Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Rezko and RICO

"Ex-director of Illinois Finance Authority admits getting post after paying Rezko"

Rezko's lawyer did a pretty good job of painting the Feds' big star witness, Stuart Levine, as unscrupulous and unreliable. But the Feds keep bringing on more witnesses to testify that Rezko was a corrupt fixer.

The Feds kill you with small cuts in these RICO cases, where they get to bring in separate incidents as part of a broad "racketeering conspiracy".

RICO was designed to prosecute criminal "enterprises."
"Enterprise" is defined to include "any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity, and union or group of individuals associated in fact although not a legal entity."
Note that an enterprise can just be... one enterprising guy.

RICO was aimed at "organized crime"
but now it's routinely used all the time
for individual white-collar crooks
who siphoned off dollars by cooking the books.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, the guy in the first story doesn't seem to have testified in the Rezko trial itself yet, but I think we can expect him to make an appearance.

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