Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
[ Camera shutters clicking ] Good morning.
I'm Jeff Berman, U.S. attorney
for the Southern District of New York.
Today we announce criminal charges against this man,
Lawrence Ray,
who, for nearly a decade,
exploited and abused young women and men
emotionally, physically, and sexually
for his own financial gain.
**
Kerik: Who is Larry Ray?
Nobody really knows.
Ray has been charged with nine counts,
including sex trafficking, extortion,
forced labor, and money laundering.
Kerik: He was a master manipulator, a master con man.
But every single relationship he had was based on a fraud.
Melendez: Larry, has filled this void for the kids
of having a parental figure that was there for them
and wanted to listen to them.
Reporter: Investigators claim that Ray groomed the roommates,
conducting therapy sessions.
He would talk about how to be the best person that you can be
and some weird theory called Quest for Potential.
He manipulated them into making their worlds
smaller and smaller,
until they were totally dependent upon him.
How could these bright young students
have gone along with this?
Marcus: Larry tells them they have to work all day.
Figliuzzi: They become profit centers.
He has them literally drain
the bank accounts of their parents.
Reporter: Ray initially befriended his victims,
moving into their own campus housing before encouraging them,
the summer after their sophomore year,
to move in with him to a Manhattan apartment.
He would begin to instruct them to have sex with each other
and do various things that they weren't comfortable with.
Larry has to force her to continue being a prostitute.
Figliuzzi: We're dealing with brain control, mind control.
We're looking at a con artist on steroids.
[ Thudding ]
Spit them out.
**
[ Birds chirping ]
I was looking for a story I could work on.
A friend of mine had gone
to her five-year reunion at Sarah Lawrence.
People at the reunion were gossiping about these rumors
about what had happened to some of these kids
who they'd gone to school with.
And somebody had found this website.
It was pretty unsettling.
It had a lot of different headers
that were called things like,
"I poisoned people because my mother told me to,"
or "I am a liar and I am working for the government,"
and there was a link to this video.
Sunday, March 22nd
Please talk audibly Claudia.
It's Sunday, March 22nd
This girl was sort of being interviewed.
Start from the most current time backwards.
The most current time
And first, you making this by your own free will?
Yes.
Anybody pay you?
No.
Anybody threaten you?
No.
Anybody coerce you?
No.
It begins with Claudia saying,
"I'm making this of my own free will,"
which is, first of all, like, "Hmm,
if you have to say that, you're probably not."
Okay, so when did you poison last?
And a man is off-camera,
asking her questions in this deep voice,
an older man's voice.
So you're saying you put mercury on where?
On the doorknobs in the hospital?
Yeah
your food.
Other things I touched or anybody touched?
Yeah.
It was clear that something weird was going on.
My thinking about it turned from,
"Oh, is Claudia this like, you know, evil poisoner?",
which was how the website presented her,
into, "Something wrong is being done to her by this guy."
And, you know, that's the first time
I kind of encountered Larry Ray.
I just started reaching out to people
that were named on the website
to talk to them about what had been going on with Claudia
and what had happened to her.
And I pitched it to New York Magazine
on the initial striking thing,
which was that a man moved into his daughter's dorm room.
**
Sarah Lawrence is a small liberal arts college
in upstate New York,
where people are really dedicated to learning
and are extremely intelligent.
It's a very hard school to get into.
It seems to attract young people who are interested in the arts,
interested in literature, interested in theater, maybe.
I wanted to study literature, so I went there.
It was a beautiful, leafy, green campus
and it was not too far from the city.
**
Talia Ray grew up in New Jersey.
She was a really driven student.
She had this group of friends
that she moved in with sophomore year,
into campus housing.
And they were freestanding houses
all kind of arranged in a row,
a pathway from this little forest.
They were going to have fun,
hang out, make food together, throw some parties.
Classic sophomore year of college stuff.
**
Marcus: Daniel Levin was from New Jersey.
He was kind of a shy kid,
but he was excited to make new friends.
He wanted to be a writer, I believe.
Then there's Santos Rosario,
which was Talia's former boyfriend
turned friend and roommate.
Marcus: His parents owned a travel agency in the Bronx,
small family business.
It was the American dream.
Claudia was from Los Angeles.
She was super creative.
She liked to tell stories.
You know, her friends from high school
thought of her as gregarious and, you know,
she'd also had a really sheltered kind of childhood.
And then there's Isabella Pollok.
Marcus: She was from San Antonio,
very far away from home.
She was pretty shy, also pretty sheltered.
She and Talia quickly, really bonded
and became like really close friends.
The group of students who were Talia's housemates
were, you know, 18, 19 years old.
Most of them from good families,
good academic backgrounds.
What's important to remember --
the human brain is not fully developed
until you're 25 years old,
so, that's a very vulnerable period.
They definitely were trying to figure out who they were
and where they belonged in this world at college,
kind of leaning on each other to try to figure out
what they were supposed to be doing.
**
When Talia showed up at Sarah Lawrence
and met this group,
her dad was a central part of her conversations.
She would describe how he was
this amazing, smart person that she idolized.
He is an extremely important person
who had all these important connections in New York.
She painted him as someone who had been wrongly pursued
by law enforcement because he had powerful enemies.
She described him as some political martyr
who'd taken on corruption
and been punished and was in jail.
When she was seven,
Larry and Talia's mother, Teresa, got divorced
and the custody dispute quickly turned extremely nasty.
Years later, Talia refuses to live with her mom
and, at a certain point,
Larry and Talia essentially go on the run.
They're tracked down by U.S. Marshals
and, you know, they burst through the door
and arrest Larry.
Larry Ray goes to jail for the child custody dispute.
The way that Talia describes her father
to her friends at Sarah Lawrence
is that he has been wrongfully accused
of this child custody dispute and shouldn't be in jail.
Hates her mother for putting him there.
Talia is obsessed with Larry.
He is the perfect dad ever
and he has been wrongfully convicted.
One day she basically says, "My dad is getting out of prison,"
and he needed a place to kind of land
after getting out of jail. She was like,
"Yeah, my dad's going to come visit
and maybe, you know, spend the night and," yeah.
**
It's totally not unusual for parents to drop by colleges
and even spend the night sometimes.
And then he kind of stayed.
I think the initial reaction was probably their gut reaction
and should've been one that they listened to,
was like, "Why is this grown man in our college dorm room?
This is weird."
Marcus: But he sort of installed himself in the common room
as like a father figure for the dorm.
I thought he was very cool, very smart,
very composed, and very inspirational.
As Claudia: He was very friendly
and he seemed, you know,
sort of very different from anyone,
like very magnetic, charismatic kind of personality.
