‘Free' Review: Life After Incarceration
In Buddhism there is a teaching: One's antagonists are the best spiritual teachers because they are so good at providing opportunities to practice patience and kindness. It is an idea that Amanda Knox credits for helping her overcome years of torment, living 'in the shadow of the worst thing that I never did.'
Ms. Knox is of course famous—notorious, really—for accusations made against her by Italian police and prosecutors. In 2007 she was an exchange student in Italy when one of her three roommates, Meredith Kercher, was found raped and murdered in their flat. Police brought Ms. Knox in as a potential witness—or so she believed. The 20-year-old Seattle native was held for five days without a lawyer. In 'Free: My Search for Meaning' she describes being slapped, browbeaten and coerced into implicating the Congolese owner of a local bar where she worked part time.
When her case came to court, the prosecution presented a lurid scenario of sex and violence that sent the tabloids into a swoon. It was alleged that Ms. Knox, a Volpe Cattiva, or wicked fox, had manipulated her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and an Ivorian migrant, Rudy Guede, into violating Kercher and holding her still so that Ms. Knox could 'plunge in the knife.' There was little to connect Ms. Knox or Mr. Sollecito to the crime, and abundant DNA and fingerprint evidence that Guede had been at the scene. In late 2007 the Italian authorities extradited Guede from Germany, to which he'd fled. In July 2008, Ms. Knox, Mr. Sollecito and Guede were charged with murder.
Ms. Knox's 2013 memoir, 'Waiting to Be Heard,' recounted the grueling details of her trial and incarceration, written after an Italian appeals court overturned the convictions of Ms. Knox and Mr. Sollecito in 2011 and she returned to the United States. 'Free' chronicles the author's emotional and philosophical battle to accept the events that befell her and to recognize, with as much grace and as little rancor possible, the contours of her new reality. For 'Foxy Knoxy,' as she'd been known on her middle-school soccer team, there was no stepping back into her old, anonymous life. She had joined what she calls the Sisterhood of Ill Repute. She was, and remains, a public figure and a continued object of fascination and revilement. People who hate Amanda Knox—and there are plenty—really, really, hate her. Even now internet trolls harass her. Even now she gets death threats.
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Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
As ICE ramps up activities targeting undocumented immigrants, communities are fighting back
Periodically, the Latinx Files will feature guest writers. Filling in this week are De Los reporters Carlos De Loera and Andrea Flores. Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers tried to execute two raids in San Diego. San Diego fought back. It all started on May 30 when heavily armed ICE agents showed up at the Italian eateries Buona Forchetta and Enoteca Buona Forchetta in the South Park neighborhood of the SoCal border city, as The Times' Ruben Vives reported. A spokesperson for Homeland Security Investigations, a branch within ICE, said the agents were executing search warrants related to alleged 'violations of hiring and harboring illegal aliens and false statements.' But as ICE members were making arrests, San Diego community members came out to defend those targeted and push back the agents. 'Shame! Shame! Shame!' hordes of San Diegans yelled at the gun-wielding, protective vest-wearing agents while forcing them to move away from the restaurants, social media video showed. Other videos revealed that ICE used flash-bang grenades against the protesters who interfered with the raids. Ultimately, four people living in the country illegally were taken into custody, HSI claimed. A federal search warrant, obtained by several San Diego news outlets, claimed that the restaurant owners were 'knowingly employing both illegal immigrants and individuals not authorized to work in the United States.' Additionally, it stated that HSI initially received tips about the restaurants' alleged activities in 2020 and a follow-up tip on Jan. 31 of this year. Reports on exactly how many restaurant workers were initially apprehended vary from a handful to the entirety of the staff. Claire Cody, who works at Buona Forchetta, spoke with KPBS San Diego about the situation. 'You always see this anywhere else, but then you experience it,' Cody said. 'I'm just thinking about my co-workers and I'm thinking about their families. This is just really unfortunate and very sad. I'm just praying that they're OK.' Officials from San Diego and across California commented on the situation, often scolding the ICE agents for their brute display of power. San Diego Rep. Scott Peters, whose district includes South Park, said, 'People must have thought: 'Wow, there must be an MS-13 [gang member] here or some drug kingpin like El Chapo at the bar.' No. They took four people away — dishwashers, busboys, maybe a cook.' North San Diego County/south Orange County Rep. Mike Levin also criticized the move. 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Last weekend, 18-year-old Massachusetts resident Marcelo Gomes da Silva was detained by ICE while on his way to his high school for volleyball practice. The Brazilian native was eventually granted bond on Thursday. On Monday, students at Gomes da Silva's school in Milford, Mass., staged a walkout in protest of his detention. Students were seen holding 'Free Marcelo' signs and Brazilian flags. Other members of his community protested the arrest outside Milford Town Hall on Sunday, where they called for the teen's release. On Wednesday, protesters, politicians and community organizers gathered in downtown Chicago to decry the detention of several immigrants at the hands of ICE, the Chicago Tribune reported. 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Yahoo
