improvement, McMansion, military-industrial complex, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis

The suit further alleged that Piëch had induced López to steal the documents and accused Volkswagen of witness tampering because Volkswagen had allegedly suppressed incriminating portions of a report on the incident prepared at the company’s request by KPMG Peat Marwick. Piëch denied GM’s claims, saying he had never encouraged López to take documents. In any case, Piëch said, the boxes contained little more than books, magazines, brochures, seminar materials, and the like. GM went so far as to claim that, under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, Volkswagen was a criminal organization. When Volkswagen lawyers argued that the RICO claim was outlandish and tried to get it dismissed, a federal judge refused and allowed the case to go forward. The evidence of industrial espionage was solid enough that German prosecutors and the U.S.

Piëch, 97 at VW 2002 annual meeting, 98–99 Plasser, Ursula, See Piëch, Ursula platform strategy, 53–54, 158, 213 plea deal, 269 Poland, German invasion of, 10 Porsche collaboration with VW, 38 and demise of Volkswagen law, 131 EPA’s second notice of violation, 217 fleet average fuel economy milestones, 131–32 Japanese-style production improvements, 52 legal investigation of attempted takeover of VW, 238–42 plans for VW acquisition, 132–41 Porsche family’s departure from managerial roles, 30–31 profits at end of 2008, 136 racing program, 29–30 as source of VW profit, 189 transformation in late 1990s, 94–96 VW’s acquisition of, 129–44 VW technology and, 26 Porsche, Ferdinand arrest and internment after WWII, 16–18 death of, 23 early life, 6 and Hitler, 7, 13 retirement of, 15 Tiger Tank, 10 Volkswagenwerk plans, 8 as VW designer, 6–7 and WWII conditions at Volkswagenwerk, 14 Porsche, Ferdinand (“Ferry”) and Adolf Rosenberger’s restitution claims, 24 arrest and internment after WWII, 16, 17 family dynamics, 129 and platform strategy, 53 as Porsche chief executive, 30 and Porsche family’s departure from managerial roles, 30–31 and Porsche 32 prototype, 7 as shareholder, 37 and Tiger Tank, 10, 11 and VW postwar management team, 24–25 Porsche, Ferdinand Alexander, 30, 32 Porsche, Ferdinand Oliver, 264 Porsche, Gerd, 31 Porsche, Louise, 11 Porsche, Marlene, 31, 41 Porsche, Peter, 30 Porsche, Wolfgang agreement not to intervene in VW’s daily operations, 266–67 at 2015 Frankfurt Motor Show, 203 as head of Porsche family, 130 and internal investigation, 216 and Piëch’s attempt to oust Winterkorn, 188 and Piëch-Wiedeking rivalry, 135 on supervisory board, 264, 271 and VW’s acquisition of Porsche, 141–42 Porsche Automobil Holding SE, 136, 189, 272 Porsche Boxster, 52 Porsche Cayenne, 95, 96, 128, 142, 217 Porsche design bureau, 23–24, 37 Porsche family influence over VW, 26 Piëch family and, 129–30 and Porsche company, 30 Porsche’s attempted VW acquisition, 135, 241–42 relocation of VW headquarters, 16 removal from managerial roles at Porsche, 30–31 ultimate responsibility for scandal, 264 VW after WWII, 23 VW as source of wealth, 37 VW’s acquisition of Porsche, 142 Porsche 550 Spyder, 26 Porsche 911, 26, 30 Porsche 911 Carrera S, 203 Porsche 911 Targa, 30 Porsche 914, 38 Porsche 924, 38 Porsche Panamera, 239 Porsche SE, 141, 143, 240 Porsche 356, 26, 30, 53 Porsche Tiger (tank), 10–11 Porsche Type 32, 6–7 portable emissions-measuring systems (PEMS), 74 Posada, Francisco, 166 Pötsch, Hans Dieter, 215–16, 222–23, 243, 264, 266–67 Prague, Czechoslovakia, 102–3 preferred shareholders, 144 preferred shares, 96, 130–31 PricewaterhouseCoopers, 237 Prinz, Matthias, 91, 240 productivity job security and, 58 under Piëch, 55 VW’s efficiency gap with Toyota, 50–51, 58, 94, 110, 188, 219 as VW weakness, 48 product strategy meetings, 178–79 profit from emissions cheating, 209 VW (early 1990s), 48 VW (late 1990s), 55, 89 VW (2002), 94 profit margin, 95, 150–51, 188 prostitution scandal, 102–7, 112, 130 PSA Group, 218 put options, 137, 138, 140 Qatar, 243 quattro technology, 41 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 62 racketeering, 226 Real World Emissions Workshop, 173 recall, for software updates, 182–83 recession (early 1990s), 51, 52 Reithofer, Norbert, 156 Renault, 218 Renken, Cornelius, 194, 195 Reno, Janet, 69 resale value, VW, 220–21, 235 research and development, 89, 109, 121, 130, 221, 260 Research and Development building, Wolfsburg, 121–23 restitution, 23, 24, 236 Rice, Joseph R., 233 Rittner, Barbara, 214 road testing and defeat devices, 122 EPA’s lack of interest in, 75 in Europe, 163, 260 hardware development, 70–71 truck engine tests, 72–74 WVU mobile testing unit, 78–79 WVU road test of VW vehicles in California, 166–75 Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, 82, 97 Rosenberger, Adolf, 23, 24 Rover (British carmaker), 87, 97 ROVER (Real-time On-road Vehicle Emissions Reporter), 71, 72 Royal Bank of Scotland, 136 Russia, 56, 218–19 Sandkamp, 108 San Francisco, California, See U.S.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

