The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) became law in 1970 as a means of targeting organized crime in America. RICO proved to be one of the most powerful tools law enforcement has to combat organized crime. It is not a criminal statute because it does not criminalize any act that is not already recognized as illegal. Instead, it enhances the normal punishments and penalties of certain crimes when they are committed by organizations, usually providing prison sentences and fines that are three times the norm. RICO also provides civil remedies for the victims of organized crime, which includes trebled damages plus reasonable attorney’s fees and court costs. Though most observers have welcomed the criminal provisions, many jurists fear that the civil provisions have been abused.
Originally, RICO was only a minor part of the much larger Organized Crime Control Act (OCCA) of 1970. Following on the heels of the 1967 Report of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, OCCA was intended to provide the government with the necessary tools to combat organized crime, which many observers believed was overtaking New York and other large urban centers. Some of its points included special provisions for grand juries, and use immunity, as well as special procedures to deal with contempt, false statements, and depositions. At the time, the criminal forfeiture provision inspired the most controversy; it ordered law enforcement to seize all property used in the commission of a crime. Forfeiture was an innovation in criminal justice and, though advocates claimed precedence for it in old English common law, it had never been used in the United States. Much of the congressional debate focused on this element alone.
Although RICO has since been heralded as a major step forward in the war against organized crime, initially the Department of Justice (DOJ) hesitated for almost a decade before exploiting its full potential. This was largely a result of its vague language. Modern RICO prohibits any person from using income derived from a pattern of racketeering activity to acquire or maintain interest in an enterprise; from conducting the affairs of an enterprise through racketeering activity; and from conspiring with others to do so. The authoring Congress did not know how to define organized crime in a way that would not violate the free association clause of the Constitution, and was instead left with having to list crimes that are commonly associated with organized criminal behavior, including murder, kidnapping, arson, gambling, robbery, bribery, extortion, drug dealing, and mail and wire fraud. Without a strict definition of organized crime, the “pattern of racketeering” necessary to trigger the RICO statute was broadly defined. The law also provided a broad construction clause to ensure that law enforcement agencies would be able to apply the statute to unforeseen circumstances as needed. Despite this added precaution, the courts still found significant ambiguity in the definitions of “enterprise,” “pattern,” and “person.” Until the courts arrived at some consensus on these terms, the DOJ used the statute infrequently, and only in conjunction with other, better defined laws. The civil component was used even less frequently, usually because true victims of organized crime were typically too intimidated to pursue civil recovery, preferring instead to let the FBI assume the risks of prosecution for them. This also added to the reasons why the criminal side of RICO received limited use; legitimate businesses were often too frightened to file a complaint with law enforcement.
One solution to this problem was to redefine the nature of “enterprise” in a way that would permit law enforcement to use RICO against the mob without involving legitimate businesses. Throughout the 1970s, the law professor who drafted the original language for the 1970 Senate committee, G. Robert Blakey, toured the Northeast, giving seminars to law enforcement officials urging them to reconsider the object of RICO. In 1981, however, the Supreme Court decided in United States v. Turkette that RICO’s broad construction clause justified a reinterpretation of “enterprise” that included both legal and illegal organizations. From that point on, the DOJ has depended on RICO as the prime tool in their war against organized crime and drug dealing.
During the mid-1980s, certain corporations tested the legal waters by attaching civil RICO complaints to their standard breach-of-contract suits. After years of lower-court debate, the Supreme Court ruled in Sedi-ma, S. P.R. L. v. Imrex Co. (1985) that the liberal construction clause prevented the Court from distinguishing civil RICO from “garden variety” contract disputes. Congress made numerous attempts during the late 1980s and early 1990s to reform the RICO statute to prevent civil RICO abuse. They were successfully blocked by consumer advocate groups who feared that weaker language would bar victims of white-collar crime from appropriate remedies, particularly in light of the savings-and-loan and insider-trading scandals of the later 1980s. Advocates of reform claimed that consumer-protection remedies already existed at the state level, and, under the auspices of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), they argued that RICO abused principles of federalism by imposing federal remedies for offenses that could be better addressed locally. Despite years of debate and compromise, Congress failed to pass any measures seeking to reform the civil provisions of the RICO statute. On the criminal side, however, Congress passed numerous laws adding additional predicate offenses, including child pornography, black-marketing, and terrorism. In the 1990s, RICO stirred further controversy when it was used as the basis for numerous civil lawsuits against pro-life protesters, gun manufacturing, and tobacco companies.
