See All<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\nThe party didn\u2019t stop when the two got home. Woeltz and Duplessie transformed the five-story townhouse they were staying in on Prince Street into an after-hours nightclub of their own, filling it with young employees from Brandy Melville around the corner. The parties were wild and sometimes unnerving; the hosts bragged about ties to intelligence agencies and showed off guns, knives, and cattle prods. The same security team that accompanied them to clubs \u2014 some of them off-duty NYPD officers \u2014 patrolled the house at all hours.<\/p>\n
This went on for months, until one morning, on the eve of Memorial Day weekend, when a 28-year-old man dashed from the townhouse onto the sidewalk, barefoot and bleeding from his head. He staggered down the street and flagged a traffic cop. He\u2019d just escaped from a nightmare, he claimed in a lilting Italian accent. Two crypto investors had held him captive and tortured him for weeks for the passwords to his cryptocurrency accounts. The man, Michael Carturan, was taken to a hospital. Police soon arrested his alleged captors, Duplessie and Woeltz.<\/p>\n
There have been at least 33 crypto kidnappings around the world this year; this would be the first known occurrence in New York. The appeal is irresistible. Over the past few years, as the value of crypto has ballooned, its millionaires and billionaires have lived heedlessly, some blithely filling the space left by mafia bosses and drug kingpins before them, publicly posting pictures of their Brickell penthouses and courtside Chrome Hearts outfits. These very suddenly, very flashily wealthy people have found themselves contending with the downsides of having chosen to release their fortunes from the grip of banks. Even the most successful crypto investors tend to hold their vast digital fortunes on their own devices, and their money can be taken from them almost instantly. All a thief needs is access to the right device, like a hard drive, or the password to an online account. Once a crypto fortune has been stolen, there is often no regulator or bank security department a victim can ask to reverse the transaction.<\/p>\n
For some who knew Duplessie \u2014 friends, former business partners \u2014 his arrest seemed inevitable. In fact, some of these guessed he might be involved in the kidnapping before he was even named. \u201cI just saw the headline, like, \u2018Chain-Saw Torture in New York Penthouse,\u2019 and I assumed it was Will,\u201d says one former friend. \u201cThat\u2019s how on brand it was for him.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n Michael Carturan in designer clothing Will Duplessie bought him. Footage obtained by WNBC showing Carturan approaching a Nolita traffic cop went viral. Photo: Gotham Galleria; Photo: WNBC.\n <\/p>\n
\n Michael Carturan in designer clothing Will Duplessie bought him. Footage obtained by WNBC showing Carturan approaching a Nolita traffic cop went viral… more
\n Michael Carturan in designer clothing Will Duplessie bought him. Footage obtained by WNBC showing Carturan approaching a Nolita traffic cop went viral. Photo: Gotham Galleria; Photo: WNBC.\n <\/p>\n
William Duplessie grew up in Greenwich next door to the hedge-fund billionaire Ray Dalio. His father, James, was an investment manager specializing in distressed debt; his mother, Eve, was a social worker. They had four children but divorced when they were still young; James moved to a condo in Soho, and Eve stayed in Connecticut. Will, their eldest child, appeared to possess all of the privilege and pedigree that would guarantee future success. He was handsome and charming with straight white teeth, a chiseled jaw, and an enviable physique, not just tall but strong and hulking.<\/p>\n
But from early in his teen years, he seemed unable to avoid trouble. His father told friends they\u2019d \u201cspent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to figure out what was wrong with him.\u201d Will told people that before he could finish his senior year at King, a private high school in nearby Stamford, he had stabbed a drug dealer.<\/p>\n
After this incident, he later told people, his father shipped him off to China to work in a bicycle factory. There, each evening, Duplessie returned covered in soot to his five-star hotel. It seemed like a miracle when he was accepted to Bard College. He started in 2012 but showed little academic interest. He spent much of his time in a house off-campus his freshman year with Peter Brant Jr., son of the billionaire art collector. To people who met him, he came across as fratty, an anomaly at a liberal-arts school with no fraternities. \u201cHe never went to class, like, ever. I think he went to, like, two classes the entire time we knew him,\u201d says a friend. Instead, he stayed home making electronic music \u2014 he DJ\u2019d under the alias \u201cWilliam the Conqueror\u201d and tried to get gigs at Webster Hall. \u201cI don\u2019t think anybody liked him, but they would all go to his parties,\u201d says the friend. \u201cHe would buy a shit ton of liquor for everybody, and they would ball out.\u201d<\/p>\n
On weekends, Duplessie would escape to the city in his Audi, doing the nearly two-hour drive in a little more than an hour: \u201cJust driving dangerously fast,\u201d says the friend. He could be volatile. A perceived slight could send him screaming, his face ruddy and glistening with sweat and snot. \u201cIt was pretty terrifying to see, especially for someone that\u2019s just so physically big,\u201d says a former classmate. One night, as a show of toughness, Duplessie took a lit cigarette and held it to his own tongue for so long \u201cthat you could actually smell burnt flesh,\u201d says a person who witnessed it.<\/p>\n
When Duplessie was sober, he would heap praise on friends, offering to do them favors or make introductions. In this state, the former friend says, \u201che was an easy guy to like. He was fun to be around.\u201d But by his second semester, Duplessie had dropped out.<\/p>\n
