By DAVE COLLINS

A Connecticut man whose parents were kidnapped after he took part in a $245 million Bitcoin theft has pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering conspiracy charges and has agreed to testify against his co-defendants, according to court documents that were unsealed this week.

Related Articles

Verdict against a pardoned Capitol rioter is only a partial victory for a police officer’s widow

Close ally of drug kingpin ‘El Mencho’ gets 30 years in prison as US ramps up pressure on cartels

Judge asks if troops in Los Angeles are violating Posse Comitatus Act

Judge orders Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil freed from detention

How to stay cool in the heat wave hitting parts of the US — even without air conditioning

Veer Chetal, 19, from Danbury, Connecticut, was one of three men charged with stealing 4,100 Bitcoins from a victim in Washington, D.C., in an elaborate online scam last August. The trio lived large after the heist, spending millions of dollars on cars, jewelry, rental mansions and nightclub parties, prosecutors say.

A week after the theft, Chetal’s parents were assaulted and kidnapped briefly in Danbury in a failed ransom plot aimed at Chetal, who the attackers believed had a large amount of cryptocurrency, authorities said.

Chetal’s criminal case was unsealed on Monday in federal court in Washington, revealing his guilty pleas in November and his agreement to cooperate with federal authorities investigating the Bitcoin theft. It also revealed new allegations that he was involved in about 50 similar thefts that raked in another $3 million between November 2023 and September 2024.

Another man charged in the Bitcoin theft, Malone Lam, was also among 13 people indicted by a federal grand jury in May in an alleged online racketeering conspiracy involving cryptocurrency thefts across the U.S. and overseas that netted more than $260 million, including the $245 million Bitcoin theft.

This photo provided by the U.S. Marshals in March 2025 shows Veer Chetal. (U.S. Marshals Service via AP)

Chetal is facing 19 to 24 years in prison, a fine between $50,000 and $500,000 and restitution to the victim that has yet to be determined, according federal sentencing guidelines and his plea agreement.

His lawyer, David Weinstein, declined to comment, saying Chetal’s case is still pending.

In September, federal agents with a search warrant raided Chetal’s apartment in Brunswick, New Jersey, and his parents’ home in Danbury in connection with the $245 million Bitcoin heist. Authorities said they found more than $500,000 in cash, expensive jewelry and watches and high-end clothing. Federal agents also said Chetal had $39 million worth of cryptocurrency that he turned over to investigators.

Authorities alleged Chetal, Lam and Jeandiel Serrano were involved in online “social engineering” attacks against cryptocurrency holders. Lam would send victims alerts about unauthorized attempts to access their crypto accounts, while the others would call the victims posing as representatives from well-known companies like Google and Yahoo and gain access to their accounts, authorities said.

Messages seeking comment were left with lawyers for Lam and Serrano on Friday.

A week after the theft, six Florida men were accused of kidnapping Chetal’s parents in broad daylight in Danbury. One of them crashed a car into the parents’ Lamborghini, while others pulled up in a van, police said. The attackers forced the couple out of their vehicle, beat them, put them in the van and tied them up, police said.

The plot was foiled, and the attackers were arrested quickly because there were eyewitnesses who immediately called police, and an off-duty FBI agent happened to be driving by at the time of the kidnapping, authorities said. Federal agents said a seventh man who was later arrested in connection with the kidnapping had previously gotten into a dispute with Chetal that turned physical at a Miami nightclub.

The attack on the couple is part of an increasing trend worldwide in robbers using violence to steal cryptocurrency.

Chetal, who was attending Rutgers University in New Jersey at the time of the $245 million theft and later withdrew, was born in India and came to the U.S. with his family when he was 4 years old in 2010, according to court documents. His father was granted a foreign worker’s visa, and his wife and children obtained related dependent visas.

Federal authorities said Chetal could face deportation as a result of the criminal case.

Authorities say Chetal’s father lost his job at Morgan Stanley because of the kidnapping and his son’s connection to it.

