When dealing with an enterprise whose business is racketeering activity, such as an organized crime family, can horizontal relatedness be established?

When dealing with "an enterprise whose business is racketeering activity, such as an organized crime family," horizontal relatedness can be established simply by linking each act to the enterprise. United States v. Coppola , 671 F.3d 220, 243 (2d Cir. 2012) (internal punctuation and citations omitted). When dealing with an enterprise that is primarily a legitimate business, however, courts must determine whether there is a relationship between the predicate crimes themselves; and that requires a look at, inter alia, whether the crimes share "purposes, results, participants, victims, or methods of commission." H.J. , 492 U.S. at 240, 109 S.Ct. 2893 ; see also Indelicato , 865 F.2d at 1382 (looking to "temporal proximity, or common goals, or similarity of methods, or repetitions").⁴

We have explicitly drawn that same distinctionbetween enterprises that are and are not primarily legitimatein the context of the "continuity" requirement for a RICO pattern. See Burden , 600 F.3d at 219 (" Where the enterprise is an entity whose business is racketeering activity, an act performed in furtherance of that business automatically carries with it the threat of continued racketeering activity. " (quoting Indelicato , 865 F.2d at 1383-84 )); see also United States v. Minicone , 960 F.2d 1099, 1108 (2d Cir. 1992) ("The question of whether acts form a pattern rarely is a problem with a criminal enterprise, as distinct from a lawful enterprise that commits occasional criminal acts." (internal quotation marks omitted)). That distinction ensures that RICO does not ensnare "the perpetrators of isolated or sporadic criminal acts." United States v. Vernace , 811 F.3d 609, 615 (2d Cir. 2016). If every crime done by any employee of a large, ramified corporation was deemed horizontally related, it would be child's play to plead RICO actions against those companies notwithstanding that the crimes themselves might be "isolated" and otherwise

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