Source: http://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/in-wakefields-wake
Timestamp: 2017-02-28 07:41:18
Document Index: 451662005

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 901', '§ 1962', '§ 460', '§ 1962', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 1961', '§ 200', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 210', '§ 460', '§ 210', '§ 210', '§ 36', '§ 210', '§ 189', '§ 96', '§ 460', '§ 901', '§ 1961', '§ 460', '§ 1961', '§ 460', '§ 200', '§ 460', '§ 200', '§ 36', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 52', '§ 52', '§ 460', '§ 155', '§ 460', '§ 460', '§ 36', '§ 460', '§ 210', '§ 36', '§ 189', '§ 96', '§ 460']

Yale Law Journal - In Wakefield 's Wake: Rescuing New York's Enterprise Corruption Jurisprudence
262-563
In Wakefield 's Wake: Rescuing New York's Enterprise Corruption Jurisprudence
Noah A. Rosenblum introduction
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 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.
i. rico: a new crime for an old criminal The crime of enterprise corruption owes its origins to the
Mafia crisis of the mid-twentieth century. Following World War II, the Mob was powerful and hard to prosecute,1 operating through lucrative schemes,
of which only some components were obviously criminal. For example, the Lucchese crime family ran a protection racket in the Long
Island sanitation industry, skimming $200,000 to $400,000 a year off of garbage
collection fees.2 The scheme relied on some
recognizable crimes like bid rigging and intimidation. However, at its center
was an apparently legitimate trade association, which the Mob used to control
prices and collect payments.3
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.
However, the very features of the law that made it useful
against organized crime also raised serious concerns about the violation of
defendants’ basic rights. Controversially, RICO appeared to criminalize “being
a criminal”—a status instead of an act.9 Although this seemed less
problematic when the targets were dangerous crime families, federal prosecutors
soon used RICO to pursue a variety of non-Mafia defendants.10 Some feared prosecutorial
overreach.11
ii. occa: new york’s “baby rico” The Mafia had long been a significant presence in New York,12 and by the 1980s the state
was grappling with an epidemic of organized crime.13 When legislators finally created a
state counterpart to RICO in 1986,14 they attempted to correct for two of
the federal law’s perceived deficiencies. First, state legislators worried that
RICO undermined the guarantee to a fair trial because it severed criminality
from the commission of criminal acts.15 Second, and more profoundly,
legislators feared that RICO was overly broad and potentially applicable to
defendants undeserving of its heightened sanctions.16
The crime they invented, called “enterprise corruption” in
the Organized Crime Control Act of 1986 (OCCA),17 was designed to provide an
avenue for prosecuting the Mob while responding to these concerns.18 The legislature intended
enterprise corruption to apply to a narrower range of cases than RICO19 and to offer defendants
greater protections.20
OCCA’s most significant innovation, a radical departure from
RICO, was the way it defined the crime.21 Both RICO and OCCA sought to reach Mafiosi
through their involvement with an enterprise.22 OCCA, however, additionally
required that alleged criminals specifically participate in a criminal enterprise,23 defined 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.”24 In practice, the “criminal purpose”
element of the law has not had much bite,25 leaving two prongs for
courts to grapple with: an “ascertainable structure” and a “continuity of
existence.”26
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.
These were not the only changes OCCA’s drafters inserted into
their “baby RICO.”28
They further cabined the law by incorporating detailed
legislative findings about the Act’s purpose into the text of the statute,
along with provisions requiring that it only be used in line with those
findings.29 Further, whereas the federal law
required proof of two predicate criminal acts to constitute a pattern of
criminal activity, OCCA required three.30 Finally, legislators
incorporated a host of changes to the New York State Criminal Procedure Law to
tweak the way OCCA prosecutions unfold and offer defendants additional protections.31
Underlying these decisions was a felt need to restrict OCCA
to criminals who posed the same kinds of enforcement problems for traditional
law enforcement as the Mafia. As Assemblyman Melvin Miller, one of the bill’s sponsors, put it, in what has become the most influential
statement of legislative intent underlying the Act: “[T]he extraordinary
sanctions allowed under [OCCA] should be reserved for those who not only commit
crimes but do so as part of an organized criminal enterprise. Present law
[without OCCA] is adequate to punish ordinary white-collar crime . . . .”32
And although OCCA’s drafters always understood that organized criminal
enterprises might include more than just Italian crime families,33 the Mafia was their main
target.34
The application of the law initially stayed within these
bounds, and where prosecutors overreached, the judiciary disciplined them. For
example, when the Manhattan district attorney charged a pair of union officials
under OCCA for passing bribes,35
the court threw the indictment out with a forceful condemnation: there was “no
question” that the defendants met the criteria for prosecution under the
federal law, but “OCCA was designed to target certain criminal activities more
precisely defined and with less sweep than RICO.”36
iii. the law slips its binds
Over the next twenty-five years, however, New York State courts
expanded the definition of “criminal enterprise,” ignoring OCCA’s original text
and purpose. This divergence originated with People v. Wakefield Financial Corp.37
In Wakefield, a
number of traders at separate firms had been indicted under OCCA for
collaborating to fraudulently set stock prices. No Mafia connections were
alleged, nor were participants directed by bosses otherwise beyond the reach of
the law. Indeed, all of the participants faced not only enterprise corruption
charges but also many other criminal counts, including multiple counts of falsifying
business records and grand larceny.38 Nevertheless, the court
declined to dismiss the enterprise corruption charge.39 Reasoning that OCCA should
apply “where it is alleged that a structure is established to engage in continuing . . . criminal activity,”40 the court sought to satisfy the
law’s narrow, multi-pronged definition of “criminal enterprise” with a more
flexible and unitary “system of authority” test drawn from federal RICO trials.41 Under the court’s new
“system of authority” standard, borrowed from federal law, the government no
longer needed to show, distinctly, that an alleged criminal enterprise had an ascertainable
structure and a continuity of existence.42 Rather, the state could
focus on showing that a group of criminals were bound together by a system of
authority. The system of authority would speak to both the criminal
enterprise’s structure and its continuity.43
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.