Chetal was initially released from federal custody on his own recognizance. But a judge ordered him detained until trial earlier this year after federal prosecutors said they discovered Chetal was involved in another crypto theft worth $2 million in October that he didn’t tell them about, after he had begun cooperating with federal authorities.

INTERNATIONAL FALLS, Minn. — When Nancy Imhof goes to the grocery store in International Falls, she glances at the bumpers of vehicles in the parking lot.

“I still look for Canadian license plates,” Imhof said. “There’s a few, not a lot, but there’s a few.”

Since President Donald Trump took office Jan. 20, he’s announced, and then delayed, significant tariffs on Canadian products and threatened to make Canada the “51st state,” prompting some Canadian citizens to boycott the U.S.

Now, their reluctance to visit their neighbor to the south is showing in the border crossing data at two northern Minnesota ports of entry.

From January through May, 25% fewer travelers entered the U.S. from Canada at International Falls compared to the same period last year, and 23% fewer travelers entered the country at the Grand Portage Port of Entry, according to data tracked by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. That includes those entering as pedestrians or in passenger vehicles and trucks.

Across the entire U.S. northern border, travelers crossing into the U.S. by those methods are down about 18% compared to last year.

“We’ve definitely noticed the street traffic being less,” said Imhof, who owns the clothing store Mason’s on Main in International Falls, just three and a half blocks from the border crossing — a bridge over the Rainy River to neighboring Fort Frances, Ontario.

The International Bridge, linking International Falls, Minn., and Fort Frances, Ontario.

“If people aren’t shopping, it’s more to defend their government,” said Imhof, who was born in Canada.

According to border entry data, monthly crossings into the U.S. at Grand Portage and International Falls in 2023 and 2024 were almost always higher compared to the previous year.

The COVID-19 pandemic made for a slow 2022, but Kjersti Vick, a spokesperson for Visit Cook County, said Grand Portage crossings were close to returning to pre-pandemic levels.

Then came 2025.

“It’s definitely noticeable,” Vick said. “We have definitely noticed a decrease.”

At Grand Portage, April saw the biggest dip with 6,800 travelers entering the country, down 38% compared to April 2024.

With fewer travelers on the road, Vick said gas stations, dining and retail are most affected.

Elliot Noyce, co-owner of the Angry Trout Cafe in Grand Marais, Minn., said customer counts are down this year, but since the restaurant doesn’t track where customers come from, he said it’s hard to gauge why.

Around Grand Marais and Cook County, Noyce said there’s uncertainty. “It’s sort of a thing that’s out of our control, so we don’t really give a lot of mind space to it,” she said.

Visit Cook County is running an advertising campaign inviting Canadian citizens to visit, Vick said.

“We want to make sure that they know that they’re welcome and that we love seeing them,” she said. “Because we consider them our neighbors.”

In International Falls, Imhof said the city and Fort Frances are intertwined. If one community doesn’t have something, the other might. For example, she said she is the only place in either town that rents tuxedos.

That interconnection makes cooling tensions between the two countries even more important.

“We just hope that this kind of blows over, or it comes to some sort of workable solution. … People who don’t live in border communities probably don’t understand just how close the relationship is — both directions,” Imhof said.

Related Articles

Minnesota adds a net 6,600 jobs in May, unemployment rate at 3.3%

Back to the ’50s will be starting line for a Minnesota to South Carolina vintage car rally

UMN hikes tuition 6.5%, makes program cuts at all campuses

Julian Scadden: Recent grads can build their futures in the trades

Northern Minnesota murder-suicide came minutes after judge issued warrant

By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Coming to court this week, a police officer’s widow wanted to prove that a man assaulted her husband during a mob’s attack on the U.S. Capitol and ultimately was responsible for the officer’s suicide nine days later. A jury’s verdict Friday amounted to only a partial victory for Erin Smith in a lawsuit over her husband’s death.

The eight-member jury held a 69-year-old chiropractor, David Walls-Kaufman, liable for assaulting Metropolitan Police Officer Jeffrey Smith inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They will hear more trial testimony before deciding whether to award Erin Smith any monetary damages over her husband’s assault.

