The Crypto Criminals and The Soho Townhouse

Summary

Infamous Podcast Summary

Episode: The Crypto Criminals and The Soho Townhouse

Date: February 19, 2026
Hosts: Vanessa Grigoriadis, Gabriel Sherman, Natalie Robehmed
Guest: Ezra Marcus (freelance reporter, New York Magazine co-author)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the surreal and alarming world of "crypto crimes," focusing on a sensational New York City case involving two alleged kidnappers, John Waltz and William Du Plessis. The hosts and guest Ezra Marcus unpack the rise of violent "wrench attacks" aimed at seizing digital currency, blending elements of modern techno-paranoia, high society parties, and true crime intrigue. The conversation also explores broader cultural implications of the crypto boom, the psychology and lifestyle of crypto "bros," and the vulnerabilities inherent in digital assets.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Introduction to Crypto Kidnappings [00:35–02:15]

• The episode starts by highlighting the evolution of crime in the age of cryptocurrency, specifically mentioning "wrench attacks"—violent assaults intended to extract crypto wallet passwords.
• Vanessa Grigoriadis frames the central story as "a modern day American psycho, like Wolf of Wall Street meets crypto paranoia," introducing the main accused, John Waltz and Will Du Plessis.

The New Mafia: Crypto Criminals [02:15–04:56]

• Vanessa and Ezra discuss how "crypto criminals" are becoming the new mafia, often targeting fellow insiders for their digital wealth.
• “If you're a crypto crime boss, this is the new way that you operate.” – Vanessa Grigoriadis [02:39]
• Ezra describes the “mainstream bro criminal” versus "underground subcultural figure" distinction as blurred in the crypto world, with the “Lamborghini lifestyle” incentivized by rapid speculation and risk.

Culture of Risk, Crypto, and the Modern Bro [04:56–10:46]

• Ezra connects this story to broader transformations in youth culture: rampant speculation, online gambling, and a normalization of high stakes, high reward thinking.
• “We've all become sort of numb how crazy it is that these people in the last 10 years started making life altering amounts of money by investing in NFTs and stuff.” – Ezra Marcus [05:38]
• Vanessa critiques fetishization of wealth and instant success and how this narrative attracts young men looking for shortcuts.

Paranoia, Parties, and White House Mansions [14:16–24:00]

• Recounting the alleged duo’s NYC life—renting an $75,000/mo eight-bedroom townhouse, extravagant nightlife, and outrageous spending.
• “They would spend over six figures a night at all these high end clubs...” – Ezra Marcus [15:45]
• Details the “party house” with a constant stream of Brandy Melville store employees and young club-goers, plus conspicuous security.

Descent into Delusion and Vigilantism [17:40–20:58]

• Explores Waltz and Du Plessis’ friendship, their time spent in Kentucky at the bizarre Smith Mansion, and their increasing delusions—paranoia, stockpiling of weapons, writing a "manifesto" about taking action against criminal elements.
• “It laid out their plan to essentially fight against criminals and pedophiles by targeting enemies of the country … a fantasy of patriotic, extrajudicial revenge.” – Ezra Marcus [20:15]

The Importance of Cocaine [20:58–21:56]

• Both hosts and Ezra stress the excessive and constant cocaine use as vital context for the paranoia and reckless behavior.
• “...the story, really, the key to this story is cocaine. Even more than crypto is the amount of cocaine that these guys were doing.” – Vanessa Grigoriadis [20:58]
• Guests arriving to the mansion were greeted with military cosplay, armed guards, and open drug use.

Targeting and "Investment Scams" [25:00–27:51]

• The alleged criminals would seek out crypto investors, feigning interest in business or investments to extract access to victims’ wallets, sometimes using intimidation tactics.
• For example, one would-be victim was told to hand over his passwords for a "security check," which he immediately recognized as a ruse. [25:47]

The "Torture Townhouse" Case [27:51–29:26]

• Focus shifts to the main victim, Michael Karturin: initially lured by friendship and parties, allegedly then held captive, tortured, and forced to hand over his crypto assets.
• Victim eventually escaped barefoot into the street, bleeding and flagged down police.
• “He basically said that two crypto investors had held him captive and tortured him for weeks for the passwords to his cryptocurrency accounts.” – Host/Producer (Natrobe) [28:57]
• Waltz and Du Plessis now face kidnapping, torture, and extortion charges.

