“I smell money, crypto, crypto, blockchain and all the good things,” Mayor Eric Adams said last week in what city officials billed as the “first ever N.Y.C. Crypto Summit.” Referring to himself as a “tech mayor” who used to program in COBOL and Fortran, he reasoned that hating on crypto was like hating credit cards 65 years ago.
“The naysayers and the DNA of naysayers of yesteryears, they are the DNA of naysayers of these times as well,” he proceeded to say, his convoluted speech oddly well matched to the generally opaque understanding of alternative currencies. The mayor’s goal remained as it always had, he said: to make “New York City the crypto capital of the globe.” He then headed to a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.
It was a strange time to set these particular priorities. What was happening in a Prince Street townhouse, just a mile from City Hall, already suggested that New York was the crypto capital of the world — if in a Martin Scorsese adaptation of a Stephen King novel. Over the course of 17 days, according to police reports, two crypto supplicants had been holding an Italian millionaire captive and torturing him — with chicken wire, Taser shocks, pistol whips, a chain saw aimed at his leg, splattered urine and the forced consumption of crack cocaine. The point was to torment him into giving up the password to his Bitcoin wallet.
Two men — William Duplessie and John Woeltz, both in their 30s — were eventually arrested and charged with kidnapping and assault. The abducted man, a 28-year-old named Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan, managed to flee the house and get help from a traffic cop on the corner of Spring and Mulberry Streets. He told the police that he been held over the ledge of the building and that his captors had threatened to kill his family.
This was raw, gangland violence — adjacent to Little Italy, no less — playing out against the purported and inscrutable sophistication of the cryptocurrency markets. Increasingly, it seemed, the “Matrix”-y, clean-room culture of digital finance was falling prey to a lurid, visceral, old-fashioned style of criminality.
In recent months, the French have witnessed a series of kidnappings targeting the family members of crypto magnates, coming at the hands, as one theory goes, of hackers breaking through the presumably impenetrable virtual walls that conceal the personal information of the richest beneficiaries of this world. At almost the same time that Mr. Duplessie was surrendering to the police in Downtown Manhattan earlier this week, 24 people were taken into custody in Paris in connection with the abduction of a crypto investor’s daughter. In another case, a victim’s finger was cut off to terrify the family into complying with ransom demands.
For a certain generation, this calls to mind the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, a young oil dynast, whose ear was chopped off by his abductors, in Rome, and sent to a newspaper. Efforts to extract cash from the rich by taking their children captive distinguished a lot of felonious activity in the mid-20th century but ultimately fell out of rotation for the simple reason that kidnappers typically get caught. The sources of wealth may change over the decades, but apparently the nefarious means of redistributing the money do not, rates of success be damned.
In regard to the New York arrests, one image stands out both for its anachronistic quality and the deceptions it lays bare. It is the picture of Mr. Woeltz, known as “the crypto king of Kentucky,” being handcuffed on Prince Street barefoot and wearing a bathrobe. If Mr. Duplessie looked like any fintech bro cosplaying a fourth-generation member of Winged Foot — he turned himself in wearing a white long-sleeve Polo shirt tucked into his slacks and loafers without socks — Mr. Woeltz looked like Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, the Genovese crime-family boss who was taken into custody at his house on Sullivan Street, 35 years ago this month, not for the first or last time. Mr. Gigante famously ambled around Greenwich Village and Little Italy in a bathrobe and slippers, which he would eventually admit was a strategy to appear insane and evade prosecution on racketeering charges.
Crypto acolytes troll “the normies” as rubes ignoring the inevitable future, even as they find themselves entangled in the scams and barbarities of the past. Two years ago, Sam Bankman-Fried, in all of his M.I.T.-credentialed brilliance, was convicted on seven counts of conspiracy and fraud in connection with his handling of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he founded.
He, too, cultivated a look that made him appear “crazy,” in this case for the purpose of getting potential investors to buy into the idea of his disheveled genius. For all the jargon and veneer of complexity to his crimes, his play was a pure shell game in the end. The real rubes were the ones who went for it.
Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
The post Cryptocurrency Seems Futuristic. The Crimes Around It Are Not. appeared first on New York Times.