Grossman, “Punishing Climate-Change Skeptics,” Wall Street Journal, March 23, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/punishing-climate-change-skeptics-1458772173. 27 Valerie Richardson, “Bill Nye, the science guy, is open to criminal charges and jail time to climate change dissenters,” Washington Times, April 14, 2016, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/14/bill-nye-open-criminal-charges-jail-time-climate-c/; Mark Hemingway, “Senator: Use RICO Laws to Prosecute Global Warming Skeptics,” Washington Examiner, June 2, 2015, https://www.weeklystandard.com/mark-hemingway/senator-use-rico-laws-to-prosecute-global-warming-skeptics; Robert Bryce, “An Environmentalist Sues over an Academic Disagreement,” National Review, November 10, 2017, https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/11/environmentalist-who-claimed-us-could-run-renewables-sues-over-academic-disagreement/. 28 Steven Hayward, “Make Socialism Scientific Again,” Power Line, August 9, 2018, https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/08/make-socialism-scientific-again.php. 29 Steven Koonin, “A ‘Red Team’ Exercise Would Strengthen Climate Science,” Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-red-team-exercise-would-strengthen-climate-science-1492728579. 30 Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?


pages: 497 words: 123,718

A Game as Old as Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption by Steven Hiatt; John Perkins

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, airline deregulation, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bob Geldof, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, corporate governance, corporate personhood, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, full employment, global village, high net worth, land bank, land reform, large denomination, liberal capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, statistical model, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, Tax Reform Act of 1986, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transfer pricing, union organizing, Washington Consensus, working-age population, Yom Kippur War

The strategy of leaving no stone turned was highly risky, and it eventually fell apart when the Wall Street Journal exposed the trading relationship between Cantrade Bank, a subsidiary of Swiss banking giant UBS, and Robert Young, a British currency trader accused of violating the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. In a long exposé of the overlapping political and financial interests, the WSJ concluded that Jersey was an offshore hazard “living off lax regulation and political interference.” New York Assistant District Attorney John Moscow was even more critical, commenting that “Jersey sees its job as cooperating with criminal authorities when the law requires it, without necessarily keeping the bad guys out.”

Five Pakistani bankers got from three to twenty-five years in prison. Curiously, their lawyers did not allow them to plea bargain themselves, which might have reduced the sentences but would also have provided information about BCCI. The Justice Department went for the narrowest case possible. It declined to use the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) law—invented to aid prosecution of drug traffickers and organized crime—which would have threatened confiscation of the bank’s assets. BCCI’s fine was $14 million—about what the undercover agents posing as drug traffickers had deposited! The U.S. attorney’s office in Tampa agreed not to charge the bank or any affiliates with other federal crimes “under investigation or known to the government at the time of the execution of this agreement.”


pages: 466 words: 116,165

American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History by Casey Michel

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fixed income, forensic accounting, Global Witness, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, Internet Archive, invention of the telegraph, Jeffrey Epstein, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, too big to fail

Thankfully, the PSI shook off the taint of McCarthyism and eventually launched investigations into a wide range of topics, including the Italian-American Mafia, pension and credit card fraud, corruption in the U.S. military, and even abuses in federal student aid programs. The PSI’s successes ran wide. (“PSI stands for pretty scary investigations,” an opponent once quipped.23) Things like the Money Laundering Control Act were direct outgrowths of the PSI’s investigations and public hearings—as was the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) legislation, which effectively buried the Italian-American Mafia as an organized crime force in the U.S.24 By the mid-1990s, the PSI was scouring for new investigative territory. And there stood the BCCI revelations: about modern offshoring, about transnational money laundering, and about all of their handmaidens along the way.

Oxfam Ozark (television series) Panama Papers Parnas, Lev Patriot Act Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) perpetual trusts Pinchuk, Victor Pinochet, Augusto Pitts, Gerald Ponzi schemes Poroshenko, Petro Potanin, Vladimir Prince, Todd Progressive Era Putin, Vladimir Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act Razak, Najib reiderstvo (raiding) Reporters Without Borders reputation laundering Riggs Bank rollbacks, regulatory Rudolph, Josh Rutherford, Bobby Rybolovlev, Dmitry Salinas, Raul Samsung sanctions attempts to skirt against Kolomoisky Magnitsky Act and against Russian oligarchs Sanders, Bernie Sarbanes, Paul Sassou-Nguesso, Claudia Sassou-Nguesso, Denis Schmidt, Eric Schneerson, Menachem Mendel Schochet, Chaim Schochet, Rachel Sebrit Limited Shaxson, Nicholas Shearman & Sterling LLP “shell banks” shell companies, anonymous American lawyers and BCCI and Berger, Michael, and Citibank and definition and characteristics of in Delaware Kolomoisky, Ihor, and legislation against Manafort, Paul, and money laundering and in Nevada in New Jersey Nguema, Teodoro, and Obiang, Teodoro, and Pinochet, Augusto, and regulatory loopholes and Trump, Donald, and in Wyoming Shevchuk, Tetiana Shulman, Vadim Sibley, Nate Silkenat, James Silverstein, Ken Simmons, Tom Singer, Paul Skadden Arps Soliz, Ed South Dakota Specter, Arlen Steel Valley (Ohio) Stuber, Laura Subotic, Stanko Suharto Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) Tanoesoedibjo, Hary Tax Justice Network Teapot Dome scandal Telizhenko, Andrii Teodorin.


Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the US City by Mike Davis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, Berlin Wall, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, edge city, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, invisible hand, job automation, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, market bubble, mass immigration, new economy, occupational segregation, postnationalism / post nation state, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, The Turner Diaries, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor

Yet during the explosive 1992 strug- gle of 4000 drywall workers "the grants' village of origin [El social Maguey solidarity for the organizing drive." in networks based on immiGuanajuato] helped build The drywalleros, as they call themselves, defied mass arrests, police brutality, threats of deportation and even an attempt by employers to indict them under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to achieve, according to labor journalist ion contract trades won by anywhere Immigrant that so David Bacon, "the first un- a grassroots organizing effort in the building in the country since the social mobilization many immigrants occupy tions in the parallel worlds they is 1930s."^'^^ also complicated by the fact strikingly different class posi- move between.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

The journalist concluded that several factors resulted in New York City’s unions being prone to corruption, including the entrenched Mafia presence, the city’s many construction projects, the availability of large numbers of immigrant workers, and the juxtaposition of large, powerful unions with small, vulnerable businesses.57 Media reports regarding union corruption have highlighted the FBI’s efforts to enforce the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act since the 1970s and bring an end to labor racketeering. According to the FBI, some unions, including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the International Longshoremen’s Association, have in the past been “completely dominated by men who either have strong ties to or are members of the organized crime syndicate.”58 Despite extensive media coverage of the FBI’s successes in curtailing organized crime’s involvement in labor unions, connections between some unions and crime persist.

See poor and homeless/ underclass Undercover Boss, 216 UNICEF, 36 United Automobile Workers (UAW), 130, 131 United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, 132 United Press International, 223 United States: Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 100; Annual Homeless Assessment Report, 89; calculating poverty line by, 82–83; Census Bureau, 88, 90, 91, 92; Conference of Mayors, 91, 92; Department of Agriculture (USDA), 91; Department of Commerce, 165; Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), 89; Department of Justice, 139; 2/10/11 10:47 AM Index Department of Labor, 72; Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 134; Federal Emergency Management Agency, 138; Gilded Age in, 23, 23; Great Depression in, 23, 203, 218; Great Recession in, 21, 30, 43, 48, 88, 94, 154, 194, 210, 220–21; healthcare reform legislation in, 194; Labor Day, 125, 127; Medicaid, 97; New Deal programs, 173; Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, 100; Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 134; Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 71, 72; Senate Committee on Education and Labor, 127; September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on, 137; Social Security Administration, 82; Supplemental Poverty Measure, 90–91; Taft-Hartley Labor Act, 128; Telecommunications Act, 224; Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, 100, 102; troops in Iraq, 95; White House Task Force on Middle Class Families, 175, 177 UPI, 121 UPN, 186 upper class: admiration framing of, 17, 29, 34–39, 50; bad-apple framing of, 18, 29, 54, 55, 61–76, 77–80; composition of, 14–15; consensus framing of, 17, 29–34, 50; defining, 14–15; emulation framing of, 17, 29, 39–42, 50–51, 212; endorsements and advertising by, 26; framing of, 211–12; impressing one another, 22; in-house publications by, 28–29; luxury consumption by, 54, 70–74, 77; media hogs in, 61–63, 77; misconduct and crimes of, 54, 55, 65–70; mixed attitudes toward, 25; mogul style and, 70–74, 77; philanthropic activities of, 34–39; 9781442202238.print.indb 299 299 positive and negative media frames of, 17–18, 29–51; price-tag framing of, 17, 29, 42–49, 51, 212; as “ruling class,” 33; Society Page coverage of, 23–51; sour-grapes framing of, 17–18, 29, 53, 55–61, 77, 80; as unhappy and dysfunctional, 55–61; wealthy women and crime, 65–70 upper-middle class, defining, 14, 15 Urban Institute, 102 U.S.


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When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm by Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, Bear Stearns, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Citizen Lab, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, data science, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, illegal immigration, income inequality, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, job satisfaction, job-hopping, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, load shedding, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, mortgage debt, Multics, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, profit maximization, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, The future is already here, The Nature of the Firm, too big to fail, urban planning, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Who are these persons who knowingly and secretly decide to put the buying public at risk solely for the purpose of making profits and who believe that illness and death of consumers is an appropriate cost of their own prosperity.” For his strong words, Judge Sarokin was removed from the case. But they would be echoed a decade later when another federal judge expressed the same conclusion after presiding over the government’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case against Big Tobacco. Anyone seeking to justify taking money from cigarette companies could always find a way. Big Tobacco did employ tens of thousands of workers. In 1990 a Fortune magazine survey of top executives, outside directors, and analysts ranked Philip Morris as America’s second most admired company, largely because it had pleased investors.

., 10, 11, 13–15 Princeton University, 135 prisons and jails, 25, 78, 81, 157 private equity firms, 18, 64, 157 Private Finance Initiative (NHS), 265 privatization, 52, 261, 263–64, 269, 272–74 Procter & Gamble, 249 productivity, 49–50 Project Destiny, 263–64 ProPublica, 25, 72, 75, 79–88 PT Pertamina, 166 Public Citizen Health Research Group, 67–68, 145 public option, 62–63 Pulido, Alfonso, 126 Purdue Pharma, 109, 131–44, 280 Evolve to Excellence and, 142 FDA and, 137, 144–45, 148 settlements and, 136, 148 pure loss ratio, 198 Putin, Vladimir, 26 Q Qatar Petroleum, 163 QuantumBlack, 210–11, 214–15 Quartet, 244 Queensland, 158 R Race for the World (Bryan), 208 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO, 1970), 115, 119–20 Raghavan, Anita, 39 railroads, 33, 102, 226–29, 263–64, 269 Railtrack, 263–64 Rand, Ayn, 9 Rand Corporation, 63 Rauner, Bruce, 52–53 Raytheon, 246 Reed, Maureen, 194–95 Reform think tank, 268, 271 Regiments Capital, 227, 229–30, 233, 237, 239–40 regulation, 18, 236.


