Senior U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis calls it “not comprehensible to this court” that case was prosecuted in Brooklyn when state and federal authorities in Albany were aware of “illegality and abuses” here

NEW YORK — A federal judge spared high-ranking NXIVM defector Lauren Salzman any prison time while sharply questioning why authorities in the Capital Region failed to bring a criminal case against Keith Raniere and his cult-like organization despite abundant evidence of wrongdoing.

Addressing a courtroom that included the defendant’s father, her victims and at least one Raniere loyalist, Senior U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis on Wednesday praised federal prosecutors in the Brooklyn-based Eastern District of New York for tackling what he termed the “NXIVM sex cult.”

Garaufis said it was “not comprehensible to this court” that the case was tried in Brooklyn instead of in the Northern District of New York, which included NXIVM’s Capital Region base of operations — even though state and federal authorities in Albany were aware of “illegality and abuses.”

“How in the world this went on for so many years in Albany, New York, and its environs will forever be a sad mystery to this court,” the judge said, sitting in the same fourth-floor courtroom where Raniere was tried and convicted two years ago.

The Times Union, which had been covering NXIVM since 2003, published an especially devastating series of articles in 2012 that revealed allegations that Raniere had molested underage girls. As recently as the spring of 2017, an FBI agent in Albany declined to take action when a woman who had recently left the group reported that women were being blackmailed and branded as part of a “master-slave” group within NXIVM.

Now 60, Raniere was convicted of all charges against him, including racketeering, sex trafficking, forced labor and wire fraud conspiracy. He is serving 120 years in prison.