Pain & Gain - The True...

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Pain & Gain - The True Story behind the Movie (Part 5) - Miami New Times

The Oddly True Story behind the Movie

"He's sick," groaned the nurse.

Doorbal, whose bride-to-be had just become an accessory to a capital crime, said nothing.

On Sunday morning Griga's Lamborghini was found three miles west of the Florida Turnpike, just north of Okeechobee Road. The car was abandoned in a desolate, wooded area known to police as a weekend site for Santería rituals. The doors were left open, the windows down, and the key was still in the ignition. A state trooper at the scene found no clues in the nearby brush. Nor had the car been reported stolen. A tow truck was summoned from Opa-locka to haul the vehicle to a police impound facility.

That afternoon Lugo approached another Sun Gym member for recruitment into the gang. "Little Mario" Gray had been badgering him about a job for a couple of weeks, but he'd already turned down one opportunity to earn some quick money. All he'd been asked to do was stand still while Lugo shot him with a pneumatic tranquilizer gun. Lugo had wanted to see exactly how far the steel dart would penetrate into human flesh. It had been test-fired once already, in Doorbal's apartment, and the dart had penetrated all the way through a wall and stuck in the bedroom wall. Lugo offered Gray $500 in cash. Just to shoot him one time! But Gray had refused.

Now Lugo came back with a second offer, this one requiring actual work. It was a simple night job, transporting barrels from Lugo's warehouse. Sure, Gray said, and that night, he drove out to the warehouse. Waiting for him were three drums, welded shut. Together he, Lugo, and Doorbal lifted the barrels into a rented truck. Two of the drums were especially heavy. As Gray lifted one of them, acrid smoke snaked through a tiny opening. The three men drove to a drainage ditch in southwest Miami and heaved the barrels into the murky water. The drums settled next to a submerged refrigerator.

After getting married at the Delray Beach courthouse on Tuesday, May 30, Doorbal and Cindy returned to the Main Street townhouse to find the answering machine filled with messages from Attila Weiland, Beatriz's ex-husband. It was he who'd arranged their introduction to Frank Griga.

Doorbal called him back, full of good news: He and Cindy were now husband and wife. After the courthouse nuptials, the couple enjoyed a romantic lunch at Nick's Italian Fishery overlooking the Atlantic Ocean--

Weiland cut him off. "Adrian! Adrian! Hello? Are you crazy?" he shouted into the phone.

"What?"

"The police, Adrian! My messages? They've been around ... about Frank and Krisztina!"

"The police?"

"The police are everywhere! They want to talk to you! They consider Frank dead. Frank's sister, Zsuzsanna, she's calling from Hungary and threatening me and you. If you had anything to do with this, please, please say something, Adrian!"

"How the fuck am I supposed to know where those people are?"

"I told the police everything, Adrian! So did Beatriz."

"You know, Attila," said Doorbal in a voice heavy with disappointment, "you're supposed to be my friend. You should hope you stay my friend, Attila."

That afternoon Daniel Lugo stopped by Doorbal's townhouse. Cindy stayed out of their way; they were immersed in serious discussions. All their usual playfulness had vanished. She heard Doorbal say, "You're either going to be arrested or killed!" And she heard Lugo: "If they mention my name to the police, I'm going to have them and their families killed!"

Things were suddenly going very badly. Lloyd Alvarez had seen them on the road. Beatriz was talking to the cops, and so was Attila. And just count the people who'd been at Griga's house as they headed out to dinner that Wednesday: Alvarez, the housekeeper and her child, their neighbor Judi Bartusz, whose husband was Frank's business partner.

Frank Griga and Krisztina Furton had been missing for eight days by the time private investigator Ed Du Bois got a phone call from Capt. Al Harper, the 27-year Metro-Dade Police veteran who had tried to help him with the Marc Schiller kidnapping. It was 8:00 a.m., and Harper had just overheard at roll call that suspects were under surveillance in the possible abduction of the wealthy Hungarian businessman and his girlfriend. The suspects worked at a gym, and their names had a familiar ring. Could they be the same group Du Bois had identified back in April?

Du Bois ran down the facts of the Schiller case, and Harper felt a shot of adrenaline. Du Bois had to talk to the homicide team supervisor, Sgt. Felix Jimenez, he said. They arranged to meet at Du Bois's North Miami office. The private investigator showered, dressed, and headed off to the meeting in high spirits. This was his vindication; the Schiller investigation was coming back to life. If more cops had listened to him sooner, those deranged goons wouldn't have had the chance to strike again.

