In May, a video emerged showing Charlie Zakkour, a then-upcoming star on Bravo’s new reality series Next Gen NYC, outside of a Soho townhouse looking concerned as cops arrested a cryptocurrency investor named John Woeltz. The townhouse, it turns out, is where Woeltz and business partner William Duplessie were allegedly holding an Italian businessman named Michael Carturan hostage in an attempt to extort him out of millions of dollars of crypto. So what exactly was a budding Bravo celeb doing there?
Season one of Next Gen NYC offered no answers, but thanks to a new report from our friends at Intelligencer, we have an idea. Apparently, Zakkour was enlisted by Duplessie and Woeltz’s assistant, Morgan O’Connor, to help bring hot girls to their townhouse — namely, employees at the nearby Brandy Melville on Broadway. As writers Ezra Marcus and Jen Wieczner report, Zakkour is a Manhattan club kid who’d dated several of the Brandy Melville girls over the years and “often brought them and their friends to clubs and after-parties. (Sometimes he’d apparently drop by the store just to hang out, leading one young employee to ask herself, ‘What’s an unc doing at Brandy?’)”
The arrest reportedly freaked out the Brandy crowd: One friend of several employees described it as “D-Day in the Brandy store.” Zakkour hasn’t been formally charged with any crime, and it is unclear what exactly he knows about the alleged torture scheme. Add this to the ever-growing pile of Brandy Melville scandals, I guess?
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