NEW YORK (AP) — A person who moved into his daughter’s faculty dorm and charmed her schoolmates with tales about his knowledge was convicted Wednesday of costs that he exploited the close-knit group, utilizing threats and violence to counterpoint himself with thousands and thousands of {dollars}.
Lawrence Ray, 62, was convicted at a trial the place weeks of testimony chronicled his psychologically manipulative relationship with younger folks he met in fall 2010 at Sarah Lawrence School, a small New York liberal arts college. Ray moved into his daughter’s dorm after ending a jail stint for a securities fraud conviction.
Sentencing was set for Sept. 16 on costs together with racketeering, conspiracy, pressured labor, intercourse trafficking and obstruction of justice. Ray, who stood together with his arms at his facet and confronted the Manhattan jury as responsible verdicts have been returned on 15 counts, may withstand life in jail.
After the decision was learn, Ray was returned to custody, the place he had been since his early 2020 arrest.
His legal professionals declined remark outdoors court docket and didn’t instantly return e mail messages in search of remark.
In a press release, U.S. Lawyer Damian Williams mentioned Ray had modified “a bunch of associates who had their entire lives forward of them.”
“For the subsequent decade, he used violence, threats, and psychological abuse to attempt to management and destroy their lives,” Williams mentioned. “He exploited them. He terrorized them. He tortured them. Let me be very clear. Larry Ray is a predator. An evil man who did evil issues. Right now’s verdict lastly brings him to justice.”
Jurors concluded deliberations lower than a day after receiving the case following a monthlong trial that featured testimony from quite a few victims who normally referred to Ray simply as “Larry.” Some testified that Ray had made them consider they’d poisoned or in any other case harmed him and so they wanted to pay him again.
One girl testified that she turned a intercourse employee to attempt to pay reparations to Ray after changing into satisfied that she had poisoned him. She mentioned that, over 4 years, she gave Ray $2.5 million in installments that averaged between $10,000 and $50,000 per week.
Ray’s legal professionals maintained he was victimized by former associates who fabricated their tales.
Ray didn’t testify. Twice, the trial was interrupted as he was taken to the hospital in an ambulance for undisclosed sicknesses.
A number of college students testified that they have been drawn into Ray’s world as he advised them tales of his previous affect in New York Metropolis politics, together with his function in ruining the profession of former New York Metropolis Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik after serving as one of the best man at his wedding ceremony years earlier. Ray had, actually, been a determine within the corruption investigation that derailed Kerik’s nomination to steer the U.S. Division of Homeland Safety.
A few of the college students agreed to dwell with Ray in the summertime of 2011 at his Manhattan one-bedroom house, the place his sinister facet emerged as he began to say that the scholars had poisoned and harmed him or his property.
To make amends, they testified, they did what he requested, together with turning over cash. One man mentioned he gave Ray over $100,000.
Prosecutors mentioned the cash was by no means sufficient. By threats and violence and videotaped “confessions,” Ray tightened his maintain on the younger folks, together with forcing them to to landscaping and different work on the Pinehurst, North Carolina residence of his stepfather for weeks in 2013, they mentioned.
The abuse culminated in October 2018 when Ray for hours repeatedly abused the lady who gave him her proceeds from intercourse work, forcing her to be tied bare to a chair whereas he berated her, choked her with a leash and made her concern for her life by placing a bag over her head, prosecutors mentioned.
Ray carried out his crimes with assist from his daughter and Isabella Pollok, a girl who has pleaded not responsible to legal costs, prosecutors mentioned. Her trial is about for later this yr. The daughter has not been charged.