Argument Draws Near in Supreme Court RICO Case

"As Congress wages a battle over illegal immigration and its impact on this nation, the Supreme Court is about to enter the fray in a context involving one of the law's most powerful weapons -- RICO . . . The high court case stems from a class action against carpet giant Mohawk Industries Inc., most of whose more than 30,000 employees work in northwest Georgia. The suit was brought by Howard Foster of Chicago's Johnson & Bell, who has pioneered the use of RICO on behalf of workers who lost jobs or had wages artificially depressed because of their employers' alleged hiring and concealment of illegal immigrants," the National Law Journal reports. "Mohawk here is asking the court to interpret RICO in a way that would make it extremely difficult to prosecute a corporation or partnership or any business entity, and it also wants to read corporations out of RICO all together," said Foster. "It's hard for me to see how it would be easy for a majority of justices to agree with Mohawk unless they wanted to do fairly radical surgery on the statute."

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