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Chapter 1: What are crypto wrench attacks and how do they work?
If you've been paying attention to crime stories lately, you may have noticed there's a new genre of muggings and kidnappings happening. Ones that have to do with cryptocurrency. Some of these crimes, known as wrench attacks, use violence to get access to a victim's cryptocurrency assets. It's like holding someone up at gunpoint and stealing their wallet. Except it's their cryptocurrency wallet.
Today we're talking about one such alleged attack that occurred in an upscale New York townhouse and the two men accused of carrying it out, John Waltz and William Du Plessis. Cryptocurrency investor is in a New York jail today charged with kidnapping a 28-year-old man. A suspected kidnapper held a man captive and tortured him for weeks.
John Waltz and Will DuPlessis allegedly beat and tortured the victim, hanging him over a ledge and threatening to kill him if he did not provide his Bitcoin password. Last year, they were arraigned on charges of first-degree kidnapping, assault, coercion, attempted grand larceny, and criminal possession of a weapon. The pair pled not guilty, and their trial is upcoming.
This story is a modern-day American psycho, like Wolf of Wall Street meets Crypto Paranoia. It's got guns and cocaine and a party house filled with employees from Brandy Melville. So how did two guys allegedly pose as crypto investors to find potential targets? And what was going on in their crazy world of crypto? Let's find out.
Welcome back, everybody, to Infamous, a Sony Music Entertainment and Campside Media production. I'm Vanessa Grigoriadis. So today we are talking about 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.
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Chapter 2: What happened during the alleged kidnapping case in Soho?
Thanks for having me.
So Ezra, your being is just weird crime shit on the internet?
That's pretty much it, yeah. I mean, it's all over the place, but that tends to be the intersection of all the different things that I write about.
And is that because you yourself are extremely online and extremely young?
Well, I'm not as extremely young as I used to be, but I think that when I first started out as a freelance reporter, that was kind of my edge to a certain extent. And I think that I am just drawn to deviant behavior and I'm fascinated by it. I think that nowadays a lot of the craziest types of behavior are people that are operating in online adjacent spaces. And so I find myself there a lot.
Then again, I wouldn't say I'm a particularly online person more than anyone else, but I definitely use social media.
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 think there's a lot to unpack there. When it comes to these guys, I think that trying to delineate between like what is a mainstream bro criminal and what is an underground subcultural figure is almost like a false economy when it comes to the crypto world where the underlying premises are themselves so speculative and crazy. You know, these guys, they go to bottle service clubs and they...
crypto. They don't have any kind of particularly obscure theology, philosophy, anything like that. At the same time, they are in an extremely arcane world full of really crazy context where they're just surrounded by people that are making and losing absurd volumes of money in this really out of control way that, you know, I think we've all become sort of numb to how
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Chapter 3: Who are John Waltz and William Du Plessis in the crypto crime scene?
And then, you know, that was actually the technically robbery because he was using other people's money to gamble. I don't think he was coming at it from a sense of like, I'm a robber bear. And I think it was more just like, I'm the smartest guy in the room and my bets keep winning. And so I'll just keep making bigger and bigger bets.
And I think something that you just said about the backdrop of this world is really important, which is that we are just infected by this get rich quick online gambling attitude. And I think that might be part of why crypto seems to attract so many nefarious Or maybe that's an unfair characterization, but at least that's how it strikes me.
We've become numb to the sheer amount of wealth that has been created by these new crypto millionaires. But it's all on paper or rather in your crypto wallet. It's all completely intangible. And I do feel like there's something about the immateriality of that that really allows for it to just get headier and headier and crazier and crazier.
As we saw with this story of Will DuPlessis and John Waltz.
Yeah, I think what happened with them in the crypto townhouse really is the story of the moment because you feel like you had SBF, but then you also have everybody's anecdotal understanding of what guys in their 20s are doing now, which is maybe you dealt some Adderall in college and you just need to make money and you don't really have anything you feel like you want to do professionally.
So now you're going to get into crypto. And I've had people say to me, I went to a party there the other night. And I'm like, oh, who was there? And they're like, crypto criminals. And so it's like a sort of unknown version of dude primarily in New York now is this person who is, as we started off saying, maybe sort of mainstream, maybe a person who would have
been an investment banker in the 80s. Yes, very American psycho, right into his suit and having the perfect dinner and hopefully not cutting women up. But we know that type. And now it's like, okay, you're a crypto guy who's a little on the edge, but this is the option that's open to you.
Yeah. And I mean, to even zoom out further, it's like against the market paradigm where everything is speculation. Sports gambling, Kalshi, Polymarket, all this stuff is so now embedded in the worldview of young people that It's like everyone knows somebody. I know tons of people who I wouldn't have told you would be savvy investors, but they got into this bullshit earlier than I did.