But the judge presiding over the civil trial dismissed Erin Smith’s wrongful-death claim against Walls-Kaufman before jurors began deliberating. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said no reasonable juror could conclude that Walls-Kaufman’s actions were capable of causing a traumatic brain injury leading to Smith’s death.

Reyes divided the trial into two stages: one on the merits of Smith’s claims and another on damages. For the damages phase, jurors are expected to hear attorneys’ closing arguments Monday.

In the meantime, the judge urged the parties to discuss a possible settlement over the weekend. Reyes said it would be “exceedingly rational” for both sides “to get this behind you” and avoid the time and expense of an appeal.

Erin Smith claimed Walls-Kaufman gave her husband a concussion as they scuffled inside the Capitol. Jeffrey Smith was driving to work for the first time after the Capitol riot when he shot and killed himself with his service weapon.

His widow claims Walls-Kaufman struck her 35-year-old husband in the head with his own police baton inside the Capitol, causing psychological and physical trauma that led to his suicide. Smith had no history of mental health problems before the Jan. 6 riot, but his mood and behavior changed after suffering a concussion, according to his wife and parents.

Walls-Kaufman, who lived near the Capitol, denies assaulting Smith. He says any injuries that the officer suffered on Jan. 6 occurred later in the day, when another rioter threw a pole that struck Smith around his head.

Walls-Kaufman served a 60-day prison sentence after pleading guilty to a Capitol riot-related misdemeanor in January 2023, but he was pardoned in January. On his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump pardoned, commuted prison sentences or ordered the dismissal of cases for all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in the attack.

Trump’s sweeping act of clemency didn’t erase Smith’s lawsuit against Walls-Kaufman.

Erin Smith, the trial’s first witness, recalled packing a lunch for her husband and kissing him as he headed off to work on Jan. 15, 2021, for the first time after the riot.

“I told him I loved him, said I would see him when he got home,” she testified.

Within hours, police officers knocked on her door and informed her that her husband was dead. She was stunned to learn that he shot himself with his service weapon in his own car.

“It was the most traumatic words I’ve ever heard,” she recalled. “You just don’t know what to do.”

Walls-Kaufman’s attorney, Hughie Hunt, urged jurors to “separate emotion” and concentrate on the facts of the case.

“This is tragic, but that doesn’t place anything at the foot of my client,” Hunt said during the trial’s opening statements.

Smith’s body camera captured video of his scuffle with Walls-Kaufman. In his testimony, Walls-Kaufman said he was overcome by “sensory overload” and “mass confusion” as police tried to usher the crowd out of the Capitol.

“I couldn’t tell who was pushing who or from what direction,” he said.

The police department medically evaluated Smith and cleared him to return to full duty before he killed himself. Hunt said there is no evidence that his client intentionally struck Smith.

“The claim rests entirely on ambiguous video footage subject to interpretation and lacks corroborating eyewitness testimony,” Hunt wrote in a court filing in the case.

More than 100 law-enforcement officers were injured during the riot. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick collapsed and died a day after engaging with the rioters. A medical examiner later determined he suffered a stroke and died of natural causes. Howard Liebengood, a Capitol police officer who responded to the riot, also died by suicide after the attack.

In 2022, The District of Columbia Police and Firefighters’ Retirement and Relief Board determined that Smith was injured in the line-of-duty and the injury was the “sole and direct cause of his death,” according to the lawsuit.

“Will the next mayor treat reparations as the moral and economic necessity that it is, or let this moment pass, despite the will of the people?”

Racial equity legislation on the mayor’s desk at City Hall in 2020. (Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office)

In Tulsa, Oklahoma, something historic happened this spring. The city’s mayor, Monroe Nichols, unveiled a bold $105 million plan for reparations to the survivors and descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. 

Here in New York City, we also face a defining question: will the next mayor treat reparations as the moral and economic necessity that it is, or let this moment pass, despite the will of the people? 