He later enrolled at Tulane, his father\u2019s alma mater. The friends he made off-campus, in the 13th Ward of New Orleans, weren\u2019t like the gentle progressives upstate at Bard. He acquired a collection of guns. \u201cI\u2019m known as Wild Bill, and I\u2019m feared in New Orleans,\u201d Duplessie told friends. \u201cI don\u2019t wear blue because I\u2019m Blood-affiliated.\u201d Tulane students who knew him didn\u2019t take any of it too seriously. \u201cHe would meet people along the way that had some attribute that he would say, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s cool,\u2019 and he would integrate it into his personality,\u201d says an old acquaintance. According to someone close to the family at the time, Duplessie had gotten mixed up in the local gang scene, apparently even agreeing to sell $5,000 worth of cocaine on one local syndicate\u2019s behalf (and instead snorting it all himself). His father pulled him out of Tulane and brought him to California, where he was living.<\/p>\n
One thing Duplessie actually had going for him was crypto. By 2017, he\u2019d made enough off his early investments to open doors in the nascent industry. He managed to get a job in Los Angeles working for DNA, an investment firm focused on Web3 that was founded by Brock Pierce, and claimed he was making $100,000 a year. He lasted a month before he was \u201cabruptly terminated,\u201d says a person familiar with the situation. Duplessie quickly fell into debt, according to court documents and text messages from the time, sinking borrowed money into risky trades in the market and blowing it on cars he couldn\u2019t afford. \u201cAlways had drugs, always had girls, never had money. That was Will,\u201d says a former associate. By the beginning of October 2017, he was begging friends for money. \u201cI\u2019m in a bad spot,\u201d he wrote to one, seeking what he insisted would be only a bridge loan until his refund check from Tulane came through. \u201cShould I just sell my Rolex and buy another in a month or two?\u201d he asked. He\u2019d begun dating Joe Biden\u2019s niece Caroline Biden \u2014 the relationship was turbulent and didn\u2019t last long, friends say. \u201cWill would buy very small amounts of cocaine repeatedly, all day long. He would just be like, \u2018Hey, I just need to go say hi to my friend.\u2019 And some car would pull up and then he\u2019d have coke again. He would do that, like, ten times a day,\u201d says the old acquaintance. At some point, the YouTube personality\u2013slash\u2013motivational speaker Tai Lopez supposedly paid Duplessie $20,000 to appear in a video with him. (Lopez didn\u2019t respond to requests for comment.) A friend says he spent the same amount on drugs, cigars, a stripper, an Italian suit, and hundreds ofdollars\u2019 worth of Jonathan Adler coasterswithin 72 hours. Another day, a man showed up outside Duplessie\u2019s cottage in Venice Beach on a Harley-Davidson and began loudly revving the engine and throwing rocks at the windows. Duplessie, the man shouted, owed him money.<\/p>\n
By November 2017, James Duplessie\u2019s career had flatlined. He\u2019d once made up to $6 million a year; now, his income had \u201cdropped off precipitously,\u201d according to a lawsuit filed by his brother Michael. (They settled in 2021.) He was staying at what one friend describes as \u201cthe saddest shack in Manhattan Beach.\u201d Over the next couple of months, the father and son hatched the idea for a new fund: Pangea, an investment firm for cryptocurrency-token start-ups. The timing was good; bitcoin and ethereum were on a frenzied bull run. Newly launched tokens were raising millions of dollars of real money based on blurry ideas that had little chance of coming to fruition. The Duplessies managed to quickly line up a pitch meeting with Jennifer Johnson, the head of Franklin Templeton, one of the country\u2019s largest and most reputable asset managers.<\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t go well. \u201cBasically every single person was rolling their eyes the entire time,\u201d says someone who was in the room. At the time, James was dating Lucy Dahl, daughter of the author Roald Dahl. After the disastrous meeting, he began asking around about where an original golden ticket from the 1971 Willy Wonka movie, a highly valuable collector\u2019s item, could be pawned. Within months, by April 2018, James and William Duplessie had departed California entirely.<\/p>\n
They resettled in Switzerland. There, they quickly rebranded as a pair of successful American crypto investors, eager to help the country become a new capital for digital currency. They tried to ingratiate themselves with Swiss officials, including the mayor of Lugano, by promising to invest in local blockchain start-ups. Will began flying to bitcoin conferences in Dubai, Japan, and Singapore to sell Pangea to investors, doling out gifts along the way: cigars, $300 lighters, sometimes just cash. In mid-2018, at a conference on a yacht in Monaco, father and son ran into Roger Ver, an early crypto investor nicknamed \u201cBitcoin Jesus.\u201d \u201cJames was a smooth talker who sounded trustworthy and capable,\u201d according to someone who was there. Will, well versed in crypto and apparently on his best behavior, acted as salesman. Ver invested $2 million in Pangea, giving the Duplessies the big-name backer they needed to persuade other investors to put money in too. Soon, the Duplessiesannounced that they\u2019d raised another $20 million in a fund overseen byCopernicus, a well-respected Swiss asset manager. They were looking for $180 million more.<\/p>\n
That winter, cash rich, the Duplessiesmoved into a ski chalet in St. Moritz. Investors who went to the Duplessies\u2019 parties were greeted with custom skis, armed guards, and escorts. \u201cThose friendly women would then act as honeypots,\u201d says an executive who watched the Duplessies solicit investors. \u201cPotential investor hooks up with a girl, and he thinks he\u2019s just getting lucky by association. No, no, no \u2014 that\u2019s not what\u2019s happening.\u201d The money poured in, by some estimates more than $100 million. In 2020, an early crypto investor and entrepreneur sent a message to an industry-wide group chat warning others not to give or accept money from Pangea: \u201cThey\u2019re like a train spewing cyanide in every direction, killing everything around them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Early that year, as the pandemic forced the world into lockdown, the Duplessies abruptly abandoned Switzerland. Many of the Swiss officials and investors they\u2019d spent months impressing never saw them again. By 2021, investors were hounding them for their money, sending emails demanding updates. The Duplessies continued to assure Ver and other individual investors that they had huge returns coming their way soon. But the money never materialized. \u201cThey were bragging to me about it being worth some huge amount,\u201d says one Pangea investor who has still not received the money he says he\u2019s owed. \u201cTo be honest, I think I was scammed the whole way through.\u201d Eventually, the Duplessies stopped joining Pangea conference calls altogether. (Pangea is in the process of liquidating whatever assets it has left. James Duplessie declined to comment on the record.)<\/p>\n
