At last they had their man. But if they thought this breakthrough proved they were suddenly criminal masterminds they were very much mistaken.
Today Marc Schiller lives in a small one bedroom apartment in Boca Raton Florida. In contrast to 1994 when he had a house with a pool his own accountancy firm a deli and $1.26 million in the bank he is now an employee of a modest sized company which pays him $20 an hour. He rarely socialises outside of work is divorced from his wife sees his children only occasionally and has by his own admission zero interest in making friends.
He s not a man given to self pity but anyone who hears what happened to him after he was kidnapped by Doorbal and his accomplices can t fail to feel sorry for him. And now to compound his problems a film has been made that depicts him in a far from favourable light.
Pain Gain which stars Mark Wahlberg and is directed by Michael Bay the man behind the Transformers blockbusters is a high tempo black comedy that pokes fun at the bodybuilder gang but goes out of its way to stigmatise Schiller as well in order one assumes to generate some sympathy for its leading man. Schiller s name has been changed but it would take about two minutes on Google to identify him since the case was well covered by Miami newspapers at the time and in a three part serial by the journalist Pete Collins in 1999.
No one involved with the film ever talked to me he says now. It wasn t me they put in the movie. When I saw it I thought Who is this person On screen Victor Kershaw (aka Schiller) brags about his money treats his employees with contempt and drives around with the words Miami B emblazoned on his number plate. In reality says Alex Ferrer the judge who presided over the case Schiller wasn t like that at all.
In the movie they made him out to look slimier than he was says Ferrer. He really wasn t a slimy guy. And besides he adds nobody deserves what he got. Nobody. The man ultimately responsible for what happened to Schiller was a former car salesman called Jorge Delgado. In 1991 he had come to work for Schiller as a sales representative at his accountancy firm and over the next 18 months the quietly spoken Cuban had become a trusted friend looking after Schiller s house when he and his family went on holiday and working with him on other ventures.
Tony Shalhoub who plays Victor Kershaw a character based on Marc Schiller
But things started to sour in late 1992 when Delgado joined a bodybuilder s hang out called Sun Gym. There he met Daniel Lugo (played by Wahlberg in the film) a 6ft 2in muscle bound personal trainer and the gym s manager. Lugo was a man whose ambitions far outstretched his abilities. Obsessed with money women and fast cars he had just competed a 15 month prison sentence for fraud and was currently involved in another scam to swindle the government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars via ten fake medical companies.
When Lugo heard about Delgado s work with Schiller he initially wanted to go into business with them both but Schiller was not interested.
The first time I met him I could tell there was something says Schiller. He was unsavoury. He couldn t look you in the eye. You could tell he was hiding something. Unfortunately for Schiller Lugo had become something of a big brother figure to Delgado. They were spending an increasing amount of time together and in February 1994 convinced Delgado was working with Lugo on some sort of fraud Schiller ended their business relationship.
After settling their affairs he didn t expect to see either Delgado or Lugo again but Lugo had other plans. In mid October the 30 year old arranged a meeting with Adrian Doorbal his workout partner Stevenson Pierre Sun Gym s back office manager and a friend of Pierre s called Carl Weekes.
Are you he asked Pierre and Weekes interested in making $100 000 for two days work He d recently discovered that a scumbag named Marc Schiller had stolen money from a gym member called Jorge Delgado. He wanted to kidnap Schiller force him to return the money and while they were at it take his house his cars his savings and anything else they could get their hands on.
Pierre agreed Weekes put up some resistance. A petty criminal who was battling an addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine the 31 year old had recently embraced Christianity and was meant to be getting his life in order. But Weekes was very much a work in progress and a few reassuring words from Lugo were enough to persuade him to agree to the venture. One month later he was in the back of a Ford Astrovan racing towards a warehouse in North Miami with a bruised and bewildered Marc Schiller at his feet.
Marc Schiller as he looks today
As soon as they arrived the door was opened and the victim was thrown face down on top of a cardboard box. He was still blindfolded and sweating profusely partly from the temperature inside the van partly from fear. Then someone pressed an object that felt like an aluminum bat against his face.
Feel this asshole You know what it is
Yes.
You make one wrong move and I ll break your head.
Schiller had just got his first taste of the customer service in what he calls Hotel Hell . Over the next few hours he was punched pistol whipped and Tasered again. They played Russian roulette against his temple. One of them Schiller believes it was Doorbal took a lighter to his arm and burnt his flesh until it sizzled.
After that he was forced to phone his wife and tell her he had gone on a last minute business trip. She should fly to Colombia with their children for a family event and he would follow in a couple of days. To Schiller s relief she agreed at least his family was now out of harm s way but it now meant his captors had access to his empty house. They started quizzing him about his assets.
OK said one of them. You have a house that s paid for your wife s family money that you invest your wife s jewellery an apartment in Miami Beach jet skis... It was obvious immediately that his former friend Delgado was behind the operation nobody else knew all these details. Schiller also clocked who he was talking to. This is the Daniel Lugo Show he thought.