He'd make dinner for everyone or he'd order food,
these kind of lavish meals.
You know, you're a college student. That's awesome.
So kids would kind of hang out with him and listen to him talk
and he'd give these almost sort of like lectures
at night in the common room.
So, I think that, while their immediate reaction was like,
"Talia, why did you just bring your father into our house?",
quickly transited into, "Talia, I can't imagine your father
not being in this house."
Being in college is a uniquely vulnerable point
in the life of a lot of people.
You're away from home for the first time.
You're in a strange place,
not exactly sure what you're doing.
It was --
It was really hard for me.
I-I was not really prepared to live alone.
I had like never done laundry before going to college.
I had a lot of separation anxiety from my parents.
I just felt very sort of anchorless and anxious
and didn't really have a good handle on myself.
Larry sold himself as an expert in self-improvement,
some sort of combination of a life coach and therapist.
Somebody tells you, "I got the answers,"
and can do it in a confident way,
is in a position to exert undue influence.
"I have exactly the answer
and I am the bridge to mental health for you,"
and that can be powerful.
I'm having anxiety and all these problems
and Santos was like, "Why don't you talk to Larry?
He's great. He's been helping me."
I ended up confiding in him a lot
about issues that I have with my family,
my depression that I struggled with in high school.
Larry really listened and really, really seemed
as though he actually very much wanted to help me.
I shared a lot of very personal things.
He spoke a lot about inspirational things,
like honesty, principles, science, and philosophy.
I considered him a very honest and truthful person.
And, initially, I felt it was important to me
to be a good person, you know, be like him,
be honest and be truthful.
**
Marcus: He would talk about how to be the best person that you can be
and how everybody has a potential
that they can achieve.
Some weird theory called Quest for Potential.
As Felicia: He framed it as helping them optimize
and helping them get over their insecurities
and become happier, more effective people.
Larry promised young people
who were very confused and felt alienated
that he was the person who was going to pull them out of it.
He's helping them reveal hidden truths about themselves
and changing the programing
that their evil parents and evil society,
all these things that were sort of done to them.
He is intentionally changing their mind-set.
Larry said that he had extensive military training
in the mind and human behavior,
from different departments of the government,
so, DOD, FBI, CIA, DIA, Marine Corps.
Marcus: The sort of climax of it
would be these stories about his heroic past.
Larry claimed to the kids that he helped negotiations
to end the war in Kosovo.
He claimed to be related to Al Capone.
The list goes on.
He was very good at mythmaking about himself.
I think, if you were to sit Larry Ray down
and ask him the question, "Larry, who are you?"...
...I think he'd con you in his own answer
because I'm not sure Larry Ray knows who he really is.
Larry Ray is someone who can become
whoever you want him to be
and whoever he needs you to think he is.
**
Larry Ray is Larry Grecco, one thing.
That's the name he was born under.
Melendez: Larry grew up in Brooklyn.
I mean, if you hear him,
he's a quintessential Brooklyn boy.
At a certain point, his parents divorced
and Mom remarried a man named Gordon Ray...
...and Larry took his stepfather's last name.
He served in the military for 19 days.
He was discharged for reasons that are unclear.
He married his high school sweetheart, Teresa.
Jacobs: He's known a lot of people.
He's known a lot of connected people.
He seems to sort of fit in where he goes,
whether that be law enforcement or, reportedly,
he had some Mafia connections in Brooklyn.
Melendez: He seemingly knew everybody.
Really good friends with Bernie Kerik.
Bernie Kerik was
the New York City police commissioner.
And he was somebody Giuliani had brought up
from just being an undercover cop
into being like, you know,
a high-ranking member of the administration.
Kerik: In 1995, I met Larry Ray.
We would work out together.
We'd have coffee, have lunch.
He was extremely charismatic.
He was very smart.
Very, very smart.
Marcus: It's this sort of like
mutually beneficial business relationship,
but it's also a real friendship.
Larry's the best man at Bernie's wedding.
Kerik: Looking back, it's kind of strange, you know.
You get married, you have all these wedding photos
and I've got a thousand wedding photos
and not one has my best man in it.
They've all been discarded.
And Larry Ray helped Kerik broker an introduction
between Rudy Giuliani and Mikhail Gorbachev.
[ Speaking foreign language ]
Larry was flying into JFK
and he comes out of the international terminal
and he says, "Bern, I want you to meet
President Gorbachev."
I said, "Okay, alright."
I told him the mayor.
I said, "Gorbachev is here.
He'd love to see you, if you have a minute,"
and Giuliani said, "Absolutely. Bring him down."
[ Flashbulbs exploding ]
For a politician like Rudy Giuliani,
that kind of photo op
[ Flashbulb explodes ] is worth more
than its weight in gold.
It was pretty slick.
[ Flashbulb explodes ]
**
Lalich: You've got this guy who just spent years in prison.
He lands in this dorm with these young, vulnerable,
eager roommates of his daughter, who adores him,
who basically set them up to like him.
And so, for him, you can see where his little wheels
are turning and thinking, "Oh."
Marcus: Isabella was clearly the closest to Talia
and the closest to Larry.
And Larry would often sleep in Isabella's room.
Ray told residents of the apartment that she needed help,
she needed supervision, essentially, you know.
Instead of it being something sexual,
he was really just there
to supervise her through the night.
I was pretty freaked out, at first.
I didn't really know what to think.
I thought it was weird.
He got her like this coat that she really loved,
that was like significantly more elegant than her other clothing.
So, she seemed to like actually open up more after meeting him.
He just said that he was helping her
through some psychological issues
or emotional issues she was having.
**
Marcus: And then, at the end of that semester,
Isabella's parents get a phone call from Larry.
He said, "If she comes home for Christmas,
she's going to be reliving trauma
and she's going to kill herself."
He told them that, you know,
Isabella didn't feel safe with them.
That was a complete shock.
Lalich: He was breaking her from her family.
The purpose is separating you from friends and family,
any support system you may have had.
And, obviously, making the decision for her
that she wasn't going to go home
and Isabella isn't protesting that,
so, the family gets completely flummoxed,
like, "What the hell's going on here?"
Marcus: But their hands were kind of tied.
I mean, you can't take an adult
away from a situation she wanted to be in.
And so it's the beginning
of breaking everyone off from anyone else.
**
My name is Lee Chen.
I'm a businessman based primarily here in Manhattan.
I first remember meeting Larry Ray,
he was a person with a commanding presence.
We had engaged in several business dealings.
He seemed like a very kind person.
I thought that he was caring
and he exhibited signs that he had a lot of compassion.
[ Horns honking ]
There was a time during Christmas break
Larry had brought back to my apartment,
not only Talia, but also Isabella Pollok.
