Monday’s big Russia-related news shows that special counsel Robert Mueller is treating his probe into election collusion like a mob case — with President Donald Trump potentially playing the role of Al Capone.

Early on Monday morning, FBI agents took Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his aide Richard Gates into custody. The two men were indicted on charges of money laundering and illegal lobbying charges on behalf of Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych (charges to which they pleaded not guilty). About two hours later, we learned that Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI. He admitted to lying, specifically, about meetings in which he discussed potentially colluding with Russian agents to acquire Hillary Clinton’s private emails.

Put together, the charges against the three men illustrate a clear pattern of using whatever charge you can stand up — even if it doesn’t directly relate to the Russian collusion — to build a case against anyone who was involved, with the ultimate goal of getting the lower-level people to testify against the bigger fish.

You’ve probably heard of this kind of approach in mob movies, but it’s also what real prosecutors do. Experts say that Mueller is adapting this playbook for the Russia investigation.

“The idea that he would go after the campaign manager of the Trump campaign is just extraordinary — it means he must have great confidence in the case against Manafort,” says Ryan Goodman, a former Department of Defense special counsel and editor of the legal publication Just Security. “It does compare to prosecutions of organized crime, with respect to going after someone who is legally exposed … and trying to flip them if they have the kind of information that could really break open the case.”

What this means, then, is that the Manafort/Gates/Papadopoulos cases are not intended to stand alone. They are the first blood in a battle that will likely involve more and more members of Trumpworld as time goes on — with indictments going as high as the evidence and law support.

Already, experts say, there’s a clear next target in sight: former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who lobbied for a foreign power without proper paperwork, as Manafort reportedly did, and allegedly lied the FBI, as Papadopoulos reportedly did.

“Flynn looks like he’s in the crosshairs here for sure,” says Andrew Wright, a professor at Savannah Law School.

Manafort shows a key weapon in Mueller’s arsenal

When the feds went after Al Capone in the late 1920s, they couldn’t get him on the kind of charges (murder, bootlegging, etc.) that you’d expect. The only thing they could really prove was that he had been hiding the profits from his criminal enterprise, which led to a conviction on tax evasion. It’s a famous story because it illustrates how any misstep by a criminal can be used to roll him up — even if it’s not the most serious crime the criminal in question actually committed.

Prosecutors going after organized crime today use the Capone gambit relatively frequently. Drug cartel members aren’t always prosecuted on charges of distributing drugs — it’s often gun running, or money laundering, or all sorts of other things that aren’t directly related to the core criminal conspiracy under investigation but are still clearly illegal.

Mueller is clearly using this same strategy to Manafort and Gates. Not a single one of the combined 12 charges leveled against the two men alleges any wrongdoing related to Russian interference in the election. The White House is claiming that this shows the charges have nothing to do with Trump — but if anything, it’s more likely to mean the opposite.

What Mueller’s team alleges, specifically, is that Manafort lobbied on behalf of Yanukovych, a former president of Ukraine, for years without registering under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). They further allege that Manafort hid the profit from this undisclosed lobbying, with Gates’s assistance, and laundered it through a series of different front companies and properties. For example, Manafort reportedly bought a condo in New York with Yanukovych money and rented it on Airbnb, then told authorities that one of his daughters and her husband lived there in order to dodge taxes on the rent.

These charges appear to have grown out of Mueller’s initial investigation into Russia’s role in the election. Yanukovych was a tight Kremlin ally, to the point where he fled to Russia after he was deposed in a popular uprising in early 2014. It would be absurd to look into the Trump-Russia case without investigating Manafort’s links to Yanukovych, an investigation that uncovered evidence of unregistered lobbying and money laundering.

“Mueller has the explicit authority to investigate ‘links’ or ‘coordination’ between the Trump campaign and Russia, but also other allegations that ‘arise’ directly from that investigation,” Jens David Ohlin, vice dean of Cornell Law School, said in emailed comment. “[The charges] are clearly within the special counsel's mandate.”

Part of the intention here is simply to punish Manafort (and, to a lesser extent, Gates) for committing criminal acts.

“I think Paul Manafort is in trouble on his own,” Wright says. “I don’t think the only investigative interest is in his proximity to Trump.”

But the Trump campaign is, at root, Mueller’s core foundational interest — which means that the Manafort and Gates arrests are part of a bigger play. The ultimate goal, experts say, is to offer them a plea deal in exchange for information on the core aim of the investigation: uncovering any criminal misconduct relating to Russia’s role in the 2016 election. Manafort was not only the campaign manager for months but was present at some vital moments — most notably, the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting set up by Donald Trump Jr. to discuss potentially acquiring information on Clinton from Russia.