Third, this deviation led to confused jurisprudence­ in the
lower New York courts. OCCA had set up exacting standards for determining what
kind of conduct it covered. But the Wakefield
court’s mushy RICO-based test drew alternative, unclear lines. For applying the
law to concrete cases, it proved plainly inadequate.53
iv. from wakefield to keschner: enterprise corruption law today” 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.
The second prong, “continuity,” has given the court more
trouble. In the previous twenty years, some New York State courts had turned
the Wakefield “system of authority”
standard into a complete “removability test,” inspired by one of Wakefield’s progeny, People v. Yarmy.63 In that case, a New York supreme court justice dismissed enterprise corruption
charges against a pair of criminals who sold guns illegally.64 Their two-man scheme hardly
resembled an organized crime syndicate, but they may have met the “system of
authority” test for ascertainable structure, since their operation relied on
Richard Yarmy’s personal federal firearms license.65 Perhaps looking for an
alternative ground to dismiss the count, the trial court found that the alleged
criminal enterprise lacked continuity.66 In dismissing the OCCA
charge, the court opined that “one important factor in determining continuity
is whether the organization could exist after the removal—by arrest or
otherwise—of any of the participating member(s),”67 which the gun-selling
operation decidedly could not. Although this removability test never achieved
universal adoption,68
it did prove influential.69
The removability test, however, was not good law. It was a
far cry from the language of the statute. And it seemed to suggest that a
criminal enterprise that ended with the arrest of its members might not be a
criminal enterprise at all. At the very least, it created perverse incentives
for criminal groups. If a criminal enterprise simply concentrated all its
responsibilities in the hands of a single individual, would it then no longer
count as a criminal enterprise, because that individual would be irreplaceable?70
The issue came to a head last summer, when the Court of Appeals
was asked to resolve a split among the state intermediate appellate courts.71 In People v. Keschner, decided in June 2015,
the court struck down the removability test and applied the excess capacity
standard to OCCA’s continuity prong. The case concerned a medical clinic, which
was organized to systematically generate fraudulent billings.72 Although many different
members of the clinic participated in the criminal scheme, a quirk of New York State
law made one of the doctors indispensable.73 The court held that this
did not bar finding the clinic to be a criminal enterprise. To establish
continuity, it concluded, it would not be necessary to show that a criminal
enterprise could “survive[] the removal of a key
participant.”74 Instead,
is . . . that [the group] continues to exist beyond individual
criminal incidents. A team of people who unite to carry out a single crime or a
brief series of crimes may lack structure and criminal purpose beyond the
criminal actions they carry out; such an ad hoc group is not a criminal
enterprise. If a group persists, however, in the form of a structured,
purposeful criminal organization beyond the time required to commit individual
crimes, the continuity element of criminal enterprise is met.75
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.
v. the court of appeals’ solution creates new problems for the doctrine 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
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.
More troublingly, the new standard has put the doctrine into
tension with two fundamental principles of criminal law: notice and legality.
Defendants are at risk of OCCA’s penalty enhancements with only minimal notice
because the application of OCCA to their conduct is not the result of any
statutory enactment, nor reflected anywhere in New York’s codified Penal Law.
