Source: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/comment/in-wakefields-wake
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 03:51:23+00:00

Document:
For many years, New York State’s enterprise corruption law was grounded in a legal error. Recently, the New York Court of Appeals has sought to correct some of the doctrinal consequences of this mistake. Unfortunately, the court’s solution has left the law unmoored from its original purpose, perpetuated issues of notice and legality, and heightened the risk of overcriminalization. This Comment reconstructs and analyzes these developments. It then turns to the practice of a lone (and heretofore ignored) New York State trial court judge as a potential solution to the legal and policy problems created by the current state of the law.
The argument proceeds in six parts. Part I demonstrates how the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO)—the inspiration for New York State’s enterprise corruption law—was designed to respond to the special problems that the Mafia posed for traditional law enforcement. Part II explains how New York legislators, concerned about the way the federal law threatened fair trial principles, sought to limit the reach of their state analog, the Organized Crime Control Act (OCCA). Part III shows how New York State courts eliminated many of those limits as a result of an error of statutory interpretation, creating bad doctrine. Part IV examines the way the Court of Appeals has recently tried to fix this flawed jurisprudence. Part V details some of the problems with the court’s solution. Part VI proposes the use of section 210.40(2) motions under the New York Criminal Procedure Law as an alternative by which the judiciary can correct its long-standing error. Finally, a short conclusion suggests the broader implications of this possible reform.
Schemes like the Lucchese’s posed three related problems for law enforcement officials. First, they insulated higher-ups from serious criminal charges by distancing them from easy-to-prove crimes.4 Second, and counter-intuitively, they provided law enforcement with plenty of other criminals to prosecute besides the scheme’s orchestrators, creating the illusion of enforcement authority without the ability to reach the real underlying crime.5 These difficulties can both be understood as manifestations of a third, deeper problem: the organization of the Mob made it resistant to traditional criminal prosecution. Traditionally, law enforcement sought to pin individual crimes on individual criminals.6 But most individuals in a complex criminal organization like the Mafia were interchangeable. If one low-level Mafioso were jailed, another would simply take his place. The core crime family—and with it, the criminal scheme—remained out of reach.
To address these problems, in 1970, Congress enacted an innovative new statute, RICO, criminalizing the use of thuggery and illicit schemes to infiltrate legitimate businesses.7 This new law allowed prosecutors to go after the Mob not in spite of its complex organization, but through it.8 Focusing on how the Mafia made its money allowed prosecutors to pursue not only the low-level street enforcers who committed traditional crimes, but also the captains who planned them and the bosses who indirectly profited.
Defining the crime this way responded to both of the legislature’s concerns about RICO. It protected defendants by requiring prosecutors to affirmatively establish that the defendants had participated in or sought to advance the affairs of a criminal enterprise.27 This restored the nexus between wrongful action and punishment. It also limited the law’s reach by restricting the application of OCCA to defendants who were explicitly participating in such enterprises. This narrowed the law by preventing it from potentially reaching anyone engaged in a pattern of criminal activity.
The Wakefield decision is problematic on three counts. First, as a technical matter, it rests on an error of statutory interpretation. The Wakefield court relied on the fact that OCCA had been heavily influenced by RICO44 and that its drafters had apparently borrowed the law’s concept of criminal enterprise45 and even some of its definitional language from federal RICO cases.46 Ordinarily, under the so-called Lorillard rule, when a legislature borrows statutory language from another jurisdiction, it is also understood to borrow extant interpretations of that language by the other jurisdiction’s courts.47 This seems to be how the Wakefield court read OCCA’s provisions on criminal enterprise48: since New York borrowed language from a federal case, the meaning of that language must be the same as that found in federal law. However, it is well established that the Lorillard rule should not apply where there are manifest and substantial differences in public policy between the two jurisdictions.49 That exception should have controlled here. Although New York legislators adapted federal language, their purpose was fundamentally different. As they repeatedly articulated, and as OCCA’s text makes explicit, OCCA was meant to have a less expansive reach than RICO and to demand more of prosecutors.50 The Wakefield court was therefore wrong to import the federal standard into New York law.
Second, and largely as a result of this mistake, the court stripped away the protections the narrow definition of “criminal enterprise” had offered. As interpreted by the Wakefield court, OCCA could reach any criminal operation involving a system of authority.51 Most criminal schemes with more than a single actor, however, involve some system of authority. But OCCA was not intended to reach all cases of group criminality. As its text and drafters made clear, and as its legislative history shows, it was supposed to reach criminals who resisted traditional prosecution in the same way as the Mafia.52 Under Wakefield, OCCA could be used expansively, despite the fact that the statute’s terms demanded it be used restrictively.