19 hours ago
- Yahoo
'Wrench Attacks' Are Shocking and Violent. It's Only Going to Get Worse.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Late last month, a shoeless and injured cryptocurrency investor fled from a posh Manhattan townhouse and approached the NYPD with a mortifying story: He'd just escaped 17 straight days of torture, having been held in SoHo and peed upon, forced to smoke crack, pistol-whipped, shocked with a Taser, cut with a saw, and dangled over a ledge. All because two fellow crypto enthusiasts, whom he personally knew, desired access to his multimillion-dollar Bitcoin fortune—and were willing to do anything to make him give up the password to his virtual wallet. With the information provided by this battered trader—a 28-year-old Italian named Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan—the authorities quickly took the accused culprits, John Woeltz and William Duplessie, into custody. Per police reports, Carturan and Woeltz had ties to an unnamed New York crypto hedge fund; the latter had often 'picked on' the former and, eventually, a disagreement over money led Carturan to fly back to Italy. Woeltz, who'd been spending time with Duplessie partying hard and splurging generously—including on that 17-floor, $30,000-a-month SoHo townhouse—persuaded Carturan to return to NYC early last month and allegedly hired an off-duty NYPD officer to pick him up from the airport on May 6.(It's unknown whether the cop knew what was about to happen.) According to Carturan's account, he only escaped after agreeing to give up the passkey to his Bitcoin wallet, claiming it was stored on his laptop; when his tormenters left him behind to fetch the computer, Carturan bolted from the premises. The NYC torture scheme was just the latest example of a 'wrench attack,' where a thief employs brutal physical violence in order to gain access to a target's virtual cryptocurrency stashes. The phrase hails from a 2009 strip from the popular webcomic xkcd, making the point that any common thief could break into a user's encrypted software simply by battering the owner with a $5 wrench 'until he tells us the password.' It's not a new phenomenon—but these days, it's a troublingly common one. On the same day Carturan left his captives, the crypto-crime watchdog group TRM Labs put out a report on the recent uptick in wrench attacks, noting that such acts 'have escalated in both frequency and severity,' typically involving 'high levels of violence that are extremely traumatic for the victims to endure.' Ari Redbord, a former federal prosecutor who now heads global policy for TRM Labs, gave me a blunt explanation for this surge: 'We've seen the price of Bitcoin double in the last year or so. Criminals tend to go where the money is. These aren't cybercriminals. These aren't hackers. They don't need sophisticated tools.' A few days later, longtime software engineer and Bitcoin maximalist Jameson Lopp gave a detailed presentation on the escalation in wrench attacks at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas. After kicking off with a reference to that xkcd comic, Lopp deployed various graphs of reported wrench attacks over the years, noting that such assaults are still relatively rare compared with other crypto-related crimes (such as hacking or phishing), but that they do tend to spike whenever Bitcoin's value balloons rapidly, like during the crypto craze of 2021. This year, Bitcoin's value has reached all-time highs—and 2025 is on pace to see a record amount of wrench attacks worldwide. Lopp emphasized that the total number will still be 'relatively small'—the previous record-breaking year, 2021, only recorded about 35 attacks, most of them in the U.S. But the details common to these crimes are terrifying enough to warrant extra caution for crypto holders: home invasions, kidnapping, drugging. And, Lopp warned, 'a decent number of these also involve torture.' Bitcoin Conference attendees likely found Lopp's presentation valuable, not least because many crypto investors are reportedly growing more fearful. The Wall Street Journal recently spoke with anonymous 'members of the crypto community' who 'say they are turning their Instagram profiles private and are trying to remove their physical addresses, and those of their families, from public records.' Other crypto enthusiasts are also training in hand-to-hand combat—perhaps not incidental to the fact that, as Lopp stated, many wrench-attack survivors lacked adequate home-security or self-defense tools. Again, such events are rare. But for those who go through them, they're scarring. Just last week, two Russian crypto executives were kidnapped by Chechens in Buenos Aires and forced to pay $43,000 in ransom before the perpetrators fled. A few weeks before that, a 30-year-old American tourist in London was drugged by a man who claimed to be his Uber driver; the kidnapper only let him out once the American gave up his crypto-wallet passkey. In late November, a Las Vegas–based investor left a local crypto conference and was kidnapped by three armed and masked robbers right as he reached home; they extorted him for $4.8 million worth of tokens, then abandoned him in a desert area 26 miles from the Nevada border. That same month, WonderFI CEO Dean Skurka was kidnapped in Toronto, held for a $1 million ransom, then freed when the sum was paid. There are still more recent incidents that I have not rounded up—or that, more chillingly, have not been made public. But a series of repeated kidnappings in France alone (which, in at least two cases, ended with the captive's finger getting cut off) were enough to spur the country's interior minister to convene a group of local crypto entrepreneurs and promise extra protection. (Redbord suspects that the revitalized presence of organized-crime syndicates in France has contributed to the increase of wrench attacks there, as he told me.) Bennett Tomlin and Cas Piancey, reporters for the crypto news site Protos and co-hosts of the Crypto Critics' Corner podcast, told me that the targeted wrench attacks may come down to the fact that fewer and fewer people hoard more and more digital currencies, juicing the value of their stashes. 