Opinion ID: 814677
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Application to the Case at Hand

Text: The second superseding indictment describes two parts of the enterprise: (1) “Enriching the members and associates . . . through among other things, fraud, money laundering, and foreign and interstate transfer of funds,” and (2) “Enabling the members and associates . . . through marriage, passport, and visa fraud, to travel, among other countries . . . [including] the United States, and to flee China and Hong Kong in the event that the criminal activity of the Enterprise was discovered.” One part consisted of racketeering activities conducted predominantly in China, and one part consisted of racketeering activities in the United States. The first part centers on the Bank of China fraud and, to the extent it was predicated on extraterritorial activity, it is beyond the reach of RICO even if the bank fraud resulted in some of the money reaching the United States. See Cedeno, 733 F. Supp. 2d at 472 (“the scheme’s contacts with the United States . . . were limited to the movement of funds into and out of U.S.-based bank accounts.”); Norex, 631 F.3d at 33 (“The slim contacts with the United States . . . are insufficient to support extraterritorial application of the RICO statute.”). The second part, however, bound the Defendants’ enterprise to the territorial United States. This second part involved racketeering activities conducted within the United States including the commission of RICO predicate crimes based on violations of United States immigration laws, as codified in 18 U.S.C. §§ 1542, 1546(a). Specifically, Defendants entered the United States using fraudulent visas and passports. Defendants traveled within the United States to execute documents in furtherance of their immigration fraud and to open bank accounts. Finally, Defendants were 20 UNITED STATES V . XU arrested in Kansas and Oklahoma in possession of these fraudulent immigration documents. By conspiring to enter and hide out in the United States with the fruit of their ill-gotten gains, Defendants engaged in an enterprise that had the implicit goal to breach United States immigration law in furtherance of the overall goal of the enterprise. The dual parts of Defendants’ enterprise were necessarily conjoined in pursuit of that goal—i.e., to steal large sums of money from the Bank of China and to get away with it in the United States. Defendants intended to use the immigration fraud to consummate the purpose of the enterprise: to acquire the money and safely enjoy it the United States, beyond the reach of Chinese law. Without the immigration fraud, the bank fraud would have been a dangerous failure. See, e.g., CGC Holding Co., 824 F. Supp. 2d at 1210 (“In the present case, the conduct of the enterprise within the United States was a key to its success.”). In sum, Defendants’ violations of United States immigration laws fall squarely within RICO’s definition of racketeering activity. See 18 U.S.C. § 1961(1)(B) (listing 18 U.S.C. §§ 1542, 1546 as RICO predicates); cf. Rocha v. United States, 288 F.2d 545, 548 (9th Cir. 1961) (sham marriages in violation of § 1542 are “crimes directed toward the sovereign itself [and] may be tried within the jurisdiction even though committed without”) (internal quotation marks omitted). Defendants’ pattern of racketeering activity may have been conceived and planned overseas, but it was executed and perpetuated in the United States. Under Morrison, we look “not upon the place where the deception originated,” but instead upon the connection of the challenged conduct to the proscription in the statute. 130 S. Ct. at 2884. UNITED STATES V . XU 21 Having determined that RICO’s focus is on the pattern of racketeering activity, we conclude that Defendants’ criminal plan, which included violation of United States immigration laws while the Defendants were in the United States, falls within the ambit of the statute. We affirm Defendants’ count one convictions because the convictions are not based on an improper extraterritorial application of RICO, but rather are based on a pattern of racketeering activities that were conducted by the Defendants in the territorial United States.2