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By JENNIFER LIBERTO, Times Staff WriterIt wasn't easy to show Steven Lorenzo had unwilling victims. So investigators collected drug evidence before arresting him.
TAMPA - On a June 2, 2004 raid, authorities hit the jackpot at Steven Lorenzo's Seminole Heights bungalow.
They found sex toys, duct tape, gas masks, rope and hundreds of pictures of young men - naked, bound and asleep with fat lips and swollen noses.
The raid also uncovered a five-minute video of a bound, naked, groggy man crying and whimpering, as Steven Lorenzo stands over his head. It was recorded days before the fatal weekend when two 26-year-old men disappeared.
Evidence appeared to support testimony from several young men who told Tampa police officers Lorenzo had drugged them against their will and tortured them after meeting them at clubs in Tampa.
There was a lag, however, between the time police learned about the accusations and when Lorenzo was jailed on the charges he currently faces. During the summer of 2004, he was picked up on minor drug charges, but got out on bail almost immediately.
While out, he is alleged to have committed another assault. Prosecutor Anthony Porcelli said in the trial Thursday that Lorenzo drugged and assaulted a ninth victim at the Suncoast Resort in St. Petersburg, in October 2004.
Prosecutors waited five months - until Nov. 2, 2004 - to charge Lorenzo, 46, with the more serious accusations of distributing the "date rape" drug GHB to a series of victims.
What took so long?
It turns out that prosecuting an admitted sadist who clearly had contact and "partied with" willing torture victims, or masochists, is no easy task.
Lorenzo, 46, faced a second day of trial Thursday on nine counts of giving GHB to victims to commit violent crimes. He faces 20 years in prison for each count, plus another 20 years for a count of conspiracy with Scott Schweichert, 40, of Peru, Ill.
Neither Lorenzo nor Schweichert has been charged with murder. Yet, prosecutors are expected to present evidence implicating Lorenzo and Schweichert in the December 2003 murders of Jason Galehouse, 26, of Sarasota and Michael Wachholtz, 26, of Tampa.
Lorenzo's attorney Donald Harrison said Lorenzo was promiscuous but knows nothing about the disappearance of Galehouse and Wachholtz. Lorenzo has said sexual activity at his house was consensual.
In hundreds of instant messages that he printed out and left in heaping piles on the floor of his office, Lorenzo writes that he derived pleasure from torturing people. But cases involving sadists looking for masochists can be tricky, because there's an entire subculture that engages in consensual sexual "torture" for pleasure.
"It's not a crime to be a sadist," said Bob Walsh, a professor of criminal justice at University of Houston Downtown, who teaches a course on sex crimes.
In some Internet messages seized from Lorenzo's home, some of the people Lorenzo contacted over the years agreed they wanted to be tortured, even as they heard Lorenzo describe that he would "rape" them after he drugged them with GHB to make them more pliable to his sexual advances.
When Lorenzo told one person he planned to drug them so that, "You have no choice but to leme (sic) have my way with you," the person wrote in reply: "Hot, love that."
However, it is absolutely a crime to torture people who are not willing participants, Walsh said. And criminals and serial killers tend to prefer to target and attack unwilling, vulnerable victims rather than masochists who are more agreeable, Walsh said.
Also, distributing GHB for human consumption is a crime with no exceptions, Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Scott Albrecht said in trial Thursday.
Albrecht testified nearly all day Thursday. He pointed out a purple rag, which he said was used to block the intake of a respirator strapped to a man's face, as an example of torture that may come up later in the trial. Testimony from victims is expected to start next week.
Prosecutors also played a disturbing five-minute section of a video recorded Thursday, Dec. 18, 2003, at 3:57 a.m.
Most of the time, the man seemed helpless, groggy, awake and in pain while Lorenzo walked all around him, talking dirty and fondling him.
"I told you before I own you and I let you go," Lorenzo told the man. "If I let you go."
The person in the video is not among the young men described in documents as having come forward to say Lorenzo assaulted them.
When Lorenzo asked him if he was going to be a "good boy," the man whimpered, "Yes, master."
Times staff writers Justin George, Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler and Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report.