Mere days after rapper and self-proclaimed “serial entrepreneur” Heather Morgan was arrested for conspiring to launder $4.5 billion in stolen Bitcoin, Netflix announced it has ordered a docuseries on her and her husband, Ilya “Dutch” Lichtenstein, who was also picked up by the feds.
The docuseries will be directed by Chris Smith, who will also executive-produce alongside Nick Bilton. Smith helmed Netflix’s Fyre Festival documentary, as well as the recent HBO surfing docuseries 100 Foot Wave. Bilton, meanwhile, is a Vanity Fair journalist who also served as a producer on Alex Gibney’s Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos doc, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.
No additional info about the film was available, and a rep for Netflix didn’t immediately return Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
The fact that a docuseries about Morgan and Lichtenstein is already in the works is hardly a surprise given the scale and the extremely online nature of their alleged crimes. The couple was arrested on Feb. 8 for allegedly conspiring to launder Bitcoin, with the Department of Justice saying it seized $3.6 billion “directly linked” to a 2016 hack of a virtual currency exchange called Bitfinex. Per court docs, an unnamed hacker had stolen 119,754 Bitcoin — valued at about $4.5 billion in February 2022 — and moved chunks of it through a “complex” web of unauthorized transactions that eventually led to “a digital wallet under Lichtenstein’s control.”
And as if an alleged $4.5 billion Bitcoin heist wasn’t enough to perk the ears of studio executives, it also turned out that Morgan, in particular, had a wildly colorful past. On top of her decade of work in the tech industry, her occasional contributions to Forbes, she also moonlighted as a surrealist artist and — most importantly — a rapper, who released music under the name Razzlekhan. Morgan had even given herself a pitch-perfect nickname on her Razzlekhan website, “the infamous Crocodile of Wall Street.”
From Rolling Stone US
