Opinion ID: 353818
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: RICO to the Rescue: The Enterprise Conspiracy

Text: 90 In enacting RICO, Congress found that organized crime continues to grow in part because the sanctions and remedies available to the Government are unnecessarily limited in scope and impact. Thus, one of the express purposes of the Act was to seek the eradication of organized crime . . . by establishing new penal prohibitions, and by providing enhanced sanctions and new remedies to deal with the unlawful activities of those engaged in organized crime. Pub.L.91-452, § 1, 84 Stat. 922 (1970). Against this background, we are convinced that, through RICO, Congress intended to authorize the single prosecution of a multi-faceted, diversified conspiracy by replacing the inadequate wheel and chain rationales with a new statutory concept: the enterprise. 91 To achieve this result, Congress acted against the backdrop of hornbook conspiracy law. Under the general federal conspiracy statute, 92 the precise nature and extent of the conspiracy must be determined by reference to the agreement which embraces and defines its objects. Whether the object of a single agreement is to commit one or many crimes, it is in either case that agreement which constitutes the conspiracy which the statute punishes. Braverman v. United States, 317 U.S. 49, 53, 63 S.Ct. 99, 102, 87 L.Ed. 23 (1942). 93 In the context of organized crime, this principle inhibited mass prosecutions because a single agreement or common objective cannot be inferred from the commission of highly diverse crimes by apparently unrelated individuals. RICO helps to eliminate this problem by creating a substantive offense which ties together these diverse parties and crimes. Thus, the object of a RICO conspiracy is to violate a substantive RICO provision here, to conduct or participate in the affairs of an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity and not merely to commit each of the predicate crimes necessary to demonstrate a pattern of racketeering activity. The gravamen of the conspiracy charge in this case is not that each defendant agreed to commit arson, to steal goods from interstate commerce, to obstruct justice, and to sell narcotics; rather, it is that each agreed to participate, directly and indirectly, in the affairs of the enterprise by committing two or more predicate crimes. Under the statute, it is irrelevant that each defendant participated in the enterprise's affairs through different, even unrelated crimes, so long as we may reasonably infer that each crime was intended to further the enterprise's affairs. 28 To find a single conspiracy, we still must look for agreement on an overall objective. What Congress did was to define that objective through the substantive provisions of the Act.