RICO and conspiracy defense
Racketeering charges turn association into evidence. Defending them means separating what a person did from what a group is alleged to have done.
RICO allows the government to charge an enterprise and then treat the acts of everyone said to belong to it as evidence against each member. Once that structure is in place, a defendant can find themselves answering for conduct they had no part in and may never have known about. The charge is powerful precisely because it is broad.
The prosecution still has to prove an enterprise, a pattern of racketeering activity, and a connection between the defendant and that pattern. Each of those elements is contestable. In practice the fight is often about the pattern requirement, about whether the alleged predicates are actually related to one another, and about whether the defendant's involvement in any of it has been established by anything other than the word of people who are cooperating to reduce their own exposure.
State racketeering prosecutions in Georgia operate differently and have their own definitions and defenses. The YSL prosecution in Fulton County was one of the largest state racketeering cases in the country, ran more than 22 months, and produced a published body of law on how far the state can reach.
Cooperating witnesses are the backbone of most of these cases. Their incentives are the defense's most useful material, and the firm's approach is to establish those incentives concretely, from the record, rather than to argue about them in the abstract.