Lawrence Grecco (born November 16, 1959), known as Larry Ray, is an American criminal who was convicted of sex trafficking, extortion, forced labor, conspiracy, money laundering, and other offenses.
[4][10] After graduating high school he served in the United States Air Force for19 days, was dishonorably discharged, and then switched to other employment.
[9][4][14][15] Shortly after, Kerik helped Ray obtain a job as security director with a construction company run by Frank DiTommaso and his brother known as Interstate Industrial Corporation, where a portion of Ray’s responsibility was to assist the business in obtaining a license from city regulators, as the business faced allegations that it was tied to organized crime.
He pleaded guilty in 2009 in the Southern District of New York to federal felony charges for tax fraud, making false statements, and his efforts on behalf of Interstate.
It’s been close to 20 years since I last heard from him, yet his reign of terror continues.”[4] In March 2000, as Ray was living in Warren, New Jersey, he was indicted with others in Brooklyn, New York, for his role in a federal racketeering and stock fraud scheme.
This is because of Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Bernard Kerik!”[13] In 2004, his then-wife, Teresa Ray, whom he had married in 1988, filed for divorce, and alleged that he had hit her.
"[7][5] Ray was subsequently charged with interference with child custody, bail jumping, and contempt of court after he in 2005 refused to turn his daughter Talia over to a maternal relative for a visit.
[22] While there, Ray started a sex cult in which he presented himself to students as a former US Marine with training in psychological operations, as well as past work with the Central Intelligence Agency.
[2][20][7] He told the students fabricated stories about his decorated history as an international CIA agent, how he recovered Stinger missiles from the black market and engineered a cease-fire in Kosovo, and lauded the values of the Marine Corps.
[13] He then began doing “therapy sessions” and "sex education" with his daughter's roommates, initially college sophomores, counseling them, and convincing them he could help with their psychological problems.
[24][4][10][7] He learned intimate details of the students' private lives and their mental health struggles, saying it was so that he could help them, and alienated several of them from their parents.
[4] Ray, after gaining the trust of the students, then subjected his daughter’s friends to interrogations that lasted hours at a time and led to verbal and physical abuse.
[4][2] Over time, using threats, coercion, and eventually threatening some of them with knives and a hammer, he persuaded them to confess to crimes that they had not committed, including damaging his apartment and property and him and his family, using tactics such as sleep deprivation, psychological and sexual humiliation, verbal abuse, physical violence, and threats of legal action, and then extorted $1 million from five of his victims, with some victims withdrawing hundreds of thousands of dollars from their parents’ savings accounts at his direction.
[25] In the summer of 2011, he and some of the group of Sarah Lawrence students, including Santos Rosario and his two sisters (Yalitza, a Columbia University student, and Felicia), Daniel Levin, Claudia Drury, Isabella Pollock, and Talia moved into a one-bedroom condo apartment owned by Ray's old friend Lee Chen, in Apartment 5E at 300 East 93rd Street on the Upper East Side in nearby Manhattan, New York City.
[30][13][31][7][32] Ray forced the female roommates to have sex with him and with others, saying it would assist them in moving past their childhood traumas, videotaped the encounters, and threatened to post the tapes and to send them to the young women's parents.
[34] In that same year, he brought Yallitza and Felicia Rosario, and later also Claudia Drury and Isabella Pollock, to his stepfather's property in Pinehurst, North Carolina, where he restricted their access to food (locking the refrigerator), was physically violent with them, berated them for imaginary infractions, accused them of poisoning him, and threatened them.
[20] In February 2020, Ray was arrested in New Jersey and charged by federal prosecutors in Manhattan with sex trafficking, extortion, forced labor, conspiracy, money laundering (of $1 million that he obtained from the victims), and other related offenses, following eight years of alleged transgressions with Sarah Lawrence College students and former students, including subjecting his victims to sexual and psychological manipulation and physical abuse, and torturing them mentally and physically.
[7][48] A two-act play Runts written by Melvin Jules Bukiet was produced, opening in May 2023 at the Teatro Latea on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as part of the New York Theater Festival, which was loosely based on the events.