By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -William Duplessie, one of the two men charged in New York with kidnapping a man for three weeks in Manhattan’s upscale SoHo neighborhood, shocking him with electric wires, and dangling him over a staircase to try to get him to give up his Bitcoin password, appeared in court on Friday.
In court, a prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office told Judge Kacie Lallie that Duplessie, 33, has not yet been indicted. His co-defendant, John Woeltz, was indicted by a grand jury on Thursday and is due to be arraigned on June 11, prosecutors said.
Duplessie, wearing beige prison garb, was led handcuffed out of the courtroom after the brief hearing ended. Both he and Woeltz, who was arrested on May 23, had been ordered jailed earlier this week.
Duplessie was arrested on Tuesday. His lawyer, Sam Talkin, declined to comment after Friday’s hearing.
Local media have called Woeltz a cryptocurrency investor and described the alleged victim as an Italian man. Both Woeltz and the alleged victim had ties to a crypto hedge fund in New York, the New York Times reported, citing an internal police report described by a law enforcement official.
When the man refused to share his password, Woeltz and Duplessie allegedly began a series of brutal beatings over three weeks in a luxury townhouse until the man managed to escape. They tied his wrists, hit him on the head with a gun, and threatened to kill his family, according to the complaints against the two men.
Woeltz has been indicted by a grand jury and is due to be arraigned on June 11, prosecutors said on Thursday. Neither Woeltz nor Duplessie has entered pleas.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York;Editing by Noeleen Walder and Aurora Ellis)
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