—Aharon W. Zorea
Reagan, Ronald W. (1911-2004) 40th U. S. president Ronald Wilson Reagan became the 40th president of the United States in 1981 and served two terms in the White House. His election marked the ascension of conservatism to political power in postwar America. Reagan spent his early life as a liberal Democrat. His mother, Nellie, was an evangelical Protestant who stressed religious values; his father, John Reagan, was a salesman and a liberal Democrat.
After working as a radio sports announcer, Reagan became a movie actor with Warner Brothers’ studio in Hollywood. Reagan performed in well-received films, including Kings Row, The Hasty Heart, and The Winning Team.
He was elected to five terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the movie actors’ union, by his fellow actors. As SAG’s president, Reagan worked to secure better benefits and working conditions from studio executives. A New Deal Democrat, who enthusiastically voted and campaigned for both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Reagan struggled with Communist Party members in SAG, and developed a permanent loathing for communism and socialism in general, and the Soviet Union in particular. Reagan slowly turned away from the New Deal liberalism of his youth, voting for Republican Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election. In 1962, after being a Democratic endorser of Eisenhower and Nixon, Reagan finally registered as a Republican.
Reagan’s nationwide television speech in October 1964 for Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater inspired rich, conservative California businessmen to back the former actor for governor of California in 1966. Reagan’s campaign featured forceful uncompromising attacks against student protesters at the University of California, African-American urban rioters in Los Angeles, welfare cheaters, and taxes created by Democratic governor Pat Brown. Reagan promised to restore order. He was easily elected by more than 1 million votes.
As governor, Reagan cut the rate of budgetary growth in California. Reagan’s long experience with television, movies, and radio enabled him to appeal directly to voters in simple language over the appeals of legislators and bureaucratic experts, winning him the sobriquet, “The Great Communicator.” To Reagan’s later embarrassment, in 1967 he became one of the first three governors to sign an abortion rights bill. In one year, California abortions jumped from 517 to over 100,000. A divorced man himself, Reagan also became the first governor to sign a no-fault divorce bill in 1970. He was reelected that year.
Reagan made an unsuccessful bid for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, but lost to Richard M. Nixon. Nixon’s Watergate scandal, mismanagement of the economy, and detente with the communist Soviet
President Ronald W. Reagan (Ronald W. Reagan Library)
Union and People’s Republic of China, revived Reagan’s presidential hopes. Nixon’s successor, Gerald R. Ford, continued Nixon’s policies. After the Supreme Court’s Roe V. Wade (1973) pro-abortion ruling, the conservative movement discovered another reason to oppose traditional Republicanism. Reagan publicly converted to an antiabortion position, supported prayer in the public schools, and promised to rein in what he viewed as “federal judicial activism.” He allied himself with New Right leaders Senator Jesse Helms and Phyllis Schlafly and challenged Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination. Reagan denounced detente and called for a tougher stance against the Soviet Union. At the convention, Reagan lost the contest by a handful of delegates. It appeared his political career might be over.
As James Earl Carter, Jr.’s presidency confronted stagflation, Soviet expansionism, and the seizure of the Iranian embassy hostages, Reagan solidified his position in the Republican Party, and won its presidential nomination in 1980. He selected George H. W. Bush as his vice presidential running mate. Reagan told the American people he would “get the government off our backs,” that is, shove liberal bureaucratic experts aside, so he could renew prosperity, control crime, and regain respect for the country overseas.
On election day 1980, Reagan won in a landslide, taking 50 percent of the popular vote to Carter’s 41 percent, while third-party candidate John B. Anderson won 9 percent. Reagan won 44 states, helping the Republicans to win the Senate (for the first time in 16 years) with a net gain of 12 seats, and to attain a working majority in the House with a net gain of 33 seats.
