Damages for pain and suffering, be they physical or emotional, are not compensable under RICO. See, e.g., Grogan v. Platt, 835 F.2d 844, 846 (11th Cir. 1988); James v. Meow Media, Inc., 90 F. Supp.2d 798, 814 (W.D. Ky. 2000); Moore v. Eli Lilly & Co., 626 F. Supp. 365, 367 (D. Mass. 1986); City and County of San Fransisco v. Philip Morris, 957 F. Supp. 1130, 1138-39 (N.D. Cal. 1997).
For many years, however, the courts have debated whether financial losses that are derivative of a personal injury, such as medical expenses and lost wages, claims are compensable under RICO.
For example, in Grogan, two FBI agents were killed in a shoot-out with members of a criminal organization. Other FBI agents were injured. The survivors of the two killed agents and the injured agents brought a RICO claim against the responsible members of the criminal organization, seeking to recover the agents’ lost wages. The court dismissed the claims of the killed and wounded FBI agents:
Relying on the assumption that Congress intends the ordinary meanings of the words it employs, [citation omitted], [plaintiffs] argue that the common sense interpretation of the words “business or property” includes the economic damages that result from injury to the person. We are not convinced that [plaintiff’s] contention accurately captures the ordinary meaning of those words. In our view, the ordinary meaning of the phrase “injured in his business or property” excludes personal injuries, including the pecuniary losses therefrom. . . .
Id. at 846-47. The First Circuit held that if plaintiffs wanted to recover such damages, they had to pursue more traditional claims, e.g., wrongful death or assault and battery. See Ryder v. Hyles, 27 F.4th 1253, 1257 (7th Cir. 2022) (regardless of the horrific nature of the sexual abuse suffered by the plaintiffs, the economic losses derivative of that abuse were not recoverable under RICO); Jackson v. Sedgwick Claims Management Serv., Inc., 731 F.3d 556, 566 (6th Cir. 2013) (plaintiffs denied worker’s compensation benefits by reason of fraudulent expert reports did not have standing to bring a civil RICO claim; “Michigan’s decision to create a workers’ compensation system does not transform a disappointing outcome in personal injury litigation into damages that can support a RICO civil action, even if Michigan law characterizes the benefits awarded under this system as a legal entitlement”); Brown v. Ajax Paving Ind., Inc., 752 F.3d 656, 658 (6th Cir. 2014) (Sedgwick “does not immunize any insurer, claim adjuster or medical examiner who fraudulently denie[s] or conspire[s] to deny workers their benefits”; employees may still pursue whatever relief they may be entitled to under state law); Evans v. City of Chicago, 434 F.3d 916, 931 (7th Cir. 2006) (holding that “. . . earnings stemming from the lost opportunity to seek or gain employment are, as a matter of law, insufficient to satisfy section 1964(c)’s injury to ‘business or property’ requirement where they constitute nothing more than pecuniary losses flowing from what is, at base, a personal injury”); Santana v. Cook County Bd. of Review, 679 F.3d 614, 623 (7th Cir. 2012) (defendant’s alleged defamation of plaintiff constituted a personal repetitional injury that was not actionable under RICO; plaintiff failed to explain how the defamation interfered with his work).
In 2005, the Ninth Circuit split with the First Circuit. In Diaz v. Gates, 420 F.3d 897 (9th Cir. 2005), the plaintiff alleged that corrupt police officers within the LAPD had fabricated evidence against him and falsely imprisoned him, which caused various forms of economic loss, including lost employment, lost business opportunities, and lost wages. Diaz described Grogan’s reasoning as “flawed.” Id. at 902. The Diaz court further distinguished “the mere loss of something of value (such as wages)” from “injury to a property interest (such as the right to earn wages).” Id. at 900 n.1. The Ninth Circuit held that although the former were not compensable as injuries to business or property, the latter form of economic harm was actionable under section 1964(c). Id. at 903; but see Avalos v. Baca, 596 F.3d 583, 594 (9th Cir. 2010) (holding that plaintiff’s over-detention did not cause any injury to property where plaintiff admitted that he was not a U.S. citizen and did not have a work visa).\
In 2025, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Horn v. Medical Marijuana, Inc., 145 S. Ct. 931 (2025), and seemed to side with the Ninth Circuit. In Horn, the plaintiff truck driver ingested a pain-relief product after researching the product specifications, which stated that the product was THC-free. The plaintiff knew that he would lose his job if he ever tested positive for THC. After he took the product, the plaintiff was subject to a random drug test at his place of employment. That test revealed the presence of THC in his system, and he was fired. The plaintiff brought a RICO claim alleging that the product manufacturer fraudulently concealed that the product contained THC. The plaintiff sought his lost wages. The Supreme Court held that section 1964(c)’s use of the words “injured in his business or property” did “not preclude recovery of all economic harms that resulted from personal injuries” and remanded the case for further proceedings. Id. at 946. The Supreme Court noted, however, that the plaintiff still had to clear all of the other hurdles necessary to state a civil RICO claim, e.g., proximate cause.