In response to this confusion, the New York judiciary has recently sought to redefine the meaning of “criminal enterprise.” In a series of opinions over the past four years—culminating in a decision issued in the summer of 2015—the New York Court of Appeals has articulated a new standard to replace Wakefield’s “system of authority” test: “excess capacity.”54 The new test acknowledges that “[t]he days of traditional organized crime families,” with their hierarchies of godfathers, capos, and soldiers, “seem to be fading.”55 The legislature’s real concern, the court correctly noted, was with “[t]hose enterprises [that] were understood to present a distinct evil by reason of their unique capacity to plan and carry out sophisticated crimes on an ongoing basis while insulating their leadership from detection and prosecution.”56 Such organizations could theoretically take many forms.57 What made them dangerous was not their form but their capacities—their crime-committing ability.58 The new standard thus seeks to replace Wakefield’s flabby formalism with a more principled, functional approach.
Reconciling the new standard with OCCA’s first prong—the need for an “ascertainable structure”—was relatively straightforward. For example, in one case involving a materials testing company that appeared to be systematically faking results,59 the question before the court was whether the individuals who perpetrated the crimes constituted a criminal enterprise with an ascertainable structure even though their only relation to each other was within a legitimate corporation.60 The court decided they did. It was not necessary, the court explained, for an alleged criminal enterprise to have a separate hierarchical organization in addition to that of the legitimate corporation. Rather, it would be enough if it were “an association possessing a . . . constancy and capacity exceeding the individual crimes committed under [its] auspices.”61 True, a hierarchical organization could provide evidence of excess capacity.62 But the key factor was the capacity, not the chain of command.
Taken together, these cases have revised the meaning of OCCA’s two criminal enterprise prongs. To satisfy them now, prosecutors need not worry about establishing authoritative reporting lines or stepladders of criminal advancement. Rather, they must prove only that a group of people could have committed more crimes than they did, and that they continued to exist as a distinct group with a shared goal even when they were not in the act of committing those crimes.
The new excess capacity standard is an improvement. It gives New York courts greater guidance than they had from Wakefield, moves away from improper reliance on federal law, and is more responsive to OCCA’s text and purpose. However, this jurisprudential correction remains incomplete. As it stands, the Court of Appeals’ enterprise corruption jurisprudence still suffers from two problems: it continues to sanction prosecutions that the statute bars, though to a lesser degree than Wakefield, and it undermines principles of notice and legality. OCCA’s sponsors made clear that it was meant neither to criminalize behavior otherwise appropriately covered by the New York State Penal Law, nor to attach to most traditional white-collar criminal schemes.76 This intention was not only reported in the legislative history but was also incorporated into the actual text of the law.77 These limitations had been operationalized largely through the narrow definition of a criminal enterprise.78 However, the Wakefield court dismantled those protections, and the Court of Appeals’ recent decisions have not fully restored them. As interpreted by the court, OCCA still does not do what its own text calls for.
This risks over-criminalization. Although less broad than Wakefield, even the new, more functional standard covers whole categories of cases that do not pose the special problems for law enforcement that OCCA targeted. This has both philosophical and practical effects. On the philosophical level, it means that we are punishing defendants for conduct that we do not actually believe to be criminal. Where criminals collaborate to commit several crimes, for instance, to punish them for enterprise corruption instead of simply the underlying predicate acts is to make a judgment that the association itself represents a special kind of additional harm worth punishing. But the new standard, on its own, does not guarantee that the law will only be used to punish such associations. For example, in many bribery-related public corruption situations, the actors are repeat players—such as lobbyists and contractors—who continue to exist as a recognizable group because of their professional identities, even when they are not in the act of committing crimes. Furthermore, public officials will always have “excess capacity” by virtue of their office. Consequently, they are likely to always meet the requirements for a charge of enterprise corruption under this new standard. However, not every bribe-taking public official has done a wrong beyond that already punished under traditional public corruption crimes.79 If they have not, they should not be indictable under OCCA. The new standard, however, seems to allow it.
On a practical level, then, this may transform OCCA from a tool for targeting otherwise hard-to-reach forms of criminality into a mechanism for enhancing penalties and easing prosecutors’ work. OCCA gives prosecutors another powerful weapon with which to compel plea bargains from certain defendants: the threat of indictment for an additional class B felony. A corrupt public official from the earlier example could find herself risking twenty-five years in jail where, in OCCA’s absence, she would have faced only minimal jail time for the less serious underlying offenses.80 This can create a powerful incentive to plead to one or several of the predicate acts, and one that can be easily abused.81 While bribe-taking public officials are not “natural objects of moral or political sympathy,”82 this is no reason to subject them to heightened penalties at the whim of a prosecutor or to ease the state’s burden in proving its case.
This presents two different legality issues. First, if OCCA is used to enhance penalties for certain crimes for which the legislature has not specified penalty enhancements, one law (OCCA) would be used to undercut others. Prosecutors and courts would be, in effect, encroaching on the legislature’s authority to define the severity of crimes by using OCCA to prescribe stricter punishments for certain crimes than what the legislature had prescribed. This raises the specter of serious separation-of-powers concerns.
