What Are RICO Charges, and How Can They Be Proven?
Among the five charges Sean Combs is facing at trial is one count of racketeering conspiracy, based on a federal law that was originally written to combat organized crime but is now used by prosecutors much more widely.
To convict Mr. Combs on that charge, prosecutors must prove that he did not merely lead a typical celebrity entourage, but instead ran a criminal enterprise responsible for years of sex-trafficking, drug distribution and other crimes.
The federal law — the 1970 Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO — was once seldom used, but has been central to recent cases against R. Kelly, Young Thug, Wall Street executives, street gang members and President Trump.
The charge allows prosecutors to present a sweeping narrative that includes accusations about a defendant's misdeeds that could stretch back decades, sometimes long past the statute of limitations.
In the wake of the #MeToo movement, the racketeering statute increasingly has been used by federal attorneys to prosecute a series of high-profile men accused of sexual abuse.
To convict a defendant of a racketeering charge, jurors need to find that they knowingly joined an unlawful conspiracy and agreed that they or a co-conspirator would commit at least two criminal acts to further the enterprise.
In Mr. Combs's case, those crimes include allegations that in 2011 he kidnapped an employee to help confront a rival and then his alleged co-conspirators set the rival's car on fire weeks later with a Molotov cocktail, as well as accusations that he dangled a woman off a balcony after she witnessed his abuse.
The racketeering charge is sometimes used against a pool of defendants — as in the case against Mr. Trump that accused him and his allies of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia — but can also be used against individuals who prosecutors deem leaders of an operation, as in the R. Kelly prosecution.
Mr. Combs was the only person known to have been charged with racketeering in his case, but the prosecution listed several others it said were part of a conspiracy, including his former chief of staff Kristina Khorram, his bodyguards and other lower-level staff described as 'foot soldiers.'
Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all the charges against him. The defense has denied the existence of any criminal conspiracy and argues Mr. Combs is not responsible for what the government has outlined as crimes.
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