RICO is a law intended to go after people acting in concert. Essentially for situations like a mob hit where the Feds know a group of five people killed someone but the five of them each start claiming the others did it. With proof of the murder, proof all five were involved and no way to identify the trigger man, the Feds use RICO to make all five liable for the killing - and usually use a threat of RICO to get four of them to finger the fifth guy as the guilty one at trial.
Here we likely have a low level hood with zero connection to the site owner or any criminal conspiracy, beyond knowing where to find an illegal ID, taking the fall for all of it. He has nobody to roll over about, just a 20 year sentence for something that would have been a crime with a much smaller penalty.
It's not a question of whether he did something illegal, or if he should have gotten a penalty. It's a question of whether he should be responsible for every other criminal who used the site just by virtue of the fact that they all used the same domain to commit a crime.
If ten people buy a gun illegally from the same dealer (at different times and not knowing each other at all), and only one uses it to kill someone, are we now ready to arrest the other nine for murder?
