Lawrence Ray
New York Times
Aug. 26, 2020
Prosecutors say Lawrence V. Ray was a Svengali-like figure who moved into his daughter’s dormitory at Sarah Lawrence College and recruited some of her classmates into a bizarre, cultlike group.
Over the next decade, Mr. Ray, 60, subjected the students to psychological and physical abuse and even forced one into prostitution, they have said. Charged in February with sex trafficking and extortion, Mr. Ray has been awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail cell.
Now, though, prosecutors say, his case has taken a disturbing new turn. The government says Mr. Ray has continued to try to control at least two of his victims from inside his cell, speaking with his father on the telephone, in coded language, and asking him to send the women messages, trying to ensure their loyalty and even promising to marry one of them.
“These messages are plainly designed to tamper with witnesses and deter these women from cooperating in the government’s investigation,” the prosecutors wrote on Friday to the judge overseeing Mr. Ray’s case.
In one phone conversation in June, which prosecutors quoted in their court papers, Mr. Ray told his father that the government wanted the women to testify against him.
“That’s never going to happen,” Mr. Ray declared, adding that “what they’re going on is not the truth.”
Mr. Ray, who has pleaded not guilty in the sex-trafficking case, has not been charged with jury tampering, and his lawyers, who declined to comment, are expected to respond to the new allegations in a court filing late on Wednesday.
Even before he was charged in February, Mr. Ray was a figure of intrigue, someone who was in and out of legal trouble and who knew mobsters, politicians and high-ranking military officials.
In 1998, he was the best man at the wedding of Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York police commissioner. In a New York magazine article last year, Mr. Kerik was quoted, calling Mr. Ray “a psychotic con man who has victimized every friend he’s ever had.”
In announcing charges against Mr. Ray in February, prosecutors said that he had exploited his victims, initially at Sarah Lawrence, in Yonkers, N.Y., and later at residences in Manhattan and Pinehurst, North Carolina.
The authorities said he used psychological manipulation, offering “therapy” sessions in which he learned intimate details of their private lives and mental health struggles under the pretense of helping them.
According to the indictment, he later extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars from his victims, relying on tactics like sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, verbal abuse and physical violence as he persuaded them to make false confessions to damaging property or even trying to kill him.
The investigation that resulted in the charges against him was prompted by the article in New York magazine, titled “The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence,” officials have said.
Mr. Ray’s lawyers recently asked the judge, Lewis J. Liman of Federal District Court, to temporarily release him into home incarceration, citing what they called his “near-total inability” to meet with them and review discovery materials because of strict jail conditions related to the coronavirus pandemic.
The office of Audrey Strauss, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, objected to the request, writing to the judge that Mr. Ray’s recent calls to his father demonstrated “ongoing efforts” to influence and tamper with victims, co-conspirators and potential witnesses.
Prosecutors said the calls, placed from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, revealed that Mr. Ray was continuing to communicate with the two young women who had been living with him before his arrest and who had been witnesses to his “pattern of victimization” of others over the years.
Ms. Strauss’s office said it has evidence that Mr. Ray had physically and verbally abused the two women, who were not identified. He also had amassed videos that contained “graphic sexual content of these two women, including sexual acts performed at Ray’s direction that appear designed to debase and control them,” the government said.
Since his arrest, the prosecutors said, Mr. Ray had kept the two women “in his orbit,” using his father as a conduit.
In their phone calls, Mr. Ray’s father provided his son with “frequent reports about the women’s whereabouts” and often used “coded references to ‘company’ or ‘friends’ to indicate when the two women are physically present during a call,” the government wrote. In one call, Mr. Ray’s father told his son that the two women had moved to a location near his home.
“Most troubling,” the prosecutors wrote, “the calls suggest that Ray’s ongoing communications are designed to ensure the ongoing loyalty of these women and to inhibit their ability to detach from the influence he commanded over them for nearly a decade.”
In one call in May, for example, Mr. Ray asked his father to tell the women that they had “signed on forever.” In June, the government said, Mr. Ray “made clear his intent to keep the women isolated from others” and to keep them under his control.
“The defendant admonished his father, seemingly in the presence of the women, ‘No new friends. There should be no one in anybody’s life except each other,’” the prosecutors wrote.
Mr. Ray also tried to ensure the women’s continued loyalty through romantic commitments, the government wrote. Before his arrest, he had described one of the women as his common-law wife and the other as akin to a daughter. But in one call, prosecutors said, Mr. Ray instructed his father to tell the one he considered a daughter that he would “marry” her and to “make sure she knows that.”
The prosecutors asked the judge to keep Mr. Ray in jail and to order he be prohibited from contacting potential witnesses.
Benjamin Weiser is a reporter covering the Manhattan federal courts. He has long covered criminal justice, both as a beat and investigative reporter. Before joining The Times in 1997, he worked at The Washington Post. @BenWeiserNYT
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/26/nyregion/larry-ray-sarah-lawrence.html
No comments:
Post a Comment