Now that a third ACORN video has surfaced, a pattern emerges of ACORN workers willing to help people engage in prostitution, tax fraud, housing fraud, and even human trafficking. Under federal law, a RICO investigation is now warranted. Three strikes and you’re out, ACORN.

Videos show ACORN employees offering to help two undercover reporters/filmmakers posing as a prostitute and pimp in falsifying tax returns and getting a federal loan to buy a house that they could use as a brothel for underage prostitutes smuggled in from El Salvador.

When the first video emerged from such a meeting in ACORN’s Baltimore office on Thursday, ACORN fired the two workers involved. When another video surfaced on Friday, this one from ACORN’s Washington, D.C. office, the two workers involved there were fired as well, and ACORN said that these two reporters had tried and failed to carry out this sting in other offices.

One such office where ACORN said these reporters tried and failed was New York City. Yet Monday, a third video surfaced from Brooklyn in New York City. Once again, the ACORN employees on the video advise the undercover duo on how to violate federal law by filing a false income tax return to qualify for a federal housing loan.

As one worker says on the video, “honesty is not going to get you the house.” — Well, not if you’re engaged in a host of felonies.

ACORN has the audacity to say that the undercover reporters may have committed a crime in the videotaping process, alleging that they doctored the tapes and that the reality is not what every viewer can plainly see and hear on the tape. (Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?)

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

The reality is, there are at least a half-dozen state and federal laws that could have been broken here. Even though the undercover young woman is not really a prostitute and there are no El Salvadoran girls here either, this could still meet the legal standard for conspiracy to commit these various crimes. At a bare minimum, depending on the state, it likely fulfills the elements for the crime of attempted conspiracy, which usually carries the exact same penalty as the underlying crimes themselves (prostitution, tax fraud, etc.).

What’s important about prostitution and human trafficking is that they are specific triggers for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, better known as RICO. The RICO law is designed to enable the Justice Department to go after criminal enterprises. It defines “racketeering activity” as including importing illegal aliens for immoral purposes, falsifying identification documents and immigration papers, mail and wire fraud, and the sexual exploitation of children, among others.

These are all implicated on the video tapes. The ACORN workers rattle off their how-to instructions on carrying out these crimes without needing to do more than skim a couple books that they have on hand. The clear implication is that these workers are seasoned pros who know how to carry out these crimes, subsidized by federal taxpayer money.

Although everyone is presumed innocent until proven guilty, a RICO investigation is now warranted. There are already multiple state investigations of ACORN underway, and thirty ACORN workers have already pleaded guilty to committing crimes. Attorney General Eric Holder should immediately order a RICO investigation, while we all wait to see if more footage is forthcoming.

The sensational undercover video showed ACORN Housing employees in the group’s Baltimore office trying to help the two journalists set up a brothel. The pair told ACORN employees that underage girls from El Salvador were ready to enter the U.S. and start working as child prostitutes.

The video, first shown on Andrew Breitbart’s new website Big Government, was featured that day on Glenn Beck’s TV program. Hannah Giles, who portrayed the prostitute in the video, told Beck she got involved in the project “to expose ACORN.”

“I saw them as a thug organization that was getting my tax dollars,” said Giles.

But guess who might be facing prosecution for exposing the group best known for its never-ending voter registration fraud scandals? You guessed it — the conservative journalists involved in the undercover reporting of course!

Obama supporter Patricia Jessamy, Maryland State’s Attorney for Baltimore City, released a statement saying the video might violate the state’s anti-wiretapping law that was used against Linda Tripp after she recorded telephone conversations with President Clinton’s Oval Office paramour Monica Lewinsky. The law requires consent to the recording by both parties in a conversation.

Always ready to smear conservatives, left-wing journalist Joe Conason said on the Sept. 10 “Lou Dobbs Tonight” that the filmmaker who portrayed the pimp may not be making himself available to the media because he feared prosecution for unlawful recording, as if the First Amendment’s press protections don’t apply in the state of Maryland.

Fox News contributor, former Judge Andrew Napolitano, said that’s bunk. The Maryland statute does not apply to videotape recordings — only to phone calls or other electronic “communications,” Napolitano said.

Meanwhile, the radical group and crime syndicate that is a longtime ally of President Obama went into damage control overdrive after the videos showed ACORN officials advising the pretend prostitute and her procurer about how to get taxpayer funds, launder money, commit tax fraud, and commit who knows how many other crimes.

