Opinion ID: 3017028
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the causal connection between defendant’s

Text: wrongdoing and plaintiff’s harm; (2) the specific intent of defendant to harm plaintiff; (3) the nature of plaintiff’s alleged injury . . . ; (4) “the directness or indirectness of the asserted injury”; (5) whether the “damages claim is . . . highly speculative”; and (6) “keeping the scope of complex antitrust trials within judicially manageable limits,” i.e., “avoiding either the risk of duplicate recoveries on the one hand, or the danger of complex apportionment of damages on the other.” Steamfitters, 171 F.3d at 924 (citing AGC, 459 U.S. at 537-38, 540, 542-44). The Steamfitters factors also support the District Court’s decision to dismiss this action: (1) the causal connection between wrongdoing and harm is attenuated, as several independent causes (Schatz’s report, the imposition of the trusteeship, and KurzHasting’s own decision to fire the plaintiffs) intervened between defendants’ alleged fraud and plaintiffs’ termination; (2) there is little indication of specific intent to harm plaintiffs, as the alleged wire fraud was apparently intended to attack Morris, not the plaintiffs, and Kada’s phone call did not even mention Anderson or Breslin; (3) the nature of the injury, job loss, is one that has been found not normally to create RICO standing in Beck and Shearin; (4) the injury is extremely indirect; (5) the damages claim is not speculative insofar as plaintiffs claim lost wages, but it would be 8 difficult to determine to what extent plaintiffs’ job loss was due to the alleged RICO acts and to what extent it was due to intervening factors; and (6) while there is little danger of duplicate recovery, there is significant danger of duplicative litigation, as this lawsuit appears to be at least in part an attempt to relitigate the trusteeship dispute that this Court settled in Morris v. Hoffa, supra. Thus we conclude that, under both the Supreme Court’s RICO standing decision in Beck and our proximate cause analysis in Steamfitters, Anderson and Breslin have failed to allege facts sufficient to support a civil RICO cause of action with regard to the wire fraud that supposedly led to their termination from KurzHastings.4 Although plaintiffs claim not only that they were injured in losing their jobs, but also that they were “injured by the corruption of their local,” this corruption is not a cognizable injury that can create RICO standing. Maio, 221 F.3d at 483 (“[A] showing of injury requires proof of a concrete financial loss and not mere injury to a valuable intangible property interest.” (quoting Steele v. Hospital Corp. of Am., 36 F.3d 69, 70 (9th Cir. 1994)). Plaintiffs point to no concrete losses, financial or otherwise, stemming from the alleged corruption of their local.