Legal Arguments & Nature of Crypto Crime [29:26–31:04]

• Defense claims the victim was a willing participant; prosecution asserts coercion and violence created effective captivity.
• Ezra details the paradox of crypto: self-custody means one’s fortune is only as secure as one’s resilience to physical intimidation—unlike bank-protected funds.
• “If you want to be the bank, you have to suddenly start hardening your life in all these ways... the security of my holdings is only as strong as my ability to withstand torture as far as giving up my password.” – Ezra Marcus [31:10]

The Tragedy of Unprotected Wealth & Cultural Reckoning [32:48–34:44]

• Discusses the wave of wealthy crypto owners now reverting to secrecy and paranoia, hiding their assets and identities amid rising dangers.
• “Much easier to steal the $30 million of somebody whose $30 million is just essentially a password in their mind versus a bank account...” – Ezra Marcus [31:56]
• Vanessa frames this as part of a larger cultural shift away from flaunting wealth and questioning whether the get-rich-quick, hyper-individualist tech ethos will persist.
• “If part of what goes down is the get rich quick attitude and everybody branding themselves and the total fetishization of multimillionaire culture, I don't think that's a bad thing.” – Vanessa Grigoriadis [34:44]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It just turns out to not be a very easy thing to store millions of dollars of assets. I mean, it isn't really something that I think most people feel comfortable doing. That's why you don't usually see people with millions of dollars of cash in your house.”
  — Ezra Marcus [33:32]

• “My pleasure. Thanks for having me.”
  — Ezra Marcus closing out the discussion [35:59]

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Important Timestamps

• [00:35–02:15] — Introduction and framing of the story
• [14:16–16:45] — Description of the Soho Townhouse and nightlife extravagance
• [17:40–21:15] — Paranoia, the Kentucky mansion, vigilante delusions
• [21:56–23:39] — Interactions with Brandy Melville employees and the “party” scene
• [25:00–29:26] — Criminal allegations, victim’s story, police involvement
• [31:04–32:48] — Why crypto is vulnerable to physical theft ("wrench attacks")
• [34:44–35:59] — Closing reflections on cultural impacts and the future of crypto culture

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Episode Tone & Takeaways

• Candid, darkly humorous yet serious in exploring both the farcical excess and the real dangers of crypto-fueled crime.
• Explores the intersection of technology, culture, criminality, and wealth through vivid storytelling and sharp journalism.
• Leaves listeners with critical questions about the sustainability of public crypto culture, self-custody, and the under-examined risks in digital asset ownership.

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For more reporting on this and similar scandals, find Ezra Marcus in New York Magazine and listen to further episodes of Infamous.

Transcript

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[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

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.

[Tara Palmieri]

Plessis, cryptocurrency investor, is in a New York jail today charged with kidnapping a 28 year old man.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

A suspected kidnapper held a man captive and tortured him for weeks.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

John Waltz and Will du Plessis 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.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

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 COVID of New York magazine in a hugely well read story, the Cryptomaniacs 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.

[Ezra Marcus]

Thanks for having me.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

So, Ezra, your beat is just weird crime shit on the Internet?

[Ezra Marcus]

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.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

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

[Ezra Marcus]

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, 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.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

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

[Ezra Marcus]

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 dichotomy 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 buy 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 how crazy it is that these people in the last 10 years started making life altering amounts of money by investing in NFTs and stuff. But for these guys, they're just living in this world of magic money. And I think it gave them a sense of the world that was like totally on the one hand irrational and fantastical, but also totally valid in terms of what was available to them from a kind of Lamborghini lifestyle perspective.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

Yeah, the Miami lifestyle perspective.