By 2021, Will had parted with his father and moved to Miami, where he quickly racked up traffic tickets speeding down the MacArthur Causeway in expensive sports cars. He rented two houses, then abruptly stopped paying for both. (According to a lawsuit and messages from his landlord, Armen Nalband, he \u201ctrashed the place and overdosed.\u201d) He then tried to drive a Lambo from Florida to California, but it broke down in Jacksonville. In April 2023, though his driver\u2019s license had been suspended, he managed to crash a Porsche Cayman GTA on a Miami freeway, allegedly causing the other driver involved \u201cdisability, disfigurement, and mental anguish.\u201d<\/p>\n
At some point over the next few months, Duplessie returned to Switzerland. Friends later heard he spent at least part of the next year in jail there for domestic violence. This is difficult to verify \u2014 Swiss court records are sealed \u2014 but by late 2024, he was back in Miami, bragging about the new posse of tough-guy Ukrainians he\u2019d met while locked up.<\/p>\n
That fall, Duplessie began visiting a new friend, John Woeltz, at his home in Kentucky. The 150-acre property abutted the Ohio River in Smithland, a 200-person community four hours west of Lexington; the area was so off the grid that even locals referred to it as \u201cthe stix.\u201d<\/p>\n
The two made an unlikely pair. Woeltz was a mild-mannered and nerdy perfectionist with a round face and deep-set eyes; a cybersecurity obsessive, he\u2019d begun mining bitcoin soon after its launch in 2009. By 2019, in his 30s living alone in San Francisco with his cat, he no longer had to work. \u201cHe used to live off Soylent or Huel or his own homemade vegan sludge,\u201d said a friend. Now, back near his hometown with a net worth of over $100 million, he led a quiet life. He studied regenerative agriculture, burying the skeleton of a fish he\u2019d caught in his garden and sending friends photos of snakes he\u2019d shot on the property. He\u2019d also become a patron of the small local blockchain scene, promoting statewide bitcoin-mining efforts and donating money to a start-up accelerator and co-working space in Paducah called Sprocket. It appeared to everyone who knew Woeltz that he intended to settle down and start a family with his girlfriend, Kayla Barbour, an aspiring actress and small-business owner from Lexington. Woeltz was supportive, if controlling. \u201cIn the two years we dated, I was not allowed to work and he controlled all of my finances,\u201d Barbour would later attest. Still, they were making plans to hold a wedding in Hawaii in late 2024.<\/p>\n
As an early bitcoiner, Woeltz had developed an online reputation as a security white hat, a kind of good-guy hacker who could easily identify vulnerabilities and to whom strangers would sometimes reach out for help \u2014 which was why, in 2020, Michael Carturan first got in touch with him. Carturan was a socially awkward permaculture enthusiast from the small Italian town of Rivoli, a technically proficient programmer who grew up on internet forums like 4chan. He believed deeply in bitcoin as a tool that could help build a new tech-focused world order and was working on a decentralized version of a virtual private network. As they got to know each other, Carturan described his expertise operating anonymous online trollbots and \u201crunning psyops\u201d \u2014 in other words, using social-media bots to hype meme-coin projects, making them appear more popular than they actually were. In the beginning, he was reluctant to give his real name, introducing himself only as \u201cSergio.\u201d \u201cIt was always some made-up Italian name,\u201d says a mutual friend. Soon, the two were collaborating on a brand-new cryptocurrency project. Over the years, Carturan came to see Woeltz not just as a business partner but as a role model and protector. When Carturan worried a former colleague was trying to kill him over a business dispute, he asked Woeltz for help. \u201cJohn saved my life,\u201d he would later tell others.<\/p>\n
Carturan knew Duplessie, too \u2014 Pangea had invested in his cryptocurrency project in 2021. And it was through Carturan that Duplessie and Woeltz eventually developed their own relationship. By December 2024, Duplessie could almost always be found at Woeltz\u2019s Smithland cabin. \u201cJohn and Will began displaying very paranoid, cultlike behavior,\u201d Barbour later wrote in a restraining-order petition against Woeltz. His demeanor had shifted dramatically; he and Duplessie bought thousands of dollars\u2019 worth of guns and \u201cbegan wearing matching militant clothes,\u201d patrolling the property \u201con the hunt for terrorists who they were convinced would be tracking us down to kill us.\u201d<\/p>\n
By January, Woeltz\u2019s relationship with Barbour had reached a boiling point. At dinner one night, Woeltz demanded that she load his magazine clip for him, according to court documents. She refused. \u201cLoad the gun or get out,\u201d Woeltz said. Then he grabbed her by the throat and put the gun to her head, \u201cscreaming that he was going to kill me and that he had a hole dug to bury me in,\u201d she said. Woeltz and Duplessie locked her in her bedroom, took her phone, \u201cand refused to allow me to leave the bedroom for several hours.\u201d She wasn\u2019t let out until the next morning. By then, a snowstorm had set in, trapping her in the home with the two men for another week. After the weather cleared, the group went out for Chinese food. Woeltz lashed out, asking Barbour why she\u2019d taken them to \u201cthat Chink restaurant with spies.\u201d \u201cYou should have cooked me dinner and sucked my dick,\u201d he said. The next day, Barbour checked herself into a rehabilitation center in Arizona.<\/p>\n
