Vanessa Grigoriadis

the spate of crypto kidnappings that you may have heard about if you are interested in crime and being very online and finding out the horrible things that people do to each other.

Basically, there's a bunch of people who are nefariously involved with other people, and maybe those people have some of their money.

And so they bring, let's say, a lead pipe

to their house and say, hey, I'm going to hit you with this pipe unless you open your crypto wallet and send me everything inside it.

So there were dozens of such crypto crimes in 2025.

It's almost like this is the new mafia.

If you're a crypto crime boss, this is the new way that you operate.

So today we are going to talk about the one that is the most famous because it was on the cover of New York Magazine in a hugely well-read story, the crypto maniacs and the torture townhouse.

So we're going to be getting into all of that with co-author of the piece, Ezra Marcus, who is a freelance reporter who writes about crime and culture for New York Magazine, the New York Times Magazine and other publications.

Welcome, Ezra.

So Ezra, your being is just weird crime shit on the internet?

And is that because you yourself are extremely online and extremely young?

I guess we're all sort of online to our soul's detriment at this point.

But I do think that it's an amazing beat and you've broken...

a lot of really good stories.

So would you consider the crypto criminals to be a subculture or you think they're just more mainstream bro criminals who operate in the crypto space?

I don't even remember the Sam Bankman Freed story now because I feel like we've moved so incredibly far from that moment where...

He had that fluffy hair and he was telling everybody that he was an altruist.

But then he also was lying to everybody.

Can somebody update me on this?