> Mortgage originators that emphasized profit-fueled quantity over loan quality, which resulted in the misreporting of key financial information in 48% of loans securitized by nongovernment agencies;
If 48% of your company's financial transactions were fraudulent, would you expect the CEO to bear responsibility for that? At that point, I'd expect to see a RICO case, or something come out of it.
Meanwhile, that number likely means that the borrowers lied on those same applications. That’s where the fraud actually occurred. And would be easy to prove.
> The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act is a United States federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. The RICO Act focuses specifically on racketeering and allows the leaders of a syndicate to be tried for the crimes they ordered others to do or assisted them in doing, closing a perceived loophole. For example, before RICO, a person who instructed someone else to murder could be exempt from prosecution because they did not personally commit the crime.[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
Quite the opposite you’ll find all manner of examples of the CEO’s enabling things like anti-fraud and risk management teams.
The issue was the implicit organizational pressures between those parts of the companies and the lending/revenue arms.
Making a new class of law that makes those implicit conflicts a criminal responsibility of company CEOs seems extremely fraught, but more importantly those laws didn’t exist at the time.
For it to be RICO, no you do not need to prove that. You need to prove more. You'd need to prove that the "Wall Street CEO" told someone to commit mortgage fraud, and then used the proceeds of that mortgage fraud to take control of an enterprise (which would presumably have to exclude the company of which he is CEO).
(https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1962, for reference)
More importantly, there's a specific sequence of connections between the original predicate acts of racketeering and the control of the enterprise that has to be established for it to happen. 18 USC §1962 has the gory details, but I just don't see how the CEO can possibly be guilty of RICO.
As Ken White says, it's never RICO: https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...