What happened to the group of bright college students who fell under the sway of a classmate’s father?
on all counts. Authorities began investigating Ray in response to this article, originally published in April 2019.time with Talia Ray during her first year at Sarah Lawrence College heard her talk about her father. He was a truth teller, she’d explain, who’d been silenced by a group of powerful, vindictive men. He’d been sent to prison for his heroic efforts to save her and her younger sister from their abusive mother, and his incarceration was the result of deep-seated government corruption.
Located just above the city limits of New York, Sarah Lawrence looks as if it had been plucked from a New England town and plopped 15 miles north of Times Square. It can feel whimsically sheltered, even more so than most liberal-arts colleges. The school’s head of security once sent out safety alerts because a small fox had been seen on campus. The residents of Slonim 9 were in some ways typical Sarah Lawrence students: an artistic, bookish group of introverts with good grades.
“Isabella was pretty fragile,” says Juli Anna. “In fact, a lot of people in that building were pretty fragile.” Another roommate, Claudia, was particularly intrigued by the presentation and began having weekly counseling sessions with Larry. Claudia had grown up on the outskirts of Los Angeles. In high school, she was part of a group of close friends who spent weekends writing poetry, taking pictures, and talking about boys. “She was so smart and creative,” says one of her best friends from high school. “I think what she was best at was telling stories.
Near the end of the school year, Daniel found himself unmoored. His relationship with his girlfriend was crumbling, and he had nowhere to live that summer. Santos and Claudia urged him to speak with Larry. The two met in a Starbucks one afternoon and talked for hours. Larry gave him advice that felt refreshingly straightforward: Dump your girlfriend. On the question of Daniel’s sexuality, Larry shut down the suggestion conclusively: “Oh no, you’re not gay,” he said.
Daniel worked at a vegan-ice-cream shop in the East Village that summer. Larry seemed to have several streams of income: He was a life consultant for a wealthy friend and was building a domain-name business he’d enlisted the kids’ help with. He could be extravagantly generous.
Larry prodded his young roommates to live healthier lifestyles. Claudia was particularly motivated to adopt Larry’s eating and exercise regimen. According to her mother, she became fixated on losing weight and increasingly unhappy with how she looked. From the first time they’d heard about Larry, Claudia’s parents were suspicious of him. When they realized he was living in Slonim 9, they met with Allen Green, Sarah Lawrence’s dean of student life.
Daniel remembers delivering handwritten letters to Larry listing items he had damaged as part of an intentional effort to harm Larry’s family. Daniel now believes the confessions served to cement Larry’s psychological conditioning. “All this pressure had been put on all of us to believe that we had done all these terrible things to him and his family,” he says. The confession process demanded that Daniel reconfigure his own memories to reconcile them with Larry’s accusations.
Larry worked on Wall Street in the early ’80s despite not having a college degree. He later became a consultant, helping clients in the insurance, construction, finance, and gambling industries. He claimed to be a partner in a popular Italian restaurant, where he held fund-raisers for politicians, including one for Patrick Kennedy in 1993.
Of all Larry’s relationships with powerful people, one would prove the most significant in the years to come. In 1995, Larry met a young NYPD detective named Bernie Kerik. Kerik had recently been promoted from being Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s driver to the director of the New York City Department of Correction’s investigations division. Kerik was impressed by Larry, who exuded a macho, streetwise charisma and had valuable connections. The two became friends.
In March 2000, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn indicted 19 defendants, including Larry, for their involvement in the securities-fraud scheme. Larry was charged with agreeing to pay a $100,000 bribe to the executive of a bond brokerage on behalf of Garafola. Prosecutors acknowledged that Larry had provided useful background information to the FBI but nothing that had helped the investigation in any significant way. In fact, they argued, Larry had repeatedly lied to the FBI.
