The Crypto Maniacs and the Torture Townhouse

Cryptocurrency turned John Woeltz and William Duplessie into friends. It also allegedly allegedly turned them into military cosplayers who club-hopped their way through New York with a cadre of guards and a seemingly bottomless appetite for drugs. And when Michael Carturan ran from their townhouse in late May, claiming Woeltz and Duplessie had been torturing him for his crypto accounts, it marked the arrival of crypto kidnappings, a.k.a. “wrench attacks,” in New York. If that all sounds like too much to fit into a single feature, trust me: that’s barely the logline of the dizzying nightmare that it this week’s New York cover story.

Over the course of May, Duplessie and Woeltz became more focused on gaining access to Carturan’s cryptocurrency, according to court documents. Carturan briefly returned to Italy at the end of April — on orders from Woeltz and Duplessie, he testified, who wanted him to retrieve yet more crypto wallets — 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’s wearing one of the shirts; so is the 19-year-old Brandy [Melville] employee, who stands in front of him holding a cattle prod. “One more time,” she says, shocking him in the midsection. Carturan screams as he collapses to the floor. “You didn’t get hit,” she says. “No, I did get fucking hit,” he tells her, before Duplessie walks over to give Carturan a high five.