VENICE, Italy (AP) — Of all the roles Ellen Burstyn might have been offered in her 90s, that of Marilyn Monroe, who died at 36, seemed fairly unlikely. But then one day Maggie Gyllenhaal came to her apartment to talk about a wild idea: What if she played Monroe at 100?
“It sounded like a good idea to me,” Burstyn told The Associated Press.
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Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal poses for photographers at the opening ceremony and the red carpet for the film 'Ink' during the 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal poses for photographers at the red carpet for the film 'A Place to Heal' during the 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
FILE - Ellen Burstyn attends the "Law & Order" 25th anniversary celebration in New York on Jan. 6, 2026. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Ellen Burstyn arrives at the AFI Awards on Friday, Jan. 12, 2024, at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)
Their 17-minute short film, “Flesh Impact,” is having its world premiere Monday at the Venice Film Festival, where Burstyn, 93, is receiving a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.
Though Burstyn never met Monroe, there was overlap. They shared a massage therapist, who would tell stories about his late friend. He even told Burstyn that she was actually quite like Monroe, and lent her one of Monroe's old books called “The Thinking Body,” which had some treasures like old receipts, inside.
“I knew that she was not what she presented as her persona and that actually that’s a persona that she created,” Burstyn said. “She created the whole concept of Marilyn Monroe and played it.”
Once, she saw her in a nightclub and Monroe nodded at her.
“She was so startlingly beautiful and she caught my eye and … I felt that she recognized me,” Burstyn said. “I was very early in my career. And the fact that she recognized me, I just felt so honored and pleased.”
The Monroe short came about in somewhat unconventional fashion, through the luxury car company Genesis, whose chief marketing officer Amy Marentic approached Gyllenhaal about doing something around what would have been Monroe’s 100th birthday in June.
Gyllenhaal asked for a weekend to think about it, and landed on Marilyn, at 100, “doing basically the most vulnerable, one of the most vulnerable things I think an actor can do, which is audition, alone on a stage.”
Burstyn was the first actor she thought of.
“I just had this feeling maybe this is an opportunity for her to think about things in a new way,” Gyllenhaal said.
The two found that they shared a similar language and approach to the work.
“We are interested in the depth of what’s being revealed. And we both want to go there,” Burstyn said. “If we’re going to be doing anything, we’re gonna be doing it from there.”
Though nothing has really changed very much in how Burstyn chooses roles over the years — she just wants to be moved or challenged — having a set populated largely by women was a far cry from how things were when she was starting out.
“When I first started working, which was 150 years ago, there were no women on the set. There were no women crew. There was no woman behind the camera. ... If a woman was on set, that meant that she was an actress,” Burstyn said in a news conference Monday. “Then, slowly, thanks to blessed Gloria Steinem who just died, the consciousness started to change.”
Burstyn is also in a feature film, Kornél Mundruczó’s, “Place to Be” alongside Taika Waititi that’s playing at the festival. And, she said, she’s feeling “slightly overwhelmed” by the whole thing.
“I have been asking myself, why do I deserve this? What have I done? It’s a long career,” she said. “And I finally came to it today that I wouldn’t have had this career without my training.”
Perhaps that is a bit modest for someone who has won an Oscar, for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” a Tony and two Emmys for her acting. In her over 50 years in the business, she’s appeared in around 150 films, and is currently serving as a co-president of The Actors Studio. Burstyn even teaches acting classes occasionally, continuing the legacy of her mentor and acting coach Lee Strasberg.
“Her artistry, which could illuminate pain and everyday resilience with dignity, irony and courage, remains an absolute model of authenticity in performance and civic engagement within the craft of acting,” festival director Alberto Barbera said in a statement.
Sitting alongside Gyllenhaal the day before the big award, she described her outfit, a gown, and wondered if it was too much. Her director assured her it wasn’t: This was her day.
“I’m just really very happy to be here and very grateful to receive this award and grateful to this lady who put me in this interesting and deep and funny and wonderful movie,” Burstyn said.
For ongoing coverage of the 2026 Venice Film Festival, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/venice-film-festival
Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal poses for photographers at the opening ceremony and the red carpet for the film 'Ink' during the 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2026. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal poses for photographers at the red carpet for the film 'A Place to Heal' during the 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy, on Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. (Photo by Alessandra Tarantino/Invision/AP)
FILE - Ellen Burstyn attends the "Law & Order" 25th anniversary celebration in New York on Jan. 6, 2026. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Ellen Burstyn arrives at the AFI Awards on Friday, Jan. 12, 2024, at the Four Seasons Beverly Hills in Beverly Hills, Calif. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — They pulled off one of the largest cryptocurrency thefts in U.S. history, duping a stranger out of bitcoin worth over $240 million. They tried to hide their digital fingerprints, carrying out a sophisticated scheme to launder the proceeds.
And then the party started.
The scammers — a network of young men in their late teens or early 20s — celebrated the August 2024 heist by embarking on a wild spending spree. They purchased fleets of sports cars, flew on private jets, hired security guards and rented mansions in Miami and the Hamptons. An alleged ringleader, 22-year-old Malone Lam, spent over $569,000 in one evening at a Los Angeles night club.
Their bender lasted a month before FBI agents arrested Lam on charges that he organized a "social engineering" attack on the Washington, D.C., resident. Lam, an eighth-grade dropout from Singapore, has a plea agreement hearing set for Tuesday. His conviction would be a capstone for the government's investigation.
The charges against Lam and 17 others are an extreme example of an increasingly common form of cybercrime. Complaints of cryptocurrency investment fraud to the FBI rose by nearly 50% in 2025, while Republican President Donald Trump's administration largely abandoned a regulatory crackdown on the volatile industry.
