This is a couple of days old, but worth noting: G. Robert Blakey.
He did the RICO.
In 1969, he was hired as the chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures. It was there that he worked on the RICO law, under Senator John L. McClellan, the Arkansas Democrat who chaired the subcommittee.
The law — Title IX of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, for which Senator McClellan was the driving force — says that a person or group of people who commit certain crimes as part of a conspiracy or criminal enterprise can be charged with racketeering. And it allows those hurt by the enterprise to sue for three times their actual damages.
Previously, prosecutors would charge people for committing single crimes like murder, extortion or gambling, or for conspiracy to commit those individual felonies. “Bob took conspiracy law and broadened it to describe a pattern of racketeering that is committed in furtherance of an enterprise,” Ed Stier, a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey, said in an interview.
…
Some critics have argued that the RICO law is too vague, that it is too widely used and that its penalties are sometimes out of proportion to the crimes being prosecuted.
“It is sort of the white-collar equivalent of capital punishment,” Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University, told The Los Angeles Times in 1989 after the conviction of a New Jersey investment partnership for engaging in a racketeering conspiracy involving securities fraud.