[Ezra Marcus]

Yeah, totally. And he just, I mean, and yet he was quite early, relatively speaking. So he still had this sort of gravitas within, within this community. And anyway, all of which is to say, as with so many of these kind of notorious crypto people like sbf, you know, Sam Bankman Fried like had this sort of like boy genius, I'm going to change the world, like levity to the way he moved through the economy that on the one hand ended with him going to jail for life, but on the other hand was in certain ways rational to what was presented to him, which is this, that like the crazier moves you make, the more money you make in this speculation, speculative hot air balloon world.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

I don't even remember the Sam Bankman Fried 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?

[Ezra Marcus]

My co writer for the crypto story, Jen Vietchner, actually wrote the big New York mag Sam Bankman Fried story. But my sense of it, just from reading, is he was, I think, motivated by some of this EA stuff, the effective altruism stuff, and did have this belief in changing the world that also came out of this incredibly blase way of essentially treating the world through the lens of gambling. And so he was like, okay, well I'm in this situation where essentially he had two arms of the company. One is the sort of straightforward public facing the bank and the other was this highly speculative crypto gambling vehicle which lost billions. So he used money from one to cover bets, on the other, the bet turned out wrong, he fumbled it all, and then that was actually 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 I'm a robber baron, 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.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

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 types. 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 du Plessis and John Waltz.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Yeah, I think what happened with them in the. 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, like, 20s are doing, which is, you know, 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 gonna 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 sort of unknown version of dude, primarily in New York now, is this person 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.

[Ezra Marcus]

Yeah. And I mean, to even zoom out further, it's like against the backdrop of a, you know, to generalize a young male market paradigm where everything is speculation, sports, gambling, call sheep, poly market. 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 so.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Insane.

[Ezra Marcus]

I'm just saying. Insane. Yeah. You know, and so I'm like, 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 yeah, and I think it's against this backdrop of people feeling this kind of constriction of regular life pathways and it's leading people towards this almost nihilistic but also hopeful sense of like I'm going to be a multimillionaire and have my Lamborghini in Miami if I can just find the right niche online side hustle or gambling strategy or investment vehicle or something like that. Another thing that I've noticed in a lot of my stories and just looking around is that 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 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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[Tara Palmieri]

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.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

So these two guys, Will Du Plessis 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 right. Piles of cocaine were procured along with a silver Tiffany tray to serve it on. And these 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.

[Ezra Marcus]

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. Like they would go to a club on a given night and they would get multiple tables and have a section cordoned off and have like 15 $20,000 bottles. Like they would spend over six figures a night at all these high end clubs, sort of trashy mainstream bottle service clubs and they would do it five, six nights a week. New York isn't really a bottle service city anymore. That sort of ended. Now there's like private clubs this and that, but These guys were doing it over and over again at these clubs like the Box. And all these club owners were like, what is going on? These guys weren't like they didn't know anything about New York. I mean, Will had spent time here, plenty of time here, but he certainly wasn't plugged in particularly. So they attracted this sort of orbit of hanger on nightlife fixer guys, cooler younger guys whose job was to like fill their tables with girls and get them a sick house and like fill it with DJs and DJ equipment and throw parties for them and set them up, introduce them to everybody. And their attitude was, we're gonna take over the city in this completely 0 to 100 way that it caught people's attention in nightlife world.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

They also walked around with security, Right.

[Ezra Marcus]

They were bringing more security guards than like Jay Z, you know what I mean? They were acting as if they were a list celebrities, which is hilarious and strange.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

They were just kind of willing themselves into becoming something in New York. I don't know, not even downtown, but just kind of shitty mainstream nightclub scenes.

[Ezra Marcus]

Yeah. And they were trying to do it instantly, which is crazy, right, in the.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

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 teenager, 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.