Marcus: Larry would take them out to these like lavish dinners.
He'd often pay in cash.
He had all this cash in his backpack.
Larry's in control of everything --
what they eat, where they go, what they do.
And there's a really odd kind of dynamic
between Larry and Isabella which seems really sexual,
even though it's supposedly all about helping her.
What he was doing was establishing full control.
He's away from the campus,
any like people saying, "What the hell is going on there?"
And so he is reinforcing
that separation from the outside world.
**
Often, I wasn't there
because I'd been traveling for business.
When I came back from a trip,
he had moved himself into my bedroom.
But it wasn't just him.
And it wasn't just him and Talia.
I only had one bed [ Chuckling ] in my bedroom.
It was him, Talia, and Isabella.
And they were sleeping in my bed, all together!
Larry's stroking Isabella's hair on the bed
and calling her his baby girl.
She's, what, 19, maybe 20?
This man's in his 50s.
You know, she's sleeping in his bed every night,
so he can help her, whatever that means.
It was methodically choosing one person
who became totally dependent on him...
...and then could sort of systematically work
through the rest of the people.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
**
Larry has filled this void for the kids
of having a parental figure that was there for them
and wanted to listen to them and had time for them.
Daniel was coming to him with some of his insecurities
and he had a pretty normal question,
which was he was struggling with his sexuality,
you know, "Am I straight or gay?"
Larry, in a very definitive way, said, "You're not gay.
You know, you're straight."
And, once Larry knew that, Larry was able
to really use that against Daniel
and use that in Daniel's relationship
with his family and his father.
Daniel's dad wrote to him in an email,
"It's like you're hypnotized when I talk to you.
It's like, 'What's up with you'", you know?
There was a real shift
in these people's outward personalities.
Isabella's aunt and her mother flew to New York
and they had dinner with Isabella and Larry
and Larry just seemed very much
to be kind of in control of the conversation
and Isabella seemed to just kind of go along
with whatever he said.
So, you know, they went back to San Antonio.
The history of this case is replete
with people trying their best
to draw the attention of authorities.
Some 50-year-old guy's living in the dorm.
It's strange.
Marcus: Some of the parents thought it was pretty weird,
especially as the situation progressed.
The parents said that they made complaints
to the school administrators.
Parents writing to, speaking with,
Sarah Lawrence officials.
At least one student communicating
with the dean of students, "We've got an issue here."
**
The next summer, Larry had started to bring more
and more students into my home.
Marcus: Dan, Claudia, and Santos were kind of like the newer acolytes,
the ones who were kind of
more recently falling under the sway of Larry
and seeking him out for guidance
and so they sort of all end up living there.
Larry, Isabella, and Talia shared the bedroom
and, in the living room, we got
two king-size, blow-up mattresses,
which we would put on the ground
and they would completely cover the ground.
And then there were two --
there was a longer couch and a shorter couch.
It's a one-bedroom apartment,
but there's multiple people sleeping there.
There's not enough space for everybody.
Many times, when I'd come back from a trip,
whether it be business or personal,
I'd find all these people in my living room.
And Larry standing there,
like a general talking to his assembled troops.
They're really now what I call a self-sealed system.
You're closed to the outside world.
You may be living in the middle of Manhattan,
but you're in an altered reality.
Figliuzzi: Larry Ray took it upon himself to study cults.
He wanted to hone and refine his con skills
and turn them into cult development skills.
**
He would start every morning by playing the song
to wake them up and it would be like,
"Okay, you know, Larry's in charge."
[ Upbeat rock plays ]
He was the day in, day out ringleader
of what this group was doing.
He would talk about how to be the best person that you can be
and how everybody has a potential
that they can achieve.
He'd tell you what to do.
He'll tell you what was wrong with you.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
The sort of climax of it
would be these nighttime sort of sessions
where they would sit around and talk.
It sounded like there was very little sleep,
sitting around all hours of the night,
analyzing themselves
and analyzing each other at nauseam.
He was starting to test them
in ways that would really push them.
The discussions would become like focused on one person.
This long, drawn out period of interrogation,
basically with them, at first, denying,
and then, eventually, after hours,
confessing to having done something wrong.
As Santos: He kept calling me a liar,
saying that what I was saying wasn't true
and that I should give him
a list of things that I did wrong.
And he would periodically have me affirm
how I harmed him throughout the day
or throughout the time that I knew him.
He's brainwashing them by forcing them to,
over and over again, under pressure,
admit to doing things that they hadn't done,
until they either believed it or said that they believed it.
And then, instead of using those stories
to help people feel better about themselves,
he turned them around and used them
to humiliate people and to control them.
Lalich: How could these bright young students
have gone along with this?
It's the months of indoctrination,
to the point where they have internalized the beliefs
and the behaviors that Larry has been imparting to them.
Pressure would ratchet up...
...where it wouldn't just be about like,
"You know, how can we help this person's mental health?"
It would be like, "What did this person do
to disrupt the group?"
Personally, I felt like everyone only spoke to me
because Larry,
you know, told them to.
He actually told me they only spoke to me
because he told them to, multiple times.
So, I felt very ostracized and on thin ice.
He manipulated them into making their worlds
smaller and smaller,
until they were totally dependent upon him.
[ Melancholy tune plays ] [ Birds chirping ]
**
Marcus: Iban Goicoechea was a former boyfriend of Talia's.
**
He spent a lot of time in the apartment.
He was very much part of the group.
Hines: Iban was just very, very easy to be around.
His smile was electric.
He had a gift for breaking tension
and just making the mood light.
He saw Larry as kind of a mentor
and a guiding light who had looked after him.
He believed that Larry was sort of this example
of this heroic Marine that he wanted to emulate.
He enlisted in the Marines, which Larry pushed him to do,
even though Larry was not in the Marines,
and by the time of the students living in the apartment,
he's come back from serving in Afghanistan.
He'd been through some really traumatizing things
in Afghanistan.
He'd seen some people close to him die
and he was experiencing PTSD.
I felt that Larry had placed himself in a position
where Iban saw him as a factor in his treatment
and I think it's something Larry took advantage of.
Sometimes I'd be hanging out with Iban.
He'd just like pick up the phone,
"Yes, yes," boom, hang up,
and then he's like, "Got to go."
Like, "Oh, he's got to be ready at all times."
He often played a role of sort of like a gofer.
Larry would have him drive him around.
As I was reporting the story, I spoke with Iban.
When I talked to him, it was in 2019.
He's helped me through a lot of
I mean
a lot of emotional battles that I've had.
Directing me and guiding me I should say
He was there for me to help me, sort of
get my bearings again when I came back to civilian society.
