How the RICO Act Allowed Rampant Antisemitism in America

​By Robert Korczynski

The Judge, the Fixer, and the Volunteers

​In the late 1930s, the German American Bund held massive, high-profile rallies, most famously at Madison Square Garden in New York City. They followed every law. They had permits. They held their assemblies and exercised their rights to free speech. These were Americans who were antisemitic and sympathetic to Germany, but they had every right to assemble and hold offensive opinions. They were not breaking any laws.

​The turning point occurred on February 20, 1939, at their massive rally at Madison Square Garden. A man named Isadore Greenbaum, an anti-Nazi, rushed the stage to protest. He was brutally beaten by the Bund’s security while thousands cheered, ending up bloodied and broken. That image became a foundational moment of outrage.

​Nathan Perlman, a judge in New York, saw the reality of the situation. He realized the system could not stop them because American Free Speech laws do not protect against antisemitism. They provided an unassailable cover for the Bund to operate, treating the spread of hate as a constitutionally protected activity. Perlman knew he had to look outside the system. He reached out to Meyer Lansky, but he did not just ask him for men. He asked Lansky for the phone numbers of people in different cities who could organize the boys. Perlman would call those contacts and ask, "Do you have any boys that want to beat up some Nazis?" The answer was always "Yeah." Perlman would offer to pay, but the response from Lansky and everyone he called was always the same: "We don't need to be paid for that." Volunteers would show up to do the job.

​They did not storm the massive Garden rallies; instead, they targeted the smaller local halls. When the American Nazis held a meeting, the volunteers waited until they started speaking on the stage. Then, they would lock the doors. Using bats, clubs, and pool cues, they would beat up and break the arms of the Nazis. Even the Murder Inc. underworld gang got involved at some point because they wanted in on it, and their only complaint was that they could not do more. It was an extra-legal deterrent. It was immediate and effective. The next time the American Nazis announced a rally, attendance would crater. They menaced the menace. It was an immune system at work, protecting the community when the formal machinery of the state was paralyzed by the very protections it granted to those spreading hate.

​The RICO Vacuum

​Then came the 1970s and the passage of the RICO Act. While the intention was to dismantle organized crime, the result was the destruction of the only informal enforcement mechanism that actually kept the peace. By stripping the country of its mafias, we destroyed the only groups capable of acting when the state refused to.

​Today, we are reaping the consequences. We have free speech, but we have no defense. We have allowed our legal framework to be turned into a weapon against us, and we are now standing by, watching the same cycle of antisemitism repeat itself, but this time, there is no one coming to lock the doors and settle the score.

​The Great Narrative Hijack

​Roughly 20 years after the passage of the RICO Act, the stage was set for a new kind of threat. In 1991, in Herndon, Virginia, at the International Institute of Islamic Thought, the concept of Islamophobia was effectively engineered. It was a semantic firewall designed to protect an ideology from critique by labeling any scrutiny as bigotry.

​For 30 years, that shield held. Then came the 2020 George Floyd protests. Political Islam saw an opportunity, and Palestinian Activists hijacked the language of white supremacy and systemic racism, grafting it onto the Middle East. They successfully painted Palestinians as brown victims and Israelis as white colonialists. They turned Benjamin Netanyahu into a white supremacist poster child, plastered on placards at every single protest, sometimes even with devil horns.

​​After the October 7th, 2023 Massacre of 1,200 Israeli civilians by Hamas, there was zero support for Israel on any college campus. Palestinian Activists increased their rhetoric from white supremacy and said that they were not antisemitic, they were just anti-Zionist, allowing for the most virulent classic antisemitism to be rebranded as political expression.

​The Failure of Protection

​​We saw the logical conclusion of this capture during the early December 2023 Congressional hearings, where four Ivy League presidents could not bring themselves to say that telling Jewish students that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, or repeating the slogan From the River to the Sea (which calls for the total destruction of Israel) constituted harassment. They could not protect the Jewish students because American free speech laws protect antisemitic Palestinian Activists, not Jewish students. Immediately following that testimony in early December, the House of Representatives held a non-binding vote that "anti-Zionism is antisemitism." More than half of all Democrats refused to vote yes, while only one Republican refused to vote yes, meaning more than half of all Democrats cannot distinguish between anti-Zionism and antisemitism.

​Conclusion

​​Today we are watching the results of this total loss of enforcement by ethnic mafias. Just like America’s free speech laws could not protect Jewish Americans from American Nazi antisemitism in the 1930s, they cannot protect Jewish Americans from antisemitic Palestinian Activists today. Without American ethnic mafias the Nazi party might have become a viable third party in the United States today, and now without mafias to act as enforcers, America’s free speech laws leave us no hope. The RICO Act took away the only protection we had, and now there is nothing left to stop the rampant antisemitism.

​Citations & Historical Context

• ​1939 German American Bund Rally: The February 20, 1939, rally at Madison Square Garden is a matter of extensive historical record. Isadore Greenbaum’s attempt to confront the stage and his subsequent assault by Bund guards is well-documented in period news coverage and historical archives.

• ​Nathan Perlman & Meyer Lansky: The account of Judge Nathan Perlman leveraging Jewish underworld figures to disrupt Nazi rallies is frequently cited in historical accounts of the period, including in biographies of Meyer Lansky (e.g., Meyer Lansky: The Thinking Man's Gangster by Robert Lacey).

• ​The RICO Act: The Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 remains the primary legislative vehicle used to dismantle the structures of organized crime in the United States.

• ​IIIT and Islamophobia: The International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) in Herndon, Virginia, is often identified by critics and researchers as a pivotal location in the development and proliferation of the concept of "Islamophobia" in the early 1990s.

• ​Congressional Hearings (December 2023): The testimony regarding campus antisemitism by university presidents (UPenn, Harvard, MIT) is a matter of official Congressional record from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

• ​House Vote (H.Res. 894): The non-binding vote held in December 2023 regarding the definition of anti-Zionism is a matter of public legislative record, reflecting the partisan breakdown in support and opposition.