John Woeltz being taken into custody
Credit: X/@MarioNawfal
New York: A 37-year-old cryptocurrency investor was charged Saturday with kidnapping a man and beating, shocking and torturing him for weeks in a luxury townhouse in downtown Manhattan, all in a scheme to get the man’s bitcoin password, authorities said.
The crypto investor, John Woeltz, was taken into custody Friday after the man managed to escape the townhouse and notify police. Woeltz was arraigned Saturday in Manhattan criminal court and charged with assault, kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment and criminal possession of a gun. He was ordered held without bail and forced to surrender his passport, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.
Another person, Beatrice Folchi, was arrested Friday and charged with kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment, though her connection to Woeltz was not immediately clear. A third person, identified only as an “unapprehended male,” was also mentioned as a participant in the abuse during Woeltz’s arraignment.
Wayne Ervin Gosnell Jr., Woeltz’s lawyer, declined to comment.
Many details of the violent, weekslong episode remained murky Saturday.
Just after 9:30 am, Friday, the man, a 28-year-old from Italy, ran out of the townhouse in the Nolita neighborhood of Manhattan and toward a traffic agent nearby, according to a law enforcement official.
The man, whose name has not been publicly released by authorities, told police that he had arrived in the city from Italy on May 6 and had gone to the townhouse. Woeltz had been renting the eight-bedroom home for at least $30,000 a month, the official said.
But when he arrived at the house, Mr. Woeltz and the “unapprehended male” stole his electronic devices and his passport and demanded that he tell Woeltz his bitcoin password so they could steal his cryptocurrency, according to a criminal complaint against Woeltz.
When the victim refused, the two men took him captive and subjected him to weeks of torture, which included beating him, shocking him with electric wires, hitting him with a gun and pointing the gun at his head, the complaint says.
The abuse reportedly continued for about three weeks until Friday morning, when the man escaped.
Police officers from the 5th Precinct arrived at the townhouse shortly after his escape Friday and took Woeltz into custody. The victim was taken to Bellevue Hospital in stable condition, police said.