pages: 507 words: 145,878

The Predators' Ball: The Inside Story of Drexel Burnham and the Rise of the JunkBond Raiders by Connie Bruck

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alvin Toffler, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, financial independence, fixed income, Future Shock, Glass-Steagall Act, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, offshore financial centre, Oscar Wyatt, paper trading, profit maximization, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Predators' Ball, yield management, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond

Under the margin rules (which allow one to borrow up to 50 percent of the purchase price of the stock), this would have enabled Icahn to buy $40 million of stock. Marshall Field fought back with a lawsuit as Hammermill had, making the usual battery of allegations about violations of federal securities laws, but added something novel as well: a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) count, usually reserved for dealing with organized crime. It charged Icahn with having invested income derived from a “pattern of racketeering” to acquire his interest in Marshall Field, whose activities affected interstate and foreign commerce. The complaint charged that this pattern (which was defined to include violations of securities laws) could be found in Icahn’s history of infractions over the past decade.

., 13, 14, 100, 102, 107, 109, 203, 218, 231, 355 Phillips Petroleum and, 13, 164, 165, 166, 171 at Predators’ Ball (1986), 258 Pierce, Fenner and Smith, 30 poison pill, 168, 216, 217, 224, 226, 256 Polaroid, 152 Political Action Committees (PACs), 259 political contributions, 259, 260 politics, Drexel’s influence on, 258–260, 264–65 polo matches, 190 Posner, Steven, 121 Posner, Victor, 12–13, 16, 93, 106, 119–25, 156 Boesky Day and, 318, 320–23 business problems of, 128, 139–40 Considine and, 122–23, 125 Engel and, 121, 123, 338, 340 first business venture of, 121–22 fortune made by, 120 National Can and, 119, 122–25, 127–29, 131, 132, 139–40, 146 personality of, 120–22 Predators’ Ball (1985), 10–20, 135–136, 141, 170, 183, 259, 294 entertainment at, 16 “girls” at, 15 Predators’ Ball (1986), 182–83, 257–259, 291, 302 Predators’ Ball (1987), 329 preferred stock, 290, 325 defined, 265 President’s Council of Economic Advisers, 261–63, 270 Prime Capital Associates, 231 Princeton-Newport Limited Partnership, 81, 311, 328 Princeton University, 189 Princeville Development Corporation, 284 private placements, 129–30 disadvantages of, 130 insurance companies and, 45, 46, 100 Revlon battle and, 217–18, 223 Procter and Gamble, 221 productivity, Milken’s views on, 356–57 Provident Bank, 36 proxy fights, 154–55, 157–59, 164–165, 168, 172, 202–3 Prudential Bache, 252 Prudential Insurance Company of America, 134, 311 publicity, Milken’s views on, 86 Pullman, 96 Quanex, 349 “quasi-trader salesmen,” 86 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 159–60 Rainwater, Richard, 278 Ralston Purina, 334 RA Partnership, 81 “Rape and Pillage in the Corporate Takeover Jungle” (Lipton), 204 Rapid-American, 35, 37–38, 83, 93, 327 RCA, 99 Reagan Administration, 97, 260, 264 real-estate investment trusts (REITs), 34–35, 44–45, 154–55, 307, 308 recession, 29, 33, 34, 70–71, 77, 270, 345 Regan, James, 81–83, 300, 311, 327–328 Reheis special chemical business, 232 Reich, Ilan, 318 REITs (real-estate investment trusts), 34–35, 44–45, 154–55, 307, 308 relationship banking, 63 “Relationship Group,” 340 Reliance Capital Group, L.


The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Meanwhile, freezing weather and then the threat of melting snow and floods prompted the state to close down the protest camps. The last 1,320 feet of the 1,172-mile pipeline were completed. But the battle was hardly over. The protestors and activists and their legal allies promised to fight both new and refurbished pipelines. In turn, Energy Transfer sued Greenpeace under RICO—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, originally used to go after the Mafia. For its part, North Dakota was left with a $43 million bill that included the cost of cleaning up large amounts of debris left by the protestors, who, said a local emergency management official, had left “more garbage down there than anybody anticipated.”5 By the end of May 2017, four months after the executive order giving the go-ahead, the first oil was flowing through the now-completed Dakota Access.