He kind of saw himself as on a mission for Larry.
And it was his duty to,
if Larry ever needed anything,
in the same way as he would obey a commander in the military,
he would do what Larry needed.
As time passed, Larry began
to also test them with physical violence.
In the beginning, sort of small things
that weren't necessarily scary, like shoving.
And then as time went on,
these things became actually violent.
Larry described how like Iban had come to some sort of
very critical turning point in his processing or therapy
and, in order to push him towards the right decision,
Larry like took the edge of a spatula
and pressed into his neck and told him it was a knife
and told him he was going to die and he should just let go
of whatever psychological thing he was holding onto.
**
Larry was an obsessive documentarian
of what his life was comprised of
and what the victims were doing and what they owed him.
Larry would hit them or make them do things
while simultaneously firing off questions
and forcing them to admit things that they
didn't even know existed until that second.
Daniel: Months ago.
Ray: You're trying to parse again.
[Indistinct] tongue.
I'm being honest.
Give me your tongue. [ Laughs ] [Bleep]
Stick it out. Stick your tongue out.
Next it's gonna be the head of your cock.
[Bleep]
You understand? See this how it feels?
What if I picked you up like that? Picked you up by your tongue?
[ Moans ]
Huh?
You're a grown man, I'm a grown man.
Uh-huh.
I don't like what you did.
[ Muffled ] I know.
-You hear me? -Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Now one more time and I'm gonna split your tongue in half.
You doubting me Danny?
No. [ Sniffles, clears throat ]
Larry Ray is the epitome of a malignant narcissist.
He is vengeful,
he is mean,
he is motivated by power,
and he is dangerous.
These narcissists are so full of themselves
and they want to record everything
as proof of what they're able to accomplish.
He was starting to advise them on their sex lives
and begin to put pressure on them
to be more open sexually.
And I think a lot of it, for Larry,
was about using sex as sort of a tool
to destabilize them, make them uncomfortable.
It was a tactic.
It's a way to hook someone in, you know?
How could you be more honored than to have the revered person
wanting to have a sexual relationship?
It's one of the deepest,
most intimate ways to control someone.
Larry came out of the bedroom
and it was just us in the living room
and like stood over me.
Started grabbing himself like under his pants
and started talking about like orgasms
and how he could make me orgasm without touching.
He also suggested that Dan and I have sex right there.
And, when he left, we did.
And Iban was like next to us.
Larry really targeted and humiliated Daniel
because of his issue of sexual exploration.
And he told Daniel to go in the other room and put on a dress.
It's one of the women's dresses.
And so, in front of everybody,
he's making fun of him in this dress.
And then he asked Isabella to bring out a sex toy
and then told Daniel to try
and put that into himself, in front of the whole group.
And they all sort of stood around,
making fun of him for this.
You can imagine the trauma for Daniel
to have to go through such an experience
of shame and humiliation.
Melendez: He just got bolder and bolder.
As it snowballed,
it became this cult he could completely control.
**
Lee Chen is growing increasingly disturbed
by what's happening here
and it's not just the mental
and physical abuse he's witnessing,
it's also what Larry's doing in his apartment.
Larry had asked me to help him reorganize the apartment
because it was a mess
and repaint the walls of the foyer
and remodel the bathroom.
And it quickly devolves into Larry wanting
to fix this one-bedroom apartment
and it's up to these kids to fix it for him.
I mean, Santos Rosario was a 19-year-old kid.
He does not know how to fix walls
or do manual labor or home improvement.
Larry had completely changed the appearance of my apartment.
He took down walls, painted the foyer pink,
and left electrical wires hanging in the breeze.
It was the most incredible thing I'd ever seen.
Larry had never paid me any rent.
I'd gotten completely fed up
and I told him, "I don't want to hear it.
[ Laughing ] You have to get out."
I sent him a ten-day notice to leave.
That's when he changed the locks on my apartment,
so I can no longer get into my own home.
I took Larry to New York County Civil Court.
It took me over three years to gain an eviction judgment.
**
it would never get published
because your publisher would say,
"It's too much. It's too much.
That could never happen.
Never!
Nobody's going to believe this.
So go back and do it all over again
because it's not going to work."
That's the only way to describe
the insanity of Larry Ray's con ability, if you will.
I think the way that Larry always wanted to be was
the way that he portrayed himself to other people.
He really wanted to be important.
Over the course of the '90s,
we can really see Larry and Bernie
kind of riding high together.
It's mutually beneficial,
where Kerik gets Larry's connections
to meet influential people and kind of advance his rise.
Meanwhile, Larry is using Kerik's influence
for meeting as many powerful people as possible
and playing them off each other.
And then things kind of went south.
Larry Ray does not discriminate
on getting access to powerful players
and that includes organized crime members.
**
Larry Ray served as a confidential source
for the FBI,
talking about a $40 million Wall Street scheme.
He's aware of a Wall Street fraud connected
to the Gambino crime family.
But Larry is putting himself out as an informant
to cover his own role in the scheme.
Eventually, the FBI catches on that, "Wait a minute.
Our informant is actually part of this crime."
Twenty people arrested, including stockbrokers
and alleged associates of the Gambino crime family.
Kerik: My cellphone rings.
Larry calls me, tells me he's been arrested
and he wanted to see me and wanted me to help him.
"No, you don't understand.
The FBI's got it wrong," and all this other stuff.
You know, "Can you call the U.S. attorney?
Can you call a judge?"
I said, "I'm not doing any of that.
You know, you're indicted.
I can't get involved."
**
He's sentenced to five years of probation,
with the caveat that, you know, if he commits more crimes
during this, he'll be in prison.
Larry doesn't take that well.
In Larry Ray's mind, Bernie Kerik owed him.
He made Bernie Kerik.
Larry decides, "I'm going to take out my revenge,"
and that takes the form of calling the media.
He starts talking about ethics violations
that Bernie Kerik might be involved in.
Reporter: Ray was a one-time felon turned FBI informant,
but he turned on Kerik, telling authorities
how Kerik took $150,000 in free apartment renovations
from a mob-linked construction firm.
Some of it was checks, some was cash.
Reporter: Kerik went to prison.
Kerik: I blame all of it on Larry Ray.
He started the investigation
that eventually resulted in me going to prison
and he was very proud of it.
**
By the time Larry gets out of jail in 2010,
he's completely alone.
Any sort of connection he used to have is gone.
He is no longer of any importance in the city.
But it's fascinating because the way
that Talia described him to her friends
her freshman year of college at Sarah Lawrence is
that he still has that power.
Larry pulls Bernie Kerik out
when he starts telling the college students
really powerful people are coming after him.
**
Jacobs: Santos Rosario, he had two sisters.