After rehab, Barbour returned to her mother\u2019s home in Lexington. She and Woeltz had broken up, and a relative went to check on her car at his house. They found the Mazda riddled with bullet holes, its windows completely blown out. Barbour filed a police report and a restraining order. \u201cMy ex-partner has unlimited resources,\u201d she wrote in her petition to the court, part of an ongoing domestic-violence case. \u201cI am afraid this person is extremely unhinged and severely mentally ill \u2014 and completely unpredictable as he reacts violently in fits of rage. He is armed and dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barbour\u2019s departure meant one less check on Woeltz and Duplessie\u2019s activities, which took on a new level of organization. With Duplessie\u2019s father, they formed a venture they called Wildcat. The plan was apparently to buy up land and distressed assets in Kentucky. To help with this, they hired Scott Hernandez, a New York\u2013based real-estate investor who had formerly worked with Jeb Bush. Hernandez, the son of wealthy Republicans, also advised Duplessie on his political aspirations. Duplessie wanted to run as a candidate for Mitch McConnell\u2019s Senate seat. Hernandez brokered a meeting with the campaign manager for Nikki Haley\u2019s presidential run.<\/p>\n
That winter, holed up on Woeltz\u2019s estate, he and Duplessie typed out what prosecutors would later call a manifesto. The plan, as they laid it out, was to steal foreigners\u2019 cryptocurrency through an \u201cintelligence operation.\u201d The document included a list of targets. Woeltz and Duplessie would slowly gain \u201ctheir trust over a long period of time while also investigating them, discovering their intents and networks, as well as any other valuables,\u201d they wrote. Then they\u2019d strike. \u201cWe will take bitcoin and crypto from evil people. This agency will actively purge America of its bad foreign powerhouses. Crypto keeps them alive because it is off the grid. It is our belief that these people need to lose their coin.\u201d They mentioned three targets, including Michael Mauer, the German-born CEO of a security company called Blockfinance ECO AG, based in Liechtenstein, who had worked with Woeltz years earlier. They also mentioned Carturan, their Italian business partner and friend.<\/p>\n
In January, Duplessie decided to officially move to Kentucky. Through their shared LLC, Mr Smith, the two purchased the most expensive home in Smithland, a 10,000-square-foot riverside mansion known locally as the Smith Mansion, built to resemble the White House. When they showed up to collect the keys, they were dressed in full body armor, driving a camouflage Apocalypse Hellfire, carrying guns, and accompanied by a cadre of guards. They told the former owners they\u2019d been hunting coyotes, despite the fact that it was the middle of the day. They\u2019d barely been in the house a week when the Livingston County sheriff\u2019s office received a strange call from a local Holiday Inn. The front-desk clerk reported their guest \u2014 an older woman with a thick German accent \u2014 had received an alarming text from her son. He had gone to spend time with his friend John but was being held for ransom, he\u2019d told her, and his captors were \u201carmed to the brim.\u201d They weren\u2019t letting him leave; he asked his mother to send them half his cryptocurrency. Nearly an hour later, the man \u2014 identified as Michael Mauer \u2014 called his mother from the street, a few blocks from the mansion. His captors had apparently let him go. When officers arrived, they found blackout shells, remnants of bullets that could be used with a suppressor or silencer, scattered \u201call over the front yard.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\n From left: <\/strong>Inside\u00a0the Smith Mansiontypewriters set up in the Smith Mansion dining room\n <\/p>\n\n From top: <\/strong>Inside\u00a0the Smith Mansiontypewriters set up in the Smith Mansion dining room\n <\/p>\nThat same winter, Duplessie went to visit Peter Brant Jr., whom he\u2019d kept touch with in the years since Bard, in Palm Beach. He asked his well-connected friend if he would introduce him and Woeltz to influential people on the local scene. Brant set up a dinner with a few friends, including one who had recently launched a business, which Duplessie expressed interest in investing in. The dinner went well \u2014 Duplessie and Woeltz came off as \u201cyour typical nerds, very quiet,\u201d according to someone who was there \u2014 and a couple days later, the whole group plus a few other friends boarded a private jet to Kentucky. As soon as the jet took off, Woeltz and Duplessie started \u201ctalking about probably the most insane shit I\u2019ve ever heard in my fucking life,\u201d someone who took the trip says. Duplessie said that he\u2019d been a participant in MKUltra, the secretive military experiment on psychedelics that ended decades before he was born, and that he was a CIA operative who was \u201cfound at a very early age.\u201d Then the conversation turned to a \u201cGerman terrorist\u201d he and Woeltz had recently encountered on their property. Duplessie said they had to \u201ctake him out to the farmhouse\u201d and \u201ckeep him there for about six weeks.\u201d Then, he said, they \u201ctook all his crypto to defend the front lines of America\u201d and \u201cgot rid of him.\u201d<\/p>\n
When they arrived at the Smith Mansion, Duplessie offered everyone military-style fatigues to change into. There were no computers in the house, he informed the group. Instead, they used typewriters to communicate. He gestured to a grand dining-room table covered with dozens of them. Then Duplessie and Woeltz \u201csat around typewriting messages to each other, then lighting them on fire so nobody could see what they were talking about because they work for the CIA,\u201d the guest says. As their guests nervously settled in, Duplessie and Woeltz wandered around, pistols holstered on their hips. Over their shoulders, they wore AR-15\u2019s with 100-round drums, fully loaded, with no safety on. Later that night, Duplessie pulled a Buck knife out of his camo vest and used it to slice open a Ziploc bag full of cocaine.<\/p>\n
