RICO Litigation

We have superb experience handling cases that arise under the amorphously worded RICO Act. RICO stands for “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations,” and the RICO Act as originally conceived by Congress was intended to ensnare all gangsters and the various companies and entities that they used to launder proceeds from their gangster activities. The RICO Act was therefore cast in very broad, open-ended but also incomprehensible language. Over time, many litigants learned to use this broadly worded statute in order to bring claims against all manner of businesses and people, many of whom never participated in any activity that even remotely resembled “gangster activity” even under the broadest possible definition of the term. The federal courts therefore devised a series of ever more restrictive doctrines to try to discourage these kinds of claims, but along the way they sometimes struggled to reconcile their doctrines with the express language and intended purpose of the RICO Act. It is now a very complex area of law in which we can capably analyze claims, bring claims on behalf of RICO victims, and provide sterling defenses of claims brought under the Act.

Dorn Bishop used to be a prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California, and he tried many cases to juries and never lost a single one. He also has extensive experience litigating RICO matters on behalf of defendants during his long, successful career in private practice. William Markham also has substantial experience litigating RICO matters and can provide first-rate guidance and advocacy to plaintiffs and defendants in these complicated, difficult cases that arise under the RICO statutes.