[Ezra Marcus]

Yeah, John Waltz 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'd lived in the Bay Area, but he moved back home and was involved in all these sort of initiatives to bring bitcoin to Kentucky. These sort of 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 ups and downs, becoming pretty unstable, or was about to. 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 crazy vaults and tunnels underneath it. And they moved in, and 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 Waste talking about running for senator in Kentucky. He was gonna take Mitch McConnell's seat. And they started hiring political consultants to have meetings with them. And, I mean, it was just sort of looney tunes.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

It seems to me that they started to have this really, really intense friendship that feels like a Foley idea 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, 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?

[Ezra Marcus]

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 patriotic, extrajudicial revenge from the sort of cowboy perspective of we were 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.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

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.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

Yeah. You cannot overstate the importance of cocaine in this story and the paranoia it created in them.

[Ezra Marcus]

Just picture, like, people I spoke to who visited the house. They're flown there by private jet. As soon as they get off the jet, Will and John's driver pulls up in their jeep that they've outfitted with, like, a gun turret. They go to the house, everyone's given fatigues to put on, and guns are handed out, and they get A big bag of cocaine and they rip open with a bowie knife and they're using the knife to do lines. Or it's this like fever dream of drug fueled military cosplay. It's like the craziest guy, you know at 7am after doing lines all night.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

And then they get to New York and yeah, they're having these after hours parties at their house. Let's talk about the Brandy Melville employees really quickly. So they were down the street from the Brandy Melville store. Can you explain that to me?

[Ezra Marcus]

Yeah, you know, it wasn't that they knew to go to the Brandy Melville store, but one of their club promoter fixer guys had cultivated a sort of friendship with a number of the young Brandy Melville store employees. And then just like a stream of early 20s, late teens, young women.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

We used to call these guys model wranglers. Right? The guys who, you know, put the models all in a white van and now they would get an Uber, bring them to the cheesy nightclub where it's basically the Amy Winehouse song. You got to Miami because you got here for free. So you did Miami cause you got there for free. It makes perfect sense to me that they were looking for, you know, girls from those places, which of course they would have seen as like the highest status. They're not looking for like the Sex and the City girls. They're not looking for, you know, the girls girls. They're just like, again, this is like a mainstream story.

[Ezra Marcus]

Yeah. Then the flip side of that is the Brandy girls themselves. I mean, I talked to a number of them and they were like, yeah, this is the romance of New York as some creepy rich older guy like brings you in a van to a party and you do coke in his crazy mansion. And like maybe he gives you a bag. A quote from a girl who spent time there that I put in the story was like every girl who set foot in that house thought she was Lana Del Rey. This self narrativized romance of the sleaziness of the instance. It was obvious that these guys were like sleazy, out of control monsters.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Yeah, totally. Yeah.

[Ezra Marcus]

But they also, but to a large extent, a lot of the girls who were going there were kind of like laughing at them. And then they got increasingly freaked out as they started to see the way that these guys were treating their friend.

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[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

Let's get to the criminal aspect of this case. So these guys had this manifesto where it was sort of loosely Robin Hood. They were going to take crypto from bad guys and, I don't know, whatever, save America while doing it. What were they actually doing?

[Ezra Marcus]

