Remy Ra St. Felix spent April 11, 2023, on a quiet street in a rented BMW X5, staking out the 76-year-old couple that he planned to rob the next day.

He had recently made the 11-hour drive up I-95 from southern Florida, where he lived, to Durham, North Carolina. It was a long way, but as with so many jobs, occasional travel was the cost of doing business. That was true especially when your business was robbing people of their cryptocurrency by breaking into their homes and threatening to cut off their balls and rape their wives.

St. Felix, a young man of just 25, had tried this line of work closer to home at first, but it hadn't gone well. A September 2022 home invasion in Homestead, Florida, was supposed to bring St. Felix and his crew piles of crypto. All they had to do was stick a gun to some poor schlub's head and force him to log in to his online exchange and then transfer the money to accounts controlled by the thieves. A simple plan—which worked fine until it turned out that the victim's crypto accounts had far less money in them than planned.

Rather than waste the opportunity, St. Felix improvised. Court records showed that he tied the victim's hands, shoved him into a vehicle, and drove away. Inside the car, the kidnappers filmed themselves beating the victim, who was visibly bleeding from the mouth and face. A gun was placed to the victim's neck, and he was forced to record a plea for friends and family to send cryptocurrency to secure the man's release. Five such videos were recorded in the car. The abducted man was eventually found by police 120 miles from his home.