'There's a pretty significant portion of high-net-worth individuals who have some portion of their money in crypto,' Piancey said, 'and that becomes a much easier target for a robber than demanding all the cash in their house, because there probably isn't any.' The often-public nature of crypto ownership—social media boasting, digital-influencer status, conference attendance, inconsistent cybersecurity measures—also makes it easier to target the most outspoken enthusiasts. That's especially the case at large in-person conferences with rich and powerful registrants like Bitcoin 2025. Unlike traditional means of protecting and storing wealth, like physical banks whose accounts are protected with sophisticated security measures, crypto holders carry immense, untraceable wealth by way of the passkeys to their crypto wallets, whether those are hosted online or stored within a flash drive. When you are your own bank, you risk being broken into like one. It becomes even riskier when any high-profile crypto holders gather together. Tomlin mentioned the fallout from last summer's Brussels Ethereum conference, where multiple attendees were robbed. 'You don't hear about this stuff happening at big conferences that involve bankers,' Piancey explained. 'Someone who has $100 million in crypto is a more appealing target for that kind of attack than someone who has $100 million in the banking system, because one of those is going to be a lot easier to quickly take and hold on to.' In other words: A heavily deregulated and public-facing sector that boasts relatively few buyers—who are even richer as a result—can become a sensible target for an otherwise technologically unsophisticated criminal who knows how to browse social media. At Bitcoin 2025, Jameson Lopp also noted this tendency and gave some advice to his audience: 'Shut up and stop flaunting your wealth.'
New York Post
19 hours ago
- New York Post
Woman found beheaded, stuffed in suitcase in murder that has rocked a beloved tourist hotspot
The body of a missing woman was found beheaded and stuffed in a suitcase in a famous tourist region — three weeks after she disappeared, authorities said, Maria Denisa Paun, 30, a Romanian national, disappeared from her home in the town of Prato, in Tuscany, on May 15. Her remains were found on Wednesday near an abandoned farmhouse in Montecatini Terme — about 25 miles west of Florence, Italian media reports. Advertisement A local security guard has admitted to murdering Denisa, cutting off her head with a knife, then setting fire to it with gasoline, Corriere Fiorentino reports. Denisa, who worked an escort, reportedly threatened to tell the man's wife wife if she didn't pay him. 5 The headless body of escort Maria Denisa Paus was found near an abandoned farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside. Jam Press Vasile Frumuzache, 32, who is also a Romanian national, faces charges of murder and suppression of a corpse, according to prosecutors. Advertisement The married father-of-two told police he met Denisa on a dating app before visiting her at a hotel the same night she was murdered, according to prosecutors. They had sex, but then she threatened to go to his wife unless he paid her the equivalent of around $11,450, he told police, according to Italian media reports.. 5 Her alleged killer, wearing blue, claimed she was blackmailing him by threatening to go to his wife. Jam Press Advertisement 'She was blackmailing me, that's why I killed her,' Frumuzache was quoted as saying. 'When I told her that I was a security guard and that I was married, she told me that she was able to reach my wife.' 5 Denisa was last seen alive on May 15 at a hotel in the Tuscan town of Prato. Jam Press He then strangled Denisa, dismembered her corpse and stuffed her body in a garbage bag and put the remains in a suitcase, driving from the hotel to the secluded farmhouse, Corriere Fiorentino reports. 5 Denisa was decapitated and her head set on fire. Jam Press Advertisement Hotel security footage shows Frumuzache arrive outside at 10:50 p.m. on May 15 with a black bag. Just over two hours later at around 1 a.m., he is shown on camera leaving the hotel with a white suitcase belonging to Denisa, which he loads into his Volkswagen Golf, according to reports in Italy. 5 Her remains were found inside a suitcase. Jam Press Denisa's remains were inside that suitcase, according to prosecutors. Investigators used a GPS installed in Frumuzache's car by his insurance company to retrace his movements after Denisa's disappearance, and tracked down the search to the abandoned farmhouse on Wednesday morning, where they found Denisa's headless body, along with the white suitcase. Denisa's case fascinated Italy in recent weeks, following rumors she may have been abducted by criminal gangs after leaving Rome and traveling to Tuscany last month.
