For the First 100 Days, Think RICO, Not the Ballot Box
The Offer Trump Can’t Refuse
The relationship between Trump and Musk is best understood as that of a godfather and an underboss, not as a president and his special advisor.
Let’s look at Trump’s February 3, 2025 comments regarding the limits of Musk’s authority. The president said Musk “can’t and won’t do anything without our approval, and we’ll give him the approval when appropriate, and when not appropriate we won’t.” “He’s got access only to letting people go that he thinks are no good, if we agree with him and it’s only if we agree with him.” “If there was something that didn’t have my OK, I’d let you know about it very fast.”
If we take these statements at face value, it sounds like Trump is losing interest in his bromance.
But it’s not yet clear that we should take these statements at face value. Coded speech is a hallmark of organized crime and is part and parcel of how the mob avoids self-incrimination.
Here are some other hallmarks of mob behavior that we should watch out for:
Keeping things on the down-low. Some of the safest places to live are in mob neighborhoods, as anyone knows who has lived in a city with a heavy organized crime presence. Mob families don’t want petty criminal activity becoming the gateway to larger investigations and felony charges, and they don’t want competition. Maintaining the hierarchy is paramount.
Is Musk’s Treasury activity revealing too much?
Bullying. Mob families also begin their relationships to neighborhood newcomers through bullying. In the 1990s, a man opened a Pizza Hut franchise in Montreal across the street from a pizza joint run by Agostino Cuntrera, a mafioso closely connected to the Rizzuto crime family. Cuntrera had the “opening soon” sign burnt down. The franchisee, being an honest broker, didn’t understand the signal and went forward with construction. The site was firebombed, then later dynamited as construction carried on. Warnings don’t come in the form of direct speech.
Trump is already bullying like a mob boss in his imposition of tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
He is also trying to bully federal workers out of their jobs with an absurd offer that should be refused immediately.
Maintaining strict order and hierarchy. Crime families are known to take out one of their own when a member acts too independently, threatening the balance of power. Take, for example, Carmine “Lilo” Galante. When the official boss of the Bonanno crime family was incarcerated, Galante attempted to fill the power vacuum. He tried to gain a monopoly over the heroin market and didn’t share the profits with leadership. He was gunned down in 1979 for threatening the collective interests of the families.
So the question is whether Musk’s Treasury moves are doing the bidding of the boss or threatening Trump’s financial interests and dampening his popularity with the people. Could Trump’s February 3 statements be a ruse, like the feigned insanity of mob boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante (number 2 in the picture)?
For over twenty years, Gigante wandered Greenwich Village in a bathrobe muttering to himself in an attempt to convince authorities that he was unfit for trial. His defense team relied on this ruse for decades to keep the prosecution at bay. In the mid-1990s, he admitted it had all been an act, and he was convicted in 1997.
The sooner we start treating the Trump administration as an organized crime family, the easier it will be to keep him in check and get the Democratic opposition elected during the midterms. We should judge Trump on his actions, not words, although paying close attention to words can give us some clue as to his next move.
The eighth episode of season six of The Sopranos may provide an example of the kind of power relationships that can stop an end-run around the constitution: The local goons try to shake down a newly opened Starbucks: “We’re from the North Ward Merchants Protective Cooperative … We merchants have found you need round the clock security here.” Rather than saying “I can’t do the math,” the store manager tells the family representatives that his corporation keeps track of every last penny and targeting him won’t stop the corporation: “Look, every last fucking coffee bean is in the computer and has to be accounted for. The numbers won’t add up. I’ll be gone and somebody else will be here.”
Indeed, the Pizza Hut situation was actually solved by PepsiCo, the brand’s parent corporation. PepsiCo covered the franchisee’s insurance and demanded the city step in, thus thwarting the mob’s intimidation tactics.
Trump has lately been burnishing his populism through Al Capone references. He portrays himself as the embodiment of machismo; that he is being persecuted by the law like Capone simply for his extraordinary virility. In The Sopranos episode discussed above, one of the goons exclaims unironically, “It’s over for the little guy.” Trump’s attempt to make himself the embodiment of the disaffected and powerless in spite of his great power could become his Achilles heel.
Sometimes bullies only respond to bullies. The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) was designed to break up organized crime by demonstrating patterns instead of focusing on individual criminal acts. While the Trump administration’s moves may not fall under RICO, we can still use the spirit and strategy of RICO to undermine him. We can connect the dots for multiple related issues that stand to harm the public, not just to influence Trump supporters, but to put pressure on politicians from both sides of the aisle who are falling in line. The better the chance we can break up the public’s adoration and fear, the more we will be able to go back to using the ballot box to rein in the Trump Crime Family. In other words, we should make Trump an offer he can’t refuse.