To have standing under section 1964(c), the plaintiff must also experience a concrete injury to business or property. See Gomez v. Wells Fargo, N.A., 676 F.3d 655, 661 (8th Cir. 2012) (homeowners did not experience concrete financial loss simply because the lender charged the homeowners the fair market value of an appraisal, rather than the reduced appraisal price that the lender an negotiated with the appraiser); Simpson v. Sanderson Farms, Inc., 744 F.3d 702, 709 (11th Cir. 2014) (the plaintiffs alleged that the defendant’s hiring of illegal immigrants depressed their wages; the court dismissed the claim, reasoning: “The problem here, however, is that the plaintiffs have pled injury at only the highest order of abstraction and with only conclusory assertions. They have offered no market data that might permit us plausibly to infer a gap between the wages they actually received at Sanderson and the wages they would have received but for the alleged … misconduct. Certainly, the plaintiffs have provided no direct evidence of lost profits” (court’s emphasis)); Ray v. Spirit Airlines, Inc., 836 F.3d 1340, 1350-51 (11th Cir. 2016)(the plaintiffs claimed that the defendant fraudulently depicted a portion of its airfare as a government fee; but the court held that it strained credulity to insist that a customer willing to pay $129 in base fare plus $8.99 in a passenger usage fee would not have purchased the ticket if the passenger knew the fee came from the airline not the government); but see Gil Ramirez Group, L.L.C. v. Houston Ind. Sch. Dist., 786 F.3d 400, 410-411 (5th Cir. 2015) (stating that a plaintiff need not show that the other party would have been obliged to confer a benefit, only that the other party would have conferred the benefit but for the corrupt activity and dismissing the plaintiff’s damage claim relating to bids that it allegedly lost due to corruption but sustaining the plaintiff’s damage claim relating to a sudden decline in jobs assigned to the plaintiff during the period of corrupt activity); Chevron Corp. v. Donziger, 833 F.3d 74, 135 (2d Cir. 2016) (stating that “[t]he nature of attachment is to prevent the asset’s owner from using or disposing of his property as he wishes” and that “incursion into the owner’s property rights constitutes injury” to business or property under section 1964(c)); Blevins v. Aksut, 849 F.3d 1016, 1021 (11th Cir. 2017) (the plaintiffs alleged an injury to business or property by seeking amounts paid for the unnecessary heart procedures that the defendants fraudulently induced the plaintiffs to undergo); HCB Financial Corp. v. McPherson, 8 F.4th 335, 343-344 (5th Cir. 2021) (when a RICO plaintiff’s injury is the inability to collect a lawful debt, “a plaintiff cannot rely on its lost debt to animate a RICO suit after it has recovered that debt”); South Branch LLC v. Commonwealth Edison Co., 46 F.4th 646, 654 (7th Cir. 2022) (holding that the plaintiffs’ claims were barred by the Filed-rate Doctrine, i.e., the plaintiffs, who were retail consumers of electricity, suffered no legally cognizable injury under RICO when they paid electricity bills based on retail rates that had been properly filed with the ICC).
In 2008, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled that a governmental entities’ expenditure of money to enforce laws or promote the public well-being does not constitute a “property” interest within the ambit of section 1964(c). Canyon County, 519 F.3d at 976. The Ninth Circuit also held that a government “does not possess a property interest in the law enforcement or heath care services that it provides to the public.” Id. at 977. Accordingly, the Ninth Circuit dismissed a county’s RICO claim against defendant companies who allegedly hired illegal aliens, thereby increasing the county’s expenditures for law enforcement and publicly funded health care.