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The conviction of John Kapoor, the Insys Therapeutics founder, and four other executives at the pharmaceutical firm on racketeering charges this month was a significant step toward imposing substantial penalties on corporate officials for contributing to the nation’s opioid epidemic.

Prosecutors rarely use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, in corporate criminal prosecutions because it can be a difficult offense to prove, but the law allows them to pull together disparate defendants into a single case.

And in the prosecution of the Insys executives, the Justice Department was able to bring together a number of different violations — drug distribution, mail and wire fraud, and breach of the duty of honest services — into one case. The RICO conspiracy provision allowed prosecutors to establish that Insys engaged in a long-term plan to distribute Subsys, a fentanyl-based pain reliever that is highly addictive, by bribing doctors and misleading insurers about the needs of patients who were not supposed to receive the drug.