Jimenez sat riveted as he listened to Du Bois's story of Schiller's kidnapping; how the Sun Gym boys had nabbed Schiller at his franchise delicatessen near the airport, held him chained to a warehouse wall for a month, tortured him until he'd signed over all his assets. How they'd tried to kill him in a fiery crash and run him down twice for good measure. How he'd miraculously survived and was trying to get his life back in order in Colombia.

Du Bois explained how he'd offered the information and documents to Metro police in April, only to be blown off. Jimenez's department had had this information for six weeks and had sat on it. And now there was another abduction to deal with, or something far worse. The sergeant made a call from Du Bois's office to his squad at homicide. Get ready. He was coming in with solid leads. At headquarters a long-distance call was placed to Colombia. Would Marc Schiller please come back and help?

The phone was ringing, and Cindy Eldridge picked it up. Attila Weiland was on the other end, demanding to speak to Doorbal. She passed the phone to her husband and vaguely heard something about "the missing couple" before turning her attention elsewhere. She did notice, however, that Doorbal had been watching an enormous amount of television. And so had Lugo whenever he came by the Miami Lakes townhouse. These two had become regular news junkies, especially if the coverage had anything to do with the missing Hungarian couple.

That Thursday evening, after the late-night television newscast, Cindy asked Doorbal again about the fight with the rich Hungarian businessman. This time Doorbal shared new information with his bride. Yes, someone had died in the fight. But he assured her he'd had nothing to do with it.

At midnight Lugo dropped by. The two men had an important errand to run, they told her. Then they headed to Solid Gold, the North Miami Beach strip club where Lugo had first seen Sabina Petrescu as she danced naked in a cage.

Beatriz Weiland, the beautiful stripper Doorbal had briefly dated and from whose photo album he'd been inspired to target Griga for his riches, was terrified as she stood in the club's private Champagne Room with Lugo and Doorbal. Not so long before, she'd extricated herself from the affair with Doorbal precisely because she thought he was shady, even criminal. Their questions tonight petrified her; it was obvious they knew she'd spoken with the police.

"What did you do with them?" she asked defiantly in spite of her fear.

Ignoring the question, Doorbal pressed: "Did you really talk about me to the police?"

She had to go, Beatriz said, and hurried backstage, where she called lead homicide Det. Sal Garafalo and left a message that Adrian and Danny were at Solid Gold asking questions. Next she called Attila. He said he'd be right there. When she emerged onstage to perform, she glanced around the room. Lugo and Doorbal were gone.

Back at the townhouse Cindy sat in bed, awaiting her husband's return and trying to think things through. She was scared. Really scared. The couple had vanished on Wednesday. Doorbal wanted an alibi for Wednesday. There had been a fight, he'd said. Someone had bled onto the walls and into the carpet. A man had died! Here! And she had painted over the bloodstains!

On Friday, June 2, Marc Schiller returned to Miami. It had been nearly two months since his last visit to police headquarters, when his complaint had been considered so ludicrous that the Strategic Investigations Division wouldn't even take it, had punted it over to robbery, and then sent word to the detectives there that Schiller was going to drop by with an "Academy Award-winning performance."

This time he told his story to Sgt. Felix Jimenez and lead investigator Sal Garafalo. This time no one suggested he was lying, and no one dared him to take a polygraph. He talked about his former partner, Jorge Delgado, to whom he had been forced to grant power of attorney. And Daniel Lugo, whose voice he'd recognized among the men who held him in the warehouse. He gave them the names of the people who'd taken over his house, took control of his bank accounts and offshore assets, stood to benefit from his life insurance: Adrian Doorbal, Daniel Lugo, and Lillian Torres, Lugo's ex-wife. He gave them the name of John Mese, the Miami Shores accountant who'd helped facilitate the transfers. At last Metro-Dade police moved forcefully into action, and officers busied themselves with drawing up search warrants.

Elsewhere in Dade County that morning one other individual came to the same conclusion about the Sun Gym gang. Cindy Eldridge was heading back home to Boca Raton to pick up more belongings for her move into Doorbal's townhouse. But as she drove along the expressway, her suspicions and fears solidified into accusations. Her husband and Danny Lugo were involved in the disappearance of the missing Hungarian couple. One of them had killed the man in a fight! She became so distraught she decided not to go to work. At her apartment she called Doorbal. She had just one question for him.

"Adrian, just tell me, what happened to the girl?"