Reparations in New York are not a fringe idea, as many media and political elites would have you believe. The recent survey conducted by New Yorkers for Reparations and Liberation Ventures shows that 48 percent of New Yorkers support reparations, and 70 percent would support or consider a candidate who champions them. This growing public consensus mirrors what advocates have long known: reparations are not only possible, they are inevitable. 

New York is leading the way in advancing reparations and reparative justice in many ways. The New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies, formed after years of advocacy from grassroots organizers, has been working over the past year to gather community input through public hearings. The New York City Council, through the Commission on Racial Equity (CORE), is developing its own reparations process. 

Nationally, Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Summer Lee are advancing HR-40, legislation that would establish a national reparations commission. Their leadership reflects the moral clarity needed in this moment. 

The groundwork has been laid; now we need the political leadership to act. 

Which is why we hosted a Mayoral Forum on Reparations directly across from Seneca Village, now known as Central Park, which was once a thriving Black community that was taken via eminent domain. There, four candidates—Michael Blake, Zellnor Myrie, Zohran Mamdani, and Brad Lander— each declared their support for reparations. 

They didn’t mince words: 

“Closing the racial wealth gap is not just a better deal for Black New Yorkers, it’s a better deal for all New Yorkers.” -Brad Lander 

“We as a city have to ensure that we are connecting the wrongs of the past.” – Zellnor Myrie 

“New York City actively participated in the slave trade; it should reconcile and repair this legacy.” – Zohran Mamdani 

“We have to address economic injustice at the forefront, it’s simply too expensive to live in New York because of historical injustice.” – Michael Blake. 

To understand why reparations are urgently needed, we must begin with a simple truth: Black wealth in this city was not lost, but taken. Two hundred years ago, on the land that is now Central Park, a thriving, predominantly Black community called Seneca Village stood. By 1850 it was home to 20 percent of all Black property owners in the state, and in 1853, the state decided to take it through the power of eminent domain, and by 1857 the entirety of Seneca Village was erased, not by mob, as Elie Mystal explained, but by design, by law. 

This pattern of dispossession evolved into policies across the city and state that robbed Black New Yorkers of their wealth; redlining, racial covenants, urban renewal, underfunded schools, segregated hospitals, discriminatory hiring, and unequal wages. The result is a staggering Black-white wealth gap, with the median wealth for white New Yorkers is $320,000, for Black New Yorkers, it’s just $2,800. That is not a gap, as our coalition member and long-time reparations leader, Nkechi Taifa, reminds us, it is a chasm. 

New York City is not absent from the legacy of American slavery, far from it. In 1712, the city became home to its first slave trading post at the intersection of Pearl Street and Wall Street, the very heart of what would become America’s financial district. Long before Seneca Village, there was “The Land of the Blacks,” also referred to as the Negro Frontier, a documented Black presence in New York dating back to the early 1600s who would also eventually be displaced. This rich history was nearly erased until the rediscovery of the African Burial Ground near Chambers Street at the foot of City Hall Park. 

The very name “New York,” along with the state capital “Albany,” comes from James Stuart, the Duke of York and Albany. He, along with his brother King Charles II, co-founded the Royal African Company—a powerful enterprise that dominated the transatlantic slave trade, exchanging enslaved Africans for goods as part of the triangular trade.

As a major port city, New York positioned itself at the center of this global system, helping to build the wealth of the English Crown, New York’s merchant class, and Southern plantation economies. The city’s industrial processing and shipping infrastructure directly fueled and profited from slavery, until New York legally abolished slavery in 1827.

Given this history, New York should be leading the national call for reparations, in truth, policy, and wealth redistribution. The institution of slavery as we know it would not have thrived without New York’s central role in financing, processing, and profiting from Black bondage. New York has always been a city of ambition. It’s time we match that ambition with justice.

Nicole Carty is a Brooklyn resident, New Yorkers for Reparations coalition member, and executive cirector of Get Free. Rashid Littlejohn is a Staten Island resident, New Yorkers for Reparations coalition member, and vice president of the Anti-Negro Defamation League.

The post Opinion: Why Reparations Must Be A Priority Issue in the NYC Mayoral Election appeared first on City Limits.