Second, and more concretely, OCCA’s text limits it to a narrower range of circumstances than those in which it may now be used. As judicially elaborated, the law applies in prosecutions that are beyond the reach of its text. This risks violating the basic principle of legality, according to which no behavior should be punished if it is not criminalized. OCCA explicitly limits the reach of enterprise corruption to acts in conformity with the legislative findings. But the legislative findings limit OCCA to a smaller set of cases than those covered by the court’s new excess capacity standard. Through an interpretation of a statute, then, the court risks extending enterprise corruption to conduct that the legislature pointedly refused to include within its reach.
Reviving this mechanism could fix some of the problems with the new jurisprudence of the Court of Appeals by restoring protections for defendants and giving courts a tool to limit OCCA’s overbreadth. The Court of Appeals should encourage New York courts to deploy section 210.40(2) motions to ensure that prosecutors are using OCCA in line with the law’s intention. This, after all, is what OCCA requires, and is, according to the text of the New York Criminal Procedure Law, the purpose section 210.40(2) motions serve.88 Those intentions include preventing enterprise corruption charges from attaching to low-level operatives, as the New York supreme court noted. But they also include limiting the law’s reach to criminal enterprises whose leaders might not otherwise face prosecution for the full extent of their crimes. This doubtless covers many criminal schemes without Mafia connections,89 but it should not reach ordinary white-collar crimes, particularly run-of-the-mill political corruption.
The advantages to this judicial solution are many. It would allow for a timely fix to the law without relying on the often-dysfunctional New York State Assembly. And it would keep courts and lawmakers from getting bogged down in defining new categorical tests, replacing a sterile exercise in line drawing with an act of judicial evaluation. Most beneficially, it would create an opportunity for courts to consider the real question underlying the use of OCCA: whether a given non-Mafia criminal enterprise is nevertheless similar to an organized crime syndicate in the way that it resists traditional prosecution. If it is, then the use of an enterprise corruption charge is in keeping with OCCA’s aims, and so within the statute. If not, then other criminal laws should already be adequate to punish the conduct.
It might be objected that greater use of section 210.40(2) motions would simply perpetuate doctrinal confusion, by allowing judges to make ad hoc decisions based on their own discretion. This is an understandable fear. However, it ignores the extent to which the legislative findings incorporated into OCCA already give judges concrete guidance. Whether a given factual situation fits within OCCA’s purposes is too complicated a question to be answered by a simple bright-line test. But it is not beyond judicial cognizance—not in the estimation of the legislature, which assigned that task to the courts when it created section 210.40(2) motions as part of its enactment of OCCA; nor is it beyond the competence of the judiciary in the judgment of the courts themselves, which regularly evaluate whether to dismiss indictments “in the interest of justice” in other cases.94 As an added protection, section 210.40(2) motions are presumptively reviewable for abuse of discretion by appellate courts,95 enabling the New York judiciary to create and maintain uniform standards. By endorsing Justice Fried’s approach, encouraging other New York Supreme Court Justices to follow suit, and, over time, articulating standards for the use of section 210.40(2) motions, the Court of Appeals could make sure that its recent decisions ultimately enhance OCCA, rather than explode it.
As this Comment has shown, OCCA sought to strike a balance between prosecuting exceptional dangers and respecting defendants’ rights. In the decades after its enactment, New York courts expanded the law’s reach, upsetting its equipoise. As a result, and despite the recent efforts of the New York Court of Appeals, OCCA remains out of balance. It no longer fulfills the intentions of its drafters. Its application is in tension with its own statutory text. And it raises fundamental issues of notice and legality while courting overcriminalization. Fortunately, New York courts have the resources at their disposal to address these concerns. By following the practice of the heretofore-overlooked Justice Fried and reinvigorating section 210.40(2) motions, they could set the law aright.
This readjustment may have significance beyond New York. Many states have their own “baby RICO” statutes, and commentators have long worried about possible overreach under those laws as well.96 Justice Fried’s practice could provide a way for judges in states with statutes like New York’s to curb the law without relying on prosecutorial discretion or new legislation.97 On a more abstract level, this approach offers a model for how courts can work collaboratively with legislatures to actualize legislative intent where those legislators have explicitly enshrined their intent in statute. This avoids troublesome debates about “purposivism” and “textualism” to bring courts back to one of their core functions: opening a space in which to figure out how to properly apply the law to facts. As OCCA’s drafters themselves recognized, categorical lines would not properly bound those circumstances deserving of OCCA’s heightened penalties.98 In any given use of the enterprise corruption statute, there will be a question about whether the defendants were engaged in the kind of activity that the law sought to reach. That is a question that deserves real briefing. Through the use of section 210.40(2) motions, the New York judiciary could make sure it, too, gets its day in court.
Raab, supra note 1, at 239.
18 U.S.C. § 1962(a)-(d) (2012).
18 U.S.C. § 1962 (2012); Penal § 460.20.
Kessler, supra note 21, at 797-98 (“OCCA [was] also known as ‘Baby RICO’ or ‘Little RICO.’”).
Penal § 460.00. For further discussion, see infra Parts V, VI.
Moscatiello, 566 N.Y.S.2d at 823.
590 N.Y.S.2d 382 (Sup. Ct. 1992).
See supra text accompanying notes 15-35.