State case law applying OCCA remains confused, and, as the only possible source
of notice here, does not give clear guidance either.83
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.
vi. an alternative: reigning in occa through section 210.40(2) motions
Luckily, the judiciary already has the tools at its disposal
to cabin OCCA. As part of its initial enactment, OCCA empowered judges to
dismiss enterprise corruption charges “where prosecution of that count [would
be] inconsistent with the stated legislative findings” through a special motion
under section 210.40(2) of the New York Criminal Procedure Law.84 This device, however, has
seldom been used. One New York supreme court has opined that it should be
limited to “shield[ing] a minor cog in the criminal
machinery, such as a low level operative, or one who was involved only in a
small portion of the criminal activities, from the strong penalties” of an
enterprise corruption conviction,85
drastically and unjustifiably limiting section 210.40(2) motions’ scope. Courts
have been reluctant to grant such motions at all;86 the Court of Appeals has
never issued one.87
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.
The practicability of this solution is apparent from the
unique practice of New York Supreme Court Justice Bernard Fried. Apparently
alone among New York State trial court judges, Justice Fried has used section
210.40(2) motions to dismiss enterprise corruption counts where, in his judgment,
the indictment was not in keeping with the purposes of the statute.90 In particular, he has argued
for dismissing enterprise corruption counts where there are otherwise “adequate
sanctions and remedies available to punish and deal with the conduct involved,”
as those are the cases to which the legislative findings sought to limit OCCA’s
“enhanced sanctions.”91 Since the Criminal Procedure Law
makes it clear that a New York State court can grant section 210.40(2) motions sua sponte if
necessary,92 nothing prevents trial
courts from following Justice Fried’s lead—though
this practice could be encouraged by guidance from the Court of Appeals.93
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.
NOAH A. ROSENBLUM*
Note to Authors Submitting Articles and Essays to Volume 127
Presenting Volume 127
First Circuit Decision (Igartúa v. Obama) Discusses a Volume 116 Comment
OLDER NEWS > 1
See Selwyn Raab, Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Maf…
Raab, supra note 1, at 239.
Id. at 238-39.
Id. at 177.
See id. at 181-82.
Id. at 174.
Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, Pub. L. No. 91-452, § 901(a), 84 Stat. 941 (codified at 18 …
18 U.S.C. § 1962(a)-(d) (2012).
Gerard E. Lynch, RICO: The Crime of Being a Criminal, Parts I & II, 87 Colum. L. Rev. 661, 661-62,…
G. Robert Blakey & Thomas A. Perry, An Analysis of the Myths that Bolster Efforts To Rewrite RICO …
See, e.g., Barry Tarlow, RICO: The New Darling of the Prosecutor’s Nursery, 49 Fordham L. Rev. 165…
See generally Virgil W. Peterson, The Mob: 200 Years of Organized Crime in New York (1983) (recoun…
See, e.g., Memorandum from Robert Abrams, N.Y. Attorney Gen., to Mario Cuomo, N.Y. Governor 1 (Jul…
See Memorandum Filed with Assembly Bill Number 11726 from Mario Cuomo, N.Y. Governor 2 (July 24, 1…
See, e.g., Letter from Daniel L. Feldman, N.Y. State Assembly Member, to Evan A. Davis, Counsel to…
See, e.g., Letter from Melvin H. Miller, Chairman, N.Y. State Assembly Comm. on Codes, to Evan A. …
1986 N.Y. Laws 2507. 18
See, e.g., Abrams Memorandum, supra note 13, at 2 (describing how OCCA seeks to “overcome flaws …
See generally N.Y. Penal Law § 460.00 (McKinney 2016) (noting that “[b]ecause of its more rigorous…
See, e.g., Letter from Miller, supra note 16, at 2-3 (discussing how OCCA seeks to protect defenda…
Accord Steven L. Kessler, And a Little Child Shall Lead Them: New York’s Organized Crime Control…
18 U.S.C. § 1962 (2012); Penal § 460.20.
Penal § 460.20(1).
Id. § 460.10(3).
Even a very general purpose, such as “[r]ealizing an economic benefit,” has been found to qualif…
Penal § 460.10(3).
Id. § 460.20(2).
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.
Compare 18 U.S.C. § 1961(5) (2012) (defining “pattern of racketeering activity” to require …
See, e.g., N.Y. Crim. Proc. Law §§ 200.40(1)(d), 200.65, 210.40(2), 300.10(6), 310.50(4) (McKinney…
Letter from Miller, supra note 16, at 2. For this letter’s influence in the courts, see, for exa…
See Penal § 460.00 (clarifying that “the concept of criminal enterprise should not be limited …
See, e.g., Abrams Memorandum, supra note 13, at 3 (calling OCCA “a major achievement for [New Yo…
Moscatiello, 566 N.Y.S.2d at 823.
Id. at 823, 825.
590 N.Y.S.2d 382 (Sup. Ct. 1992).
Id. at 384.
Id. at 388-89.
Id. at 390.
