Testing RICO in a Warming World: Lessons from Municipality of Bayamón v. Exxon Mobil Corporation

When the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) was first signed into law in 1970, its intended use was to prosecute entire organized crime groups engaged in a pattern of criminal behavior. More recently, however, in Municipality of Bayamón v. Exxon Mobil Corporation (2025), a coalition of Puerto Rican municipalities invoked RICO to sue major fossil fuel companies in the U.S. District Court for the District of Puerto Rico for their role in intensifying the damages caused by Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. They alleged that the fossil fuel companies conspired through industry fronts to deceive the public about the dangers of their products and the severity of climate change, thereby exacerbating the hurricanes that devastated the island. Although the court ultimately dismissed the case as time-barred under RICO’s four-year statute of limitations, the ruling still raises important questions about if RICO could ever succeed in a climate context. Absent the procedural dismissal, the facts and governing law suggest the case would likely have failed on the merits, as the risks of climate change, and the defendants’ role in it were already widely known to the public.

Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory of the US under “commonwealth” designation. They have their own Constitution and territorial court system, but are subject to the plenary powers of the US Congress under the territorial clause of Article IV of the US Constitution, are a part of the federal court system, and are subject to statutes codified in the United States Code, including RICO. [1] Municipality of Bayamón happened in the US District Court for the District of Puerto Rico, meaning that its ruling does not bind other federal courts but may serve as persuasive authority in future climate-related RICO cases. [2]

Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the primary statute used in the case, was enacted by the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 and was later codified into the United States Code. RICO creates a legal framework for prosecuting organized crime groups by prohibiting participation in an ongoing pattern of criminal activity defined by the statute. [3] In order to be found guilty of a pattern of racketeering activity, plaintiffs must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an enterprise existed, it affected interstate or foreign commerce, the defendant was employed by or associated with the enterprise, and the defendant engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity involving at least two acts of racketeering within a ten-year period. [4] Under §§ 1962(a), (b), (c), and (d), RICO identifies four distinct forms of prohibited conduct: (a) using or investing income derived from racketeering, (b) acquiring or maintaining control of an enterprise through racketeering, (c) conducting or participating in an enterprise through racketeering, and (d) conspiring to commit any of these acts. [5] The “pattern of racketeering activity” must consist of two specific underlying crimes listed in § 1961(1) called predicate acts, such as mail fraud, wire fraud, bribery, or obstruction of justice. [6]

RICO was originally enacted to help prosecute organized crime like the “Five Families” —a group of Italian American mafia crime families in New York City—which allowed all individuals involved in a corrupt organization, an enterprise, to be prosecuted together. [7] This was important because prior to RICO, prosecutors could typically only pursue charges against individual offenders, even though the criminal activity was often coordinated and distributed across an entire network. More recently, RICO has been used to hold large corporations accountable for colluding together against the public. An infamous use of RICO was in the 1999 case United States v. Philip Morris (2006), where the DOJ sued cigarette manufacturers and tobacco industry trade associations for engaging in a fifty-year conspiracy to fraudulently deceive the American public about the health impacts of smoking and maintaining that there was no scientific consensus on the subject through deceptive press releases, false and misleading articles, and destroying and concealing relevant research documents. [8] In a 1,682 page opinion issued seven years after the case began, Judge Gladys Kessler found the defendants liable under RICO and emphasized that the deception was especially material because the tobacco companies controlled the very scientific information the public needed to evaluate their claims. [9] As she explained, “failure to disclose or correct a misleading statement, even a statement which may be characterized as an opinion, is of particular concern where the public does not have other information with which they can evaluate the reliability of the opinion that was stated.” [10] On that basis, the court imposed sweeping injunctive relief to address and prevent the continuation of the harms caused by the conspiracy. 

