Prosecuting the Church of Scientology under the RICO statutes.

Factual Questions
1

When thinking about how this country can’t (and damn well shouldn’t, IMO) ban a religious group, my thoughts drifted to a second criminal Org: La Cosa Nostra. The Mafia. The group we attacked at the roots with the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, aka RICO. We passed a law that restricted the First Amendment right to free assembly in the instance of criminal assembly. Damn well we should have, too.

Now the Mafia is being handled pretty well by the FBI, AFAIK, due in no small part to the RICO statutes. The Mafia has done some pretty horrendous things (homicide, abuse, extortion, racketeering), opening them up to criminal prosecution in criminal courts with the Federal Government Itself on their sorry asses. (The Federal Government does not respond to barratry, and cannot be intimidated into silence.)

Wouldn’t what works for one wolf apply equally well to the second?

The Church of Scientology has done things far, far worse than even the Mafia. (It even has its own little Mafia-style group: The OSA.) It has done these things on US soil (as American as Clearwater, Florida) to US citizens (Lisa McPherson wasn’t a foreigner). It has a massively top-down organization with centralized control (admittedly hidden behind shell corporations and front groups (Cult Awareness Network, Narconon, etc.)).

So what prevents the Federal Government from enforcing its own statutes and taking the CoS down?

(I don’t think this will become a debate if there is a General Answer here at all. If it degenerates, I’m sorry (about a lot of things).)

2

Quite frankly, not a lot of people care that much about CoS.

As long as they’re just a wacky cult and not murdering dozens of people outright or amassing weapons of mass destruction, I doubt the government will pay them much mind.

3

freido: Not murdering dozens of people outright? Maybe they aren’t. But they’ve killed three at Flag (a base of operations near Clearwater, Florida) and have lead to the deaths of dozens more (one jumped to his death clutching his last few dollars to his chest).

Scientology-Associated Deaths
But this is not a thread about Scientology itself. It is a question about the RICO statute as it applies to the CoS.

4

Even if every one of those deaths listed on the website was due to the Scientologists (and a number of the deaths listed are from natural causes and accidents), I still don’t see how they’re doing thngs that are far, far worse than the Mafia.

I myself hold the Scientologists in mild contempt, but you’re not helping your case any with hyperbole. The RICO statutes give the Feds immense power and I’d be distrustful of any attempt to use them except against blatant criminal organizations.

Now, if you hate the Scientologists, fine. Trouble is, your bias is so obvious, it dilutes your RICO opinion. Richard Behar’s cover article in Time a few years ago about Scientology was an excellent example of a hard but calm analysis of a fairly slimy group of peope.

5

Point taken. I wrote too hastily. Perhaps I should close this and rephrase the OP.

(The GQ is a valid one, and, beside my rage, I’m genuinely curious.)

6

IANAL, but it seems to me that what RICO is looking for is to prove that the organization is a criminal enterprise per se.

I am not in the least a fan of the CoS, its tenets, its founder, or its current management, but it would appear that its goals (and for the sake of the discussion, I put it here in the worst light to be a “devil’s advocate”) are: 1.) To stay in existence 2.) To make lots of money and 3.) To increase its membership and make mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money.

Given that, you could argue (against the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution) that the real goals of the CoS are actually corporate rather than religious. If you were successful in this, you would then be able to say that they had practiced their “religion” deceptively as a cover for a business enterprise. The penalty would be a revocation of their tax-exempt status, and probably tha payment to the IRS of a crushing burden of back taxes and fines and so forth.

Since it is unlikely that you could show that the CoS’s standard business MO is by its essential nature illegal and criminal, a RICO case would probably not stick. To secure a RICO conviction, the government would have to show that the CoS wanted to do (and did) their normal business operations by illegal and even violent means.

Your best chance would to aim the thrust of your argument at the CoS’s “enforcement” sub-sets. If and only if you could show that they regularly used illegal and especialy violent means to do their business, and that this was at the direct behest of the CoS senior leaders, then you might possibly have a case.

But… you have all those constitutional issues and precedents to consider. Your best-case outcome would (IMHO) look like revocation of the CoS’s tax-exempt status, the dismissal of its current senior leaders (with possibly some jail time for them), the dissolution of its enforcement units, and its subsequent reconstitution as the “Reformed” Church of Scientology.

As a note, I don’t think private citizens can bring RICO charges against organizations or corporations. (Here’s where I prove IANAL.) Criminal charges are filed by the government’s prosecutors, citizens file civil complaints.

So… if CoS is found to be a money-making business disguising itself as a religion for tax and freedom-of-speech protections, it could lose those protections, pay heavy penalties, and it’s leaders could concievably do jail time for tax evasion or fraud. But RICO is a factor only if CoS is found to be as above with the addition of making its [principal money through activities that are in and of themselves illegal.

7

Thanks to JCHeckler for trying to keep this thread on track.

To keep it in GQ, let’s try to stick to the question of whether the church can be prosecuted under RICO, not whether it deserves to be.