Yalitza attended Columbia as an undergraduate.
Felicia's gone to Harvard
and she's now doing her medical residency in Los Angeles.
She was well on her way to a successful life
with a meaningful career.
Santos had expressed interest in connecting Felicia with Larry
because he felt Larry was helping him
identify his issues and overcome them
and he wanted his sister Felicia to get the same benefit.
And, you know, she's introduced to Larry
and begins talking to him at length on the phone.
**
Felicia was essentially
recruited and groomed long-distance.
We were on the phone together.
Oh, I thought he was really nice, charming, smart.
We ended up talking every day, multiple times a day.
So, we were friendly.
We talked about my siblings a lot
because he was spending a lot of time with them.
Then it got to be romantic.
And Larry plays off of that and gets her to
kind of do things that she's not comfortable with.
At first, he asked about how many people I slept with.
Then what kind of sex did I like,
who did I like to sleep with?
That was at first.
He insisted that I was to go out and have sex with strangers.
While she was still living in Los Angeles,
working on her residency,
Felicia started fulfilling these sexual requests for Larry.
She believed she was in a relationship with him
and she didn't want to do any of that, and pushed back.
But, ultimately, he convinced her
that she would do these things, if she loved him.
Larry also wanted to see me having sex with someone else
and he wanted me to record it.
Larry wouldn't stop asking.
He was getting more angry
and so I decided I would comply and appease him.
I didn't want to, though.
It's remarkable that someone like Felicia...
...with her education and her life experience...
...that she got sucked in so completely and so quickly.
You have to ask yourself, "How does that happen?"
Felicia was most likely
in a vulnerable place at that point.
She's in her medical residency.
That's tough.
Perhaps learned enough from Santos
of the things that would make her more suggestible to his --
whatever he was saying on the phone to her.
It really shows how good he was at what he did,
which is what some of the people in his previous lives
had said about him.
**
He talked about how he had
helped bring down Bernard Kerik...
...and basically put him in jail and that, now, Bernard Kerik
and others were after him and were trying to hurt him.
He talked about how the people who were trying to hurt him
would target everyone who he was associated with or cared about.
I had become extremely paranoid.
I was terrified that people were going to come and kill me.
I was just scared out of my mind.
I couldn't sleep.
She goes from being somebody who is like
on a really solid upward trajectory...
...to somebody who has moved her mattress into the living room
and installed cameras around her apartment
that Larry encouraged her to buy and set up
because she's afraid that people are out to get her.
He really preys on this
to induce her to leave her residency
and abandon her dreams of being a doctor.
She just drops all of this because she's afraid and in love
and thinks that Larry can protect her.
And so she moves to New York...
...and moves into the apartment.
**
Ray: Do you want to hurt yourself?
What?
I don't. I don't want to.
-What? -I don't want to hurt myself.
Unh-unh-unh unh-unh!
I don't know, why was it so difficult to say that?
Is that accurate?
No, no, I do.
I still want to.
And have you been thinking about hurting yourself?
Um --
These young people were very much hostages,
in a very real sense.
Melendez: Santos went through some awful
emotional, physical, psychological abuse.
So, there's a video of Santos slapping himself in the face...
...while his sister Felicia is next to him on the couch...
...and she appears to be really unwell
and is kind of freaking out.
Santos spends an hour slapping himself in the face pretty hard.
Stop talking Felicia.
He was doing this because Larry told him
it was the only way to get his sister Felicia
to stop talking or to be quiet.
I think Larry was able to justify in his brain
as someone was helping me.
Can I get up now?!
No Felicia, stop talking.
Larry would pit one of his followers against another
and use them to shame each other and police each other,
to just drill feelings of guilt and shame
into the minds of his followers.
I wanna go change my clothes.
Like, I don't want to be in here.
So excuse me.
ISABELLA: Do not leave it.
ISABELLA: Do not leave the room Felicia.
ISABELLA: You're a danger to yourself and others, clearly.
[ Crying ] I'm not.
Felicia was favored early on,
which can make you feel very special, like,
"Oh, this incredible man is in a relationship with me."
[ Shouts ]
Ray: [Indistinct]
And then he just most brutally destroyed her.
Felicia, lay down.
[ Crying out ]
Watching Larry physically overpower her
and physically restrain her.
And restrained her, really, in every way --
physically and emotionally.
It was a long, drawn out, tortured conditioning period.
Are you gonna behave?
**
I was terrified.
He said he would help me.
I felt it was too much for me.
The concept of being that bad of a person
was just intolerable.
So I'm going back to bed.
Goodbye, guys. Good night.
So then I went ahead
and I tried to end it. Ray: Why are you doing that?
[ Slam ]
[ Water running ]
I was in the bathroom
and I saw a bottle of pills.
ISABELLA: I hear a pill bottle opening.
ISABELLA: And closing.
[ Thudding ]
And then Larry had gotten up.
He realized I was out of bed.
And he came, slammed the door open from the bathroom,
and then yanked me by the hair.
Spit them out.
Spit 'em.
And then said to Isabella,
"Don't let this fucking cunt kill herself in my apartment."
**
Lalich: At least three of the women tried to commit suicide.
And that's not surprising, given what they were enduring.
It's beyond comprehension, what was being done to them.
And, of course, it seems only natural
that they would reach a point
where they just couldn't take it anymore.
Suicide becomes an overriding theme,
where Larry tells them,
"All of you are prone to suicide.
There's been so many suicide attempts among you.
You are all uniquely at risk and only I can save you."
**
Williams: To an extent, pretty much all of us had PTSD.
It's somewhere around 20 guys since 2011
who committed suicide.
Both people who were more close to me
and then people who were like in my unit, as a whole.
One of the primary symptoms in PTSD
and associated with combat trauma is
paranoia and hyperawareness, basically.
For Iban, it definitely didn't seem like
that was the main driver.
It seemed like it was
the thoughts that Larry had put it in his head
that always somebody was out to get him.
When I spoke to Iban,
he sounded rational and coherent
and, yet, he was talking about something
that seemed very divorced from reality.
[ Horns honking ]
EZRA: Did you ever see Larry targeted by governmental forces?
While we were in New York, were definitely followed.
I was a driver for him for a while.
And she was being followed on the streets.
Sometimes we would see them.
Other times we didn't see anything.
But there were times where it was obvious that he was being followed.
He was like, "Oh, you know, with Larry,
Bernard Kerik's still out to get him."
It was this paranoid rambling of people associated with Larry
who don't like him or out to get Iban as well.
**
So, in spring of 2013,
a number of these students go down to North Carolina,
where Larry's stepfather, Gordon Ray, lives.
And Talia's also living there.
