The attorney who drafted the RICO statute fact-checked Rudy Giuliani's claim that he cooked up the idea as a way to bring down New York City's mobsters.
Giuliani has long claimed it was his idea to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute to prosecute 11 members of New York’s five crime families in 1985 after he read a memoir by crime boss Joe Bonanno describing the inner workings of the Mafia.
But the law professor who crafted RICO is now disputing his account, reported The Daily Beast.
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“Giuliani falsely says he got the idea of using RICO against the mob himself because he read a biography by the head of one of the crime families,” said G. Robert Blakey, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame. “That was his story.”
But Ron Goldstock, a prosecutor with the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, says he brought the idea to Giuliani shortly after he became the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York – and Blakey backs up that account.
“When he said, as he’s saying now, as a defendant with Trump, ‘I know more about RICO than anybody,’ I think that stretches the truth,” Blakey said.
Blakey used a yellow legal pad to draft the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, and Title IX of the act was RICO, but he never previously challenged Giuliani's account because he was pleased the law had been used to decimate the Mafia.
“Giuliani used it in the commission case,” Blakey said. “If he says he invented it, fine -- I don’t care who invented it. If he wants to take credit for it, let him take credit for it.”
“I didn’t need the accolades for it,” Goldstock told The Daily Beast. “I was happy that it was brought.”
However, neither Goldstock nor Blakey are surprised the RICO statute had been used against Donald Trump, who reminds both of them of the mob bosses the law had put behind bars.
“Goldstock and I used to kick around when will we draft a Mafia case against him — whether we could conceptualize Trump becoming the president as a Mafia family taking over a government agency, and then using it to make money for himself,” Blakey said. “And the answer is yes. Trump’s running of the White House was done on behalf of Trump, not you and I.”
