{"id":102,"date":"2011-07-24T17:31:56","date_gmt":"2011-07-24T17:31:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/?page_id=102"},"modified":"2018-02-20T22:33:40","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T22:33:40","slug":"conclusion","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/?page_id=102","title":{"rendered":"Conclusion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Whenever anyone contacts me for advice concerning a RICO claim, they explain the facts and ask: &#8220;do I have a RICO claim?&#8221; My answer is inevitably: &#8220;yes, of course you have a RICO claim, but everyone living and breathing in the United States has a RICO claim.&#8221; Given the breadth of the mail and wire fraud statutes and given the extent to which technology invades all of our lives, it is not a stretch to say that we all have RICO claims at any given moment. With RICO, the question is not whether you have a claim, but whether you have a good claim.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">Generally speaking, certain red-flags are often apparent in &#8220;difficult&#8221; or &#8220;bad&#8221; RICO claims:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>Some defendants are more troublesome than others.<\/strong>\u00a0Increasingly, more and more people want to sue the government, be that federal, state, local, foreign, tribal &#8211; some form of government. At best, many of these latter cases involve a violation of due process rights, e.g., the victim did not receive notice or an opportunity for hearing, but it is not a crime (let alone racketeering activity) for the government to deny an individual due process. Moreover, government entities cannot be defendants under RICO. A corrupt government agent can individually be named as a RICO defendant, but these wars are very difficult wars to wage, expensive and time consuming.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>A RICO claim cannot exist in the absence of criminal activity<\/strong>. The simplest way to put this concept is: no crime &#8211; no RICO violation, and by crime I mean one of those crimes listed in section 1961(1).<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>RICO addresses long-term, not one-shot, criminal activity.<\/strong>\u00a0Not only must a RICO claim be based upon criminal activity, but the criminal acts must constitute a &#8220;pattern&#8221; of criminal activity. A single criminal act, short-term criminal conduct, or criminal actions that bear no relationship to each other will not give rise to a RICO claim.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\"><strong>New claims are better than old claims.<\/strong>\u00a0The United States Supreme Court has imposed a four-year statute of limitations on all civil RICO claims. Civil RICO&#8217;s statute of limitations begins to run when the victim discovers or reasonably should have discovered its injury. RICO is like any other law &#8211; the victim must pursue its right to relief with diligence. If one can avoid a statute of limitations defense, one should.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">In short, under the right circumstances, RICO can be an effective tool, but RICO is not right for all circumstances.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Nutshell\" href=\"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/?page_id=18\">Return to Nutshell Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Whenever anyone contacts me for advice concerning a RICO claim, they explain the facts and ask: &#8220;do I have a RICO claim?&#8221; My answer is inevitably: &#8220;yes, of course you have a RICO claim, but everyone living and breathing in the United States has a RICO claim.&#8221; Given the breadth of the mail and wire &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/?page_id=102\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Conclusion&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":18,"menu_order":6,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-102","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P7IBZZ-1E","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1602,"href":"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/102\/revisions\/1602"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/18"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ricoact.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}