See supra text accompanying notes 39-42.
See supra text accompanying note 31.
People v. Kancharla, 23 N.Y.3d. 294, 304 (2014).
Western Express, 19 N.Y.3d at 660 (Pigott, J., dissenting).
Id. at 657 (majority opinion).
Kancharla, 23 N.Y.3d at 299-302.
Id. at 304 (quoting Western Express, 19 N.Y.3d at 658).
651 N.Y.S.2d 840 (Sup. Ct. 1996), abrogated by Keschner, 37 N.E.3d 690.
Keschner, 37 N.E.3d at 691-93.
Medical clinics in New York State can only be owned by a licensed M.D. Id. at 692.
Id. at 699 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).
See, e.g., Letter from Miller, supra note 16, at 2.
See supra notes 21-24 and accompanying text.
N.Y. Crim. Proc. Law § 210.40(2) (McKinney 2016).
See Crim. Proc § 210.40(3).
See, e.g., Crim. Proc. § 210.40(1) and accompanying notes of decision.
See Selwyn Raab, Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires 156-57, 167 (2005). By the mid-1960s, the Department of Justice estimated that “organized crime’s profits were equal [to] those of the [United States’] ten largest industrial corporations combined.” Id. at 156 (emphasis omitted). Following Raab’s own practice, this Comment uses the terms “Mafia” and “Mob” interchangeably to refer to traditional La Cosa Nostra crime families. See id. at xi; cf. Organized Crime, Fed. Bureau Investigation, http://www2.fbi.gov/hq/cid/orgcrime/lcnindex.htm [http://‌perma.cc‌/8G3N-FANG] (distinguishing precisely between different branches of the American Mafia).
Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, Pub. L. No. 91-452, § 901(a), 84 Stat. 941 (codified at 18 U.S.C. §§ 1961-1968 (2012)).
Gerard E. Lynch, RICO: The Crime of Being a Criminal, Parts I & II, 87 Colum. L. Rev. 661, 661-62, 692-695 (1987).
G. Robert Blakey & Thomas A. Perry, An Analysis of the Myths that Bolster Efforts To Rewrite RICO and the Various Proposals for Reform: “Mother of God—Is This the End of RICO?,” 43 Vand. L. Rev. 851, 855 & n.12 (1990).
See, e.g., Barry Tarlow, RICO: The New Darling of the Prosecutor’s Nursery, 49 Fordham L. Rev. 165, 169-71 (1980).
See generally Virgil W. Peterson, The Mob: 200 Years of Organized Crime in New York (1983) (recounting the history of the Mafia in New York).
See, e.g., Memorandum from Robert Abrams, N.Y. Attorney Gen., to Mario Cuomo, N.Y. Governor 1 (July 19, 1986) [hereinafter Abrams Memorandum] (on file with author) (highlighting “the staggering dimensions and broad tentacles” that “organized crime as it functions in New York State” had developed); Letter from Edward I. Koch, N.Y.C. Mayor, to Mario Cuomo, N.Y. Governor (July 28, 1986) (on file with author) (urging the enactment of OCCA to help “alleviate the desperate situation” in which New York found itself unable to adequately address its Mafia threat).
See Memorandum Filed with Assembly Bill Number 11726 from Mario Cuomo, N.Y. Governor 2 (July 24, 1986) [hereinafter Cuomo Memorandum] (on file with author) (noting that, in the absence of a New York law on enterprise corruption, state investigators were forced “to turn over their evidence to federal prosecutors”). See generally Jason D. Reichelt, Note, Stalking the Enterprise Criminal: State RICO and the Liberal Interpretation of the Enterprise Element, 81 Cornell L. Rev. 224, 230-33 (1995) (discussing the enactment of state RICO laws in the 1980s).
See, e.g., Letter from Daniel L. Feldman, N.Y. State Assembly Member, to Evan A. Davis, Counsel to the Governor 1 (July 18, 1986) (on file with author) (“It has taken those four years [of drafting] to refine [OCCA] to the point at which it achieves its purposes without raising some of the problems of fair trial for which the federal law (RICO) has been criticized.”). Daniel Feldman was one of the Act’s sponsors. Id.
See, e.g., Letter from Melvin H. Miller, Chairman, N.Y. State Assembly Comm. on Codes, to Evan A. Davis, Counsel to the Governor 2-3 (July 16, 1986) [hereinafter Letter from Miller]; see also infra notes 28-33 and accompanying text.
See, e.g., Abrams Memorandum, supra note 13, at 2 (describing how OCCA seeks to “overcome flaws and eliminate potential abuses alleged to exist in the federal RICO statute,” in particular “the concern that the new powers given to prosecutors might be inappropriately used”).
See generally N.Y. Penal Law § 460.00 (McKinney 2016) (noting that “[b]ecause of its more rigorous definitions, [OCCA] will not apply to some situations encompassed within comparable statutes in other jurisdictions”).
See, e.g., Letter from Miller, supra note 16, at 2-3 (discussing how OCCA seeks to protect defendants from the “prejudicial joinder” they may face under RICO).
