Cryptocurrency Seems Futuristic. The Crimes Around It Are Not.

“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.