See also carbon emissions; greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) polysilicon, 397 Pompeo, Mike, 59, 168, 187 population growth, 4, 297, 368, 378, 413–14 populist politics, 43, 44–45, 423 Potential Gas Committee, 12 Power of Siberia pipeline, 117, 125, 126, 158 Pradhan, Dharmendra, 284, 342, 409–10 propane, 410 Public Investment Fund (PIF), 309 Putin, Vladimir, 70–71, 75–76, 125 and Arctic gas reserves, 112, 114 on gas negotiations, 83 and impact of shale revolution on U.S. foreign policy, 61 and opposition to Russian gas exports, 107 and price war among petroleum producers, 315, 318–20 relationship with Saudis, 311 and Russia-Ukraine conflict, 82–83, 94–96 and Russian gas supplies to Europe, 85 and Russian interests in Central Asia, 124–25 and Russia’s energy transition challenges, xv and Russia’s “pivot to the east,” 115–19 and Syrian civil war, 246–47 and tensions with Ukraine, 91–93 and U.S. politics, 103 Qatar, 34, 37–38, 114, 240, 278, 306–7 Quds Force, 228, 230–31, 234, 247–48, 253, 268, 289 Quest, The (Yergin), xix Qutb, Sayyid, 260–64 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, 51 railroads, 20, 48, 49, 179, 184, 187–88 Raimi, Daniel, 28 Ramírez, Rafael, 275 RAND Corporation, 133 Ras Tanura oil terminal, 241, 287 Reagan, Ronald, 53–54, 88, 172 recycling, 416 Red Sea, 251, 303 Reema bint Bandar Al Saud, 317 refugee crises, 245, 247–48, 283 REN, 398, 399 Renault-Nissan, 332–33 renewable energy, 55, 323, 330, 394–402 Republic of China, 139 Republican Guard (Iraq), 216 Republican Party (U.S.), xvii, 55 Rice, Condoleezza, 83 Richardson, Bill, 121 Richthoften, Ferdinand von, 178 ride-hailing services and taxis, 343, 347, 358–65, 368, 370–71, 373 “Road to Rejuvenation, The” (exhibit), 166 Roman Empire, 178 Rose Revolution, 82 Rosen, Harold, 327 Rosneft, 76, 104, 118, 159, 275, 314 RosUkrEnergo, 83 Rothschild, Lionel, 199 Rouhani, Hassan, 225, 226, 227 Rousseff, Dilma, 44 Royal Geographical Society, 120 Royal Shakespeare Company, 387 Rudd, Kevin, 169 Russia (Russian Federation), 69–75, 79, 92–93 Arctic gas reserves, 97–98 and Central Asia, 120–26 and China’s Belt and Road initiative, 182, 188–89 and China’s development of oil resources, 158 and China’s rise, 172 and development of Arctic resources, 110–14 development of gas resources, 70–77 and election interference, 70, 78, 81, 103–4 “energy superpower,” 70–71 and energy transition challenges, xv–xvi and Gazprom, 80–82 and global impact of coronavirus pandemic, 312–13 and global oil market, 426 and historical context of Middle East conflicts, 196 impact of shale revolution on, 56–57 natural gas supplies to Europe, 78, 80–83, 84–89, 102, 104–8, 106, 113 oil and state power, 99–101 and OPEC-Plus deal, 321–23 “pivot to the east” strategy, 114, 115–19 and price war among petroleum producers, 317, 318–21 Russian-Georgian War, 91 sanctions on, 95–98, 99–101 and Syrian civil war, 246–47 and Ukraine conflict, 80, 95–98, 96 and U.S. energy production, 63, 65–66 and U.S.


pages: 195 words: 63,455

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds by Dominique Mielle

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, family office, fear of failure, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, glass ceiling, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, intangible asset, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, profit maximization, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, satellite internet, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, Sheryl Sandberg, SoftBank, survivorship bias, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, tulip mania, union organizing

I can emphatically say yes and name one for almost certain. In 2004, the Department of Justice brought an extraordinary civil lawsuit against U.S. cigarette manufacturers. Not only did the government endeavor to recoup the unfathomable sum of $280 billion, they were suing under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which was originally intended to attack organized crime like the mafia. Never had it applied to corporate America. The rationale from the Clinton administration was that Big Tobacco had enjoyed profits wrongfully obtained from a lifelong marketing campaign of lies and deceit.


pages: 741 words: 179,454

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

The SEC and Rudy Giuliani, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, launched wide-ranging investigations into Drexel’s operations. The SEC brought charges of insider trading, stock manipulation, defrauding its clients, and stock parking (buying stocks for the benefit of another) against Drexel and Milken. Giuliani threatened indictment under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, originally intended for use against organized crime. Drexel could be required to post a performance bond of as much as $1 billion or have its assets frozen. Under an agreement with the government, Drexel pleaded nolo contendere (no contest) to six felonies and paid a record fine of $650 million.

See also Mark Twain purchases by bankers, 322-323 pure plays, 60, 139 put options, 120, 209 Pynchon, Thomas, 352 pyramid schemes, 34 Q Qantas, 156, 162 Qing dynasty, 84 Qishan, Wang, 346 QSPEs (qualified special purpose entities), 288 quantification of risk, 130 quantitative easing, 340 equity market neutral, 254 funds, 242 Quantos, 211 Quantum Fund, 240 quantum theory, 126 quasi-currency, 24. See also currency Quayle, Dan, 95 Queen, 157 Queen Elizabeth, 278 R Rabbit Is Rich, 363 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, 150 Radaker, Byron, 134 Rain Man, 153, 166 rainbows, 211 Raines, Sylvain, 309 Rains, Claude, 77 Rajaratnam, Raj, 244 Ralphie’s Funds, 191, 204 Ramones, The, 79 RAND Corporation, 35 Rand, Ayn, 294, 296 random walks, 118 rands, 21 Range Rover, 346 Ranieri, Lewis, 170 Rapid American, 143 Rappaport, Alfred, 124 Raskob, John, 97 Ratergate (2008), 285 ratings agencies, 141 bonds, 282-285 CDOs, 285 credit, 282 Rational Man, 119 Rattner, Steven, 274 Raynes, Sylvain R., 196 re-re-securitizations, 191 re-securitizations, 191 Reagan, Ronald, 65-66, 97, 101, 298, 364 real estate, 179-182 adjusted rate mortgages (ARMs), 183-184 reals, 21 recessions, 350 recovery, 359-360 rates, 171 recruitment of finance candidates, 310 recycling in Japan, 39 Red Force, 264 Redline, 186 Reed, John, 71, 75 reflexivity, 327 Regnault, Jules, 118 regulations, 81 banks, 65-67 Basel 1, 74 Basel 2, 200 central banks, 279-281 self-regulating markets, 102 synthetic securitization, 176 regulators preparation for financial crises, 264-278 understanding of securitization, 282 regulatory arbitrage, 75 Reid, Harry, 299 relative value funds arb (arbitrage) market inefficiencies, 242 religious prohibitions on usuries, 32 remote risk of loss, 220 renminbi, 21 rentiers, 33 repackaging corporate debt, 173 repos (repurchase agreements), 288 reserves banking, 32 gold, 30 resources, financial news, 89-99 restructures, corporations, 57 retirement, 20, 46, 48 Japan, 49-50 pension plans, 50 self-funded savings, 180 returns benchmarking, 123 on capital, 57 hedge funds, 243-244 private equity, 162 Revco drug stores, 150 Reykjavík, Iceland, 275 as a financial center, 84 Reynolds, Glenn, 283 Reynolds/Tube, 58 Rhodesia.