By the next afternoon, Duplessie, high and armed, seemed even more unmoored. The house chef had apparently given one of the guests a pill that made her fall asleep, and Duplessie exploded: He pulled out a pistol, cocked it, and held it to the chef\u2019s head. \u201cNow you\u2019re gonna play Russian roulette, like last time,\u201d he told him. After the guests protested, Duplessie amended the punishment, instead forcing the chef to change into a cartoonish outfit and bake the group a cake. At the end of the weekend, the group boarded the plane back to New York. Woeltz and Duplessie decided to come along. They had business there, they said. A few weeks later, they moved into 38 Prince.<\/p>\n
The townhouse, an eight-bedroom with double-high windows that look out on St. Patrick\u2019s Basilica, cost $75,000 a month. Before they moved in, Duplessie and Woeltz had to submit personal bios and pass background checks; the landlord readily accepted their application. They soon made the space their own. In came a staffed coat-check room, bartenders, and teams of security guards, some of whom had day jobs working for the NYPD. Duplessie moved a professional DJ setup and sound system into the basement. Piles of cocaine were procured, along with a silver Tiffany tray to serve it on. Brant was consulted to curate a selection of contemporary art and furniture.<\/p>\n
To ferry in guests, Duplessie and Woeltz relied on their new assistant, Morgan O\u2019Connor, a well-connected club rat and former model known for his striking look: white with waist-length dreadlocks. O\u2019Connor seemed to know every bottle girl in the city, and he soon brought on Charlie Zakkour, a handsome 30-year-old starring on Bravo\u2019s Real Housewives spin-off Next Gen. The pair grew up together on the Manhattan party circuit; both briefly dated Lindsay Lohan as teenagers. They set to work finding young women to party with Woeltz and Duplessie. \u201cThey\u2019re gonna drop stupid money \u2014 like, life-changing amounts of money,\u201d Zakkour told a friend about his new job. \u201cThey\u2019re ready to spend.\u201d There was an unusual source to help stock the parties at 38 Prince: the Soho location of Brandy Melville on nearby Broadway. The clothing shop is known for employing attractive young women, many of them part-time models. Zakkour had dated several of them over the years and often brought them and their friends to clubs and after-parties. (Sometimes he\u2019d drop by the store just to hang out, leading one young employee to ask herself, \u201cWhat\u2019s an unc doing at Brandy?\u201d) Duplessie and Woeltz were thrilled to be around young women. \u201cThey love the Brandy girls,\u201d said one promoter. \u201cThey were very keen on having a ton of chicks with them at all times for just, like, motion.\u201d<\/p>\n
Duplessie was a generous host. At a party in March, he gave five figures in cryptocurrency to one young woman, then another five figures to her friend, just for showing up. They let young women order themselves dinner on their accounts from Blue Ribbon Sushi. But sometimes the generosity was more transactional. Duplessie told women he would pay them to \u201cbring hot bitches over,\u201d sometimes offering as much as $20,000. Other women he slept with received designer bags and shoes. He could be charming, and the debaucherous atmosphere he cultivated could feel romantic in a transgressive way. \u201cEvery girl who went to that house thought she was Lana Del Rey,\u201d said one guest.<\/p>\n
Other times, the mood felt more like Kentucky. Duplessie and Woeltz would roam the house in night-vision goggles and show off the loaded gun and small chain saw they kept in the house. Duplessie sometimes described violent fantasies of revenge against terrorists, his exes\u2019 new lovers, or other perceived enemies. Once, Woeltz injured Zakkour\u2019s nose by accidentally headbutting him. Another time, he snipped off one of O\u2019Connor\u2019s dreadlocks while his back was turned. (O\u2019Connor did not respond to requests for comment.) He could be hostile. \u201cHe was looking at these girls, and he\u2019d be like, \u2018Look at that. That\u2019s a slut right there. They just want my money,\u2019\u201d one acquaintance recalls. He\u2019d talk about how he was a crypto vigilante, wanted in Russia and China, and show people photos of Barbour\u2019s blown-out car, which he used as his phone background.<\/p>\n
Woeltz often didn\u2019t stick around for the parties at all. Instead, he\u2019d retreat to his room on the fourth floor, sit at his computer, chain-smoke Marlboros, and blast dubstep. He\u2019d complain that he didn\u2019t even like New York, or nightclubs, or the Louis Vuitton pajamas Duplessie made him wear. He just wanted to settle down in the countryside and have a family.<\/p>\n
Though they were busy partying, they apparently hadn\u2019t stopped iterating on the plan they\u2019d laid out in their manifesto back in Kentucky. Soon after they arrived in the city, they pitched a potential recruit for their project, a former bitcoin thief turned start-up founder, on moving into 38 Prince and joining what they\u2019d described as a \u201cteam.\u201d They were vague about what they wanted him to do. Their work was top secret, Woeltz explained, but they did tell him they were building a SCIF \u2014 a \u201csensitive compartmented information facility,\u201d or a room designed to store classified data \u2014 at 38 Prince, along with a Faraday cage, an area shielded from radio signals. Over a $10,000 dinner at Raoul\u2019s, Woeltz gave the recruit a peek at his phone, which he was using to remotely control a desktop computer on which he was running a program called Hashcat. The recruit knew all about Hashcat, a password-cracking program sometimes used to steal crypto: \u201cI pretty much knew instantly at that point that he was up to something because nine out of ten times when somebody is using that, it is for a nefarious reason.\u201d Later that night, Duplessie texted him a selfie wearing night-vision goggles and military garb. \u201cI run the internet,\u201d Woeltz added.<\/p>\n
Eventually, Duplessie and Woeltz told the potential recruit that in order to work with him, they\u2019d have to vet all of his finances and do a \u201cfull-scope background check.\u201d This would entail handing over control of all of his cryptocurrency wallets. His crypto, they told him, was \u201cChinked,\u201d or corrupted. The Chinese were chasing them, they said, trying to find them and kill them because of their work stealing bitcoin from foreign enemies on behalf of the government. In order to \u201cun-Chink\u201d his cryptocurrency, or clean it, Duplessie and Woeltz said they would have to take control of it. The recruit, feeling suspicious, turned down the job.<\/p>\n
