Anton Lazzaro, a Republican strategist who targeted “broken” teenage girls to prey on them for sex, was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison on Wednesday.
Lazzaro, a wannabe playboy who led a flashy Instagram lifestyle driving exotic sports cars and waving stacks of cash, was a rising star in Minnesota political circles who funded Republican efforts and even landed himself a spot as an alternate elector for former President Donald Trump in 2020.
The Daily Beast first exposed the existence of an FBI investigation into his activities with underage girls, as well as a raid by special agents on his high-end Minneapolis condo—despite Lazzaro’s personal threats against this reporter for pursuing the story. Cops later tracked down his 19-year-old accomplice too.
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“Tony” Lazzaro made his defense lawyers’ lives impossible as his case made its way to trial, accusing the government of unfairly seizing his prized collection of gold, blazing red Ferrari, and swanky apartment. But he was ultimately convicted of teen sex trafficking in March—after jurors heard from victims and saw the way he took to social media to express heartfelt sympathy for another creep: sexual abuser billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.
Before his sentencing, Lazzaro in court papers derided prosecutors for relying “heavily on tropes, name calling, and vilification.”
Meanwhile, prosecutors asked the judge to send him away for 30 years, noting how he “picked out physically small and emotionally vulnerable victims, who Lazzaro called ‘broken girls.’ He alternatively impressed them, flattered them, gave them cash and presents, and plied them with alcohol. Some victims required more grooming, some less. Lazzaro praised and plainly emulated Jeffrey Epstein, the world’s most infamous sex trafficker of minors.”
“There were photos and videos that Lazzaro took and kept of his victims. But perhaps the most disturbing exchange was when Lazzaro was expecting a group of underage girls—14- and 15-year-old girls he spirited away from a slumber party in the middle of the night, out from under their parents’ noses, to Lazzaro’s home nearly an hour away,” prosecutors wrote to the judge.
In court on Wednesday morning, at least one of his victims spoke up and said, “Anton looked for broken girls. I wasn’t broken when I met him. He broke me,” according to Ben Freedland, a former friend of his in the courtroom who reached out to The Daily Beast. Most of the girls fit a particular description: young-looking, blonde, and thin.
Freedland said that when it was Lazzaro’s turn to speak, the convicted sex felon started by addressing the judge directly: “Just wanted to ask you, how’s Brett Kavanaugh?”
“Excuse me,” U.S. District Judge Patrick J. Schiltz shot back, noting that the victims “were not girls disguised as women, they were children.”
Lazzaro is set to spend two decades in federal prison—a slightly longer time than the ages of each of the six girls he sexually abused.