They were doing a lot of different things. Will came out of this sort of hedge fund that he had been working on with his dad that in sort of complicated ways seemingly was fraudulent. They were in Switzerland. There were these sort of complicated ownership structures where the money was being moved around in ways that was. They were accused of moving around in fraudulent ways. But also there was this element of sort of like what we would see in New York where they would throw these parties and there would be girls there and they would give fancy gifts to the guys who they wanted to invest with them. So what they were actually doing basically was like trying to invest in things once they get to New York. And they were telling people they had a fund. But what they're accused of actually doing was basically using that to target crypto asset holders, to extort them, to get them to hand over their passwords to their wallet. Somebody who I spoke to, not the main victim in the case, somebody else had a few meetings with them. And at a certain point they were like, okay, we want you to work with us. We want to invest big in your thing. And the guy was like, okay. And they were like, well, to do that, we need to make sure that your crypto is clean. We just make sure that foreign governments haven't corrupted it in some way. And so you need to give us your passwords. And the guy was like, are you joking? That's crazy. And in that moment he realized, these guys are just thieves. I mean, they're just trying to use the sort of posture of, of investment as a way to find targets. Which brings us to this case where they had this friend, he was in his late 20s, who they had done some sort of business with prior. Michael had credited John with like helping him out of a financial jam previously. And he had spent time with them. He spent a lot of time with them. He had. He had come to the Smith mansion, they had spent Christmas with him, and they sort of invite him to the mansion under the auspice of, you're gonna work with us, we're gonna bring you into our thing. You know, we're friends and we're gonna party together. And so he comes over, he's Italian, he comes over from Italy, and they bring him into their crazy lifestyle. They buy him fancy clothes, they take him to the Rick Owens store, they introduce him to all the Brandy Melville girls, He's sleeping with women at the house. He's seemingly a part of the non stop party that's happening as far as anyone else who's in the house could tell.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

Totally. And then this devolves in a party monster sort of way where they start torturing this guy, Michael Karturin, who they're partying with. And it's really gruesome. So we won't go into detail, but what was the point of it?

[Ezra Marcus]

You know, this gets into like. Well, both sides have their version of the story, and their version, which is what they will be saying in court, is that this was hazing, that they were toughening him up, that he was weak and he wanted them to make him strong. And so they would make him do push ups, they would make him serve drinks at parties, they'd put him in funny outfits. They would just sort of like mess around with him in the way that a frat guy might mess around with the pledge. His version of the story is that they had essentially already, when he moved there, taken money from him, and that in order to get it back, they were sort of forcing him to come live with them. And he was going along with what they were doing, which included taking away his phone and keeping him locked in the house and ultimately torturing him in various ways. And that it was because they wanted more money. They just basically wanted him to hand over his crypto.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

This went on for months, until the eve of Memorial Day weekend when he basically ran out from the townhouse onto the sidewalk barefoot, and passed bleeding from his head and flagged down a cop. And he basically said that two crypto investors had held him captive and tortured him for weeks for the passwords to his cryptocurrency accounts. He was taken to hospital and police soon arrested his alleged captors. Will Du Plessis and John Waltz. So where are Will Du Plessis and John Waltz now?

[Ezra Marcus]

Will du Plessis is in jail, and John has bailed out. They're facing really serious kidnapping and torture charges and extortion. Their trial is upcoming. It's going to be, as of now, it's scheduled for sometime later this year. I assume it'll probably get pushed back a bunch of times, but it's going to be a really interesting case where on the one hand, what they will argue, what the defendants will argue, is that it's absurd for this guy to claim that he was a captive, given that he could leave the house. He left the house any number of times. That he left the house without them, that he was. Even the night of. That he ran out of the house. He was at a club with them. That it's absurd to call him this sort of kidnap victim when he was willingly going along with what they all thought was a consensual arrangement where they were messing with him. And what the government will argue is that he was living in fear. They had threatened him. They had physically tortured him. He'd been tased, all these things, and that he was terrified. They had claimed they had, as they wrote in their manifesto, that they were targeting foreigners who had dirty money and that he believed they could have him killed and all this stuff. And they threatened his life. He was held over a balcony on the fifth floor of the townhouse. I mean, basically, he was just like that. The fear of violent retaliation was enough for him to see himself as a prisoner.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

Why is crypto so easy to steal? Why are we seeing this spate of kidnappings and people trying to get money out of people's wallets.

