§ 140A.101.Suit to Abate Racketeering

Three short subsections, and the middle one is the chapter’s defining choice.

Subsection (a): the attorney general may bring suit in the name of the state against a person or enterprise for racketeering, seeking civil penalties, costs, reasonable attorney’s fees, and appropriate injunctive relief.

Subsection (b): the chapter does not authorize suit by a person or enterprise that sustains injury as a result of racketeering.

That is a deliberate departure from the model. The federal racketeering statute is known for its private treble-damages action, and it is that provision which generated the volume of civil litigation the statute is associated with.

Texas declined to copy it. This chapter is an enforcement tool for the state alone.

Victims are not left without a remedy — the trafficking chapter in Title 4 gives them a civil claim with damages, exemplary damages, joint and several liability and a confidential identity. But that claim is theirs, and this one is the state’s.

The division has a practical logic. The remedies here — asset freezing, disgorgement, dissolution, divestiture — are directed at dismantling an operation rather than compensating a person, and they sit oddly in private hands.

Subsection (c) fixes venue in a district court in a county where all or part of the alleged racketeering offense occurred.