If their cover story \u2014 that they were undercover agents stealing bitcoin from terrorists, pedophiles, and \u201cevil people\u201d on behalf of the CIA and NSA \u2014 seemed far-fetched, their alleged scheme itself was fairly straightforward. As they wrote in their manifesto, they planned to take bitcoin and crypto. Bitcoin is just 16 years old, and we are only now seeing the maturation of a robust and significant crypto crime business. \u201cRug pulls\u201d and meme-coin pump-and-dumps are quintessential and now-familiar hustles that anyone with a decent PR strategy could pull off.<\/p>\n
But the sinister characters who have recently entered the picture, targeting especially wealthy crypto holders, are more unnerving to crypto evangelists: Investors may tolerate a little light fraud in service of the larger project, but no one expects to be tortured. In France, a crypto-wallet start-up CEO had his finger sawed off by attackers who demanded ransom money; in England, an investor was held at gunpoint. Similar incidents \u2014 now called \u201cwrench attacks\u201d \u2014 have taken place in Germany, Canada, Japan, Korea, and Uganda. In response, the French minister of the interior recently announced a raft of measures \u2014 specialized training for police focused on \u201canti\u2013crypto asset money laundering,\u201d a new working group to improve techniques for tracing crypto assets, and security training to educate individuals on best practices. Investors have had to rethink travel plans, their digital footprint, and the conferences they attend, especially after a recent data leak from the trading platform Coinbase released what is essentially a list of potential targets.<\/p>\n
Typically, people keep their bitcoin and ethereum either in virtual wallets like MetaMask or in a \u201ccold wallet,\u201d a physical device unconnected to the internet. (Many sophisticated investors will keep the majority of their holdings in the latter.) If someone obtains the password to a virtual wallet, or gets their hands on a physical wallet along with its \u201cprivate key,\u201d they can transfer all of the money into their own account. Crypto\u2019s nouveau riche, like Carturan, are essentially walking around with millions of dollars in their pocket. It\u2019s not that crypto is untraceable. Transactions are recorded permanently on the blockchain, giving investigators a thread to follow. But there is not always a bank to reverse a fraudulent transaction. In this sense, crypto is closer to gold. In real terms, protection is only as strong as an investor\u2019s ability to conceal their password.<\/p>\n
Duplessie and Woeltz\u2019s alleged tactics have struck some as especially extreme. \u201cIt\u2019s basically my worst nightmare to meet up with someone I know from the industry and they try to torture me for my private keys,\u201d says one founder of a blockchain protocol. The increasing violence in the world of digital currency has put crypto whales in a bind. To hold their coins, they must harden their lives with constant security or try to become anonymous ghosts, unable to flaunt their wealth, lest trusted partners dox or betray them.<\/p>\n
This April, Woeltz and Duplessie reached out to Carturan. They were launching a new fund, they said, and wondered if he wanted to come work on it. They also offered him something else: a sort of self-improvement program, which would help him in his efforts to become tougher and more \u201cmacho.\u201d Carturan told the pair his sheltered youth in small-town Italy had left him unprepared for the dangers of crypto\u2019s increasingly violent Wild West. After Carturan said his former colleague had threatened his life, Duplessie had urged him to begin strength and combat training. The April move to 38 Prince would be the next phase of this life upgrade. Later, prosecutors would say there was a more urgent motive behind Carturan\u2019s transatlantic trip. Months earlier, while he was staying with them, Duplessie and Woeltz had confiscated devices from Carturan containing crypto reportedly worth $30 million. They insisted he move in with them if he wanted to get them back.<\/p>\n
When Carturan first moved into the house, he seemed, to outsiders at least, to be enjoying himself. Duplessie and Woeltz gave him a large room on the ground floor with its own en suite bathroom. He was a regular at their parties, where Duplessie and Woeltz sometimes introduced him as their business partner, or intern, or \u201cHogleg,\u201d their nickname for him, inspired by the size of his penis. O\u2019Connor told someone he seemed more like a fraternity pledge. They dolled him up in outfits, including dresses and a collar from Agent Provocateur that Duplessie had originally bought for his girlfriend. One night, it was tiny shorts, a crop top, and a lampshade on his head; another, it was a Buc-ee\u2019s beaver costume. In a video from April, Carturan and his hosts are stopped by a street-style content creator who goes by Preppy Pete after a shopping spree at the Rick Owens store. As Pete marvels at Carturan\u2019s new drapey, sheer clothing, Duplessie laughs: \u201cThere\u2019s not a single funnier thing that could have just happened!\u201d<\/p>\n
Carturan served drinks at parties, did push-ups, carried a rug up and down the street, and played Edward Fortyhands, a drinking game wherein two bottles of malt liquor are bound to the palms. Prosecutors later alleged that they put him in a cage in the kitchen. A 19-year-old Brandy employee asked Carturan why he was doing all of this. \u201cIt makes me stronger,\u201d he told her. Besides, the residents of 38 Prince showed at least some concern for Carturan\u2019s well-being. One night, the group was horsing around with a whip from a sex store. \u201cI accidentally hit Michael too hard with it, to the point where he audibly said, like, \u2018Ow, ow,\u2019\u201d the Brandy employee said. \u201cEveryone in the room stopped and was like, \u2018Hold on, that\u2019s not funny.