Hemi Group, LLC and Kai Gachupin v. City of New York, New York (559 U.S. 1)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided January 25, 2010 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 559 U.S. 1 · 130 S. Ct. 983
- Decided
- January 25, 2010
- Term
- October Term 2009
- Vote
- 5–3
- Majority author
- Justice Roberts
- Issue area
- Economic Activity
- Disposition
- Reversed and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the Court in part. The city of New York (City) taxes the possession of cigarettes. Hemi Group, based in New Mexico, sells cigarettes online to residents of the City. Neither state nor city law requires Hemi to charge, collect, or remit the tax, and the purchasers seldom pay it on their own. Federal law, however, requires out-of-state vendors such as Hemi to submit customer information to the States into which they ship the cigarettes. Against that backdrop, the City filed this lawsuit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), alleging that Hemi failed to file the required customer information with the State. That failure, the City argues, constitutes mail and wire fraud, which caused it to lose tens of millions of dollars in unrecovered cigarette taxes. Because the City cannot show that it lost the tax revenue “by reason of” the alleged RICO violation, 18 U. S. C. § 1964(c), we hold that the City cannot state a claim under RICO. We therefore reverse the Court of Appeals’ decision to the contrary. I A This case arises from a motion to dismiss, and so we accept as true the factual allegations in the City’s second amended complaint. See Leatherman v. Tarrant County Narcotics Intelligence and Coordination Unit, 507 U. S. 163, 164 (1993). New York State authorizes the City of New York to impose its own taxes…
Excerpt of a 27,686-character opinion. The full text and citation network load in the interactive viewer above.