Among those indicted were some of Trump's closet advisers, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump's one-time personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.

"Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump," the indictment's introduction says.

"That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states," it says.

Former President Donald Trump and 18 others have been indicted by a Fulton County grand jury in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia, according to court documents.

A Fulton County grand jury has handed up an indictment related to efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia, according to multiple sources.

A spokesperson for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis declined to comment.

As an upstart chief prosecutor in perhaps the most prestigious legal office in the country, Rudy Giuliani in the mid-1980s made use of a novel way to quell the scourge of New York organized crime -- leveraging a brand new, little-known federal statute called Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations.

Using RICO, as it's known, Giuliani managed to charge dozens of mobsters with seemingly unrelated crimes, all under the umbrella of one overarching scheme. At the time, it was a revolutionary use of federal law and it later served as a model for state and federal prosecutors around the country.

As U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Giuliani's successful prosecutions of New York's storied crime families made him a media darling and launched Giuliani's political career. But now, four decades later, Giuliani finds himself on the other side of his own legal legacy -- facing Georgia state criminal RICO charges in the Fulton County district attorney's case against his longtime boss, former President Donald Trump, and 18 of his allies.

"This is perfect, perfect irony," said Anthony Cardinale, a veteran defense attorney who represented "Fat Tony" Salerno, the former head of the Genovese crime family, in 1986. "Giuliani is going to be sitting in a courtroom, pray to God ... 40 years after he started bringing these exact types of cases."

To read more about Giuliani's winding road to prosecution, click here.

-ABC News' Lucien Bruggeman