[Ezra Marcus]

It comes down to this sort of absurd, you might say, paradox at the heart of crypto culture, which is, like, it was marketed as this liberatory technology so that you don't need to use a bank anymore. You are the bank. Your money is yours. And it's, like, not tied to any kind of federal bureaucratic system with regulated banks, and it's international, and it's. You have your private code and only you own it. And it's like, okay, great. Like, do you know what banks have? Vaults. Do you know why? Because people can't come and take stuff out of them. So if you want to be the bank, you have to suddenly start hardening your life in all these ways that I think people didn't really realize in the first sort of glory days of crypto that, like, the security of my holdings is only as strong as my ability to withstand torture as far as giving up my password. Because as soon as you give someone the password to your wallet, the money is just instantly gone, and it's in someone else's wallet, and good luck getting it back. It's much easier to steal the $30 million of somebody whose $30 million is just essentially a password in their mind versus a bank account that you would need to break into a bank security system to get a hold of. And that's why they call these. These wrench attacks, because it's just this incredibly simple thing. It's like I'm showing up on your front door with a wrench, and I'm saying, give me your money now. And that's the crime. And that's so much easier to execute than the other sorts of complex things you need to do to steal millions of dollars traditionally. And it's, I think, serious flaw in the entire concept of digital assets.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

So what do we do about this? This is sort of like when people say, like, well, you've got to control your kids from getting on the Internet. And I'm like, I'm lying in my bed sleeping, and my kid is taking my phone and, like, showing it my face so that he can get on YouTube. Like, what are you talking about? Like, you know, give me a break.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

You've got to turn off biometrics, Vanessa.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

Okay, okay. But like. Like what? So what do we do about this, then? I mean, I. There's all sorts of two factor authentication. Could be 20 factor authentication now, you.

[Ezra Marcus]

Know, I mean, do you have millions of dollars in crypto assets?

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

I personally don't, so I'm not worried about it. I don't feel bad, really, for these guys. But there are other people who have crypto who are probably good people.

[Ezra Marcus]

Yeah. I mean, it just turns out to not be a very easy thing to store millions of dollars of assets. I mean, it isn't really something that I think most people feel comfortable doing. That's why you don't usually see people with millions of dollars of cash in your house. And if you have that, you have to take serious precautions. And I think as far as what happened in the crypto world is it was such a ostentatious, flashy way of being where they were. Like, these are my 10 bored apes that I have displayed on my Twitter, and here's my Lamborghini, and I live in Brickell, Miami, my penthouse. And I. I'm pitching this lifestyle. And part of the whole value proposition of crypto is that the people telling you about it were super rich. And the richer they seemed, the richer they got as other people bought into it, which then put a huge target on their back, because everyone knows that they have all this crypto. So what they're doing now is there's this huge reversion to secrecy. And, like, you can't trust anybody and you don't want anyone to know that you have all this money. Many of them have gone very dark on the Internet or they only use a pseudonym and they'll never quote, unquote, face docs themselves. And it's just this whole thing where they don't even want their closest business partners to know who they are. And so much of crypto now is about anonymity and secrecy and fear for this very reason.

[Vanessa Grigoriadis]

The vibes are shifting all over the place. We know that we're living in a time of, like, immense cultural, political, Everything change. And if part of what goes down is the get rich quick attitude and everybody branding themselves and the total fetishization of multimillionaire culture, I don't think that's a bad thing. I think people want to blow up the cultural moment we're in. It's not interesting to a lot of us. So I am curious where this goes next. Hopefully it doesn't go to bunkers where people are amassing a stockpile of guns. And even worse, like somebody said to me the other day, okay, fine, now there's an AI that can take a medical board and get 100 on it. Well, what about when the AI knows how to make a nuke? Like, and that's just info that everybody has. So I think we're just at the beginning of the conversation of how our culture is going to shift through all this technology. And we'll see where this part about the money goes. Well, thank you so much, Ezra, for coming on to talk to us.

[Ezra Marcus]

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

Where can people find you?

[Ezra Marcus]

In the pages of New York Magazine, I would say, is where I'm most mostly publishing right now.

[Host/Producer (Natrobe)]

That's it for Infamous. If you enjoy the show, please leave us a rating and review and tell your friends. If you want to follow me on Instagram, you can find me at Natrobe. That's N A T R O B E. And if you want to support Vanessa's work, you can buy her book, Blurred Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus. See you next week.

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