Practice areas · 3 / 12

Criminal Organizations

A criminal organization allegation turns an ordinary case into an extraordinary one. Arizona’s criminal syndicate, racketeering, and street gang statutes let the State treat a group of people, and the acts of each of them, as a single enterprise, and the allegation carries enhanced and often mandatory prison sentences. These cases range from two co-defendants labeled a gang to multi-year investigations of international syndicates: wiretaps, confidential informants, financial records, and evidence gathered by task forces on both sides of the border.

The gang statute shows how little it takes. Law enforcement can call two people a gang if each meets two of seven criteria, among them tattoos, clothing, photographs, correspondence, a witness’s statement, or “any other indicia of street gang membership,” and only one of the two actually has to be a member. Law enforcement knows the unfettered discretion it has under this statute and has historically used it to attack legitimate clubs and associations. In this area of the law the State does not play fair, and every facet of the investigation, down to the integrity of the officers who ran it, must be questioned, scrutinized, and attacked.

An alleged international syndicate demands even more: tracing how the government obtained its wiretaps and what it did with them, identifying the confidential informants and what they were promised, following the money, and testing whether the evidence actually ties the client to the organization or only to people in it. Ms. Jakobe has two decades of experience defending individuals accused of acting on behalf of a criminal organization, from street gangs to international syndicates. She has worked with experts of her own to dismantle the credibility of the State’s law enforcement witnesses who claim to be experts, and to prove that a client’s conduct, criminal or not, was not done on behalf of or in furtherance of the organization. That showing is what defeats a mandatory prison sentence.