Second crypto investor is charged with kidnapping and torturing
By Jake Offenhartz
William Duplessie, right, is escorted out of the New York Police 13th Precinct after turning himself in on charges of kidnapping and false imprisonment, Tuesday, May 27, 2025, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
NEW YORK (AP) — A second cryptocurrency investor surrendered to police Tuesday in the alleged kidnapping of a man who said he was tortured for weeks inside an upscale Manhattan townhouse by captors seeking the password to access his Bitcoin account.
William Duplessie, 32, faces charges of kidnapping, assault, unlawful imprisonment and criminal possession of a weapon, according to police.
His arrest comes four days after the alleged victim — a 28-year-old Italian national — escaped, bloodied and barefoot, from a lavish townhouse where he said he had been severely beaten, drugged, shocked and threatened with death for nearly three weeks.
On Friday evening, hours after the man’s escape, the crypto investor John Woeltz was taken into custody and charged in the alleged kidnapping scheme.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Duplessie had an attorney who could speak for him. Court records didn’t list one. Woeltz’s attorney has declined to comment.
Authorities said the pair lured the victim into an eight-bedroom townhouse in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, one of the most expensive in the city, on May 6 to steal his Bitcoin fortune.
Over the next 17 days, the man told police he was bound by the wrists, shocked with electrical wires, pistol-whipped, cut on the leg with a saw and forced to smoke from a crack pipe. At one point, he said, he was dangled from the home’s top flight of stairs.
Believing he would soon be killed, the victim said he agreed Friday morning to give the men access to the password.
As the men went to retrieve his computer, the victim was able to escape from the home and flag down a traffic agent.
A search of the townhouse turned up a trove of evidence, prosecutors said, including cocaine, a saw, chicken wire, body armor, night vision goggles, ammunition and polaroid photos of the victim with a gun pointed to his head and a crack pipe in his mouth.
The victim was hospitalized with injuries to his wrists consistent with being bound, cuts to his face and other injuries, authorities said.
Duplessie is due to be arraigned in a Manhattan court on Tuesday afternoon.
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