Building on cases like United States v. Philip Morris (2006), the Puerto Rico municipalities sought to apply RICO in a new context: climate change. Their lawsuit marked the first attempt to use the statute against major fossil fuel companies, including Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, Motiva, Occidental Petroleum, BHP, Rio Tinto, ConocoPhillips, and American Petroleum Institute, and other various unnamed individuals and entities, alleging that they had colluded through industry organizations to mislead the public about the dangers of their products and the resulting climate impacts. [11] This novel application of RICO required the court to consider not only whether the alleged conduct fit within the statute’s framework, but also whether the Puerto Rico federal court could assert jurisdiction over such a broad group of multinational defendants.

After the complaint was filed, all of the defendants individually moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. Personal jurisdiction arises from the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from Pennoyer v. Neff (1877). [12] Through this interpretation, the Court has held that a state court may not exercise authority over a nonresident defendant without sufficient connections to the state, as doing so would violate the defendant’s right to due process. [13] Normally, a federal court’s personal jurisdiction is limited to the state where it sits, which makes it difficult to hold a group of national and international corporations accountable together in one case. However, RICO includes a procedural tool that expands that reach. Under the majority interpretation of RICO’s “venue and process” statute, once a court has personal jurisdiction over at least one defendant, Section 1965(b) allows it—if the “ends of justice” require—to summon and serve other US-based defendants nationwide. [14] After multiple motions to dismiss were filed, the court referred the personal jurisdiction issue to Magistrate Judge Héctor Ramos-Vega, whose role was to review the filings and issue a Report and Recommendation to the presiding judge. In his recommendation, he proposed adopting the majority interpretation based on prior precedent. District Judge Silvia Carreño-Coll adopted the recommendation and treated Exxon Mobil as the “anchor defendant.” [15] This meant that, at least at the pleading stage, the court could potentially exercise jurisdiction over the remaining domestic defendants as part of the alleged association-in-fact enterprises, such as the American Petroleum Institute (API) and the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). The judge did not find beyond a reasonable doubt that these enterprises existed, but rather that the municipalities had plausibly alleged their existence for purposes of moving the case forward. As a result, it found personal jurisdiction over Exxon, Shell, BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Motiva, and API (for RICO claims only), while BHP, Rio Tinto, and Occidental were not subject to the court’s jurisdiction because they didn’t have sufficient ties to Puerto Rico. [16] For the defendants under personal jurisdiction, their motions to dismiss on jurisdictional grounds were denied. [17]

The plaintiffs argued that major fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil and Shell had known since the 1980s from internal research that their products would intensify climate change but concealed this information from the public. [18] At the time, they shared it only among themselves, despite being market competitors. [19] Instead of addressing the growing threat, they allegedly colluded through GCC and the API to conduct a coordinated disinformation campaign using mail and wire fraud (indictable under 18 U.S.C. §1341 (mail fraud), 18 U.S.C. §1343 (wire fraud)) to mislead consumers and delay climate action. [20] These two enterprises funded and orchestrated a string of advertising campaigns that undermined scientific consensus and changed public opinion on climate change. Ads featured in the plaintiffs’ complaint read, “Who told you the earth was warming… Chicken Little?”, “If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis getting colder?”, and “The most serious problem with catastrophic global warming is– it may not be true.” [21, 22] The plaintiffs alleged that these advertisements influenced opinions on climate change in order to generate public inaction around the climate debate, despite the defendants’ knowledge that their products they marketed and sold in Puerto Rico were substantially contributing factors to climate change. [23] The municipalities argued that the defendants acquired, maintained, conducted the enterprise through racketeering and used and invested income from the racketeering to operate said enterprise which affected interstate commerce. [24] The municipalities claimed that this pattern of racketeering prevented them from adequately preparing for the subsequent natural disasters and activity worsened by global warming. [25] As a result of the combination of increasing ocean temperatures intensified by the defendants’ products and their location in “Hurricane Alley,” the plaintiffs argued that the damages from the 2017 hurricanes were far more severe than they would have been had the defendants not colluded to conceal the risks of their products, and they sought relief for the resulting losses. [26]