And Gordon has a property.
It's a large, semirural house
in Pinehurst, North Carolina, which is a small town.
Santos and Dan stay in New York, but the rest of them --
Claudia, Yalitza, Felicia, Isabella --
are all down in Pinehurst and they're doing hard labor.
Cult leaders typically exploit their followers
in whatever way they can.
So, it's not surprising that Larry would go that route
of getting free labor.
Marcus: This property is a total mess.
Essentially, they rip up all this sod.
They have to put new sod down.
They have to dig drainage ditches.
They have to use backhoes and this machinery,
none of which they have any idea how to use.
And Larry tells them they have to like work all day
and they eat when he tells them to eat
and they can't come inside until this work is done.
Here we really see the hierarchy,
even within the group,
where Talia is the most favored among them.
So, while they're all outside working,
she's inside, you know, working
on her application to law school.
You know, she's not out in the fields.
Ray: They got to get it down from the other side
and then get the water to run inside it.
Would you believe this overflowed
right onto the lawn? Look at this.
**
You've been hurting me for so long behind my back,
doing damaging things, destroying property.
I don't want to.
-Don't want to what? -[ Sniffle ]
I don't want to damage things.
Well, when was the last time you damaged something?
Larry had a background of extorting people
and financial fraud.
He created this whole scene where he convinced them
that they broke everything of his
and then you've come up with these amounts,
you know, like thousands of dollars,
that they supposedly owed him.
I was trying to --
You were trying to damage it
and do -- and aren't you doing that?
Yes.
We were talking about how much damage I did
and I gave him the estimate of $100,000.
And he said, "It sounds about right."
And I said, "It's probably more."
And he looks like, "Yeah, it's probably more."
The group was firmly under Larry Ray's thumb
and completely sold on the idea
that they owed him this massive debt
that they really would never be able to work off.
And these things they'd done became a mechanism
for Larry to extract money from their families.
They began to go to their family and friends
and tell them that they had done something wrong
and that they had to pay him back
and could they help them out?
You know, at one point, the Rosario parents,
they weren't especially wealthy.
They had managed to
save enough money to buy a small house.
And they ended up giving
six-figure amounts to Larry.
There was one day when Santos was on the phone with Talia
about how to get his parents
to give him money to make repairs
and, occasionally, Talia would hand the phone to Larry
and Larry would talk to Santos.
It was like a large amount of money,
like $20,000, around $20,000.
Santos succeeded.
And I remember Larry talking to him and saying, "Good job.
See, doesn't that feel better, you know?
Making repairs is the right thing to do,"
that kind of thing.
They become profit centers.
And Larry Ray is exploiting that.
He has them drain the bank accounts of their parents,
in some cases, the life savings,
because they convince their parents,
"I have done this kind of damage.
I owe this guy this kind of money.
I'm in big trouble."
[ Horns honking ]
**
According to the evidence that was presented,
Claudia was in a situation where Larry was demanding
thousands and thousands of dollars from her...
...and he managed to convince her
that the only way she could possibly
make the kind of money that she needed to make was
to begin selling herself.
**
So, she began working as a prostitute.
Larry convinced Claudia that she owes him,
which, at this point is, you know,
into the hundreds of thousands of dollars
for damaged machinery in Pinehurst.
She begins sleeping with men for money.
And Larry is, you know, intimately involved.
Pushing her to set up a website.
**
And giving Larry the money.
I wanted to repair what I believed I had done to Larry.
And it was because I felt immense pressure from Larry
to get money for him.
She starts living in hotels...
...seeing clients in hotels,
and any money, except what's required
to pay rent and for food, is all given to Larry.
Melendez: She was just turned into this like money vehicle
and was no longer a person.
She was just going hotel to hotel, working constantly.
The pressure just to make money was just constant...
...and extremely intense.
He would threaten to blackmail my clients.
He would threaten me physically.
He would threaten to put me in prison.
**
Somebody had found this website that was pretty unsettling
and there was a link to this video.
Ray: Speak audibly, Claudia.
I didn't care about other people.
Okay, so, say again.
I wanted to poison you and I didn't care about other people.
In that video, Claudia kind of appears to be on autopilot.
Larry Ray would accuse Claudia of things
that absolutely made no sense,
like poisoning or conspiracies to kill.
And, first, are you making this by your own free will?
Yes.
And, if she said anything other than, "Yes, I did,"
Larry would say, "But that's not the truth.
You have to tell the truth."
And these conversations would be recorded.
So the truth really meant generating blackmail material.
I poisoned you multiple times
with vials of poison.
At the same time, you were trying to convince me
that you were a good person and regretted ever doing this
and that you would never do it again.
Yeah.
Why were you doing that?
So I could continue to have access to you.
So, I think, by the time she like admits
to all these poisonings, she just wants to get out.
She just wants to put distance between her and Larry
and get out of the situation as fast as possible.
**
The money from Claudia's clients gets transferred to Isabella
and she becomes a crucial part of Larry's operation.
Everyone in a cult, to some degree,
becomes a perpetrator.
In Isabella's case, she really became
sort of the right-hand person to Larry.
She was, in a sense, the bookkeeper
for Claudia's prostitution.
There were clear accounting ledgers kept
that tell us the kind of income
that Claudia was producing for Larry.
And yet, the amount of money that he says she owes him
never seems to go down.
[ Horns honking ]
**
You know, she ends up doing this for four years...
...no holidays...
...seeing up to five clients a day...
...and ends up giving him more than $2 million.
**
Jacobs: She didn't really have anything for herself.
She lived in constant fear of Larry punishing her
and it seems like almost everything she did
during that time period was done in order to keep him happy.
**
He was committed to a psychiatric facility,
which, from his perspective, all that does is reinforce
the "Everyone's out to get me" narrative, right?
And I'm sure Larry leaned into that.
You know, "I told you they'd come for you."
Like I don't know, "I've been telling you
this was going to happen to you.
Now it's happened and you can't trust anyone."
He was kind of like the New Jersey city kid
and I was the, you know,
they would call me Mountain Goat. [ Laughs ]
And I was always like, "No, you got to come out
and experience nature, experience the woods."
And my wife and I had been having conversations
with him on the phone. We're like, "Hey,
why don't you come, move out to Oregon for a bit,
see if you can, you know, do something different out here?"
He seemed, you know, pretty enthusiastic
about it and everything and he got cleared
with his medical staff to come out and do it.
We kind of noticed,
shortly after him getting here, you know,
he just seemed like there was no passion for anything
and there was just like nothing that he wanted to do.
I was worried.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
Lalich: For everyone who's in a cult, there are always doubts,
but, of course you can't express them.
