Boyle v. United States

This is a case that has a "Fat Sal" and a "Paciello" and others similarly named. Well, you guessed it. It implicates RICO, that federal racketeering statute, whose full name is the "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act," passed in the late 1960s to try to break the back of the Mafia. The key part of the law had to do with the definition of an "enterprise." An "enterprise" consisted of a bunch of guys (yep, they were always guys) who were, in the language of that law:

"any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or other legal entity” and, as relevant here, “any union or group of individuals associated in fact although not a legal entity," 18 USC sec. 1961(4).

Meditate on that definition night and day, for in what this definition says, and doesn't say, you have this case.

In short, the legal issue before the Court in Boyle is whether an "association-in-fact" that really consists of a rather motley, disorganized crew of guys who just periodically knocked over banks was an "enterprise" under the RICO statute. Of course, if they were an enterprise, they would all be doing big time in prison. So, this case boils down to how much structure there must be behind a pattern of activity which itself looks like it could flow from a structure in order to find the activity a RICO activity. It really is a nice little intellectual puzzle that the Court is being asked to solve.

A Few Facts

You have to have a real live defendant to move forward. In this case it is Mr. Boyle (how did he get into this? Perhaps the Irish and the Italians were working together..), who was convicted by a jury of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, bank burglary conspriacy and several bank burglaries and attempted burglaries, all violations of federal law; the first two were also violations of RICO. The RICO law was implicated because of Boyle's participation in a bank burglary ring, dubbed by the government the "Boyle Crew." The big question will be whether the government actually established that there was some kind of structure or enterprise behind this crew of wild and crazy guys who periodically knocked over banks.

Well, in order for you to make an intelligent decision on this one, you really have to sort through the facts in ways that only people paid to do it would be willing to do it, but I give you a taste of them here. The government's accomplice witness, for example, testifying under cooperation agreements in exchange for leniency, described the "crew" as an amorphous band of "free floaters" without unifying "plan" or "understanding." "Different people" would commit crimes at "different times" and "places" in a rather ah hoc and impromptu basis.

The picture we get, from several witnesses, is that it was a rather disorganized band of guys who weren't too skillful at what they did and didn't organize themselves very well. But here is where it gets interesting. Can you argue that any continuous string of robberies like this as it were requires some planning, or else it would never get done? Unless you had someone or two or three people who were generally "in charge," nothing happens or, at most, it happens once or twice. The mere fact of repeated human activity, involving several people, even if the membership in the "group" varies from time to time, requires that someone have some conception of what is going on. So, I can see that the Court would be tempted to say that just by looking at the string of robberies you have, as it were, presumptive evidence that someone is doing he planning--even if it comes out at trial that no one actually came forward and took a bow and said that he was actually in charge.

Indeed, and this is my editorial comment, I am 56 years-old, and I have known very well a lot of Italian and Irish guys over my lifetime, and I really can't imagine them getting together to do a lot of bank robberies without someone asking the question, "Hey, who is in charge here?" Thus, I think the burden will be super-heavy on the defendants to show that this was all ad hoc. I just don't know whether the presumption of enterprise is an irrebuttable one or not..

Conclusion--At the Court

Thus, I imagine that the Supremes will uphold Mr. Boyle's convictions and will hold that an "association in fact" like the one in the "Boyle Crew" will suffice to trigger RICO liability for those caught in the robberies. I don't see this Court parsing the law very generously for defendants these days.

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