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    Another Suspect Is Arrested in Bitcoin Kidnapping and Torture Case

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    The man, William Duplessie, surrendered to the police Tuesday morning. Authorities have said the victim was an Italian man who was tormented in a luxury Manhattan townhouse for weeks.A third person accused of kidnapping a man and torturing him for nearly three weeks to steal his Bitcoin fortune surrendered to the police on Tuesday morning, said Police Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch.The police identified the man, who has connections to Switzerland and Miami, as William Duplessie. He had spent days negotiating his surrender with the Police Department after the arrest on Friday of two others, John Woeltz, a cryptocurrency investor, and Beatrice Folchi, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the matter. Ms. Folchi was quickly released and her prosecution was deferred, one of the officials said.“We know he is going to be charged, with Mr. Woeltz, with kidnapping and false imprisonment of an associate,” Commissioner Tisch said in an interview on Fox 5 of Mr. Duplessie, shortly after he turned himself in.The episode burst into public view on Friday morning when the victim, an Italian man, escaped from the lavish, 17-room townhouse in the NoLIta neighborhood of Manhattan where he had been held captive and flagged down a traffic agent.The victim, Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan, and Mr. Woeltz had ties to a crypto hedge fund in New York, according to an internal police report relayed by a third law enforcement official.But Mr. Carturan and Mr. Woeltz fell out over money and Mr. Carturan flew to Italy, according to the report. Soon after, Mr. Woeltz persuaded him to return to New York.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Manhunt Underway for Former Police Chief Imprisoned for Murder and Rape

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      Grant Hardin, 56, escaped on Sunday from a high-security prison in Arkansas, where he was serving a decades-long sentence for first-degree murder and rape.A manhunt was underway in northern Arkansas after a former police chief convicted of first-degree murder and rape slipped out of a high-security prison, dressed in a fake law enforcement uniform.Grant Hardin, 56, who had previously served as the police chief in Gateway, Ark., escaped from the Calico Rock North Central Unit around 2:50 p.m. on Sunday, county officials said. He is considered extremely dangerous.An image released by the Stone County Sheriff’s Office on its Facebook page shows what it says is Mr. Hardin wearing clothes similar to a law enforcement uniform, escaping through a controlled gate while pushing a cart of utility materials.“It has been determined that Hardin was wearing a makeshift outfit designed to mimic law enforcement when he escaped the North Central Unit. He was not wearing a Department of Corrections uniform, and all DOC-issued equipment has been accounted for,” Rand Champion, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Corrections, said in a statement.Mr. Hardin was briefly the police chief in Gateway, a small town near the Missouri border. He held several other law enforcement positions in the state beginning in the 1990s, including as an elected constable, according to public records and local news reports. He was terminated multiple times, and was trailed by reports of using excessive force, poor performance and, in one instance, falsifying a police report, according to local news media.In 2017, Mr. Hardin was arrested and charged with shooting James Appleton just outside Gateway, where Mr. Appleton worked in the water department. According to the police affidavit, Mr. Appleton was pulled over in a pickup truck while he was on the phone with his brother-in-law, then was shot in the head at point-blank range with a shotgun.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Man Who Lived Abroad With Family’s Nanny Is Charged in Wife’s Murder

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      A man who appeared to be a grieving husband after he found his wife fatally shot at their Georgia business in 2006 was arrested this week and charged in her killing, officials said.After arriving at the family business in Douglas, Ga., and finding his wife fatally shot on Sept. 20, 2006, Jon Worrell called 911 and crumpled to the ground in sobs.His wife, Doris Worrell, was 39 when she was killed. The couple had three children who at the time were under the age of 12.She died of a gunshot to the head at their business, Jon’s Sports Park, amid its arcade, batting cage, go-kart track and mini-golf course. It was a recreational destination for families in that rural part of southern Georgia, about 130 miles southwest of Savannah.With such a backdrop, investigators and others in the city of about 12,000 first thought that Mr. Worrell was as he appeared, a devastated husband.The authorities said they initially believed that Ms. Worrell died in a bungled robbery attempt or by someone in retaliation for being barred from the amusement park by Mr. Worrell.But on Friday they said they had no doubts that he was behind her death, even though the authorities said he was not there at the time of the killing and have yet to determine who shot Ms. Worrell.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      My Father Was a Nazi Hunter. Then He Died in the Lockerbie Bombing.