\u2019\u201d She apologized to Carturan, and \u201cfive minutes later, we were all dancing and, like, having fun again. It just seemed cheerful and lighthearted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adding to this impression was Carturan\u2019s seemingly enthusiastic consumption of drugs \u2014 including crack that he and Duplessie cooked in an air fryer \u2014 and his pursuit of the women around him. According to court documents and videos, he participated in a variety of sexual escapades at the townhouse, including orgies and BDSM. In one video, he lies on his back as a nude woman bounces up and down on his face. Much of what he had to say at parties revolved around women. \u201cHe would talk a lot about, like, \u2018Oh yeah, that girl had big boobs,\u2019\u201d the 19-year-old recalled. \u201cOr, \u2018That girl was chopped.\u2019\u201d In court, he later said that both his drug use and the sex were under duress. He was afraid of Duplessie and Woeltz, so he tried his best to fit in with the alpha-male environment they fostered and to withstand his hazing with a brave face. He was afraid of what might happen if he didn\u2019t, prosecutors said. Duplessie and Woeltz always told him not to show fear, he said, and to be a man. He testified that while he was staying at 38 Prince, his hosts began pressuring him to divulge the passwords to his accounts and insisting that he provide them with yet more devices containing crypto. If he didn\u2019t follow orders, they said, he would be a terrorist. And he knew what they did to terrorists: Hunt them down. He believed they were undercover agents with a license to kill. Plus Carturan wasn\u2019t the type to seek out police attention. Over the years, he\u2019d managed to almost completely hide his digital footprint; he hadn\u2019t even used his real name with his former colleagues or, at first, with Woeltz. And so he resisted divulging his passwords, even as he feared for his life and his family\u2019s. (Carturan didn\u2019t respond to multiple requests for comment.)<\/p>\n
Over the course of May, Duplessie and Woeltz became more focused on gaining access to Carturan\u2019s cryptocurrency, according to court documents. Carturan briefly returned to Italy at the end of April \u2014 on orders from Woeltz and Duplessie, he testified, who wanted him to retrieve yet more crypto wallets \u2014 and when he returned in the first week of May, his hosts took his passport, he said. Their assistants were assigned to monitor his whereabouts and let him go for walks or to the gym only with permission. At some point, they made him wear a collar with an AirTag in it. He was allegedly not allowed to keep his phone and even had to ask permission to use it, Duplessie and Woeltz said, because he was a terrorist. In May, Duplessie joked with a friend about upping his own drug intake to keep up with what they were giving to Carturan; he went so far as to make custom tank tops screenprinted with an image of Carturan smoking a crack pipe. In a video taken on May 15, Carturan stands in an empty closet, his hands hooked through some hangers. He\u2019s wearing one of the shirts; so is the 19-year-old Brandy employee, who stands in front of him holding a cattle prod. \u201cOne more time,\u201d she says, shocking him in the midsection. Carturan screams as he collapses to the floor. \u201cYou didn\u2019t get hit,\u201d she says. \u201cNo, I did get fucking hit,\u201d he tells her, before Duplessie walks over to give Carturan a high five.<\/p>\n
In another video, Carturan is sitting on the floor, wearing a hoodie, when someone comes up and ignites a small blue flame on his back. He jumps up and frantically puts it out against a wall. In court, defense lawyers called this incident a prank, like when baseball players light one another\u2019s shoes on fire in the dugout. But, prosecutors later said, Carturan disagreed. They described disturbing punishments meted out to him by Duplessie and Woeltz: cutting him with a chain saw and cauterizing the wound with a flame, holding him over the edge of a staircase four floors up, holding a gun to his head. Through it all, Carturan never provided them with his crypto log-ins, he\u2019d testify.<\/p>\n
It finally came to an end on May 22, Woeltz\u2019s birthday. According to friends, the group threw him a \u201cChina\u201dthemed party \u2014 given his long-standing obsession with the country \u2014 and that night, everyone wore kimonos and rice-paddy hats and headed out to dinner at Sartiano\u2019s. Woeltz was in a terrible mood. He complained to attendees that he despised his birthday. After dinner, the group went to Little Sister, a club on East 11th Street, where Woeltz\u2019s credit card was declined. Embarrassed, he sent a security guard back to 38 Prince to get a new one. By 4\u00a0a.m., back at the house, he was belligerent, stomping around the top floor and ranting incoherently. He smashed a vase against a wall. A woman Woeltz had been casually dating was so afraid that she hid and called Zakkour. Woeltz, she told him, was out of control.<\/p>\n
In the early morning hours, Duplessie walked in on Woeltz screaming at Carturan, who was bleeding from his head. Duplessie tried to calm Woeltz down but eventually decided to leave, collecting two girls who were in the house and retreating to the Mercer Hotel. A few hours later, just after 9:30 a.m., Carturan dashed out of the house and, videos show, down the block to a traffic cop on the corner of Mulberry Street. At first, he told cops that he\u2019d been hazed. \u201cI wanted to work with them, so they were making me tougher.\u201d But then he elaborated: Woeltz, he said, \u201cwas mad at me because I caused a breakup with his girlfriend. He was going to kill me. He hit me with a gun and that\u2019s why I ran out.\u201d Woeltz had then loaded the gun, Carturan said. Then Woeltz told him, \u201cThis is the day you will turn over the crypto.\u201d<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
\n From left: <\/strong>Duplessie being escorted from the police precinct. Photo: Jefferson Siegel\/The New York Times\/ReduxJohn Woeltz in custody outside the townhouse. Photo: Kava Gorna\/AP\n <\/p>\n\n From top: <\/strong>Duplessie being escorted from the police precinct. Photo: Jefferson Siegel\/The New York Times\/ReduxJohn Woeltz in custody outside the townho… more
\n From top: <\/strong>Duplessie being escorted from the police precinct. Photo: Jefferson Siegel\/The New York Times\/ReduxJohn Woeltz in custody outside the townhouse. Photo: Kava Gorna\/AP\n <\/p>\n ![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/6ca565eb344e4676f62948cf695c4ef861-h-16350255.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n At their State Supreme Court arraignment.
