Lawrence Ray has been charged with engaging in sex trafficking, extortion, and forced labor. A law enforcement official says the investigation that led to the charges was sparked by our 2019 report on how a group of college students fell under his sway
Photo-Illustration: Art Handler On February 11, 2020, Larry Ray was indicted by federal prosecutors for sex trafficking, extortion, conspiracy and other charges. Authorities began investigating Ray in response to this article.
He could also be charming. He was a good listener and engaged the group on heady concepts like truth and justice. “He did all of our cleaning and definitely took on the dad role in the house in a big way,” says Juli Anna, one of the Slonim 9 roommates. He screened Carl Sagan’s Cosmos in the common room, where the students watched from pillows on the floor, and followed it with an impromptu lecture on the nature of the universe.
Isabella had come to Sarah Lawrence on a full academic scholarship from an all-girls Catholic high school in San Antonio. After her breakup, she seemed to take comfort in Larry’s company. “I’m 19, I was having a lot of difficulty making sense of things, I wasn’t in a good place,” Isabella says. “He started to help me kind of process and make sense of a lot of things I just couldn’t make sense of.” Talia’s boyfriend at the time remembers seeing Larry and Isabella reclining on Talia’s bed.
Larry returned to Slonim 9 for the spring semester, spending most of his nights in Isabella’s room. His “house meetings” and “family dinners” continued and, to some, started to feel mandatory. One night, Larry gathered everyone in the common room and began lecturing on Q4P, a philosophy based on the supposition that all energy in the universe is powered by the “quest for potential.
Daniel too had initially found Larry’s philosophical musings incoherent and thought Claudia’s newfound trust in his amateur mental-health counseling seemed weird. “Claudia definitely had some complex issues. She had real stuff going on,” Daniel says. “It was all stuff that a therapist would really be the right person to turn to. But Larry claimed to have some superhuman level of empathy or ability to talk to young people and help them work through their issues.
Every morning that summer in the apartment on 93rd Street started the same way: Larry would blast the Who’s “Baba O’Riley.” The message was clear. Larry planned to personally guide the young adults — Daniel, Talia, Claudia, Isabella, and Santos — through the teenage wasteland. The meetings would often end in “breakthroughs” that followed a disturbing dream logic. On one occasion, Larry convinced Daniel that the reason he played the ukulele was because of trauma inflicted on him by his father. Larry told Daniel to smash the instrument in front of the group as an act of catharsis. When he did, the group applauded Daniel for achieving “closure.” Daniel felt immense pressure to find explanations for his actions.
“She was on ‘Larry behavior,’ ” her mother says. “She’d be saying things that sounded like they came out of Larry’s mouth. ‘In the Marines you do this, you exercise, and you only eat healthy food.’ ” Claudia became very critical of her parents. “She would be disparaging about how we were running the household: ‘Look, you can’t even get dinner on the table on time.’ ”
“I got so freaked out,” Daniel says. “There was no consent in that situation. Isabella may have seemed to be pursuing all of this, but her mind was being twisted by Larry.” “Larry was a chameleon,” says one person who knew him back then. “He could be a good ol’ boy or a patriot, or he’d pull out a pipe and fake glasses and he’d be an intellectual. He would juggle ten different people at the same time, telling each of them one piece of a story he wanted them to know and convincing them that he wanted them to be part of his master plan.”
“I remember him being around,” says Chris Donnelly, the NATO official who wrote the letter. “He was connected and may have made some calls for us, as many other people did at the time. I wrote a letter for anyone who was involved.” The reports, however, paint Larry as an unreliable informant who dangled the prospect of critical evidence only to later obfuscate. After a few years of working with Larry, Uher realized that Larry had used his role as an FBI informant as a cover for his own involvement in Garafola’s scheme. “Uher hates Ray for all of Ray’s lies,” one document reads. “The FBI was Larry’s biggest mark,” says one former law-enforcement official familiar with Larry’s role in the case.
