RICO charges are easy to file but dammed hard to prove. I think they were designed to tie up the defendants and waste all their finances.
They are easier to prove than you think. Unless they've changed the law, you don't have to prove a smoking gun conspiracy where all the bad guys were meeting and planning in a backroom somewhere. You just have to show that all the bad guys had knowledge of each others' actions, and were working toward the same objective. I was involved with pursuing a bank and other bad actors under civil RICO once. Although the bad actors didn't personally know each other, they folded pretty quick after they saw the case we had against them. (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.)