Cite as: 509 U. S. 544 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
under RICO as punishment for, say, narcotic offenses. See Brief for Petitioner 11 ("[F]orfeiture of a media business purchased by a drug cartel would be constitutionally permissible"). Petitioner instead insists that the result here should be different because the RICO predicate acts were obscenity offenses. In Arcara, we held that criminal and civil sanctions having some incidental effect on First Amendment activities are subject to First Amendment scrutiny "only where it was conduct with a significant expressive element that drew the legal remedy in the first place, as in [United States v.] O'Brien, [391 U. S. 367 (1968),] or where a statute based on a nonexpressive activity has the inevitable effect of singling out those engaged in expressive activity, as in Minneapolis Star [& Tribune Co. v. Minnesota Comm'r of Revenue, 460 U. S. 575 (1983)]." 478 U. S., at 706-707 (footnote omitted). Applying that standard, we held that prostitution and lewdness, the criminal conduct at issue in Arcara, involve neither situation, and thus concluded that the First Amendment was not implicated by the enforcement of a general health regulation resulting in the closure of an adult bookstore. Id., at 707. Under our analysis in Arcara, the forfeiture in this case cannot be said to offend the First Amendment. To be sure, the conduct that "drew the legal remedy" here—racketeering committed through obscenity violations—may be "expressive," see R. A. V. v. St. Paul, 505 U. S. 377, 385 (1992), but our cases clearly hold that "obscenity" can be regulated or actually proscribed consistent with the First Amendment, see, e. g., Roth v. United States, 354 U. S. 476, 485 (1957); Miller v. California, 413 U. S. 15, 23 (1973).
Confronted with our decisions in Fort Wayne Books and Arcara—neither of which he challenges—petitioner's position boils down to this: Stiff criminal penalties for obscenity offenses are consistent with the First Amendment; so is the forfeiture of expressive materials as punishment for criminal conduct; but the combination of the two somehow results
557
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