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      On an early summer day in 1986 in a federal building in Newark, my father, Michael Bernstein, sat across a conference table from an elderly man named Stefan Leili. Then a young prosecutor at the Department of Justice, my father spent the previous day and a half deposing Leili, who emigrated to the United States from Germany three decades earlier. While applying for an entry visa, the U.S. government claimed, Leili concealed his service in the Totenkopfverbände — the infamous Death’s Head units of the SS, which ran the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled that such an omission was sufficient grounds for denaturalization and deportation. If my father could prove that Leili lied, the United States could strip him of his citizenship and kick him out of the country.Listen to this article, read by Robert PetkoffIn an earlier interview, Leili repeatedly denied guarding prisoners at Mauthausen, one of a cluster of work camps in Austria, notorious for a stone quarry where slave laborers spent 11-hour days hauling slabs of granite up a steep rock staircase. But my father and a colleague sensed that this time around, the weight of hundreds of detailed queries might finally be causing Leili to buckle. Leili had begun to concede, bit by grudging bit, that he was more involved than he first said. My father had been waiting for such a moment, because he had a piece of evidence he was holding back. Now he decided that it was finally time to use it.Leili sat next to his college-age granddaughter and a German interpreter. Earlier in the deposition, the young woman said her grandfather was a sweet man, who couldn’t possibly have done anything wrong. Indeed, it would have been hard to look at this unremarkable 77-year-old — bald, with a sagging paunch — and perceive a villain.Certainly, the story Leili first told my father was far from villainous. Born in a small town in 1909 in Austria-Hungary, present-day Romania, Leili was an ethnic German peasant, who like millions of others had been tossed from place to place by the forces convulsing Europe. In 1944, Leili said, the Red Army was advancing toward his village. He had to choose whether to join the Hungarian Army or, like many ethnic Germans from his region, the SS. The Schutzstaffel promised better pay and German citizenship, plus money for his family if he was killed. And besides, if he hadn’t gone along with what the SS wanted, Leili said, he would “have been put against the wall and shot.”Leili told my father he spent much of his time in the SS pretending to be ill so he wouldn’t have to serve. Then he guarded some prisoners working in a Daimler munitions factory. These were soldiers, not civilians. They had friendly relations, he told my father. They worked short days. They were well fed, even “plump.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Police Recover Diamond Earrings Worth $769,500 That Thief Swallowed

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      The police in Orlando, Fla., said that a suspect spent time in a hospital while they waited for the stolen jewels to be “expelled from his system.”“Am I going to be charged with what’s in my stomach?” Jaythan Gilder asked a Florida jail employee on Feb. 26.The answer, apparently, was yes.The next day, the authorities charged Mr. Gilder, 32, with first-degree grand theft and third-degree robbery with a mask. They say that he had stolen two pairs of diamond earrings worth a total of $769,500 from Tiffany & Company in Orlando — then swallowed them hours later as the police were about to arrest him.On Friday, the Orlando Police Department announced that it had recovered the earrings from Mr. Gilder, who spent more than 12 days in a hospital, when they were “expelled from his system.”The police said that on Feb. 26, Mr. Gilder of Houston, using the alias “Shawn” and posing as a representative for an N.B.A. player on the Orlando Magic, was escorted into a private room in the back of a Tiffany & Company store in an Orlando mall.There, he viewed two pairs of diamond earrings, valued at $769,500, and a diamond ring, worth $587,000, according to court records. Mr. Gilder was looking at the jewelry when he suddenly jumped up and grabbed it, according to the arrest warrant filed by an Orlando police officer.Mr. Gilder rushed toward the door, pushing and pulling at the handle as he tried to leave, the warrant said. But as he struggled to get out, an employee pulled the ring from him. Mr. Gilder was able to flee with the earrings, the warrant said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nine-Month Manhunt for French Fugitive Finally Produces an Arrest

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      A French convict was arrested in Romania months after he had been freed in a brazen daytime ambush that killed two prison guards, authorities said.A French inmate who fled police after armed assailants attacked a prison convoy in May was apprehended in Romania, French officials said Saturday. His capture ended a monthslong hunt for the man, whose violent escape resulted in the deaths of two prison guards.French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau confirmed in a statement on X that Mohamed Amra, the man who was whisked away by two gunmen in a brazen daytime attack, had been taken into custody with the cooperation of the Romanian government.President Emmanuel Macron hailed his capture as “a tremendous success,” and thanked investigators who had been tracking Mr. Amra “for months and months.” He added: “I am thinking of the families of the prison staff he had killed.”The Paris prosecutor’s office said the man arrested was “very likely” to be Mr. Amra and that investigators were working to conduct the necessary verifications.Violent prison breaks are rare in France. The two prison guards were the first to be killed in the line of duty in 32 years, and the case raised uncomfortable questions about France’s overburdened prison system and whether authorities had fully grasped how dangerous the inmate, a violent criminal known as La Mouche, or The Fly, was.He had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for burglary, one of numerous convictions for crimes including extortion and assault. But he was also under investigation on more serious charges — in Marseille, in connection with a kidnapping and homicide and in Rouen, in connection with an attempted homicide and extortion case.An undated photo of Mohamed Amra.InterpolFrench news outlets had reported that Mr. Amra had been involved in international drug trafficking and organized crime, but Laure Beccuau, the top Paris prosecutor, said at a news conference in May that Mr. Amra had no drug-related convictions.Officials have not released details about the investigation into the other people involved in the brutal ambush. During the May attack, assailants rammed a police van carrying Mr. Amra and then hooded men with automatic weapons circled the van, firing bullets into the vehicle for over two minutes.The attackers fled in stolen cars that were later found burned. The attack, which came as France was trying to project an image of law and order ahead of the Paris Olympics, was captured on video by security cameras and bystanders, and videos were later shared on X.It occurred on the same day that a Senate committee completed a report on rampant drug trafficking in France and recommended the creation of a French equivalent to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.France has been faced with a rise in drug violence and crime, not limited to traditional hot spots or big cities.A 2024 Senate report found that “the intensification of trafficking in the rural areas and the moderate-sized cities” had come with particularly brutal violence.Aurelien Breeden More