While Larry was on trial, Kerik’s star was on the rise. The police commissioner’s visibility in the wake of 9/11 springboarded him to the national stage. He appeared regularly on TV and did a stint as an adviser in Iraq. The city renamed Manhattan’s jail the Bernard B. Kerik Complex. Then, on December 3, 2004, George W. Bush nominated Kerik to be secretary of Homeland Security. A week later, Kerik withdrew his nomination, citing the fact that he had once employed an undocumented nanny.
The report concluded that Larry had manipulated Talia into making abuse allegations that “fit no discernible pattern ever reported to this examiner, who has been evaluating families for 20 years.” The examiner found that neither Talia nor her younger sister had been abused physically or sexually and characterized Larry and Talia’s accusations against Teresa as “rehearsed.” When the examiner asked Talia’s 4-year-old sister if her mother hit her, she started laughing.
The domestic-violence arrest was one reason federal prosecutors argued in 2007 that Larry had violated his probation in the pump-and-dump conviction. The government declared him a fugitive, and U.S. Marshals spent weeks trying to find him. Eventually, they tracked his cell phone to Chen’s apartment on East 93rd Street. Five marshals broke down the door and found Larry and Talia inside. The marshals pinned Larry to the ground and handcuffed him, breaking his arm.
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.
“I looked at him and I said, ‘What are you talking about? When Claudia was born, it was the joy of my life. Claudia was everything to me. I had a daughter, and I was so happy,’ ” her mother says. “And he dug in until I just exploded crying. He was trying to break us down. She was on his team, and her father and I were on another team. She said, ‘I don’t believe you, Mom. I don’t believe you could have loved me because of her.’ ” Then Claudia left with Larry.
Larry has a long history of manipulating women. According to multiple people who knew him in the 1990s, it was common for Larry to offer sex with his girlfriend to friends and business associates. And not doing what Larry wanted had consequences. According to one person, when his girlfriend tried to leave their relationship, Larry sent graphic pictures of her to her parents.
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.graduated in the spring of 2013. Santos never graduated. Claudia graduated a semester late, in the winter of 2013. Larry attended her commencement ceremony.
Claudia’s parents separated in 2013, in large part because of the stress Larry had injected into their relationship. Her mother eventually moved out of the city, and Claudia started living in hotels. In 2014, Claudia began working as an escort under a nom de guerre that was a combination of Larry’s daughters’ names. Her website advertised services for $8,000 a night. She would give her profits to Larry in order to pay for the damage she believed she’d done in North Carolina.
Claudia went on to testify that after she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence, her family began receiving money from Kerik and those working with him. Kerik ordered Claudia to poison Larry using arsenic, cyanide, mercury, silver, and lead. Eventually, her list of targets expanded to include Talia, Isabella, and others. “Bernie’s really happy with your performance,” Larry’s mother had said, according to Claudia’s testimony.
Chen won the eviction case, though it would take almost another year to get Larry out of the apartment.nine months after the trial, Larry was in the lobby of the Hudson Hotel with Claudia and Santos when DiTommaso saw him. Surveillance footage shows DiTommaso approach Larry and begin to violently beat him while Claudia and Santos try to stop him.
His primary conversational tactic is to overwhelm. He can go on 20-minute unbroken monologues, especially if the subject turns to his victimhood. Everyone in his past, from his defense attorneys to his own mother, is “corrupt” or “biased.” He firmly believes that he, Felicia, Isabella, and Talia have been poisoned — and are still being poisoned. “We’ve suffered so much, and we’re still suffering so much,” he says. But when he’s pushed for specifics, his reasoning turns circular.
Larry refused to talk about some parts of his past because they’re either “classified” or would “endanger other people.” Through Ripa his lawyer, Larry, Talia, Isabella, and Felicia denied almost every assertion in this article, including the sexual humiliation of Daniel. In conversation, however, Larry admitted to taking Claudia’s money from escorting. In fact, he was pleased with Claudia’s efforts to pay him back for the damage he says she did.
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