The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, British Empire, colonial exploitation, complexity theory, cuban missile crisis, demand response, disinformation, false flag, financial independence, flag carrier, Herman Kahn, index card, mandelbrot fractal, operational security, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment

The sad part, Hoskins thought, was that the area really needed the water project. It would be good for everyone, including the local fishermen. What made it illegal was that bribes were being made. He would have his choice of five federal statutes to apply to the case, the nastiest of which was the RICO law, the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act that had been passed over twenty years before without a thought about its possible scope of coverage. He already had one governor in a federal penitentiary, and to that he would add four more elected officials. The scandal would rip Colorado state politics asunder. The confidential informant in question was the governor's personal aide, an idealistic young woman who had decided eight months earlier that enough was enough.


pages: 273 words: 93,419

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity by Robert Albritton

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bretton Woods, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Food sovereignty, Haber-Bosch Process, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, land reform, late capitalism, means of production, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, South Sea Bubble, the built environment, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile

In response to this, some progressive lawyers then launched a damages suit on behalf of 13 former banana workers against the corporations in a Los Angeles court. The jury awarded the workers $3.2 million, but the corporations intend to appeal. Further, one of the corporations countered with a $17 billion lawsuit against the impoverished Nicaraguan workers, under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.27 CORPORATIONS AND SCIENCE Capitalism has radically manipulated scientific research to serve its interest, and by so doing has undermined the credibility of science, whose integrity depends on making an effort to advance the disinterested search for truth. As is so clearly evidenced by the war on cancer, science has often been manipulated to advance profits and not human flourishing.28 The big profits come from treating cancer and not preventing it.


pages: 300 words: 94,628

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", big-box store, Donald Davies, Drosophila, epigenetics, hydroponic farming, Internet Archive, means of production, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

Taking steps not just to concede addiction but also to help foster a better understanding of its particulars might help persuade juries to cut the company some slack when awarding damages in the legion of civil lawsuits it faced. Admitting addiction might also soften up the federal judge who was presiding over the ominous criminal case that the government had just brought against Philip Morris and other tobacco companies under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, accusing them of a decades-long conspiracy to mislead the public about the risks of smoking. (Soft the judge was not; she came down on the industry with a blistering 1,683-page opinion in 2006 that forced the companies to issue statements correcting their false claims.) But the company had another compelling reason to embrace addiction.


pages: 389 words: 109,207

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street by William Poundstone

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Albert Einstein, anti-communist, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, correlation coefficient, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, high net worth, index fund, interest rate swap, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, short selling, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

He had changed his registration to Republican only a month before. Giuliani was thus working in Washington at the time the Supreme Court handed down a decision that would change his life. The case was the United States v. Turkette, and it concerned the organized crime law RICO. RICO stands for Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. The author of RICO, Notre Dame law professor G. Robert Blakey, was a former aide to Robert Kennedy. The twisted syntax of the name was allegedly chosen so that the acronym would recall the name of Edward G. Robinson’s character (Rico Bandello) in the 1931 gangster film Little Caesar.


pages: 414 words: 108,413

King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist by Mark Stevens

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, classic study, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, financial engineering, flag carrier, Gordon Gekko, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Michael Milken, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, shareholder value, yellow journalism

Pointing to a trend that could only be seen as a sign of the times in the Roaring Eighties, Skadden noted that in a growing number of 13-d filings, “the filing person makes a ‘boilerplate’ disclosure, which includes within its terms every possible course of action, thereby protecting the filer (which, like the Icahn group here, simply takes the convenient position that it has not made up its mind what to do) against a later claim of nondisclosure while leaving it free to pursue its plans in a market that is really no better informed about its intentions than it was before the filing. This totally subverts the purposes of Section 13-d.” In addition to the run-of-the-mill securities lawsuits that Icahn and his lawyers had learned how to pulverize, Field tried a new tactic, slapping Icahn with a charge under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) claiming that the money used to acquire his position in the embattled retailer was gained through a pattern of racketeering, allegedly evidenced by his previous raids. With the suit, Skadden was seeking to lump Icahn together with the Mafia figures that were the original RICO targets.


pages: 308 words: 96,604

American Pain: How a Young Felon and His Ring of Doctors Unleashed America’s Deadliest Drug Epidemic by John Temple

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", airport security, barriers to entry, citizen journalism, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Mason jar, McMansion, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, tech billionaire

An assistant US attorney named Paul Schwartz was assigned to lead the case. Schwartz was in his mid-fifties and had spent much of his career prosecuting South Florida branches of the Colombo, Lucchese, and Gambino families, leaning hard on alleged caporegimes with nicknames like “Fat Tommy” and “Carmine The Snake” and “Ronnie One Arm.” He’d used RICO laws to go after a Bloods-affiliated street gang in Mira-mar. During a Gambino prosecution in 2004, it was alleged that mobsters were planning to murder Schwartz, and that wasn’t his first death threat. Schwartz was hard and foul-mouthed in meetings with defendants but quick to call defense attorneys and apologize afterward.


pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

As this area was a major contributor to our profits, we accepted the $2 million loss. Though the three tapes should then have been reused as was our usual practice, they sat forgotten in a desk for a couple of years until the government seized them in the 1987 raid as part of hundreds of boxes of files and materials. The government invoked the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a tool designed to prosecute mobsters, for the first time ever against securities industry defendants. It was a landmark case. The defendants posted cash bonds totaling $20 million. To pressure them further, the US attorney began contacting our limited partners and making arrangements to subpoena them to come to New York and testify (to what?)


