It is hard to imagine that Blakey intended his act to apply to someone like Shani Robinson. He’s 88 years old now; when I emailed him, he responded from a smartphone inviting me to send a list of questions, then never replied, so we can’t know for sure. But many of his thoughts are a matter of public record. Blakey has said that he designed RICO as a score settler, “the slingshot the Davids of this world can use to have a fair fight with the Goliaths.” To him, the Cosa Nostra, which was siphoning money and resources off from practically every industry in New York City and could neutralize powerful enemies without repercussion, looked an awful lot like a Goliath. But because the legal system was so exclusively focused on individuals, whenever mobsters did get their day in court it was always the little guys, the ones who actually did the dirty work, who ended up taking the fall. The people with real power could afford to keep their hands clean. And Blakey wanted RICO to be marshaled against corporate bigwigs, too. “We don’t want one set of rules for people whose collars are blue or whose names end in vowels, and another set for those whose collars are white and have Ivy League diplomas,” he told Time in 1989.
In reality, RICO has for the most part exacerbated these imbalances, rather than rectifying them — more atom bomb than silver bullet. Its passage into law in 1970, just as Lyndon B. Johnson’s “war on crime” gave way to Richard Nixon’s “war on drugs,” coincided with the start of a vast evolution in the criminal legal system. Over the past 50 years, that system has grown far more sophisticated, interconnected, and well-resourced. It reaches farther into people’s lives than ever before: not just within the thousands of prisons and jails and detention centers that span the country, but in predictive policing technology, court-ordered electronic supervision, social-media surveillance, and increasingly complex charges and cases. RICO has been both a metaphor for that transformation and an engine of it.