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      CEO’s Killing Poses Test for New NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch

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      Weeks ago, Jessica Tisch was in charge of street sweeping and trash pickup. On Monday, she found herself overseeing a ferocious manhunt as the head of the Police Department.Jessica S. Tisch, New York’s police commissioner, was giving her two sons their morning cereal on Dec. 4 when she got a text from a deputy telling her that the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare had been shot dead on a Manhattan sidewalk.“‘Kids, I’ve got to go’,” she said, and jumped in a car that drove her to police headquarters.She ordered that photos of the gunman be sent to all officers as a manhunt got underway. She assigned 10 analysts from the intelligence bureau to work with detectives analyzing surveillance video that might have recorded the gunman’s movements. For five days, investigators scoured thousands of hours of footage, analyzed ballistics and dove in the ponds of Central Park to look for evidence.They were not the only law enforcement agencies that sprang into action. In San Francisco, the police recognized a surveillance photo of the suspect as a man declared missing by his family, and told the F.B.I. in New York, which eventually passed the name to the New York police. The suspect was finally captured on Monday 280 miles away from Manhattan in Altoona, Pa., after a McDonald’s patron recognized him.The case, which has transfixed the nation, was a first test for Commissioner Tisch, who has never been a police officer and just four weeks ago could have been called the city’s street sweeper in chief. As sanitation commissioner, she oversaw more than 2,000 garbage trucks, 450 mechanical brooms, 700 salt spreaders and dozens of specialized machines to clean and plow bike lanes.Then Mayor Eric Adams appointed her to oversee about 49,000 employees at a law enforcement agency still emerging from chaos and turmoil — and the departures of three commissioners since June 2023.The killing of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, placed the department under intense pressure. It thrust Commissioner Tisch, who was appointed on Nov. 20, into the spotlight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Photographs Led Police to Person of Interest in UnitedHealthcare CEO Killing

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      In the end, it was the simple act of distributing photos — not sophisticated facial recognition technology — that led the police to a man they are calling a “person of interest” in the fatal shooting of a health care executive in Midtown Manhattan last week.After the shooting of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, last Wednesday, the New York Police Department began releasing a steady drip of images. The photos, taken together, appeared to show a young man with light skin and dark features. One photo — crucially — showed his entire face.Even as the police recovered what they called an “enormous amount” of forensic evidence and video, it was that specific photo that led to the arrest of a man on Monday morning about 300 miles from New York City, according to Joseph Kenny, the Police Department’s chief of detectives.Just after 9 a.m. on Monday, in a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., an employee spotted a man who looked like the person in the photos, and then called the police, who detained the man for questioning.The man, whom the police identified as Luigi Mangione, 26, of Maryland, was carrying a gun, a silencer and some kind of manifesto, the police said.Chief Kenny said that it was hard to credit the break in the case to any one moment or piece of evidence, but that if he had to, “it would be the release of that photograph to the media.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An N.Y.P.D. Manhunt Caught a Subway Shooter. This Time, It’s Different.

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      Capturing a suspect who slips away from a crime scene requires solid police work, help from the public and a little luck, experts say. So far, it’s not working.A shocking early morning act of violence, a frantic New York Police Department search for a suspect and a gunman seemingly in the wind: The year was 2022, and the man the police had fanned out to find was Frank R. James, who had set off smoke grenades inside a crowded subway car in Brooklyn and opened fire.Now, more than two years later, another manhunt has gripped the city. But unlike Mr. James, who was apprehended the day after his rampage, the man who assassinated the chief executive of a health insurance company just before dawn on Wednesday in Midtown Manhattan has not been caught or even identified after more than four days.The two most recent fugitive searches in New York City have involved gunmen who made seemingly improbable escapes in a city teeming with surveillance cameras and people. But despite some similarities between the cases and the investigative tactics being used to try to solve them, the search for the man who killed Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, has proved far more challenging.The suspect’s ability to evade capture appears to be tied to his methodical planning, including wearing a mask and a hood during nearly all of his time in New York City and paying with cash everywhere, along with using a fake driver’s license.And unlike Mr. James, who did essentially nothing to conceal himself after slipping away amid the chaotic aftermath of the shooting that wounded 10 people, the suspect in Mr. Thompson’s killing fled quickly into Central Park, away from the surveillance cameras that blanket much of Manhattan. He also appears to have left the state long before the police could possibly have begun to track his movements.“I don’t think I’ve seen this level of operational preplanning in any crime, never mind in a murder,” said Kenneth E. Corey, a former chief of department in the New York Police Department.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More