Despite being wounded in an assassination attempt in March 1981, Reagan carried through many of his 1980 campaign promises during his first term. Federal income taxes were cut 25 percent over a three-year period with the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981. Nondefense spending was cut sizably. Some welfare administration was shifted to the states. Federal regulations were slashed. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker aided Reagan’s program to suppress inflation with a tight money supply policy. Although unemployment rose to more than 10 percent in late 1982, losing the Republicans 26 House seats and their working majority, the American economy rebounded, and Reagan and Volcker’s policies were widely credited with beginning a seven-year-long boom in 1983, the longest peacetime expansion in the country’s history to date.
However, Reagan failed to deliver on balanced-budget or entitlement-reform promises. His huge defense spending increases combined with entitlement mandates to balloon federal deficits, despite his cheery campaign promises. However, Democratic legislators confined him to procedural changes. In 1986, during his second term, Reagan managed to work with House Democrats to reform the federal tax structure by lowering tax rates, eliminating tax shelters, and expanding the earned-income tax credit for working people. Nonetheless, because of demographic trends, entitlements continued to expand.
Reagan’s 1980 promises of what he called a “moral revival” enjoyed less success than his economic policy. He enacted executive orders forbidding federal subsidies for abortion. But the Supreme Court continued to uphold Roe v. Wade. Reagan named Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981 as the first woman U. S. Supreme Court justice. O’Connor disappointed the conservative movement by becoming a swing vote. Reagan’s first-term attorney general, William French Smith, was replaced by Edwin Meese, who declared culture war on what he perceived as liberal policies toward crime, sexuality, affirmative action, and federalism. Under Meese, the Justice Department systematically appointed judicial conservatives to federal district and appellate courts. Meese also persuaded Reagan to name conservatives William H. Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia to be chief justice and associate justice, respectively, on the Supreme Court in 1986. However, the Democratic majority in the Senate blocked the appointment of conservative judge Robert Bork in 1987. Instead, Anthony Kennedy won appointment to the Court. The Rehnquist Supreme Court rolled back criminal rights, reinterpreted property rights, and began whittling down affirmative action rulings. However, it continued to uphold reproductive rights and free speech precedents.
In face of opposition, Reagan’s presidency did not roll back environmental regulation much. Interior secretary James G. Watt received harsh criticism, as did EPA administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford. Both were pressured to resign.
Despite his failure to deliver a balanced budget, Reagan achieved most of his domestic policy aims. Tax cutting, deregulation, and tax reform changed American society. Critics charged Reagan administration officials with corruption, and in the case of Michael Deaver, a presidential aide, an investigation led to his conviction on criminal charges.
In 1984 Reagan was reelected in an electoral landslide against Democratic opponent Walter F. Mondale, winning 49 states and a 59 percent popular vote. The Republicans retained control of the Senate. Reagan’s Democratic critics called him “a Teflon president.”
Reagan restored American military power. He persuaded Congress to almost double defense spending from $171 billion in 1981 to $300 billion in 1985. The bulk of these increases financed military pay increases, spare parts, the new Intermediate Nuclear Force, or INF, and MX missile systems, and a 600-ship navy. Reagan eschewed nuclear arms control measures in his first term. Instead, he advocated building a space-based ballistic missile defense system, known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI. Reagan fought skeptics among the Pentagon command, the scientific establishment, diplomatic circles, NATO, and Democratic opposition, who derided SDI as “Star Wars,” to champion SDI as the solution to Soviet nuclear missile superiority.
Reagan acted to prevent American high-technology exports, or “technology transfer,” from being sent to the USSR or countries friendly to it. No presidency had ever policed technology transfer so stringently. These policies helped to delay Soviet development of a computer revolution. William Clark, Reagan’s second National Security Advisor, issued orders denying the USSR access to American financial resources, plugging a gap previously left open during the COLD war. Clark also assisted the Solidarity labor resistance movement in the Soviet satellite of Poland. Reagan denounced Soviet totalitarianism, labeling it “an empire of evil.” While avoiding direct military confrontation with the Soviets, Reagan did assist anticommunist insurgencies in developing nations. This so-called Reagan Doctrine used the CIA to aid anticommunist military movements in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola, and Cambodia. The Afghan resistance, especially, took a bloody toll of Soviet troops and lowered Soviet morale.
