Defendants liability

Defendants complain that the district court failed to identify the racketeering acts that support the finding of liability. While 27 it is true the district court’s opinion provided no single, discrete list of specific racketeering acts, the comprehensive findings— detailing over one-hundred racketeering acts—are sufficient to warrant affirmance.
Defendants raise numerous challenges to the correctness of the district court’s findings that they committed racketeering acts, which we take up in Parts III and IV. In this section, however, we are concerned only with the existence of these findings, not their validity. By statutory definition, any violation of the mail or wire fraud statutes can qualify as “racketeering activity.”
To prove a violation of the mail and wire fraud statutes, the government must show a scheme or artifice to defraud and a mailing or wire transmission in furtherance thereof. “Where one scheme involves several mailings, the law is settled that each mailing constitutes a violation of the statute.”
Where, as here, the mail and wire fraud statutes serve as the predicate offenses for a RICO violation, each racketeering act must be a mailing or wire transmission made in furtherance of a “scheme or artifice to defraud.” Thus, in order to identify the racketeering acts, the district court must first have found a scheme to defraud, then concluded the alleged mailings or wire transmissions were in furtherance of such scheme.