552
Opinion of the Court
Indeed, a contrary scheme would be disastrous from a policy standpoint, enabling racketeers to evade forfeiture by investing the proceeds of their crimes in businesses engaging in expressive activity.
Nor were the assets in question ordered forfeited without according petitioner the requisite procedural safeguards, another recurring theme in our prior restraint cases. Contrasting this case with Fort Wayne Books, Inc. v. Indiana, 489 U. S. 46 (1989), aptly illustrates this point. In Fort Wayne Books, we rejected on constitutional grounds the pre-trial seizure of certain expressive material that was based upon a finding of "no more than probable cause to believe that a RICO violation had occurred." Id., at 66 (emphasis in original). In so holding, we emphasized that there had been no prior judicial "determination that the seized items were 'obscene' or that a RICO violation ha[d] occurred." Ibid. (emphasis in original). "[M]ere probable cause to believe a legal violation ha[d] transpired," we said, "is not adequate to remove books or films from circulation." Ibid. Here, by contrast, the seizure was not premature, because the Government established beyond a reasonable doubt the basis for the forfeiture. Petitioner had a full criminal trial on the merits of the obscenity and RICO charges during which the Government proved that four magazines and three videotapes were obscene and that the other forfeited assets were directly linked to petitioner's commission of racketeering offenses.
Petitioner's claim that the RICO forfeiture statute operated as an unconstitutional prior restraint in this case is also inconsistent with our decision in Arcara v. Cloud Books, Inc., 478 U. S. 697 (1986). In that case, we sustained a court order, issued under a general nuisance statute, that closed down an adult bookstore that was being used as a place of prostitution and lewdness. In rejecting out-of-hand a claim that the closure order amounted to an improper prior restraint on speech, we stated:
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