THE CRYPTO GANGSTERS HAVE ARRIVED

One grew up a prep-school kid in Greenwich, the other a reclusive nature enthusiast. How did they end up accused of torturing and holding hostage an Italian tourist on Prince Street?

- EZRA MARCUS and JEN WIECZNER

EARLIER THIS YEAR, word spread through the text chains of the insular group of men who own and operate high-end Manhattan nightclubs that two new whales had appeared on the scene.

For months, William Duplessie and John Woeltz had been showing up nightly at clubs without a reservation. They were suddenly regulars at Jean's, Paul's Casablanca, and the Box, a downtown burlesque with a what-happens-here-stays-here reputation, where they often spent six figures in a single evening. Clubs had to scramble to find more expensive bottles to sell them.

They tended to bring their own security team—sometimes as many as ten guards, more than A-list celebrities have. Yet none of the nightclub operators knew who they were. Several people who saw them assumed they were tourists. “They looked like hillbillies in the middle of Manhattan,” one says, perhaps referring to the gun holsters they sometimes wore on their hips and their all-camo outfits. Other times, they wore Louis Vuitton monogrammed sets, or bear-fur vests, or bulletproof vests adorned with military patches. “When someone like these guys comes in, everyone gets all excited,” says a club promoter. “These are the types of people that nightlife is built on, because no rational-thinking person would do this on a regular basis.”

The party didn't stop when the two got home. Woeltz and Duplessie transformed the five-story townhouse they were staying in on Prince Street into an after-hours nightclub of their own, filling it with young employees from Brandy Melville around the corner. The parties were wild and sometimes unnerving; the hosts bragged about ties to intelligence agencies and showed off guns, knives, and cattle prods. The same security team that accompanied them to clubs—some of them off-duty NYPD officers—patrolled the house at all hours.