Reagan’s diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East proved more problematic. The first involved Lebanon. Reagan dispatched a marine brigade to “keep peace” between Israeli-backed and Muslim militia forces there. A Muslim suicide truck bomber killed 241 marines in October 1983. Reagan withdrew. The second failure was the selling of arms to Iran in an attempt to free American hostages held by Iranian-backed Muslim terrorists in Lebanon. Americans were indignant to discover in late 1986 that their hardline president, who had declared Iran a terrorist state, had negotiated with Iran’s fundamentalist leaders. Further revelations that the proceeds from these arms sales were used to fund the contras, anticommunist insurgents in Nicaragua, in direct violation of U. S. law, deepened the scandal. The Iran-contra affair seriously weakened Reagan’s presidency.
Reagan extended military and financial assistance to El Salvador in its war with Nicaraguan-sponsored communist guerrillas. The campaign resulted in repeated reports of atrocities on both sides of the civil war. Two days after the 1983 massacre of the marines in Lebanon, Reagan ordered marines and army troops to invade the Caribbean island nation of Grenada to remove its communist government, which had close ties to Cuba.
Reagan’s presidency enjoyed good relations with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, an ideological soulmate. Reagan persuaded NATO members to deploy INF missiles for defense against Soviet invasion, to acquiesce in SDI, and to support antiterrorist measures.
Reagan showed little faith initially in arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union. Following his reelection in 1984, Reagan surprised his leading advisers—as well as his critics—by resuming negotiations with the Soviets. In late 1985 Reagan traveled to Geneva to meet with the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, for a three-day summit meeting. At the meeting, Reagan insisted on America’s right to develop SDI. This position precluded any major agreements being reached, but Reagan and Gorbachev pledged to accelerate arms control negotiations in future meetings.
Finally, in 1987 Gorbachev flew to the United States to sign the historic Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the first major arms control agreement that called for the destruction of deployed nuclear weapons systems. The treaty provided that inspectors from both nations would observe the destruction of intermediate-range missiles. Soviet and American leaders also announced that they would seek further arms reductions through the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which had been suspended in Reagan’s first term. Gorbachev also began to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan, to end support to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and to reduce commitments to Cuba and Vietnam. Moreover, Gorbachev urged Soviet-backed governments in Eastern Europe to undertake political and economic reform. This last policy set the stage for opposition forces in Eastern European bloc nations to overthrow their communist regimes, leading to the eventual breakup of the Soviet Union during the George H. W. Bush administration. As Reagan’s administration drew to a close, the cold war appeared to have ended.
Following his presidency, Reagan retired to his ranch in California. In 1994 he revealed he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. After a 10-year battle with Alzheimer’s, Reagan died on June 5, 2004, at his home in Los Angeles, California. On June 9 his coffin was flown to Washington, D. C., where Reagan lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Visitors stood in line for hours to view his coffin until his state funeral at the Washington National Cathedral on June 11. Several heads of state and former heads of state attended the funeral, which included tributes from President George W. Bush, former president George H. W. Bush, former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, and a videotaped tribute from former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Reagan was then returned to California, where he was buried on the grounds of his presidential library.
Reagan was the recipient of many honors. In 1998 Washington National Airport was renamed Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in his honor. A U. S. Navy aircraft carrier bearing his name, the USS Ronald Reagan, was launched in 2001. He and his wife, Nancy, received the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest expression of national appreciation for achievement, in 2002. In 2006 the United States Postal Service honored Reagan with a commemorative stamp.
See also Reaganomics.
Further reading: Michael Barone, Our Country: Amer-icafrom Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press, 1990); Steven Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, 1964-1980 (San Francisco: Prima Publishing, 2001); Peter Rodman, More Precious than Peace: Fighting and Winning the Cold War and the Struggle for the Third World (Boston: Scribner, 1994).
—Christopher M. Gray and Cynthia Stachecki
World History