Id. at 389 (citing prior federal rulings in United States v. Kragness, 830 F.2d 842 (8th Cir. 1987…
See, e.g., People v. Moscatiello, 566 N.Y.S.2d 823, 825 (Sup. Ct. 1990) (dismissing an enterprise …
Wakefield, 590 N.Y.S.2d at 389 (drawing on proof of a “system of authority” to establish “an…
Id. at 388 (noting that, in designing OCCA, “the experience of the federal courts with RICO was …
Compare N.Y. Penal Law § 460.10(3) (McKinney 2016) (requiring that a “criminal enterprise” u…
Compare Penal § 460.10(3) (defining a “criminal enterprise” under OCCA as “a group of pers…
See Lorillard v. Pons, 434 U.S. 575, 581 (1978) (“[W]here, as here, Congress adopts a new law in…
See Wakefield, 590 N.Y.S.2d at 389 (reaching its decision by “[d]rawing an analogy from the federa…
See, canonically, Zerbe v. State, 583 P.2d 845, 847 (Alaska 1978), which discusses some of the man…
See supra text accompanying notes 15-35.
See supra text accompanying notes 39-42.
See supra text accompanying note 31.
Consider the muddled saga of People v. Western Express, 19 N.Y.3d 652 (2012). The case involved a …
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).
Id. at 659-60.
See People v. Keschner, 37 N.E.3d 690, 702-03 (N.Y. 2015) (Lippman, C.J., dissenting in part) (“…
Kancharla, 23 N.Y.3d at 299-302.
Id. at 302.
Id. at 304 (quoting Western Express, 19 N.Y.3d at 658).
Id. at 305-06.
651 N.Y.S.2d 840 (Sup. Ct. 1996), abrogated by Keschner, 37 N.E.3d 690.
Id. at 844.
See id. at 845. The Yarmy court held that the two-man team did not have an “ascertainable struct…
See, e.g., People v. Guardino, 880 N.Y.S.2d 244, 247 (App. Div. 2009) (ruling that a criminal ente…
See, e.g., People v. Conigliaro, 737 N.Y.S.2d 96, 97 (App. Div. 2002) (explaining that “the Peop…
Cf. Transcript of Oral Argument at 8, People v. Keschner, 37 N.E.3d 690 (N.Y. 2015), http://‌http:…
Compare People v. Keschner, 973 N.Y.S.2d 7, 11 (App. Div. 2013) (departing from the Second Departm…
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 691.
Id. at 699 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted).
See, e.g., Letter from Miller, supra note 16, at 2.
N.Y. Penal Law § 460.00 (McKinney 2016) (legislative findings); accord People v. Morris, No. 0025/…
See supra notes 21-24 and accompanying text.
These include larceny, scheming to defraud, defrauding the government, filing false instruments, o…
Compare Penal § 460.20 (noting that “enterprise corruption is a class B felony”), with id. § 460…
Upsettingly, this effect of OCCA would largely escape public accountability, since it would keep c…
With apologies to Daniel Markovits, see Will the “New Aristocrats” Broker the Deal?, New Haven Ind…
For example, even as the Court of Appeals has moved away from the Wakefield approach, Wakefield co…
N.Y. Crim. Proc. Law § 210.40(2) (McKinney 2016).
People v. Morris, No. 0025/09, 2010 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 3484, at *78 (Sup. Ct. July 29, 2010) (unrepo…
See, e.g., People v. Basbus, 889 N.Y.S.2d 578 (App. Div. 2009); People v. Joseph Stevens & Co., No…
At least none that I could find. The practice guides reach the same conclusion. See, e.g., Greenbe…
See N.Y. Penal Law § 460.00 (McKinney 2016) (stating legislative findings); Crim. Proc. § 210.40…
For a contemporary, appropriate, non-Mafia white-collar example, see the recent enterprise corrupt…
See, e.g., People v. D.H. Blair & Co., No. 3282/2000, 2002 WL 766119, at *15 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. Jan. 2…
People v. Demenus, N.Y. L.J., Apr. 13, 1995, at 29, col. 1 (N.Y. Sup. Ct.) (internal quotation mar…
See Crim. Proc § 210.40(3).
Accord Greenberg et al., supra note 30, § 36:8 (“It remains to be seen whether meaningful stan…
See, e.g., Crim. Proc. § 210.40(1) and accompanying notes of decision.
34 Glenda K. Harnad & Tammy E. Hinshaw, Carmody-Wait New York Practice with Forms § 189:165 (2d …
See 8 Jerold S. Solovy et al., Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts § 96:98 (3d …
Cf. Reichelt, supra note 14, at 270-72 (proposing prosecutorial discretion and new legislative ena…
See N.Y. Penal Law § 460.00 (McKinney 2016) (“The balance intended to be struck by this act cann…
J.D./Ph.D. Candidate, Yale Law School & Columbia University, Department of History. For comments, …
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. Subscription
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