A 63-year-old New Jersey man will spend the next 60 years in federal prison for an array of federal felonies, including financial, sex and violent crimes, the U.S. Department of Justice has announced.
Lawrence "Larry" Ray, also known as Lawrence Grecco, of Piscataway, New Jersey, was sentenced Jan. 20 by U.S. District Judge Lewis J. Liman, the DOJ announced at the time. Ray was convicted in April 2022 for "racketeering conspiracy, violent crime in aid of racketeering, extortion, sex trafficking, forced labor, tax evasion, and money laundering offenses," the DOJ reports.
The indictment and evidence presented at the 2020 trial showed Ray moved into his daughter's dorm room at Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 2010. He then subjected students and others he met "to sexual and psychological manipulation and physical abuse," the DOJ reports.
"Ray’s tactics included sleep deprivation, psychological and sexual humiliation, verbal abuse, threats of physical violence, physical violence, threats of criminal legal action, alienating the victims from their families, and exploiting the victims’ mental health vulnerabilities," according to the report.
Ray preyed on victims he could manipulate by forcing them to falsely confess to causing damages to Ray, his family and his associates. Ray would then extort payment from the victims to cover the purported damages, according to the announcement.
"The victims made payments to Ray by draining their parents’ savings, opening credit lines, soliciting contributions from acquaintances, selling real estate ownership," the DOJ states, "and at Ray's direction, performing unpaid labor for Ray and earning money through prostitution."
Ray targeted one victim while she was still in college, the DOJ reports. He "sexually groomed this victim and collected sexually explicit photographs and other personal information, which he then used to coerce her into continued commercial sex acts." The victim was subjected to coercion, fear and physical violence, including one occasion when she was almost suffocated when Ray tied her to a chair and put a plastic bag over her head. The DOJ reports Ray collected millions of dollars from forced prostitution of this victim.
As well as forced sex acts, other victims were made to perform physical labor on properties owned by Ray, "sometimes in the middle of the night, for no pay," according to the report.
“Larry Ray is a monster," U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who announced the sentence, said in the report. "For years, he inflicted brutal and lifelong harm on innocent victims. Students who had their lives ahead of them."
Williams said Ray "groomed them and abused them into submission for his own gain. Through physical and psychological abuse, he took control over his victims’ minds and bodies and then extracted millions of dollars from them."
The sentence ensures Ray will never again inflict harm on victims, he said.
"I commend the brave victims who testified in Court in the face of incredible trauma," Williams said. "I also thank the career prosecutors in this Office and our law enforcement partners who made the just conviction and sentence in this case possible.”