The Cleaner: The True Story of One of the World’s Most Successful Money Launderers by Bruce Aitken

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", air freight, airport security, Asian financial crisis, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, foreign exchange controls, junk bonds, Maui Hawaii, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, profit motive, risk/return, South China Sea

This must have been my sub-conscious reasoning when I decided to have the records destroyed. Gary Alderdice on developments: “I’ll inform Marcus” and ask… “Can you confirm that the prosecution’s strategy is that the government is trying to consolidate all into one indictment which would affect Bruce in a RICO [Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act] charge and probably a lesser charge of conspiracy to import and distribute the 42-ton marijuana shipment into Seattle?” Can you imagine that is considered a lesser charge? Alderdice wrote, “I do not see from the materials I have considered so far that there is any evidence whatsoever against Bruce in relation to the 72-ton shipment.


Off the Books by Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", business climate, gentrification, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, new economy, refrigerator car, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban renewal, working poor, Y2K

In 1978 Chicago's law enforcement agencies merged their street gang and narcotics divisions because of the overwhelming involvement of gang members in drug trafficking.4 Other cities soon followed suit. In the late eighties and early nineties, as a confirmation of street gangs' success in dominating the drug economy in Chicago, the federal government would utilize powers granted by the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to try to dismantle the organized criminal networks of gangs throughout urban ghetto neighborhoods. Eventually, several hundred senior gang members and their sympathizers ended up in jail for their roles in drug sales, commercial extortion, tax evasion, and other crimes tied to gangs' criminal enterprises.


pages: 520 words: 134,627

Unacceptable: Privilege, Deceit & the Making of the College Admissions Scandal by Melissa Korn, Jennifer Levitz

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, blockchain, call centre, Donald Trump, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, high net worth, impact investing, independent contractor, Jeffrey Epstein, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, performance metric, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Thorstein Veblen, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, yield management, young professional, zero-sum game

* * * • • • NOMINATED TO THE BENCH in 1979 by then president Jimmy Carter, U.S. District Judge Rya Zobel had seen a lot. But the case before her gave her pause. The government had charged more than a dozen of the defendants, including most of the coaches accused of taking bribes, under the RICO statute, or the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, aimed at organized crime since the 1970s. “To combat the Cosa Nostra,” Zobel specified from the bench in Courtroom 12 at the federal courthouse in Boston in June. “And now it’s being used in this particular context, which—it’s a heavy statute.” A hint of disapproval seemed to drip from the voice of the eighty-seven-year-old judge, a Holocaust survivor with an elegant bearing and a crisp accent from her native Germany.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

When he would mention this inclination, the wife of one of the firm’s partners would joke that if he was serious he should go sell his work at Pike Place Market like the guy who made the linoleum woodcut prints of flowers that the firm’s attorneys all seemed to have in their bathrooms at home. In 1980, Duke’s firm took on some of the twenty-six defendants in a racketeering case against the Carbone family. It was a huge case, the first time, he was told, that the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statute had been used in the Ninth Circuit. One day, Milo Duke joined dozens of other lawyers working on the case in a large conference room. It occurred to him that in a few months he’d gone from being a public defender for the indigent to representing mafiosi. He thought, What the fuck am I doing here?


pages: 1,199 words: 332,563

Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition by Robert N. Proctor

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", bioinformatics, carbon footprint, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, facts on the ground, friendly fire, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, index card, Indoor air pollution, information retrieval, invention of gunpowder, John Snow's cholera map, language of flowers, life extension, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pink-collar, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, publication bias, Ralph Nader, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, speech recognition, stem cell, telemarketer, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

That strategy backfired with the rise of the Internet, however, since most of these documents can now be searched by anyone with an Internet connection. The industry built in a clause requiring the documents to disappear after 2012, but Federal Judge Gladys Kessler in 2006 extended the life of these archives to 2021 as part of her ruling in USA v. Philip Morris, where the industry was found to have violated the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Historians have only just begun to work through these archives. They should not be regarded as complete, however. Many documents have been destroyed, and many of the most sensitive have been held back on grounds of attorney-client privilege. Hundreds of thousands of documents remain hidden from view, and those that we do possess—though they number in the millions—should be regarded as faint traces of the trail left by the industry.

