A man who made years-long allegations about hard-partying with Barack Obama admitted that he once asked a judge to give him the maximum sentence.
Larry Sinclair, a serial criminal with a checkered past, claimed that Barack Obama bought him “an eight ball” of cocaine during an alleged drug-fueled night in 1999, according to his self-published book.
After a 1986 arrest at the Lakewood (CO) Sheraton hotel for credit card theft and check forgery, Sinclair told a judge to give him the maximum sentence.
He said he thought being held in prison was the only way he could get himself to stop. “I informed (the judge) that I was guilty, and that he might consider sentencing me to the maximum allowed by law, because I would continue to do what I chose to do until I decided to change,” he wrote.
The prison love affair with an armed robber
Tomas Silvas was an armed robber and “heroin, valium and cocaine” abuser who “sexually assaulted a female police officer,” according to a 1992 article in the Arizona Daily Star. His father, Manual Silvas, was the last man ever executed in Arizona’s gas chamber, in 1963.
Sinclair has “Tomas” tattooed on his left arm in honor of Tomas Silvas, a love interest he met during a 1980’s stint at the Central Unit of the Arizona Department of Corrections in Florence, Arizona.
He also legally changed his name from “Lawrence Wayne Sinclair” to “La-Rye Ashaiti Silvas” “to prove how much (he) cared for” Silvas. Sinclair would change his name back to his birth name in 1997, after hearing his father had been diagnosed with cancer and was terminally ill.
In and out of prison
In the 1980s, Sinclair was in and out of state prisons in Arizona, Colorado and Florida for stealing credit cards and forging checks.
After telling the Colorado judge to give him the max for theft and forgery, Sinclair was sentenced to 16 years. He served 10 of those years, from 1987 to 1997, and was paroled at age 36.
Trouble with post-prison employment
Upon being paroled from Arizona state prison in 1982, at the age of 21, Sinclair worked for the Marriott Hotel’s Camelback Inn in Scottsdale. He claims he was fired from his job there after “a former female roommate and co-worker… falsely claimed (he) was in possession of a handgun.”
Sinclair worked for Tony Roma’s in Scottsdale, a casual dining chain specializing in baby back ribs. He says he later worked for Tony Roma’s restaurants in North Hollywood, Encino and Beverly Hills, California “before being promoted to chef/kitchen manager at the Santa Monica location.”
He said he left Tony Roma’s after “having a difference with the district manager” over the fact that more experienced Mexican employees there were being paid less “than their white and black counterparts.”
Sinclair moved from Arizona to New York, where he says he lived in Rego Park as well as in Forest Hills and Long Island City, in Queens. He worked there for Tony Roma’s in Greenwich Village and for the Waldorf-Astoria hotel.
Sinclair’s book, Barack Obama and Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies and Murder, was self-published on Amazon on Jan. 1, 2010.