It's not about stopping them. It's about arresting and convicting them.

The tangential activities that you describe, e.g. communicating, meeting, transferring funds, etc. are the means by which federal officers arrest and convict mobsters/drug dealers/terrorists/etc.

It's very rare to get a conviction on a mobster via a direct mob activity. Instead, the feds use money laundering or tax evasion laws to deal with the mob people so that they can at least do time for _something_. And if they do it multiple times, then they get slapped with RICO and do _real_ time.

franzel