You can't say anything to anybody,
so you put them on the shelf in the back of your head
and, when that shelf breaks,
you realize, "This is not healthy.
There's something not right here,"
and then you may start to think about leaving.
**
After a while, Daniel just reached a breaking point
where he kind of broke through and realized
like what Larry was sort of presenting as this,
you know, enlightenment was just -- none of it was real.
He was making it up as he was going along.
"This guy doesn't know what he's talking about,"
and, shortly after that, he left.
For Santos, I think he had a really hard time
reckoning with the idea that Larry,
someone that was there for him, someone that listened to him,
someone that like justified some of his emotions
about his family or his parents or his sisters,
was actually a really bad person.
At a certain point, Santos, essentially,
hits his limit and stops talking to Larry.
He feels abused and he leaves.
He sort of gets some low-wage jobs,
but he cut off contact.
**
During the eviction process,
it took over three years to gain judgment.
Then to get the marshal to take action,
it took another few years.
**
It was, finally, a big relief to get Larry out of my home.
You know, by this point, he's mostly living,
on a day-to-day basis, with Isabella and Felicia.
They spend some time in hotels.
They stay in some Airbnbs.
Eventually, they land at a house in New Jersey
owned by his friend Scott Mueller.
**
There were very few spurts
that Talia was not in contact every day,
but it was practically every day,
sometimes multiple times a day, especially with Isabella.
Talia clearly comes out as a key player in the con.
She bought it to the point that she sold it to other people
and continued to believe the lie
throughout the history of this case.
**
Melendez: This is already years into her being a prostitute.
She ended up telling one of her clients
in a moment of fear, but also, I think,
trying to get out of the situation that she was in.
Larry realized that something had happened
and he responds by showing up to one of her hotel rooms.
Larry and Isabella became aware
that Claudia had tipped off one of her clients
to the fact that they named him on a website
exposing his involvement with Claudia,
who was a prostitute.
Melendez: And he responds by showing up to one of her hotel rooms.
Larry and Isabella came to Claudia's hotel room...
...and Larry tortured her
over the course of a horrific night of abuse.
He comes in and immediately starts berating her
and hitting her
and yelling at her for the simple task
of trying to tell somebody what was happening to her.
He told me to strip naked.
I was physically bound to a chair.
I could not leave.
The way that Claudia described it,
Isabella was in the room.
I remember her saying that, when Larry was pouring water over me
and lowering my body temperature,
she at one point was like, "Claudia, you're such a faker.
This water is room temperature.
It's not even cold."
Jacobs: Larry repeatedly suffocated Claudia with a plastic bag.
It was relentless
and it was painful and it was terrifying.
He ended up smothering me,
choking me to the point of passing out.
I was terrified.
I was trembling.
Lalich: And it's just beyond cruelty.
Destroying this perfectly normal student,
force her to become a sex worker
and then not only take all the money,
but torture her in between.
At a certain point, they even ordered burgers and fries
and, you know, they were eating dinner
while she was tied naked to a chair in front of them.
And then the torture started all over again.
And, at the end of it, he finally unbound her
from the chair, let her go.
She slept for a few hours.
Then she woke up and went back to work.
And it wasn't very long after that
Claudia showed signs of finally becoming fed up
with what she was being put through
and she confided in the same client about what was going on
and he provided her the escape that she desperately needed.
He got her a train ticket.
And she left the city.
She got away.
I mean, this is somebody who was giving, in some cases,
over $100,000 a month directly to fund Larry and Isabella.
They sent her a series of emails and trying to guilt trip
and intimidate her into returning,
but she didn't.
And that's the beginning of the end of this story.
**
I just started reaching out to people
and people that knew Claudia really well,
her family and friends, and they were like,
"None of us have talked to her for six years."
I pretty soon was put in contact with Daniel Levin.
He agreed to talk to me
and that was when it really became clear like
this was like something really bad and really abusive.
I felt like I had to get the story out there
to try and get these people some help.
So, James Walsh and I published the article
at the end of April 2019.
Almost a decade from the time that Larry first walked
into the dorm at Sarah Lawrence,
this piece comes out in New York Magazine,
this unbelievably wild tale.
The story came out
and we were all in the newsroom
and all of us kind of started freaking out
because it was a very weird story.
And another repercussion of the publication of the article
was that Isabella's mother and aunt and Felicia's mother
went to New Jersey and they knocked on the door
and they essentially tried to rescue their daughters.
Larry apparently hid in the back of the house
and the daughters refused to come out.
You know, even then, there was nothing
that they could really do.
These are still adults.
So that New York Magazine article,
thankfully, made its way to an FBI supervisor
in the New York FBI Field Office
and that supervisor said,
"I think we need to look at this."
And they proceeded to knock it out of the park,
determining how much income Larry Ray had
that was from sex trafficking,
from depleting the bank accounts of the kids' parents.
They acquired cellphone records.
Their emails show them being controlled, confessing.
Now, all kinds of things happening
and references to violence.
Then comes a search warrant
of the residence in Piscataway, New Jersey.
[ Siren wailing ] Early in the morning,
Larry is in bed
and a team of federal agents and NYPD officers come
into the house, place him under arrest,
and begin interrogating him
and going through everything in the house
and seizing recordings
of thousands of phone calls, videos,
several dozen hard drives,
several dozen cellphones, laptops,
as well as handwritten ledgers and handwritten journals
he'd seized from the students.
And it is an agent's dream to have a search
where that much documentation of illegality exists.
The same documentation used
to control and humiliate these kids
was the same documentation used in court
to absolutely nail Larry Ray.
[ Camera shutters clicking ] Good morning.
I'm Jeff Berman, U.S. attorney
for the Southern District of New York.
Today we announce criminal charges against this man,
Lawrence Ray,
who, for nearly a decade,
exploited and abused young women and men
emotionally, physically, and sexually
for his own financial gain.
[ Camera shutters clicking ]
The indictment contained
sex trafficking, sex trafficking conspiracy,
racketeering conspiracy,
extortion, money laundering -- a vast set of charges.
[ Camera shutter clicking continuously ]
I heard about Larry being arrested
on just a like a Google News alert.
Just popped up and said he was arrested
and so I was worried about what Iban might do.
Just because of his level of devotion towards him,
that this looked like, in Larry's world,
the culmination of, "Everyone's trying to get me."
Now, they got him and I had no idea, you know,
what he had put in his head, what he should do.
**
I went to bed and, about 10:30, 11:00 at night,
[ Siren wailing ] hear, you know, a knock on the door.
And it was a Linn County sheriff's deputy.
He initially asks if I know someone named "Eye-ban,"
because he, obviously, doesn't know how to pronounce his name.