Magistrate Judge Héctor Ramos-Vega recommended that the court grant the motions to dismiss the RICO claims brought under §§ 1962(a) and (b), but allow the claims under §§ 1962(c) and §§ 1962(d) to proceed. [27] District Judge Silvia Carreño-Coll largely agreed with this recommendation and adopted it in part. However, Judge Carreño-Coll ultimately dismissed the case on procedural grounds, finding that the plaintiffs’ claims were barred by the statute of limitations because the hurricanes that formed the basis of their alleged injuries occurred more than four years before the suit was filed. [28] The court explained that under RICO, the limitations period begins to run when the injury is sustained, not when it is discovered or confirmed through later investigation. [29] Since the municipalities’ alleged property and infrastructure damages occurred during the 2017 hurricanes, the four-year clock began at that point, and filing in 2022 made the claims untimely. The court therefore did not reach the merits of the plaintiffs’ RICO or other claims, though it remarked that it was “not insensitive to the plight of the people of Puerto Rico resultant from the 2017 hurricanes.” [30]

If the case had been decided in absence of procedural issues, the law points towards a dismissal as well. This is because the plaintiffs’ claims would still have been barred unless they could show diligence—meaning care and persistence in discovering and pursuing their injuries. To evaluate whether the municipalities met this standard in Municipality of Bayamón, the court looked to Estate of Alicano Ayala v. Philip Morris, Inc. (2003), a tobacco RICO case filed five years after United States v. Philip Morris (2006). In the case, the plaintiffs lost due to failing the diligence requirement. The court concluded that a plaintiff exercising reasonable care should have known of the health hazards of smoking and the identity of the tobacco companies from the long-standing scientific reports, prior lawsuits, and extensive media coverage. [31] Drawing on that reasoning, District Judge Silvia Carreño-Coll concluded that the municipalities were in the same position as the Alicano plaintiffs, explaining that “the injury and which entities to sue and on what basis were all readily apparent from the coverage in the popular press, the court cases, and the reports, and Plaintiffs were not diligent.” [32] This suggests that, like the plaintiffs in Alicano, the municipalities would likely have been found to have failed to act within a reasonable time despite widespread awareness of the risks. 

The comparison also highlights a key difference in applications of RICO: in the 1990s, tobacco companies had access to unique, concealed data about health harms, whereas in the climate context, the dangers of fossil fuel use and global warming have been publicly recognized for decades. This distinction makes it unlikely that the municipalities’ RICO claims will ever succeed on the merits of their claims. Extracting and selling oil is not inherently unlawful, just as selling cigarettes is not inherently illegal. What exposed the tobacco companies to RICO liability was not the legality of their product, but their decades-long effort to suppress internal studies showing serious health risks while publicly suggesting uncertainty. As Judge Kessler emphasized in United States v. Philip Morris (2006), this deception is materially misleading only when the speaker controls the relevant scientific information and the public has no independent way to assess the truth. [33] By contrast, in Municipality of Bayamón, District Judge Silvia Carreño-Coll noted that the science of global warming has been widely available through government reports, academic research, and extensive media coverage for decades. She cited earlier climate-related tort cases, such as Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corporation (2012) and Comer v. Murphy Oil USA, Inc. (2013), to show that courts had already been presented with, and publicly discussed, the same climate-impact evidence years before the municipalities brought their claims. [34] Carreño-Coll also noted that the Supreme Court had acknowledged a well-established scientific consensus on the effects of greenhouse gas emissions in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), indicating that the relevant information was publicly known long before the present case was filed. [35] As a result, climate cases attempting to seek compensation for damages under RICO are ultimately unlikely to succeed and should pursue other avenues of legal relief instead.