Over the next few days Schiller still blindfolded took a series of calls patched through to the warehouse from his home phone. Each time a gun was placed against his head and he pretended nothing was amiss. He was also called upon to sign dozens of documents. He couldn t see them but it was obvious what was happening the gang were transferring everything he had into their name. After a month in captivity which Schiller spent chained up and blindfolded without a change of clothes and only intermittent food the gang were satisfied that they d got as much as they could and revealed the end game. First Schiller had to phone his lawyer with an outlandish story he d been having an affair with a Cuban beauty his wife had found out and now he was depressed and suicidal.
Then he was told to get drunk. At gunpoint he downed vodka tequila and chocolate liqueur some of it mixed with sleeping pills. At 2.30am on December 15 they put him in his car and drove him to an industrial park. Lugo placed a comatose Schiller in the driver s seat stepped on the accelerator and steered the vehicle towards a concrete pole. Just before the crash Lugo jumped out but when the men ran up to inspect the wreckage they found to their chagrin Schiller was still alive.
So they moved on to Plan B Lugo sprayed the car with petrol and set it alight. Unfortunately for the gang Lugo had forgotten to strap Schiller in. As they pulled away in their car they saw their man revived by the heat stumble out and weave his way towards the road. Weekes behind the wheel hit him and then for good measure turned the car around and ran him over.
Marc Schiller's car after the Sun Gym gang had tried to kill him
Schiller remembers none of this. The next thing he knew he was in hospital the searing pain in his body proving he was still alive. In a book he has written about his ordeal he lists his injuries a twisted spine a shattered pelvis a ruptured bladder and a damaged spleen. But Schiller s first concern was for his immediate survival a hospital was a public building and once the gang found out he wasn't dead they could come and finish him off so he organised for an air ambulance to take him to a hospital in Staten Island. And it was lucky he did because that very morning the Sun Gym gang dressed in hospital uniforms were on their way to kill him.
Over the next four months Schiller recuperated and tried to put his finances back in order. His house now belonged to a corporation in the Bahamas his deli franchise had been dissolved his offshore accounts were empty and $160 000 had been spent on his credit cards to buy among other things thousands of condoms and adult films. He learnt later that Lugo had been living in his house calling himself Tom and telling neighbours he was a member of the US security forces and the house had been confiscated by the government. The neighbours liked him. He changed light bulbs for them and helped with odd jobs.
Why didn t Schiller go to the police all this time Schiller was subsequently jailed for Medicare fraud and many people believed that explained his reluctance but he maintains he was innocent and the reason he didn t approach the police at first was because he thought they wouldn t believe him and he says he wanted to gather his own evidence. He also decided it would be best to try to negotiate the return of his money instead of going to court when he had no money for lawyers.
He hired a private investigator named Ed Du Bois who went to meet Lugo and came across all the evidence he needed. They put me and Ed Seibert a former homicide detective in a small office remembers Du Bois now 70. And after a while we noticed the trash can underneath the desk was overflowing with paper. We started looking through it and almost everything pertained to Schiller s kidnapping.
The gang had obviously been cleaning up their files but instead of shredding their papers had put them in the bin. There were copies of cheques written to all the bad guys for their part in the crime says Du Bois. So we had more than Lugo and Delgado we had the whole gang. With this haul and Lugo showing no signs of handing back any money Schiller and Du Bois finally went to the police in April 1995. Unsurprisingly they wondered why Schiller had waited so long to contact them. And while they stalled the gang moved on to their next victims a millionaire called Frank Griga and his girlfriend Krisztina Furton.
This would be kidnapping was a far more brutal and brief affair although no less farcical. Instead of tying Griga up and forcing him to sign over his assets Doorbal got into a fight with the Hungarian and ended up killing him. When Furton started screaming she was sedated with Rompun a horse tranquilliser but the dose was far too high and she died as well. The hapless weightlifters then cut up the bodies with a chainsaw. As soon as the couple were reported missing Lugo and his accomplices fell under suspicion and when one of the detectives who had worked on the Schiller case heard a gang of weightlifters were in the frame he immediately phoned Du Bois. Within a matter of hours all but Lugo had been arrested. The ringleader who had fled to the Bahamas was picked up five days later.
Krisztina Furton and Frank Griga who were murdered by the Sun Gym gang
Today Lugo and Doorbal are both on death row. Delgado served seven years. And Schiller is working 11 hours a day for less money than he earned in his first job out of college and doing what he can to forget his ordeal. When the case came to trial in 1998 the prosecution was able to present the jury with 10 000 pieces of evidence concerning both the murders and Schiller s kidnapping and testimony from more than 100 witnesses including one statement that revealed Lugo went back to the DIY store Home Depot to return the chainsaw he had bought to dismember Griga and Furton because it was suffering from a burnt out engine.
There were literally times during the case when the lawyers would approach the bench to talk about an issue and we would just shake our heads and laugh because of the stupidity says Ferrer the judge. The case was incredibly tragic but it had a lot of dark humour in it.
The new season of Judge Alex featuring Alex Ferrer begins on September 2
To buy Marc Schiller's book 'Pain And Gain The Untold True Story' click here
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