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.
For a certain generation, this calls to mind the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, a young oil dynast, whose ear was chopped off by his abductors, in Rome, and sent to a newspaper. Efforts to extract cash from the rich by taking their children captive distinguished a lot of felonious activity in the mid-20th century but ultimately fell out of rotation for the simple reason that kidnappers typically get caught. The sources of wealth may change over the decades, but apparently the nefarious means of redistributing the money do not, rates of success be damned.
In regard to the New York arrests, one image stands out both for its anachronistic quality and the deceptions it lays bare. It is the picture of Mr. Woeltz, known as “the crypto king of Kentucky,” being handcuffed on Prince Street barefoot and wearing a bathrobe. If Mr. Duplessie looked like any fintech bro cosplaying a fourth-generation member of Winged Foot — he turned himself in wearing a white long-sleeve Polo shirt tucked into his slacks and loafers without socks — Mr. Woeltz looked like Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, the Genovese crime-family boss who was taken into custody at his house on Sullivan Street, 35 years ago this month, not for the first or last time. Mr. Gigante famously ambled around Greenwich Village and Little Italy in a bathrobe and slippers, which he would eventually admit was a strategy to appear insane and evade prosecution on racketeering charges.
Crypto acolytes troll “the normies” as rubes ignoring the inevitable future, even as they find themselves entangled in the scams and barbarities of the past. Two years ago, Sam Bankman-Fried, in all of his M.I.T.-credentialed brilliance, was convicted on seven counts of conspiracy and fraud in connection with his handling of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange he founded.
