The single most important change with regard to the effectiveness of organised crime, certainly in the US, that took place in the 1980s was the decision to take advantage of the passage of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act a decade earlier, in 1970.

RICO had a rather unusual origin; it was the brainchild of an academic lawyer named G. Robert Blakey, who specifically designed it to hit at the ability of organised crime to stand against the law. What the new act did, essentially, was to vastly increase the cumulative length of the sentences that could be imposed for racketeering, which was deliberately chosen as a catch-all activity (covering everything from murder down to meeting to plan a crime). Similarly, the act was framed in such a way that simply being a member of an organisation that planned and carried out any of the acts covered by the law attracted considerable penalties, whether or not the member in question had participated in the crimes being prosecuted, or even knew of them.

Since RICO allows for the imposition of consecutive sentences of up to 20 years without the possibility of parole for every count proven in court, the overall effect was to make it vastly easier for law enforcement to obtain punitive verdicts against large numbers of criminals associated in organised crime "families". Once early verdicts started coming in, and it became clear that even low-ranking members who had had nothing to do with a given crime could be on the receiving end of what were effectively life sentences simply for being a member of the organisation, it became almost impossible for the leaders of these gangs to maintain discipline among their men. The idea of maintaining one's position in an organisation by keeping quiet, refusing to implicate others, and accepting the necessity of serving infrequent and relatively short terms in jail went out of the window and law enforcement began to find it vastly easier to persuade members of organised crime groups to testify against each other in exchange for immunity or reduced prison terms.

Neither the Mafia nor its rivals have ever fully recovered; such partial recoveries as have been documented coincide with shifts in the deployment of law enforcement resources (such as after 9/11) and not with any real improvement in the effectiveness or organisation of the crime families themselves.