What happened to the group of bright college students who fell under the sway of a classmate’s father?
Photo-Illustration: Art Handler I. Anyone who spent 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.
Living in the apartment wasn’t all that different from living in a college dorm. There were family meals, movie nights, and a self-serious camaraderie that fostered intense discussions that could drag on all night. Daniel would wake up the next morning to “Baba O’Riley” and go to his job exhausted. Larry himself never seemed to get tired. He preached the benefits of prescription amphetamines and, according to multiple acquaintances, took them in such high doses he rarely needed sleep.
On 93rd Street, small mistakes weren’t just symbols of childhood trauma. They were evidence that the kids were trying to “sabotage” Larry’s program of self-improvement. Subversive behavior was explored in painstaking detail and required written, signed confessions. In one, Santos wrote, “I threw out around five checkbooks and ripped out pages from at least two,” and detailed plans to “interfere with Larry’s business and not let him work by making sure to take up his time and waste it.
Still, Daniel didn’t leave the apartment. “It was a combination of feeling like, This is unusual, and I feel kind of weird,” he says, “but my immediate next thought was, Everyone else seems to think this is really good. Maybe there’s something wrong with me, and I need to lean into this.” 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.
In 2004, his wife, Teresa, filed for divorce. A few months later, Teresa called the police to their house and claimed Larry had hit her. A source close to the family said that when police showed up, Larry and Talia, then 15, accused Teresa of child abuse. New Jersey’s child-welfare department gave Larry temporary custody. Over the next few months, the department received multiple anonymous complaints accusing Teresa of physical and sexual abuse.
Behind this mass plot to undo him, Larry claimed, was his former friend Bernie Kerik. “Kerik aligned himself with my wife in 2004 and Giuliani and his whole camp, and he used the family court against me,” Larry told conspiracy theorist A. J. Weberman for his book Homothug: The Secret Life of Rudy Giuliani. According to Larry’s blog posts at the time, judges, prosecutors, police, federal agents, and even his own lawyers were working on behalf of Kerik.
Both Claudia and Daniel spent their winter break in the apartment on the Upper East Side, and when their time abroad was over, Larry welcomed them back for the summer. Once school started again, Daniel continued to live in the apartment, commuting to Bronxville for class. Claudia got on-campus housing but still visited the apartment and stayed close with Larry.
Claudia’s mother had similar fears. “We talked to Claudia many, many times and had many, many arguments about how we thought Larry was not good for her, but there was no convincing her,” she says. “Still, we didn’t get how serious it was until it was too late.” It wasn’t the first time Larry had shown flashes of violence. According to Chen, Larry would regularly abuse Santos, often putting the 20-year-old in a sleeper hold until he passed out. “Did the darkness envelop you?” he would ask when Santos woke up. Once, after Daniel supposedly damaged the oven, Larry asked him to kneel and then stood over him with a knife and threatened to dismember him.
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.
Santos’s parents estimate that they gave Larry more than $200,000 over three years. They were forced to sell their house to cover the costs. They went to the NYPD three times with their story, but police told them there wasn’t much that could be done if their children were over 18. Claudia’s parents also alerted the police and were told the same thing. In 2017, the police conducted a wellness check on Claudia and determined that she was acting of her own free will.
Daniel, Talia, and Isabella graduated in the spring of 2013. Santos never graduated. Claudia graduated a semester late, in the winter of 2013. Larry attended her commencement ceremony. According to Claudia’s mother, Green, the dean of students, approached her and Claudia’s father and said, “Well, I’m glad I won’t be seeing him anymore.”
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. IV. It’s clear they want to kill us,” Larry says, walking across midtown Manhattan at a gentle pace on a recent afternoon. He is talking about Kerik and DiTommaso. “They’re arrogant, they’re violent, they’re terrible people.” Isabella, a few strides ahead, is on a fool’s errand, browsing Yelp for a quiet restaurant in Murray Hill during happy hour. “In a way, it’s so wild,” Larry continues, stopping dead in his tracks for dramatic effect.
Now 59, he is, he explains, in tremendous pain. He’s lost teeth, he gets headaches, sometimes he limps. He seems to have divided the former students into camps. On one side are Talia, Felicia, and Isabella, who were poisoned. On the other, Claudia, Yalitza, and Santos, who he believes are behind the poisoning.
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