controlled by the people at the top in the form of a criminal enterprise. in this case, a ruling body body with a mob boss from every family, a ruling body called the they are said to run the most powerful crime families in new york. in fact, in the nation. and according to the government, they make up the commission. the ruling body of a potent criminal enterprise dealing in drugs and extortion, loan sharking, labor racketeering and murder. and mafia hitters were rounded up in an overnight to sweep. and today u.s. attorney rudolph giuliani announced the indictments. this is a great day for law enforcement. but this is a bad day probably the worst for the mafia. the commission has existed in new york for more than 50 years at that point, without anyone being able to touch it. what gave giuliani the ability to go after the commission itself, rather than just the commissions footsoldiers, like whack whack, was giuliani s pioneering use of a relatively new law, the racketeer
cheating scam on grading exams, she actually indicted 35 defendants. by the time she got to trial, there were only 12 of them left. and that is this sort of winnowing procedure that you are hinting at, alex, where some of these folks will decide to plead guilty, maybe without a deal. others will want to deal and they may plead and cooperate and strengthen her case. but it is likely that, by the time that williscroft trial, she would no longer have all 19 of these defendants on her hands. rico cases, and the big conspiracy case, is messy. you have got if you ve got ten defendants, you ve got ten people making opening statements and cross examining witnesses and jumping up and saying, your honor, i object. so, it is a little bit different than the normal trial. but it s nothing that a prosecutor, and particularly when like will, as you has a number of these rico cases under her belt, isn t well equipped to handle. joyce, let me ask a follow-up on that. in terms of the penalties these
the charges against them simply fail to stay the federal crime. it should be diminished on that basis. so, six months will pass in the blink of an eye, i suspect, while these pretrial motions are litigated. whether this case ends up in federal court is a wide open question. but i think laura again is right to say that it s not frivolous. but the judge if the judge reads the paper, whatever the defendant sends to the federal judge is supposed to be a short, plain statement this one is not. it s rather lengthy and convoluted. the judge may well look at it and say, i can t read this and make a determination that it is okay to just send this back to state court. so, we need to have an evidentiary hearing. and that, of course, involves more delay, before we even decide which courthouse this case will move forward. in yeah. i do wonder i mean, when you talk about other various co-defendants having different status, laura meadows s lawyers are making the case that what he did was
but some of them it s just not so clear. and so i think we are going to have to wait and see what else comes out on this. but i think it is certainly clear that they have some people cooperating, and that they want some more, and that they have certainly added this large group as a pressure mechanism. yeah. so, joyce 18 other named an coconspirators, 30 unnamed, unindicted coconspirators. we are talking about a large number of people involved in this case in one way or another. they are directly indicted or floating around indictments potentially cooperating what is your assessment about how this case gets to trial? how practically this seem so unwieldy, so sprawling. for the layman, lay woman, lay person, how does fani willis get this done? you know, when fani willis indicted another rico case, the atlanta educators case, a
2 to 3 years. others received a lower sentences. and then there were folks on the high-end who received sentences well beyond five years, which suggests that, for the most culpable bowl culpable defendants, in a successful rico i m going to assume that we are talking about donald trump when we see the people who are most involved in this. laura, what happens as the fani willis case and the jack smith case interject here? tell me definitively who gets priority. i think there s a fair amount of overlap. and so i think the real question is, what is the former president do over the next course of days, weeks and months, to push her to move this trial up? she has already issued judge chutkan. judge chutkan has issued something of a warning. and i tried to social media post that mitigate witnesses, arguably, that she is going to throw him in jail, or site him two for