\n Photo: Jefferson Siegel\/The New York Times\/Redux\n <\/p>\n
Zakkour arrived just in time to see Woeltz emerging from the front door, handcuffed and in a white bathrobe. When police searched the house, they found blood in the areas of the apartment where Carturan said he\u2019d been tortured, according to court records, as well as Polaroids of Duplessie and Woeltz holding a chain saw against his leg and a loaded gun to his head. They found tarps, buckets, goggles, and a hacksaw, which Carturan claimed Duplessie and Woeltz had threatened to use to dispose of his body. They also found three documents, presumably drawn up by Duplessie and Woeltz, purporting to charge Carturan with violations of the Patriot Act and Italian law. Those included sections for him to provide the passwords for his cryptocurrency wallets. Carturan\u2019s account shocked those who had spent time at the house and thought he\u2019d been having fun. \u201cIt was like D-Day in the Brandy store,\u201d says a friend of several employees. Multiple girls were in tears, frightened they\u2019d accidentally become accessories to torture. One said that the experience had \u201ccaused a flare-up\u201d of her \u201ccrippling anxiety and panic disorder.\u201d<\/p>\n
Duplessie quickly decamped to the Hamptons for Memorial Day weekend, negotiating his own surrender to the police even as he partied at clubs. He called the Realtor for the Smith Mansion. He needed the house sold, he told her, \u201cASAP.\u201d It was too late. On June 10, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives raided both the Smith Mansion and Woeltz\u2019s cabin. They seized five guns, according to the ATF, and more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition. (James Duplessie\u2019s Coral Gables home was later raided too; agents seized a Glock pistol.) On June 11, Duplessie and Woeltz were arraigned on charges of first-degree kidnapping, a crime that carries a sentence of up to life in prison, as well as assault, coercion, attempted grand larceny, and criminal possession of a weapon. Their lawyers have argued that Carturan exaggerated his plight. He could not have been kidnapped, they said, if he was free to come and go from 38 Prince. Plus, in the video evidence, he\u2019s \u201call smiles.\u201d In response, prosecutors brought out texts in which Woeltz talked about \u201ctorturing\u201d Carturan, as well as messages between assistants who described Carturan sobbing, hyperventilating, and appearing \u201cbroken\u201d with \u201cno more life in his eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n
The evidence raises complicated questions. The prosecution claims that Carturan was a captive for 17 days, from May 6 through 23. Prosecutors must convince a jury that he was only pretending to enjoy himself during that period; that he was having sex, taking drugs, and going to clubs just to placate his captors. It doesn\u2019t seem that he was chained up in the basement. He left the house numerous times, including the night before Woeltz was arrested. Why did he wait almost three weeks to flee if he was allegedly being tortured? And why did he tell multiple people he was merely being hazed \u2014 including when speaking to the police shortly after Woeltz\u2019s arrest? Prosecutors have placed Woeltz\u2019s net worth at more than $100 million, and Carturan\u2019s has been reported at $30 million. What sort of thief robs people with far less money? The defense, meanwhile, must argue that the mountain of bizarre and terrifying things the police found \u2014 cattle prod, cage, wheelchair, crack, chain saw, loaded gun, threatening Polaroids, blood, corpse-disposal implements, fake legal documents, crypto-theft manifesto \u2014 was all just window dressing for a sequence of harebrained pranks that Carturan signed up for, until one night he decided it had all gone too far, leading him to concoct a story that reframed his hazing as torture. (A lawyer for Duplessie declined to comment. A lawyer for Woeltz did not respond to requests for comment.)<\/p>\n
So far, the two have been charged only in Manhattan criminal court; Kentucky state police opened a probe early this year, while the Feds, including the ATF, continue their own investigation. \u201cNone of it surprised me about having that kid come over and partying with him, and convincing him this was fun while you were maybe also torturing him, or playing head games with him,\u201d says a former Duplessie associate who has known him for almost a decade. \u201c\u2009\u2018Oh, it\u2019s all in good fun.\u2019 And then the next thing you know, it\u2019s not in fun \u2014 that\u2019s very much Will\u2019s style. He\u2019s just a guy who should be in jail.\u201d<\/p>\n
In mid-July, Woeltz and Duplessie were granted bail, though only Woeltz has been released. He\u2019s still adjusting to the radical shift his life has just undergone. \u201cI don\u2019t understand why I\u2019m here,\u201d he told officers the morning of his arrest. \u201cI\u2019m from Kentucky. I came out here for work. Obviously, it\u2019s going great. Hedge fund. I\u2019m 37. My birthday was yesterday. We went out to a club for a little bit. We had a few drinks. It was all right. New York has not the best reputation in Kentucky, but everyone here has been really, really good.\u201d<\/p>\n
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