They are, in short, marrying the Al Capone tactic of prosecuting quasi-related criminal wrongdoing with a broader strategy of trying to get Trump campaign members to turn states’ evidence in exchange for plea deals. If you tell us what you know about Russia, Mueller is suggesting, we might go easy on the other stuff.

“Mueller is likely trying to flip Manafort [because] Manafort is at the center of all things, potentially, when it comes to Russian collusion,” Goodman says.

Papadopoulos shows how Mueller has been quietly advancing the ball on Russia

Papadopoulos is a small fish, at least compared to Manafort. Papadopoulos, who is 30 years old and recently listed Model UN experience as a line on his résumé, played a relatively minor role in the Trump campaign. It’s not actually clear what his duties as foreign policy adviser entailed on a day-to-day basis.

But his guilty plea is, nonetheless, hugely significant. It shows that while the flashy work is targeting people like Manafort — there had long been public indication that he was a target — the Mueller team is making serious behind-the-scenes moves that we may not often be aware of.

The charges against Papadopoulos go back to this January, when he was interviewed by the FBI about his conversations with Russians during the campaign. Papadopoulos had in fact worked with multiple individuals claiming to be able to connect him with the Russian government — one of whom, called “the Professor” in the indictment, promised to get “thousands” of Clinton emails acquired by Russia into the Trump campaign’s hands.

Papadopoulos didn’t tell the FBI any of this, and instead chose to lie to its investigators — which is a felony. The Mueller team put together proof that he lied as the year progressed, quietly arresting him on July 27. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty on October 5, but the plea wasn’t unsealed until October 30.

Those precise dates are crucial. During that July 27 to October 30 time frame, there had been little public indication that Papadopoulos had been scooped up. This appears to be because Papadopoulos was needed as a state’s witness: The government’s motion to seal his guilty plea described him as a “proactive cooperator,” a legal term suggesting he was actively assisting in some fashion with Mueller’s probe, and that revealing his plea “may alert other subjects to the direction and status of the investigation.”

Papadopoulos was, in the mob investigation analogy, wearing a wire for the past several months. In fact, it’s possible he was literally wearing a wire; that’s something that “proactive cooperators” occasionally do, according to one former prosecutor interviewed by the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale.

And what’s more, it appears to have yielded real and valuable information. The indictment against Papadopoulos contains previously unknown examples of him talking about contacts with the Russians with a number of different unnamed Trump associates — including a “Senior Policy Advisor,” “Campaign Supervisor,” and “High-Ranking Campaign Official.”

Who this implicates is yet to be revealed, but it’s clear that Mueller is interested in going after more Trump people. Papadopoulos’s quiet cooperation, in short, appears to have helped put a series of Trump officials in the crosshairs on Russia-related stuff.

“They are going to be under more scrutiny,” Wright says, “and have probably [already] been the subject of interviews of Papadopoulos.”

All signs point to Flynn being next

There are obviously a huge number of different places the Mueller investigation could go from here. But the Manafort and Papadopoulos cases suggest that targeting individuals and getting them to flip is going to be a key tactic going forward — and no one is more obviously vulnerable than Michael Flynn.

“It is a bad sign for Flynn,” Goodman says of today’s news.

Flynn’s alleged sins are similar to both Manafort’s and Papadopoulos’s. Like Manafort, he failed to fully disclose lobbying done on behalf of a foreign government (Turkey, specifically) last year. Though Flynn filed FARA paperwork retroactively announcing this work earlier this year, it’s not clear if that was complete or enough to protect him from charges. What’s more, Flynn also took $45,000 from the Russian government in 2015 to appear at a dinner with Putin, but appears to have claimed that the money came from “US companies” on a security clearance form — which would constitute lying to federal investigators under US law.

The fact that Mueller’s team has already deployed both of these charges, unregistered lobbying and lying to federal investigators, means that Flynn is likely to face seriously scrutiny. “[Mueller] is taking substantive FARA violations very seriously and they’re taking false statements to FBI agents very seriously,” Wright says.

What’s more, Flynn is someone whom Mueller would almost certainly love to flip. Multiple reports from inside the Trump camp say that he and the president were personally close; Trump has tweeted support for Flynn repeatedly even after firing him from his post as national security adviser. Flynn also has longstanding ties to the Russian government; he was a regular on Russia Today, the country’s English-language propaganda outlet, for a long time.

Flynn’s own actions both render him vulnerable to the kind of pressure Mueller wants to use and mark him as someone who could very well have known about any collusion between Trump and Russia. It’s hard to imagine a juicier target for this clearly mounting investigation.