G. Robert Blakey

G. Robert Blakey is an extraordinarily arrogant man who has two saving graces: he will freely admit that he is arrogant and he is altogether entitled to be arrogant. If anyone has heard a news report of someone being charged with racketeering, that is almost certainly a reference to 42 United States Code 1961, the Racketeer Influence Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). RICO was largely Professor Blakey’s work. He got his start as one of Robert Kennedy’s right-hand men in the early sixties. He has forgotten more about prosecuting organized, syndicated crime than most people will ever learn. RICO was a revolutionary development in American jurisprudence. Here’s the deal: at common law, there is a distinction between civil and criminal law. Criminal law is designed to prosecute one person committing one crime on one day. As anyone who ever watched The Godfather knows, just as modern business organizations have become more sophisticated and diversified, so have syndicated criminals. RICO is designed not to attack individuals, but organizations. Whereas the common law treats crime like an individual atom, RICO deals with entire molecules. Anyone who has committed to predicate offenses within a ten-year period can be prosecuted, not only for those two offenses, but also for being a member of that organization. A RICO conviction carries a 20-year sentence in addition to the sentences for the predicate offenses.

The Notre Dame Law School snack bar had a special sandwich called The RICO, with the slogan, “everything comes under it.” I happened to be sitting next to Professor Blakey at a table in the snack bar in 1985, when the television news announced the indictments of the heads of the five New York crime families. Blakey was grinning like a Cheshire Cat. I’d often heard him say in class, that the Sherman Anti-trust act was passed in 1890, but it took the government 15 years to figure out how to use it, and it would take federal prosecutors a similar period to fully utilize RICO.

Ever since Lucky Luciano formed the Commission in the 1930s, the mafia (or more properly, La Cosa Nostra, “this thing of ours”) has worked to create an aura of invincibility. That only the small fish get convicted and serve short sentences. With that in mind, it’s interesting to relate what happened to the 11 Commission defendants. One, Anthony Delacroce, died of cancer before the end of the trial. One had his case severed and went to prison in a separate trial, serving all but three days of the rest of his life in prison. (The feds let him go home to die.) A third Commission member, Big Paulie Costellano, was whacked outside Sparks Steakhouse in Manhattan. (This indirectly caused Professor Blakey great annoyance. On the evening of December 16. 1985, he was lecturing on RICO to a group of FBI agents and federal prosecutors when he was interrupted by an audience member’s beeper. Then another. And another. Until the hall was filled with the chorus of beepers going off. The attendees of his seminar were all getting the news of Big Paulie’s whacking and he lost about half of his audience. I know from personal experience that Professor Blakey gets notoriously snappish at students who arrive late to his 8 a.m. lectures. (My best guess is that he does not use the same tone while addressing FBI agents who are packing .357 Magnums.) Of the eight remaining defendants, all were convicted and received lengthy prison sentences. In a last meeting before being shipped off to prison, one of the Mafioso offered their traditional toast, “centane.” (One hundred years.) Since four of the men had received one-hundred-year sentences, one suggested they might need to get a new toast. Of those eight men, four have died in prison and three are still there. Carmine “The Snake” Parsico is now seventy-five, and I’m sure he’s looking forward to his parole date…in 2050. The eighth Commission defendant, Antony Indellicato was released after thirteen years, returned to prison twice for parole violations, for nine months and two years, respectively. Last year, he accepted a plea agreement to serve a twenty-year sentence for murder.

I once heard Professor Blakey comment that the movie, The Godfather, played up the power and glamour of the mafia lifestyle, while The Godfather 2 depicted the horrendous human cost.