Larry pleaded guilty to securities fraud, and in 2003 he was sentenced to five years’ probation. At his sentencing hearing, the judge accused Larry of “manipulating” the court and promised to “throw the book” at him if he violated his probation. Kerik’s perceived betrayal seemed to shift something inside Larry. Or perhaps Larry’s duplicity was catching up to him. Whatever the reason, the conviction marked a change in Larry’s behavior. He became more malicious, and his targets became more personal.
When a final court order demanded Larry turn his children over to Teresa, he refused and was charged with contempt and interference with custody. He spent six months in jail. Instead of living with her mother, Talia chose to live in youth shelters. “She was his soldier,” says someone familiar with the divorce. “Talia is a really loving person, and she is the biggest victim of all.”
III. Photo: Dana Scruggs Even the distance of the Atlantic Ocean wasn’t enough to keep Larry from Daniel and Claudia. On one occasion, the two met up so Larry could Skype in for a “family meeting.” He proceeded to coach them through sex. Though Daniel’s parents were distressed by their son’s relationship with Larry, they never attempted any dramatic intervention. Daniel understands why. “There was nothing that was going to dissuade me. They were justifiably afraid — and I made this clear to them whether through my words or my actions — that if they weren’t onboard with Larry that I would just stop talking to them.
Daniel experienced the worst of Larry’s attentions his senior year, after Talia missed the application deadline for Stanford Law School. Larry accused Daniel of intentionally sabotaging his daughter by distracting her. In a confession session that night, Daniel denied having anything to do with the missed deadline.
“I was concerned because of my parents, because this whole thing involved Bernard Kerik and the police,” Felicia says. “Going to the police in California, in Los Angeles, which is incredibly corrupt, it was like, Is this really going to be effective?” Felicia abandoned her residency program and moved in with Larry. They quickly began a romantic relationship, often talking about marriage and having children together. Larry has referred to both Felicia and Isabella as his wife.
Toward the end of senior year, Larry brought Claudia, Isabella, Yalitza, and Felicia to his stepfather’s house in Pinehurst, North Carolina. There he put them to work installing a new drainage system in the yard. When they returned, Claudia, Yalitza, and Isabella began asking their friends and family for money, saying they’d damaged Larry’s property.
According to family and friends, only Santos tried to take his own life before meeting Larry. Since then, Isabella, Yalitza, and Claudia have all attempted suicide. Larry later estimated their cumulative number of attempts at more than 12. “You’re talking to a young adult, not a 6-year-old,” her mother says. “If she made a decision to go to Larry’s against our will, there was nothing, other than physical intervention, we could do to stop her. It was like she was literally hypnotized.”
“The first time I heard his name mentioned,” she answered, “I was probably 9 years old.” Over the course of her hourlong testimony, Claudia laid out an elaborate conspiracy tracing back through three generations of her family. She testified that, as a child, she’d overheard her grandfather talking about Larry “making trouble.” Even then, she said, she knew Kerik and Giuliani were somehow involved.
Yalitza similarly described feeling guilty about the supposed poisonings. “I went to the hospital again, in December of 2013, for another suicide attempt. It was my third attempt,” she said. “I was feeling badly about everything that I was doing to Larry.” One tab on the website linked to a video in which Claudia sits on a duvet-covered bed in dark-green Sarah Lawrence Gryphons sweatpants, looking dazed. “I never stopped poisoning Lawrence Ray, Talia Ray,” as well as Felicia and Isabella, she says drowsily, facing the camera.“Yes,” Claudia responds immediately.“Because I just want to tell the truth,” she says.
At the Moonstruck Diner on Third Avenue, Isabella orders sliders with Cheddar cheese; when Larry orders the same thing, she corrects him tenderly. “You want yours with American cheese?” she asks. “Oh, yes, American cheese,” Larry tells the waiter. Larry says he’s now living with Isabella and Felicia in New Jersey. His relationship with Isabella is as opaque as everything else in his life.
And yet Larry has caused untold devastation in the lives of the people around him. Dozens of people contacted for this story refused to speak on the record for fear of Larry’s retribution. For years, he has silenced his victims by intimidating them physically, psychologically, legally, and, when all else fails, by public shaming and harassment. “My intentions are honorable intentions,” he says. “It’s the way I’ve lived my life, even through 20 years of this.
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