The dismissal in Municipality of Bayamón also reflects broader trends in climate litigation. Federal courts—particularly those with judges appointed in more recent administrations, including Judge Silvia Carreño-Coll, who was appointed by President Trump—have been reluctant to extend traditional liability doctrines to climate-related harms. [36, 37] Similar suits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for orchestrating coverups of the climate impacts of their products, such as City of Charleston v. Brabham Oil Co. (2025), have been dismissed on comparable grounds. [38] This pattern suggests that, beyond the procedural flaws of this case, the current legal landscape remains inhospitable to climate damages claims framed in this way.

The case also raises broader questions about accountability. How can national and international corporations be held responsible for local environmental harms when jurisdictional limits, broad public knowledge, and the diffuse nature of climate impacts undermine litigation? Ultimately, unless courts become more open to broader applications of statutes like RICO, the future of climate litigation will likely depend on reshaping the doctrinal landscape through statutory reform or transnational legal approaches that can account for the global reach of climate misconduct.

Edited by Emma Listgarten and Noelle Shih

[1] “Puerto Rico Law,” Justia U.S. Law, https://law.justia.com/puerto-rico/.

[2] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025).

[3] “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Law,” Justia U.S. Law, https://www.justia.com/criminal/docs/rico/. 

[4] “18 U.S. Code § 1961 - Definitions,” Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961. 

[5] “18 U.S. Code § 1962 - Prohibited activities,” Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1962. 

[6] “18 U.S. Code § 1961 - Definitions,” Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1961. 

[7] “Then and Now: The Evolution of the RICO Law,” Gimbel, Reilly, Guerin & Brown, LLP, https://www.grgblaw.com/wisconsin-trial-lawyers/now-evolution-rico-law. 

[8] United States v. Philip Morris USA Inc., 449 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2006).

[9] United States v. Philip Morris USA Inc., 449 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2006), 1504.

[10] United States v. Philip Morris USA Inc., 449 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2006), 1504-1505.

[11] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, Complaint, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. filed Nov. 22, 2022), 4.

[12] “Overview of Personal Jurisdiction and Due Process,” Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-5/overview-of-personal-jurisdiction-and-due-process.

[13] “Overview of Personal Jurisdiction and Due Process,” Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-5/overview-of-personal-jurisdiction-and-due-process.

[14] “18 U.S. Code § 1965 - Venue and process,” Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1965. 

[15] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025), 15-22.

[16] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025), 5-6; 16.

[17] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025), 5-6.

[18] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, Complaint, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. filed Nov. 22, 2022), 8.

[19] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, Complaint, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. filed Nov. 22, 2022), 7.

[20] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, Complaint, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. filed Nov. 22, 2022), 216.

[21] “1991 Information Council for the Environment Climate Denial Ad Campaign,” Climate Files, 23, https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3119453/1991-Informed-Citizens-for-the-Environment.pdf

[22] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, Complaint, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. filed Nov. 22, 2022), 111.

[23] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, Complaint, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. filed Nov. 22, 2022), 8.

[24] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, Complaint, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. filed Nov. 22, 2022), 219.

[25] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, Complaint, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. filed Nov. 22, 2022), 17.

[26] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, Complaint, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. filed Nov. 22, 2022), 60.

[27] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025), 4. 

[28] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025), 92-93. 

[29] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025), 89. 

[30] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025), 122. 

[31] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025), 93. 

[32] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025), 92-93. 

[33] United States v. Philip Morris USA Inc., 449 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2006), 1504-1505.

[34] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025), 88.

[35] Municipality of Bayamon v. Exxon Mobil Corporation, 3:22-cv-01550, (D.P.R. Sept. 11, 2025), 88-89. 

[36] Karen Zraick, “Unusual Climate Case Accusing Oil Giants of Racketeering Is Dismissed,” New York Times, September 12, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/climate/puerto-rico-lawsuit-energy-racketeering-irma-maria.html.

[37] Austyn Gaffney, “Supreme Court Rejects an Effort to Block States From Suing Oil Giants,” New York Times, March 10, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/climate/supreme-court-climate-lawsuits-states.html. 

[38] City of Charleston v. Brabham Oil Co., No. 23-1802 (4th Cir. Aug. 6, 2025).