Anti-Racketeering Legislation in America
![handle is hein.journals/amcomp54 and id is 1581 raw text is: CRAIG M. BRADLEY*
Anti-Racketeering Legislation in America
It appears that when the Congress does not seem to have
anything else to do, we must meet here and make some more
crimes.
- Statement of Congressman Young
concerning the 1934 anti-racketeering legislation'
In 1983, President Ronald Reagan emphasized the importance of
federal efforts to curb organized criminal activity, characterizing or-
ganized crime as a continuing threat to the domestic security of our
nation, and stating that organized crime take [s] a tremendous toll
on the criminal justice system and its resources.2 To agree that a
national problem of organized crime exists, however, is not necessa-
rily to agree that the government's declarations as to its scope are
accurate or that the methods used in fighting it are appropriate or
effective. Like other social issues, organized crime is addressed to
the extent that it is politically favorable, which is not necessarily an
indicator of how great a threat the problem actually poses. In the
last two decades, the volume and scope of legislation addressing or-
ganized crime has drastically decreased, with the most recent major
legislation put into effect over fifteen years ago.3 This decrease, how-
ever, may not reflect success in the federal efforts against racketeer-
ing and other forms of organized crime, but simply a realization by
Congress and the executive that other issues hold more political
value.
This article is about the methods of the American government in
fighting organized crime. It traces the history of federal anti-racke-
teering legislation, beginning with Congress's ban on lotteries in the
* James Louis Calamaras, Professor of Law, Indiana University (Bloomington).
This article is a condensed and updated version of Racketeering and the Federaliza-
tion of Crime, 22 Am. Crim. L.R. 213 (1984). My thanks to Laura Jakubowski for her
editorial and research assistance.
1. 78 Cong. Rec., 7967, 8138 (1934) (statement of Rep. Young).
2. Letter from President Reagan to Senator Thurmond (January 26, 1983), re-
printed in Organized Crime in America, Hearings Before the Comm. on the Judiciary,
United States Senate, 98th Cong., 1st Sess. 3 (1983) [hereinafter cited as Organized
Crime in America].
3. Norman Abrams and Sara Sun Beale, Federal Criminal Law and its Enforce-
ment 3d, at 515 (West Group, 2000) (West Publishing Company, 1986).
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Anti-Racketeering Legislation in America
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