From the Editor

I see that my old friend Michael Keinsley has recently been supporting the Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act as a legitimate tool against all sorts of crime, not merely crime committed by racketeering-influenced and corrupt organizations. Michael’s reasoning is, as always, ingenious. I particularly liked his point that RICO’s provision allowing prosecutors to impound an organization’s assets before trial was justified in order to “prevent the assets slipping away and making the trial pointless.” But would Drexel Burnham Lambert really have moved all its assets to the Cayman Islands and managed the junk-bond business from there if RICO had not been threatened against it? It seems unlikely to me. And since threatening RICO is equivalent to threatening bankruptcy, wasn’t that threat, employed without due cause, a legal version of the protection racket, forcing Drexel to surrender whether guilty or not?

At this point in the argument liberals accuse conservatives of inconsistency and hypocrisy. How come you’re raising these legalistic quibbles about the rights of the accused, goes the refrain, when you invariably attack the exclusionary rule? Isn’t white-collar crime every bit as bad as street crime? To which the answers are: a) abolishing the exclusionary rule would not damage a fair trial, which RICO does, and b) no, as a matter of fact, white-collar crime is not nearly as bad as street crime because it doesn’t wound, maim, and kill people.

About the Author

John O’Sullivan

John O’Sullivan is a senior fellow at National Review Institute and a contributing editor of National Review.

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I see that my old friend Michael Keinsley has recently been supporting the Racketeering-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act as a legitimate tool against all sorts of crime, not merely crime committed by racketeering-influenced and corrupt organizations. Michael’s reasoning is, as always, ingenious. I particularly liked his point that RICO’s provision allowing prosecutors to impound an organization’s assets before trial was justified in order to “prevent the assets slipping away and making the trial pointless.” But would Drexel Burnham Lambert really have moved all its assets to the Cayman Islands and managed the junk-bond business from there if RICO had not been threatened against it? It seems unlikely to me. And since threatening RICO is equivalent to threatening bankruptcy, wasn’t that threat, employed without due cause, a legal version of the protection racket, forcing Drexel to surrender whether guilty or not?

At this point in the argument liberals accuse conservatives of inconsistency and hypocrisy. How come you’re raising these legalistic quibbles about the rights of the accused, goes the refrain, when you invariably attack the exclusionary rule? Isn’t white-collar crime every bit as bad as street crime? To which the answers are: a) abolishing the exclusionary rule would not damage a fair trial, which RICO does, and b) no, as a matter of fact, white-collar crime is not nearly as bad as street crime because it doesn’t wound, maim, and kill people.