Ottawa Citizen

More muscles than sense

1994 brutal kidnapping turned into comic film, but the victim isn’t laughing

- SUNDAY TELEGRAPH PAUL KENDALL

On the afternoon of Nov. 15 1994, Adrian Doorbal, a weightlift­er with a penchant for extreme violence and a serious steroid addiction, sat in the front seat of a rented van, waiting to abduct the millionair­e owner of a Miami deli.

On paper it wasn’t a difficult job. Not only did Doorbal and his two accomplice­s outnumber their target — Marc Schiller — three to one. They were also armed with a gun and a shock-inducing Taser, which was capable of paralyzing a person from a distance of about six metres.

Despite these advantages, Doorbal was worried. This was, after all, the gang’s eighth attempt, the seventh having taken place just the day before, and one could be forgiven for wondering whether something was going seriously wrong in the planning stages of the operation.

Two weeks previously, for example, their plan had been to dress up as ninjas on Halloween and grab Schiller when he opened his door to what appeared to be a group of trick-or-treaters. Somehow this idea fell by the wayside and they ended up going to a strip club instead.

Then, a few days later, before dawn, they had donned camouflage paint and hidden in Schiller’s yard under some tarpaulin, ready to pounce when he came out to get his newspaper. But, again, the mission had to be cancelled when it suddenly dawned on them they would be exposed by the headlights of oncoming cars.

So, today there could be no mistakes.

At first, everything seemed to go well. Just after 4 p.m. Schiller emerged from his deli and started walking toward his car. As he inserted his key in the lock, the gang grabbed him from behind and dragged him into the van, employing the Taser with gusto. But if they thought this breakthrou­gh proved they had suddenly become criminal mastermind­s, they were very much mistaken.

Today, 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 that pays him $20 an hour.

He rarely socializes outside of work, is divorced, sees his children only occasional­ly and has, by his own admission, “zero” interest in making friends.

He’s not a man given to selfpity, 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, is a hightempo black comedy that pokes fun at the bodybuilde­r gang, but goes out of its way to stigmatize Schiller.

His 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.

Just after 4 p.m. Schiller emerged from his deli and started walking toward his car. As he inserted his key in the lock, the gang grabbed him from behind and dragged him into the van.

“No one (involved with the film) ever talked to me,” Schiller 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 (a.k.a. Schiller) brags about his money and treats his employees with contempt. 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. 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.

But things started to sour in late 1992 when Delgado joined a bodybuilde­r’s hangout called Sun Gym. There he met Daniel Lugo (played by Wahlberg in the film), a sixfoot-two-inch muscle-bound personal trainer, the gym’s manager and a convicted fraudster. When Lugo heard about Delgado’s work with Schiller, he initially wanted to go into business with them both, but Schiller was not interested.

In October 1994, Lugo arranged a meeting with 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” (Schiller) had stolen money from a gym member (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.

One month later they were in the back of a Ford Astrovan racing toward a warehouse in North Miami with a bruised and bewildered Schiller at their feet. Once there, a blindfolde­d Schiller was punched, pistol whipped and Tasered again. The gang played Russian roulette against his temple. One of them took a lighter to his arm and burnt his flesh until it sizzled. 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 jewelry, 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 — was forced to sign dozens of documents, transferri­ng everything he had into their name. After a month in captivity — which Schiller spent chained up, 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.

Schiller was forced to get drunk at gunpoint and was driven to an industrial park. Lugo placed a comatose Schiller in the driver’s seat, stepped on the accelerato­r and steered the vehicle toward 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 gasoline and set it alight. Unfortunat­ely, 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 toward the road. Weekes, behind the wheel, hit him and then, for good measure, turned the car around and ran him over.

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.

But his first concern was for his immediate survival: he organized 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.

Schiller recuperate­d over the next four months. 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 learned later that Lugo had been living in his house, calling himself “Tom” and telling neighbours he was a member of the U.S. 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? He maintains he thought they wouldn’t believe him and 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.

He hired a private investigat­or named Ed Du Bois, who went to meet Lugo and came across all the evidence he needed.

“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,” remembers Du Bois, now 70.

“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. Meanwhile, the gang moved on to their next victims — a millionair­e called Frank Griga and his girlfriend, Krisztina Furton.

This would-be kidnapping was far more brutal, 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 tranquilli­zer — 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. When a detective 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.

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.

 ?? PARAMOUNT PICTURES ?? Dwayne Johnson, left, Tony Shalhoub and Mark Wahlberg star in the movie Pain & Gain, released in April.
PARAMOUNT PICTURES Dwayne Johnson, left, Tony Shalhoub and Mark Wahlberg star in the movie Pain & Gain, released in April.
 ?? SUZETTE LABOY/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ?? Author Marc Schiller was kidnapped, tortured and left for dead by a South Florida gang of bodybuilde­rs in 1994.
SUZETTE LABOY/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Author Marc Schiller was kidnapped, tortured and left for dead by a South Florida gang of bodybuilde­rs in 1994.

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