People are throwing around the word
RACKETEERING in connection with the Trump Georgia investigation. The New Yorker has a cool article explaining how the broad Georgia racketeering statutes might apply to Trump and his cronies. Turns out the prosecutor investigating Trump has successfully applied Georgia's racketeering law to teachers and principals caught cheating on students' standardized tests.
Letter from the South
Georgia’s Broad Racketeering Law May Now Ensnare Donald Trump
Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, often relies on Georgia’s capacious rico statute—though critics say that she has stretched it past the law’s intent. July 31, 2023
In 2013, Fani Willis served as the lead prosecutor in what is still the longest criminal trial ever held in Georgia. Teachers and administrators in Atlanta public schools had been accused, a few years before, of cheating on standardized tests. A special report commissioned by Georgia’s governor concluded that a hundred and seventy-eight educators—including more than three dozen principals and a superintendent—had participated in “organized and systemic misconduct” since at least 2001. Teachers were giving children answers and altering incorrect responses, investigators reported; administrators were offering financial incentives to those who abetted the cheating and punishing those who did not. One teacher, who admitted to changing test answers, told investigators, “APS is run like the Mob.”
The Fulton County district attorney’s office agreed: the county indicted thirty-five educators and administrators for conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or rico—a statute that, historically, is associated with the prosecution of Mafia figures. Willis, in her opening statement, explained how such charges could be applied in the case. “You don’t, under RICO, have to have a formal, sit-down dinner meeting where you eat spaghetti,” she said, seemingly invoking a scene from “Goodfellas.” “But what you do have to do is all be doing the same thing for the same purpose. You all have to be working towards that same goal. In this case, the goal—inflate test scores illegally.”
. . .
Georgia created its rico statute in 1980, less to target the Mafia than to go after Black street gangs and “nontraditional conspiracies,” as Norman Eisen, a former trial lawyer and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, put it to me. (The Georgia Assembly cited the need to address “the increasing sophistication of various criminal elements.”)
But the Georgia law didn’t require prosecutors to demonstrate an underlying criminal enterprise, only the commission of a range of illegal acts that furthered a single criminal goal. “Because of its breadth,” Eisen said, “Georgia prosecutors are more prone to utilize their criminal rico provision as a vehicle for major cases.” It’s one of the best places in the country for deploying such a provision, he added. Volkan Topalli, a professor of criminology at Georgia State, told me that the state’s generous statute helps create a “whirlpool effect” in the prosecution of criminal conspiracies: “If you capture one person in the whirlpool, everyone else gets sucked in along with them.”