And I was thinking, "Oh, crap, what did he do?"
But then he is asking about his tattoos
or if he has any identifiable markers.
So, now, I'm like, "Okay, like [ Laughing ] wha--
what's going on?"
And I guess the point is like, "Oh, he was found dead."
**
To my knowledge, Iban tried to slit his wrists
and was unsuccessful
and then got up and walked into traffic
and laid down on a highway.
[ Melancholy tune plays ]
**
And it seemed like Iban created like a rabbit hole for himself
that he couldn't get out of with that paranoia.
At the end of the day, I think that it's all on Larry.
I think that, if it wasn't for him,
Iban, you know, he might still have mental health struggles,
but not to that degree.
I absolutely blame Larry 100% for Iban's death.
[ Suspenseful music plays ]
Felicia was talking to the government,
but she still, essentially, was on Larry's side.
And then, at a certain point,
she kind of came to a realization
and began actually cooperating and turned on Larry.
Santos, he was played videos of what Larry had done to him
and then he just realized like, "I'm being abused,"
and he began cooperating as well.
So, Felicia, Santos, Yalitza, Claudia, and Dan,
they all handed over documents
and spent innumerable hours talking to the government.
Isabella was initially described as a victim.
The government was hoping that she would also flip.
Probably expecting that she would
and she didn't.
**
Reporter: Headlines for you.
This out of New York --
A dad accused of running a sex cult
from his daughter's dorm room. Remember this?
He's due in court in the next half hour.
Reporter #2: Ray's charged with nine counts, including extortion,
money laundering, and sex trafficking.
The prosecutor called Ray a flight risk
and a danger to the community.
The government described Talia;
and Gordon Ray, Larry's stepfather;
as coconspirators, but neither have been charged.
Talia is the ultimate true believer
because not only has she continued
to stick by her father,
her father is a blood relative
and I think that may have figured
into the prosecutive decisions here.
The idea of charging a daughter for believing her father's lies,
going back all the way to childhood,
it could be too much for a jury,
just distracting from the case at hand.
Larry appears to have essentially insulated
his immediate family
from the most incriminating parts of what he was doing.
But he had Isabella recording information
about the money coming from Claudia,
which makes her a direct accessory.
**
Where there's a trial and people have
to get up on the stand and talk
about what they experienced,
what they saw, what happened to them,
I can't think of anything that could be harder, really.
**
First of all, you have to sit there in front of your abuser.
You probably haven't seen that person in, perhaps, years.
To have that person looking at you,
trying to shut you up with their eyes.
They deserve awards
because they're helping bring these people down.
Larry Ray's trial was a jury trial,
so, you've got to convince a group of citizens,
beyond a reasonable doubt,
that these cult members were truly, against their will,
unable to consent to what was done to them.
Larry recorded everything and we got to watch it.
And it was really hard to watch
because Larry's physically beating them.
The more I heard, the more I realized
that Larry Ray was far more of a demon
than anyone ever imagined.
I think the problem for the defense was,
no matter how you spin this,
you're facing incredibly damaging videos
of your client physically harming people.
**
The witnesses were remarkably composed,
considering what they had gone through
and the nature of what they were describing for the jury --
the torture, the humiliation, the shame.
So, imagine this incredibly vulnerable person
who was part of this and having to talk about what happened,
what was done to you, and to say that publicly.
That's hard. That's tough.
Claudia really had a pretty high burden
because she was a sex trafficking victim,
so, it was not easy, I'm sure,
for her to sit there and recount,
in laborious detail,
all of the things that had happened to her.
All of a sudden, as Claudia is describing
being a forced prostitute,
one of Larry's lawyers stands up and asks for a break
and, usually, during testimony, that doesn't really happen.
He seems to go through some kind of seizure
in the courtroom, right there.
[ Siren wailing ]
And he has to be carried out of the courthouse
on a stretcher.
And he's making like eye contact with people,
like he's trying to like see who's there,
how many people are around him
as he gets put into the ambulance.
In the witness room, you can audibly hear
Claudia crying as we're all walking out,
trying to figure out what's happening.
And I said, "I know him.
I know exactly what he's doing.
He's trying to influence the jury.
He's trying to create this self-pity thing."
I said, "He's doing it on purpose."
**
As with anything related to Larry,
you have to expect some kind of curveball.
I mean, is he going to be able to like, somehow,
at the last minute, like prolong this
so that the victims no longer want to testify
or they're unsettled, and what happens?
You know, it didn't end up working.
There were two seizures and then there weren't any more.
[ Siren wailing ]
**
In all, the jury only deliberated for four hours,
which, for a trial that lasted a month
and for as many counts as he was accused of,
kind of speaks to where the jury was
before they even got to the verdict room.
It didn't take the jury very long
to come back with a unanimous verdict
that Larry was guilty on all counts.
Kerik: He knew it was coming.
The court testimony was overwhelming.
I knew he would be convicted.
Marcus: There is justice for the victims.
They wanted Larry to get arrested
and indicted and convicted
and I think it was really powerful for them.
They could now resume their lives.
They see justice has been served for him.
There's nothing harsh enough that could happen to him,
based on what he did to those kids.
There certainly have been other evil cult leaders,
but the extent of what he did
and the amount of time he was allowed to do it,
with such concentration and precision...
...that was almost beyond anything I've heard of.
I don't think there's an ounce of regret.
He just destroyed people's lives.
He loved feeling powerful.
And I almost call him a power addict.
The way that you can judge other people is
how they treat other humans.
Just a horrific individual.
There's this inevitable question
of why nothing was done earlier.
The guilt that must be felt,
not only by Sarah Lawrence administrators,
but the guilt of the victims' parents must be painful.
I have no trouble blaming Sarah Lawrence
for letting somebody move into the dorm.
What was Sarah Lawrence to do?
They could've made sure he got out of the dorm.
But I'm not sure, had they gotten him
out of the dorm sooner,
anything would've been different.
The really troublesome stuff happens later,
at the apartment on the Upper East Side.
Larry Ray was one of the most skilled con artists
I've seen in 25 years.
There may not have been much more that you could've done.
I think the biggest question about this case is
why Larry Ray did what he did.
In terms of what drove him,
I don't know if it's as simple as he wanted money and sex,
although I think he certainly did.
He was like somebody who, for decades,
was able to carve out a space for himself
outside of the typical rules
where he could exploit people's vulnerabilities.
And it was these exact same tools
which eventually led to his downfall
because he recorded his own crimes.
Part of his defense was that he really believed the conspiracy
and that these kids were bad actors working for Bernie Kerik.
Whether he believed it or not,
it's hard to say why he would ever,
and how he could, torture these young people
so extensively, in the ways that he did.
**