When ACORN learned of the video Thursday it fired the workers, called Fox News racist for airing the footage, and threatened a lawsuit.

Stuart Katzenberg, lead organizer for ACORN’s Maryland branch, said that the employees were canned because they “did not meet ACORN’s standards of professionalism.” Sonja Merchant-Jones, head of Baltimore City ACORN, said that the workers were low-level part-time workers unsupervised by senior staff at the time.

Another video showing a similar scenario surfaced the next day. This time it was a slightly different undercover operation in which Washington, D.C. ACORN employees were only too willing to participate in the prostitution scam. ACORN promptly cashiered those employees too, screaming it was a victim of a “smear” campaign.

Marcel Reid, who is officially chairwoman of the D.C. chapter of ACORN, said that Katzenberg took over as lead organizer for Maryland and the District of Columbia after ACORN’s national board expelled her last November for asking uncomfortable questions about the group’s finances.

While Reid is chairwoman in name, she has been barred from the D.C. office since her expulsion from the board. She co-founded a reform group called ACORN 8.

When in charge of D.C. ACORN, Reid said she had no authority over ACORN Housing employees working in the D.C. ACORN office. Employees of ACORN Housing, a nonprofit legally separate from ACORN, share office space in ACORN offices across the country.

After Reid was booted out, Katzenberg became head organizer for Maryland and D.C. He was a key campaign official for Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Maryland) and ACORN Maryland went all-out last year to get Edwards elected.

It is also unclear why national ACORN officials such as chief organizer and CEO Bertha Lewis have gotten involved in spin-doctoring this latest corruption crisis. ACORN frequently likes to point out that ACORN Housing, which has taken in tens of millions of dollars in government grants, is a separate and distinct legal entity.

But that wasn’t the end of ACORN’s worst public relations week ever.

In addition to ACORN’s underage illegal alien sex slave scandals, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Friday it was severing ties with ACORN regarding next year’s decennial census. Census Director Robert M. Groves sent a letter to ACORN national president Maude Hurd explaining that “ACORN’s affiliation with 2010 Census promotion has caused sufficient concern in the general public, has indeed become a distraction from our mission, and may even become a discouragement to public cooperation, negatively impacting 2010 Census efforts.”

Employing polite euphemism, Groves wrote that “recent events concerning several local offices of ACORN have added to the worsening negative perceptions of ACORN and its affiliation with our partnership efforts.” Officials at the Census Bureau “no longer have confidence that our national partnership agreement is being effectively managed through your many local offices.”

Just months earlier former ACORN organizer Gregory Hall warned of the dangers of allowing the group to be involved in the upcoming census while the Obama administration lied about the extent of ACORN’s involvement in next year’s national head count.

The administration had said the idea ACORN would be involved in any Census count was “baseless.” A response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Judicial Watch revealed that ACORN was given the opportunity to “recruit Census workers” to participate in the count and “organize and/or serve as a member on a Complete Count Committee,” which, according to Census documents, helps “develop and implement locally based outreach and recruitment campaigns.”

Next it was revealed that ACORN founder Wade Rathke didn’t have a problem with domestic terrorists trying to kill delegates at the Republican Party’s national convention in 2008, according to former radical community organizer Brandon Darby.

After Darby worked with the FBI to stop a left-wing terrorist bomb plot at the RNC convention in Minnesota, Rathke denounced him for breaking the radicals’ code of silence. In January Rathke suggested on his blog that it’s better to let innocents die than squeal on your comrades in the struggle. It’s “one thing to disagree, but it’s a whole different thing to rat on folks,” wrote the former organizer for the ultra-left Students for a Democratic Society, the same group that gave birth to Bill Ayers’s Weather Underground.

This is the same Wade Rathke who orchestrated an eight-year coverup of his brother’s nearly $1 million embezzlement of ACORN funds. When that conspiracy was unearthed last summer, Rathke was given the bum’s rush from the organization he founded in 1970. He remains unapologetic about the scandal, claiming that if it had been disclosed when it happened the “right wing” would have used it to discredit ACORN.

As an added bonus, ACORN’s name was thrown about as an epithet by speakers and other participants at the 9/12 national tea party rally outside the U.S. Capitol on Saturday.

Who knows what the coming weeks will bring.