Accord Steven L. Kessler, And a Little Child Shall Lead Them: New York’s Organized Crime Control Act of 1986, 64 St. John’s L. Rev. 797, 810 (1990) (noting that “OCCA’s requirement that each defendant be associated with a criminal enterprise is probably the most fundamental distinction between OCCA and other RICO-type statutes”).
Even a very general purpose, such as “[r]ealizing an economic benefit,” has been found to qualify “as a common purpose under the enterprise corruption statute.” People v. Joseph Stevens & Co., No. 2394/2009, 2011 WL 1757051, *29 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. May 2, 2011) (unreported disposition) (quoting People v. Pustilnik, No. 2759/2005, 2007 WL 674116, at *4 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Mar. 1, 2007)). The Court of Appeals has also allowed a criminal purpose to be inferred from the actions of defendants. See People v. Kancharla, 23 N.Y.3d 294, 305 (2014).
Compare 18 U.S.C. § 1961(5) (2012) (defining “pattern of racketeering activity” to require “at least two acts of racketeering activity”), with Penal § 460.10(4) (defining “pattern of criminal activity” to mean conduct requiring “three or more criminal acts”).
See, e.g., N.Y. Crim. Proc. Law §§ 200.40(1)(d), 200.65, 210.40(2), 300.10(6), 310.50(4) (McKinney 2016); see also infra Part VI. One such procedural check requires the explicit consent of the district attorney for any prosecution under OCCA. Penal § 460.60(2); Crim. Proc. § 200.65. Courts do not appear to have worried overly much about this provision, articulating a presumption in favor of the prosecutor even where the required attestation giving consent was not timely filed, and suggesting that there may be no remedy to improper filing at all. See People v. Thomas, 866 N.Y.S.2d 22, 24 (App. Div. 2008) (relying in part on the “presumption of regularity” to find the required consent for an enterprise corruption prosecution); 6 Richard A. Greenberg et al., New York Practice Series: New York Criminal Law § 36:8, n.11 (3d ed. 2014) (discussing People v. Marquez, N.Y. L.J., July 22, 1996, at 25 (N.Y. Sup. Ct.)).
Letter from Miller, supra note 16, at 2. For this letter’s influence in the courts, see, for example, People v. Yarmy, 651 N.Y.S.2d 840, 843 (Sup. Ct. 1996), which quotes Miller’s letter to establish the limits of the statute’s “target group [as] envisioned by the legislature.” See also People v. Moscatiello, 566 N.Y.S.2d 823, 824-25 (Sup. Ct. 1990) (quoting Miller’s letter to show that the legislature intended the “criminal enterprise” requirement to limit the statute’s application).
See Penal § 460.00 (clarifying that “the concept of criminal enterprise should not be limited to traditional criminal syndicates or crime families”).
See, e.g., Abrams Memorandum, supra note 13, at 3 (calling OCCA “a major achievement for [New York State] in its efforts to attack organized crime,” including “Mob infiltration of, and influence in, legitimate industries”); Cuomo Memorandum, supra note 14, at 2-3 (noting RICO’s success at targeting “traditional organized crime families” and anticipating that OCCA would be similarly successful).
Id. at 389 (citing prior federal rulings in United States v. Kragness, 830 F.2d 842 (8th Cir. 1987); United States v. Lemm, 680 F.2d 1193 (8th Cir. 1982); United States v. Bledsoe, 674 F.2d 647 (8th Cir. 1982)).
See, e.g., People v. Moscatiello, 566 N.Y.S.2d 823, 825 (Sup. Ct. 1990) (dismissing an enterprise corruption indictment because, “having reviewed the Grand Jury minutes,” the court found that the defendants “were associated in no structure and certainly not one with a scope of existence beyond their criminal acts”).
Wakefield, 590 N.Y.S.2d at 389 (drawing on proof of a “system of authority” to establish “an ascertainable structure” and the existence of a “continuing enterprise”).
Id. at 388 (noting that, in designing OCCA, “the experience of the federal courts with RICO was examined closely by the legislature”); see also Ethan Brett Gerber, Note, “A RICO You Can’t Refuse”: New York’s Organized Crime Control Act, 53 Brook. L. Rev. 979, 995 (1988) (“New York’s definition of criminal enterprise has been greatly influenced by judicial interpretations of RICO.”).
Compare N.Y. Penal Law § 460.10(3) (McKinney 2016) (requiring that a “criminal enterprise” under OCCA be “distinct from a pattern of criminal activity”), with United States v. Turkette, 452 U.S. 576, 583 (1981) (“[U]nder RICO, the Government must prove both the existence of an ‘enterprise’ and the connected ‘pattern of racketeering activity.’ . . . The ‘enterprise’ is not the ‘pattern of racketeering activity’; it is separate and apart from the pattern of activity in which it engages.”).