Fortunately, however, the courts have begun to see through this ruse. In the summer of 2006 federal court Judge Gladys Kessler ruled in United States v. Philip Morris that the industry had deliberately tried to deceive consumers with its “lights” campaign. Justice Department lawyers had accused the industry of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act—the statute created to punish organized crime—and the court was harsh in its condemnation. In one of the most detailed legal judgments in history—the “Final Amended Opinion” runs to 1,600 pages—the court ruled that the companies had committed fraud and racketeering on a scale of massive proportions.


pages: 500 words: 156,079

Game Over Press Start to Continue by David Sheff, Andy Eddy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", affirmative action, air freight, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, game design, HyperCard, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, pattern recognition, profit motive, revision control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

Posing as a David against the Goliath of Nintendo, Tengen fought viciously. Nintendo filed a twofold countersuit almost immediately, charging Atari Games with “the fraudulent inducement” of Nintendo to enter into the licensing agreement and with the sale of unauthorized and unsupported games. It claimed that Atari Games violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) by creating Tengen as a front company in order to defraud Nintendo. In good faith NOA had given substantial marketing and technical support for the Tengen NES cartridges. Then, the complaint continued, “having achieved its goal of strong public identification with the games and packaging with Nintendo, beginning sometime in late December [1988] or early January, Tengen commenced selling unauthorized versions of these same games.”


pages: 487 words: 147,891

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, BRICs, colonial rule, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Firefox, forensic accounting, friendly fire, glass ceiling, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Nick Leeson, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, Pearl River Delta, place-making, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, trade liberalization, trade route, Transnistria, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile

Yamanouchi, “the police told the Osaka Bar Association that I was no longer permitted to print the phrase ‘Legal Counselor to the Yamaguchi-gumi’ on my business card. But apart from that, it hasn’t affected me too much!” The gold standard of anti–organized crime legislation is the RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), passed by the U.S. Congress in 1970 and thought (apocryphally, some say) to be named in honor of Edward G. Robinson’s character in Little Caesar (“Is this the end of Rico?” he asks rhetorically while breathing his last in the 1930s classic). It took ten years before a mafia boss was actually convicted under RICO.


pages: 509 words: 153,061

The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 by Thomas E. Ricks

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Berlin Wall, classic study, disinformation, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, interchangeable parts, It's morning again in America, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman

Unfortunately, they were two of the three most important: the oil ministry, loaded with revenue, and the interior ministry, which controls the police and other law enforcement organizations, such as the border patrol. Leakage at the oil agency was said to be “massive,” with much of the money going to the insurgency, the report alleged. It likened the interior department to a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization: “MOI is a ‘legal enterprise’ which has been co-opted by organized criminals who act through the ‘legal enterprise’ to commit crimes such as kidnapping, extortion, bribery, etc.” ARMY 2006 VS. ARMY 2007 A sharp but illuminating squabble would break out later among some Army officers who had commanded in Iraq about whether the U.S. approach in 2007 really was that different from earlier years.


pages: 499 words: 148,160

Market Wizards: Interviews With Top Traders by Jack D. Schwager

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, computerized trading, conceptual framework, delta neutral, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, fixed income, implied volatility, index card, junk bonds, locking in a profit, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Michael Milken, money market fund, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, short selling, Teledyne, transaction costs, uptick rule, yield curve, zero-sum game

The firm’s divided structure worked extremely well for 19 years, but also led to its demise. In December 1987, 50 federal agents raided the Princeton office to gather files and tapes as evidence of securities violations. United States Attorney Rudolph Giuliani eventually brought racketeering charges against PNP, the first time the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statute had been invoked against a securities firm. In August 1988, Regan and four other members of the Princeton office were indicted on 64 counts. The charges essentially boiled down to two items: stock parking (leaving shares with another party to conceal true ownership)1 and stock manipulation related to a Drexel Burnham Lambert securities offering.


pages: 914 words: 270,937

Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", active measures, affirmative action, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, card file, disinformation, operational security

"In cooperation with six foreign governments, we have initiated the necessary steps to seize all of those funds, and also to seize eight real-estate joint-venture investments here in the United States which were the primary agency in the actual laundering operation. This is being done under the RICO - the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization - statute. I should emphasize on that point that the real-estate ventures involve the holdings of many innocent investors; their holdings will not - I repeat not - be affected in any way by the government's action. They were used as dupes by the Cartel, and they will not be harmed by these seizures."


pages: 1,073 words: 302,361

Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World by William D. Cohan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, deal flow, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyman Minsky, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short squeeze, South Sea Bubble, tail risk, time value of money, too big to fail, traveling salesman, two and twenty, value at risk, work culture , yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The prosecutors began to conceive of a way to perhaps bring their ongoing embarrassment in the case to a rapid close by using the existence of the Bunny testimony—which of course was not part of the original complaint or indictment and was not even a phrase Siegel remembered uttering—against Freeman. After two years of behaving like the Keystone Kops, the prosecutors began to wise up. Shortly after Brosens testified, Laurie Cohen, an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal and a protégée of both Stewart and Hertzberg, wrote a “legal perspective” column below the headline “RICO Law Keeps Insider Trading Case of Goldman Sachs’ Freeman in Limbo.” Her article, which all but said the government’s prosecutors were seriously considering charging Freeman under the RICO statutes, scared Freeman to death. Cohen’s article suggested a new indictment against Freeman was imminent and that he would likely be charged under the RICO statutes because one of the alleged charges of insider trading against Freeman supposedly involved a tip Freeman had given Siegel more than five years earlier about Continental Group, Inc.


pages: 1,009 words: 329,520

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Carl Icahn, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, deal flow, diversification, Donald Trump, East Village, fear of failure, financial engineering, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, interest rate swap, intermodal, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, land bank, late fees, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Michael Milken, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short squeeze, SoftBank, stock buybacks, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, Yogi Berra

There was now a nagging sense that Lazard, despite its immense prestige and profitability, was dangerously out of control and a pattern of criminal malfeasance had emerged. Not surprisingly, the federal authorities were by now in regular communication with the Lazard senior partners and the firm's lawyers about the goings-on in the municipal finance department. There was the possibility that the firm would be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, which would likely put the firm out of business. One partner recalled, sadly, "Lazard was told by the feds, 'Hey, look, guys. You got two bad actors. Ferber and Poirier. Kidder went down. Drexel went down. We're really trying to be sensitive to the fact that we can put companies out of business, because we see we can do that, just by suggesting something.