And so they now have like millions of dollars. And I'm just like, you know, and so I'm like, okay, well, like if I was 17 now or whatever, it just would be so much more normalized to live your life in this incredibly risk tolerant way. It's just become very valorized and mythologized, the notion of taking insane swings and
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Chapter 4: How did the accused criminals live their lavish lifestyle?
There's a more Gen X millennial attitude towards the internet that is very one-to-one sort of like, it's where I go to talk about myself. It's like the Lena Dunham millennial, like I'm blogging about my life and that's interesting. And people want to, it's like, this is me existing online.
And for young people, there's so much more, I think, correctly assessing that that is false, that the internet is a vehicle for finding shortcuts for money glitch and anything else you're getting played.
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Chapter 5: What was the nature of the friendship between John and Will?
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37-year-old John Waltz and his business partner are accused of kidnapping and torturing an Italian man in an attempt to steal his Bitcoin.
So these two guys, Will DiPlessi and John Waltz, they're both from these slightly different eras of crypto, but they're both big in crypto in their own way. And they moved to New York and into this townhouse at 38 Prince Street. And you had some fantastic color about it. It's an eight bedroom house with double high windows that look out on St. Patrick's Basilica.
And it costs $75,000 a month, which gave me a heart attack, but I guess that's fine. And you write, piles of cocaine were procured along with a silver Tiffany tray to serve it on. And these guys sort of started going out and hitting all the clubs and getting bottle service. And they turned this townhouse into an after hours nightclub with lots of girls from Brandy Melville.
Yeah, that's exactly what they did. I mean, they came in to New York City like a hurricane, splashing out crazy amounts of money at clubs and quickly got the attention of this small group of nightclub owners who cater to rich guys just at the sheer volume of what they were spending. I mean, it was really crazy.
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Chapter 6: What led to the violent torture of Michael Carturian?
And they were trying to do it instantly, which is crazy.
Right. In the way that you can get rich in crypto instantly, they were trying to become New York nightlife people instantly. Will DuPlessis, I mean, he grew up in Greenwich and his dad was an investment manager. He kind of got in trouble as a teen, went to Bard for a little bit and then went to Tulane and got mixed up in the local gang drug scene.
But this other guy, John, as you said, he was much quieter and lived at home in Kentucky?
Yeah. John Woltz comes from a small town in Kentucky. It wasn't like rural poverty as his parents work. There was nothing to do with coastal, liberal, elite, high culture. And John independently found his way to tech and had lived in Silicon Valley for a while. He lived in the Bay Area, but he moved back home and was involved in all these sort of initiatives to
Chapter 7: What is the significance of the manifesto written by the accused?
bring Bitcoin to Kentucky, these sort of like local coding initiatives. Yeah, he was just sort of this seemingly stable guy. And then somewhere in there, he and Will became friends. And they became very close, seemingly pretty fast, at a time when John was seemingly either already going through mental health issues ups and downs, becoming pretty unstable, or was about to.
Chapter 8: Why is crypto so easy to steal and what security measures can be taken?
But they basically, at a certain point, they buy this outrageous mansion in Paducah, Kentucky, that's called the Smith Mansion, modeled on the White House. We're talking like,
columns out the wazoo like marble floors stately grounds in this otherwise low-key rural town i mean it's a total non-sequitur building it has these these crazy vaults and tunnels underneath it and they moved in and it was they were just sort of like off to the races they had like 60 typewriters in a room that they would spend all night typing messages to each other because they didn't want to communicate digitally because they believed they were being watched by spies will was
talking about running for senator in Kentucky. He was going to take Mitch McConnell's seat. And they started hiring political consultants to have meetings with them. And it I mean, it was just sort of Looney Tunes.
It seems to me that they started to have this really, really intense friendship that feels like a folie a deux where they both egg each other on and go off the deep end together. And they sort of enter this paramilitary haze is how I would describe it.
As you write, they bought thousands of dollars worth of guns and began wearing matching militant clothes and patrolling the property on the hunt for terrorists who they were convinced could be tracking them down to kill them. And I'm picturing them holed up in this house that's like Graceland meets the White House with tons of guns and tons of cocaine. And they write a manifesto.
Why are men obsessed with writing manifestos? That's one question. But B, what was in the manifesto?
The manifesto was taken at face value, just a product of extreme delusion. It laid out their plan to essentially fight against criminals and pedophiles by targeting enemies of the country. And they were going to like find people with illicit Bitcoin and take it from them. It was this sort of like fantasy of delusion.
patriotic, extrajudicial revenge from the sort of cowboy perspective of we're going to be these vigilante secret agents. I mean, it was like kids talking about fantasy of being a spy and they typed it out and left it in their house and the government found it and used it to indict them for doing that.
It's Scarface stuff. Like it's just, there's just cocaine. Like the story really, the key to this story is cocaine. Even more than crypto is the amount of cocaine that these guys were doing.
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