Compare Penal § 460.10(3) (defining a “criminal enterprise” under OCCA as “a group of persons sharing a common purpose of engaging in criminal conduct, associated in an ascertainable structure distinct from a pattern of criminal activity, and with a continuity of existence, structure and criminal purpose beyond the scope of individual criminal incidents”), with Lemm, 680 F.2d at 1198 (holding that an “enterprise” under RICO is a group of persons with “(1) [a] common or shared purpose; (2) some continuity of structure and personnel; and (3) an ascertainable structure distinct from that inherent in the conduct of a pattern of racketeering”).
See Lorillard v. Pons, 434 U.S. 575, 581 (1978) (“[W]here, as here, Congress adopts a new law incorporating sections of a prior law, Congress normally can be presumed to have had knowledge of the interpretation given to the incorporated law, at least insofar as it affects the new statute.”). See generally William N. Eskridge, Jr. et al., Cases and Materials on Legislation, Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy 858-66 (5th ed. 2014) (discussing Lorillard); 2B Norman Singer & Shambie Singer, Sutherland Statutes and Statutory Construction § 52:2 (7th ed. 2015) (describing the presumption that “[w]hen a state legislature adopts a statute which is identical or similar to one in another [jurisdiction], courts of the adopting state usually adopt the original jurisdiction’s construction”); William N. Eskridge, Interpreting Legislative Inaction, 87 Mich. L. Rev. 67, 79 (1989) (discussing the Lorillard rule).
To be clear, OCCA borrowed from federal case law interpreting RICO and not the language of the underlying statute. This might make the Wakefield court’s adoption of federal law seem more understandable. After all, if the statutes’ drafters used the federal court’s own language, surely they must have intended it to mean what the federal courts themselves meant. However compelling this argument in the abstract, it is inapposite here. OCCA’s drafters were familiar not only with the text of RICO, but the interpretation it had been given by federal courts. See Kessler, supra note 21, at 799 (noting that “New York legislators . . . sift[ed] through more than fifteen years of RICO history” to draft their bill). They nevertheless explicitly rejected the reach and formulation of federal law. See supra text accompanying notes 15-35. And New York State courts understood this. See, e.g., Moscatiello, 566 N.Y.S.2d at 825 (rejecting an indictment under OCCA that, the court asserted, would have been appropriate under RICO). Given these circumstances, the Wakefield court’s decision was arguably less defensible. Since the underlying language of OCCA differed so greatly and explicitly from the language of RICO, the federal interpretation the Wakefield court adopted was groundless: it took as the gloss of one statute (OCCA) the interpretation of a completely different statute (RICO).
In any case, the logic of the public policy exception to Lorillard applies with equal force to borrowings of statutory and judicial language. See infra note 48.
See Wakefield, 590 N.Y.S.2d at 389 (reaching its decision by “[d]rawing an analogy from the federal RICO statute” and relying on citations to federal cases from the Third, Fifth, and Eighth Circuits).
See, canonically, Zerbe v. State, 583 P.2d 845, 847 (Alaska 1978), which discusses some of the many limits on the rule of borrowed statutes, noting that, even in its strongest form, the Lorillard rule should be “a presumption” that is “in any event, not conclusive.” See also Zerbe v. State, 578 P.2d 597, 599-601 (Alaska 1978), overruled on other grounds by Kinegak v. State Dep’t Corr., 129 P.3d 887 (Alaska 2006) (rejecting various federal court interpretations of legislative language adopted by the state of Alaska because those interpretations were not persuasive and against the state’s own public policy); William N. Eskridge, Jr. et al., Cases and Materials on Legislation, Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy 1077-80 (4th ed. 2007) (discussing Zerbe); Singer & Singer, supra note 46, § 52:2 n.30 (summarizing case law across jurisdictions that qualifies when original jurisdiction interpretations should be adopted).
Consider the muddled saga of People v. Western Express, 19 N.Y.3d 652 (2012). The case involved a ring of credit card thieves associated with an otherwise legitimate website. Id. at 654-55. The trial court dismissed the government’s enterprise corruption charge, noting that the criminals used the website as a market and were not organized in any Wakefield-like system of authority. Id. at 656. The Appellate Division reversed, pointing out that, however useful the Wakefield court’s system of authority standard might be, it was not actually required by the text of the statute, and the website did provide a kind of structure. Id. at 657. A divided Court of Appeals reversed again, declining to endorse either the Wakefield test or the Appellate Division’s disavowal, noting only that whatever organization the thieves had, it was not robust enough to count as a clear structure. Id. at 660.
See People v. Keschner, 37 N.E.3d 690, 702-03 (N.Y. 2015) (Lippman, C.J., dissenting in part) (“If a structured criminal entity, as constituted, is designed to continue to engage in orchestrated criminal conduct over a sustained period, and not just to commit one or a few discrete crimes, it falls within the statute’s description and, indeed, its intendment.”).
See id. at 845. The Yarmy court held that the two-man team did not have an “ascertainable structure” as it lacked “any semblance of a hierarchical organization” and such a hierarchical “organizational structure is critical to establishing an enterprise.” But the Yarmy court, too, erroneously relied on federal RICO prosecutions to reach this conclusion. Id. at 844. OCCA, of course, makes no mention of a hierarchical organizational structure.
