We had RICO charges with a 10-year minimum dismissed.
Racketeering counts turn a group into an enterprise and a person into a pattern. Built to take down mobs, now aimed widely - and beatable.
Netflix told the story. The defense was ours.
When Shonda Rhimes built Inventing Anna, the defense at its center was Todd Spodek’s - argued for the so-called fake heiress in a Manhattan courtroom long before Arian Moayed of Succession played him on screen. What 320 million hours of viewers watched is the method every client of this firm gets, in every federal district.
The record, dated and sourced.
RICO lets prosecutors bundle years of alleged conduct into one enterprise theory, with penalties to match. But the statute’s reach is its weakness: the government must prove an enterprise, a pattern, and your agreement to it. We dismantle the pattern element and separate our clients from the enterprise - in one matter, winning dismissal of RICO charges that carried a 10-year mandatory minimum.
The statute that charges a story.
RICO lets prosecutors narrate years of unrelated conduct as one “enterprise” - and try you alongside people you never met. The indictment is a wall of predicate acts built from cooperators and old state files. The defense dismantles the wall brick by brick: no pattern, no enterprise, no case.
You are sentenced on the predicates.
§2E1.1 takes level 19 or the underlying conduct, whichever is higher - so the sentencing fight is really a fight about which acts survived. Forfeiture is mandatory and reaches whatever the enterprise touched. Every predicate knocked out moves both numbers.
Enterprise, pattern, and your actual role.
RICO demands an ongoing organization, related predicates, and continuity - not a neighborhood and a rumor. Statutes of limitation kill old predicates; Reves limits who “operates” an enterprise; and association is not agreement. Juries acquit on RICO more than prosecutors admit.
§1962’s four crimes and §1963’s reach.
RICO criminalizes investing in, acquiring, conducting, or conspiring to conduct an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering - at least two predicates from the statutory list, within ten years, related and continuous under H.J. Inc. Twenty years per count, life where a predicate authorizes it, and §1963 forfeiture that reaches your entire interest in the enterprise. Reves’ operation-or-management test keeps outsiders and service providers off the hook; the government’s org chart is a theory, not evidence.
When the indictment calls your block an “enterprise”.
List every predicate act with dates - limitations and relatedness problems hide in the government’s own chronology. Identify which conduct is actually yours; RICO trials are severance fights, and sitting next to the wrong co-defendant convicts. Expect detention motions built on the enterprise’s worst actors - your release plan answers your risk, and we make the court see the difference.
Know who is on the other side.
The first 72 hours decide the next 72 weeks.
No interviews, no consents, no explaining, no deleting. The words said in hour zero are the exhibits at trial. Write down what was asked and by whom - then stop.
Privilege attaches, facts get mapped while memory is fresh, documents get preserved the right way, and nobody in your orbit talks to agents unrepresented again.
We contact the government as your counsel: target, subject, or witness gets confirmed, deadlines get calendared, and the defense - not the investigation - sets the tempo.
How your case unfolds.
THE FULL PROCESS →Risk-free, in person or by phone. Ask anything, for as long as it takes. Strategy starts the same day.
An enterprise theory and a wall of predicates - we engage on severance and scope before the story settles.
Knock out predicates, brief Reves, fight continuity - the pattern is the case, and patterns break.
Todd A. Spodek is a second-generation trial lawyer whose defense of Anna Delvey became Netflix's Inventing Anna. He appears on Fox News and CNN as a legal analyst, authored "My Advice to Diddy" in The Spectator, and is quoted by the Associated Press when the biggest federal cases break. The record behind the profile: a complete acquittal in a $26M money-laundering trial, RICO charges carrying a 10-year minimum dismissed, and 6 months on a $12M Ponzi case.
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Why this firm.
Five decades of federal courtrooms. Whatever the government has charged, this firm has defended it before.
No allegiance to U.S. Attorneys, agents, or agencies. The client is the only constituency.
Every district in the country, one client portal - documents, invoices, counsel, in real time.
We decline more federal matters than we accept - and every accepted case gets the whole bench.
On the record, on the wire.
Get ahead of the case.
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