Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan was renting a luxury New York townhouse for $40,000 a month, enjoying the fruits of his highly lucrative investments in cryptocurrency. But in May, his 17-room Manhattan home became a torture chamber in which he was held by kidnappers for 17 days.
Carturan’s captors, John Woeltz and William Duplessie, who wanted access to his cryptocurrency accounts, used brutal methods in their bid to prise open Carturan’s Bitcoin wallet, purportedly containing some $28m worth of cryptocurrency. Among other torture methods, they hung him from the building’s roof, shocked him with electrical wires and threatened him with a chainsaw.