See, e.g., People v. Guardino, 880 N.Y.S.2d 244, 247 (App. Div. 2009) (ruling that a criminal enterprise showed the necessary continuity of existence even though it ended upon the arrest of its members).
See, e.g., People v. Conigliaro, 737 N.Y.S.2d 96, 97 (App. Div. 2002) (explaining that “the People [in People v. Nappo, 690 N.Y.S.2d 649 (App. Div. 1999), rev’d on other grounds, 729 N.E.2d 698 (N.Y. 2000), had] failed to establish . . . any continuity of existence wherein the said entity was capable of continuing without the participation [of the defendants],” citing to Yarmy); People v. Nappo, 690 N.Y.S.2d 649 (App. Div. 1999) (dismissing a charge of enterprise corruption, citing to Yarmy), rev’d on other grounds, 729 N.E.2d 698 (N.Y. 2000); People v. Pustilnik, 2007 WL 674116, at *8 (Sup. Ct. Mar. 1, 2007) (unreported disposition) (noting that OCCA’s continuity prong was satisfied for a given criminal enterprise since “[s]ufficient evidence in the Grand Jury demonstrated the continuity of the criminal enterprise even if a different member were to have replaced one of the defendants,” citing to Yarmy).
Cf. Transcript of Oral Argument at 8, People v. Keschner, 37 N.E.3d 690 (N.Y. 2015), http://‌http://www.nycourts.gov‌/ctapps‌/arguments‌/2015/Jun15/Transcripts/060115 -15-16-Oral-Argument‌-Trans‌cript‌.pdf [http://perma.cc/9MWE-MZHH] (reporting Judge Stein asking defendant-appellant’s counsel whether “all an organization . . . has to do to exempt itself from criminal enterprise liability is to put one guy at the top and  have him or her control the whole thing”).
Compare People v. Keschner, 973 N.Y.S.2d 7, 11 (App. Div. 2013) (departing from the Second Department of the Appellate Division in Conigliaro insofar as that decision had endorsed Yarmy by “holding that the involvement of one or more irreplaceable participants removes an organization from the statutory definition of ‘criminal enterprise’”), with Conigliaro, 737 N.Y.S.2d at 97 (arguably endorsing Yarmy by construing a prior dismissal of an enterprise corruption charge as having rested, in part, on the People’s failure to establish that the alleged criminal enterprise could have continued to exist without the participation of two key members).
N.Y. Penal Law § 460.00 (McKinney 2016) (legislative findings); accord People v. Morris, No. 0025/09, 2010 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 3484, at *78 (Sup. Ct. July 29, 2010) (unreported disposition) (noting that a given provision of OCCA was “both a legislative finding and an enacted portion of the Penal Law and therefore bind[ing on] this Court as any other relevant Penal Law provision”).
These include larceny, scheming to defraud, defrauding the government, filing false instruments, official misconduct, giving and receiving bribes, giving and receiving rewards for official misconduct, giving and receiving unlawful gratuities, giving and receiving bribes for a public office, impairing the integrity of a government licensing exam, corrupt use of a position of authority, and the crime of corrupting the government, which is a crime of its own and an aggravating factor. See generally Penal §§ 155, 175, 190, 195, 200, 496.
This is not to say that New York’s anti-corruption laws are adequate. See Kathleen Rice et al., Preliminary Report, Commission to Investigate Pub. Corruption 85-97 (Dec. 2, 2013), http://‌publiccorruption‌.moreland‌.ny.gov‌/sites/default‌/files/moreland‌_report‌_final‌.pdf [http://perma.cc/TD9E-SEZC] (detailing problems with New York State’s current anti-corruption penal laws and recommending substantial reforms). But the inadequacies in New York’s public corruption laws documented by the Moreland Commission may not be the kind easily reached by enterprise corruption prosecutions.
Compare Penal § 460.20 (noting that “enterprise corruption is a class B felony”), with id. § 460.10.1 (listing predicate criminal acts, including some nonviolent class D and E felonies).
Upsettingly, this effect of OCCA would largely escape public accountability, since it would keep cases out of court and would not show up in the plea deal or charging instruments. Only a study of prosecutors’ archives or careful comparisons of the sentences that followed after plea deals or trials for similarly situated defendants would let us know whether—and to what extent—this was happening. For studies along these lines, see, for example, Jamie Fellner, An Offer You Can’t Refuse: How US Federal Prosecutors Force Drug Defendants To Plead Guilty, Hum. Rts. Watch (Dec. 5, 2013), http://‌http://www.hrw.org‌/sites/default‌/files/reports‌/us1213‌_ForUpload‌_0_0_0.pdf [http://perma.cc/F85H-EJ3N], which uses detailed reporting to explore the power of plea deals and the penalty defendants pay for going to trial; and Kyle Graham, Crimes, Widgets, and Plea Bargaining: An Analysis of Charge Content, Pleas, and Trials, 100 Calif. L. Rev. 1573 (2012), which uses United States Department of Justice datasets to look at the relationship between the charge sheet, the underlying crimes, plea deals, and actual sentences.
