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Before he was nabbed in a $41 million pump-and-dump stock fraud two decades ago, Lawrence Ray had reportedly developed mob ties.
Ray, now 60, also became good friends with former NYPD Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik of Franklin Lakes.
He also claimed to have worked for a U.S. intelligence agency in Kosovo and in 1997 brokered a City Hall meeting with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Ray reportedly offered his services as an FBI mob informant, but things quickly unraveled in 2000 with a massive federal stock fraud case against him and several others, including the brother-in-law of notorious Mafia hitman-turned-snitch himself Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano.
Around the same time, Kerik parted ways with Ray, who’d been the best man at his 1998 wedding.
Ray then began cooperating with investigators against the Paterson-raised Kerik, who went to prison for three years after pleading guilty to tax fraud and lying during a White House background check when he was nominated as U.S. Homeland Security secretary.
Ray, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to conspiracy in the stock fraud case.
In a New York Magazine story, Kerik called Ray “a psychotic con man who has victimized every friend he’s ever had.”
In a statement to News 4 on Tuesday, Kerik said he wished that federal authorities “realized what a con man he was prior to making him their superstar witness against me” and hoped the charges against Ray “will be the end of his reign of terror on everyone he has conned, manipulated, or deceived, and the children he has hurt."
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