Last year, the Justice Department disbanded a unit dedicated to prosecuting crypto-related crimes. Meanwhile, crypto companies that complained of unfair treatment during Democratic President Joe Biden's presidency are enjoying the government's hands-off approach under Trump, who took in roughly $1.2 billion from his crypto businesses in 2025.
Cybersecurity researcher Allison Nixon, who has spent years tracking The Com, an underground subculture of young hackers united by the “insane amount of money” that crypto fraud can generate, advocates for more law enforcement resources to go after them.
“If we don’t seriously ramp up the resources to take these people down and do it faster, then it’s going to spread more and more,” she said.
A man identified as “Victim 7” in court filings was at home in Washington on Aug. 18, 2024, when his phone rang. The first caller identified himself as a Google representative inquiring about attempts to breach his account. A second, claiming to be from the Gemini crypto exchange, warned the man of a malware attack affecting his crypto wallet.
The callers manipulated the man into giving them access to his Google Drive and revealing security codes that allowed Lam to siphon off over 4,100 bitcoin, according to prosecutors. They said Lam and his friends on the calls — Veer Chetal and Jeandiel Serrano — targeted the man because he was a wealthy, longtime crypto investor.
A private recording captured the moment when the friends realized how much money they just stole, according to a video posted by a well-known private investigator of cryptocurrency crimes who goes by ZachXBT.
“Oh, my God! Bro, bro, I'm going to spaz out!” a voice on the video said.
Once they swiped the man's savings, they used money laundering specialists to wash it through multiple exchange platforms and convert virtual currency into government-issued cash.
It wasn't the first social engineering scam for the friends, who met in online gaming forums. They had teamed up on other multimillion-dollar thefts since late 2023 using a similar playbook, according to prosecutors.
This time, however, one of them made a costly mistake: Serrano failed to conceal his IP address when he created an account on a cryptocurrency exchange to hold nearly $30 million in stolen crypto, according to prosecutors. Investigators linked the IP address to a home in Encino, California, that Serrano was renting for $47,500 a month.
Serrano was vacationing in the Maldives when investigators identified him as a suspect. Lam was in Los Angeles, where he and friends spent $4 million at nightclubs in one month, authorities say. Chetal gifted a Lamborghini to his parents and hid a duffel bag filled with $500,000 in cash in their laundry machine.
Word of their windfall quickly spread in crypto scammers' circles. A week after the big score, Chetal's parents were driving in Danbury, Connecticut, when several masked men cut them off, forced them out of their new car, beat Chetal's father with a baseball bat, shoved the couple into a van and bound their hands.
The captors, from Miami, had intended to use Chetal's parents as leverage for extorting him into giving up his share of the stolen crypto. But the ransom plot fell apart when witnesses notified police, who apprehended the carjackers.
The FBI showed up to search Chetal's apartment in Brunswick, New Jersey, on Sept. 9, 2024, and found $37 million in stolen crypto in his possession. He agreed to cooperate with their investigation.
Lam was attracting attention, too, for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a night at clubs and tossing handbags worth tens of thousands of dollars to women in the crowds. He also used stolen cryptocurrency to buy a $2 million watch and over 30 cars, including custom Porsches, Lamborghinis and Ferraris, according to the FBI.
“This luxury lifestyle, of which so many young men and women could only dream, was just built on a foundation of fraud,” a prosecutor, William Hart, said during a recent sentencing hearing for a money laundering co-defendant.
Serrano was wearing a $500,000 watch when FBI agents arrested him at Los Angeles International Airport on Sept. 18, 2024. He initially professed his innocence but soon admitted to having roughly $20 million of the D.C. man's stolen crypto, prosecutors said.
Lam was arrested at one of his Miami mansions on the same day as Serrano. An off-duty law enforcement officer had tipped off Lam that authorities were on their way to arrest him, the indictment says.
“We always talked about what it would be like if I were to go down, but never thought it would be this crazy,” Lam told associates from jail on a recorded call, according to his indictment.
The judge for Lam's initial court appearance in Miami sounded astonished by a prosecutor's summary of his lavish spending.
"I could only think of Ferris Bueller gone bad," U.S. Magistrate Alicia Valle said, referring to the school-skipping protagonist of the 1986 movie “Ferris Bueller's Day Off.”
Lam's capture didn't stop the splurging. Ferro, who pleaded guilty to a racketeering conspiracy charge last year, used stolen funds to cover Lam’s legal expenses.
Eighteen defendants have been charged. Lam would be the 11th to plead guilty. At Lam's first court appearance, a prosecutor estimated that his sentencing guidelines would recommend a prison term of at least 14 years upon conviction.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who presides over Lam's case, already has sentenced three of his co-conspirators. She sentenced two money launderers to prison terms of approximately six years.
Chetal pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in November 2024 and awaits sentencing. Serrano's charges remain pending.
Tucker Desmond, who pleaded guilty to destroying evidence of other plotters' crimes, was sentenced to probation. Desmond apologized at his sentencing hearing in March, saying he “got obsessed with the image of success rather than actually becoming a hard-working individual myself.”
Ferro declined to address the court during his sentencing hearing in May. His attorney, Kevin Wilson, described the co-defendants as mischievous “young kids," but the judge didn't accept that as an excuse.
“Being young only goes so far,” Kollar-Kotelly said.
This Justice Department court filing in the case against Hamza Doost and Kunal Mehta, that includes a photo of Malone Lam, is photographed Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
This Justice Department court filing in the case against Hamza Doost and Kunal Mehta, that includes a photo of Malone Lam, is photographed Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
This Justice Department court filing in the case against Hamza Doost and Kunal Mehta, that includes a photo of Malone Lam, is photographed Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
This Justice Department grand jury superseding indictment against Malone Lam and his co-defendants is photographed Friday, Sept. 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