With apologies to Daniel Markovits, see Will the “New Aristocrats” Broker the Deal?, New Haven Indep. (May 25, 2015), http://www.newhavenindependent.org‌/index.php/archives‌/entry‌/yale‌_law_commencement/ [http://perma.cc/3ZER-WNGJ] (quoting Daniel Markovits, Address at the Yale Law School Commencement: A New Aristocracy (May 18, 2015)).
For example, even as the Court of Appeals has moved away from the Wakefield approach, Wakefield continues to be cited in trial court orders, see, e.g., People v. Foster, No. 063422009, 2011 WL 12842248 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Feb. 15, 2011) (relying in part on Wakefield to construe enterprise corruption), and appellate court briefs, see, e.g., Reply Brief for Defendant-Appellant-Respondent, People v. Barone, 14 N.E.3d 354 (N.Y. 2014) (No. APL-2013-00013), 2014 WL 2117928 (also relying on Wakefield to construe enterprise corruption). As Stephen Skowronek and Karen Orren have noted in a different context, succeeding institutions, such as legal tests, do not usually displace one another in neat succession, but rather coexist uneasily, in tension and partial contradiction, in a phenomenon they call “intercurrence.” Karen Orren & Stephen Skowronek, The Search for American Political Development 108-19 (2004) (describing intercurrence).
People v. Morris, No. 0025/09, 2010 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 3484, at *78 (Sup. Ct. July 29, 2010) (unreported disposition).
See, e.g., People v. Basbus, 889 N.Y.S.2d 578 (App. Div. 2009); People v. Joseph Stevens & Co., No. 2394/2009, 2011 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 2152 (Sup. Ct. May 2, 2011) (unreported disposition). For an important exception, see infra note 90 and accompanying text.
At least none that I could find. The practice guides reach the same conclusion. See, e.g., Greenberg et al., supra note 30, § 36:8 (noting that it “remains to be seen . . . whether [New York] appellate courts will develop their own jurisprudence” around section 210.40(2) motions).
See N.Y. Penal Law § 460.00 (McKinney 2016) (stating legislative findings); Crim. Proc. § 210.40(2) (“[A] count alleging enterprise corruption in violation of article four hundred sixty of the penal law may be dismissed in the interest of justice where prosecution of that count is inconsistent with the stated legislative findings in said article.”).
For a contemporary, appropriate, non-Mafia white-collar example, see the recent enterprise corruption indictments of Narco Freedom, Inc. A.G. Schneiderman Announces Indictment of Nonprofit Narco Freedom and Its Top Executives for Participating in an Organized Crime Ring, N.Y. St. Att’y Gen. (Mar. 18, 2015), http://www.ag.ny.gov/press-release/ag-schneiderman -announces-indictment-nonprofit-narco-freedom-and-its-top-executives [http://perma.cc‌/4EST-GVQB].
See, e.g., People v. D.H. Blair & Co., No. 3282/2000, 2002 WL 766119, at *15 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Jan. 29, 2002) (Fried, J.) (citing People v. Andreadakis, Ind., No. 9691/93 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1995)).
People v. Demenus, N.Y. L.J., Apr. 13, 1995, at 29, col. 1 (N.Y. Sup. Ct.) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also D.H. Blair & Co., 2002 WL 766119, at *15 (discussing Justice Fried’s use of section 210.40(2) motions in earlier decisions).
Accord Greenberg et al., supra note 30, § 36:8 (“It remains to be seen whether meaningful standards will be developed for determining when dismissal of an enterprise corruption charge in the interest of justice is warranted, and whether the appellate courts will develop their own jurisprudence for deciding when dismissing (or refusing to dismiss) an enterprise corruption charge on this ground constitutes an abuse of discretion.”).
34 Glenda K. Harnad & Tammy E. Hinshaw, Carmody-Wait New York Practice with Forms § 189:165 (2d ed. 2016) (noting that the Court of Appeals may review an order dismissing an indictment in the interest of justice for abuse of discretion as a matter of law).
See 8 Jerold S. Solovy et al., Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts § 96:98 (3d ed. 2015) (listing state RICO statutes); Reichelt, supra note 14, at 266-70 (discussing arguments for limiting state RICO).
Cf. Reichelt, supra note 14, at 270-72 (proposing prosecutorial discretion and new legislative enactments to curb state RICO laws).
See N.Y. Penal Law § 460.00 (McKinney 2016) (“The balance intended to be struck by this act cannot readily be codified in the form of restrictive definitions or a categorical list of exceptions.”).
J.D./Ph.D. Candidate, Yale Law School & Columbia University, Department of History. For comments, suggestions, and encouragement, thank you to Abigail Fradkin, Geoffrey Shaw, Jihee Suh, Jacob Victor, Alice Wang, Katie Wynbrandt, and Jarret Zafran. Special thanks to McKaye Neumeister and her team at the Yale Law Journal for generous and insightful editing.

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