"Cindy, what are you talking about?"

"I just want to know what happened to the girl."

"I can't talk about it on the phone."

"Why, Adrian?"

"I have to talk to you in person."

That evening she drove back to Miami Lakes and confronted him about Krisztina Furton. His reply chilled her. "What you don't know," he said, "won't hurt you."

Later that night in the townhouse, Cindy couldn't sleep. She was haunted by the bloodstains and by the violence that had transpired in her new home. Lying beside her, Doorbal slept like a baby.

The next morning at 7:00, Metro-Dade police gathered in a park next to the Miami Lakes police station. The 75 officers included homicide squads, SWAT teams, and hostage negotiators. They were ready to serve search warrants at the homes of Daniel Lugo, Jorge Delgado, and Adrian Doorbal. John Mese, the accountant who owned Sun Gym, was on the list as well. He'd witnessed Marc Schiller's coerced signatures on the transfers of his house and business properties, and the two-million-dollar life-insurance policy that would have gone to Lugo's ex-wife. Ed Du Bois had turned over incriminating documents he'd found in Mese's office, documents that linked Mese financially with the Sun Gym gang's new holdings. That morning Mese was in downtown Miami; his National Physique Committee's Florida Men's State Championship competition was scheduled to take place at the Knight Center.

The house warrants were all served at 8:30. Jorge Delgado and his wife, Linda, who had worked as Schiller's secretary when he first offered her husband a job, laughed aloud as the arrest warrant was read to them. Marc Schiller? His old partner, who'd stolen 200 grand from him in the first place? The Delgados couldn't believe the police were taking his accusations seriously. But under interrogation at police headquarters, Delgado began to talk. Yes, he'd hired Lugo to collect the money Schiller owed him, "but Lugo got carried away." When his lawyer showed up, Delgado declined to speak further.

Cindy awoke that Saturday prepared to end her honeymoon. She had no idea that within minutes it would come screeching to a halt anyway. She was still in her nightgown and sipping coffee when the knock came, and she opened the door to a throng of officers. They moved quickly inside, read her the warrant, then waited at the foot of the stairs as she called for her husband. Adrian Doorbal walked to the landing, his magnificent physique on display. He went to police headquarters voluntarily. Just some questions, he assured his bride.

As he was being driven downtown, officers searched the townhouse for evidence. The items they collected -- furniture, jewelry, electronics, computer equipment and software, bric-a-brac, even subscription magazines -- had come from the Schiller house. One find seemed particularly odd, given his own recent nuptials: Doorbal had kept a photo album of Marc and Diana Schiller on their honeymoon.

At his interrogation Doorbal admitted his participation in the Schiller abduction, then stopped talking. His last comment to detectives: "I'll never see daylight again."

Over at the Knight Center, the contestants already were flexing their oiled muscles onstage. John Mese quietly left the auditorium under police escort and also was taken in for questioning.

No one was home at Sabina's place across the street from Doorbal's. Metro-Dade officers discovered that Lugo already had fled to the Bahamas with Sabina and his parents. But Sabina had left Diana Schiller's BMW in the apartment's assigned parking space. Five days later a multiagency task force flew to the Bahamas. They found Lugo at the Hotel Montague in Nassau and brought him back in handcuffs to Miami on a commercial flight. As the plane rolled to a stop at MIA, Lugo gazed out the window and saw the row of squad cars, police lights flashing, arrayed on the tarmac.

"Is that all for me?" he asked.

"I told you, Lugo," said the detective who sat beside him, "you're in a little bit of trouble in Miami."

Adrian Doorbal sat in his jail cell along with 50 other high-risk inmates and watched Daniel Lugo on television news as he was led, handcuffed, through Metro-Dade police headquarters. The reporter announced that Lugo was prepared to take police to the bodies of Frank Griga and Krisztina Furton. "You motherfucker!" he growled to Lugo's image on the screen. "You're the one who started this shit!" If Lugo had kept his mouth shut, he maintained, they could have pulled off the perfect crime.

As the lurid tale played out in the local media, Ed Du Bois became a mere spectator to the grisly findings. He felt some relief that Lugo, Delgado, and Doorbal were in custody, but the institutional cynicism that thwarted a true investigation into Schiller's kidnapping filled him with ire. Why did Frank Griga and Krisztina Furton have to pay such a terrible price? Why hadn't the police taken him seriously? "How does it feel," he scornfully quizzed one investigator, "to have blood on your hands?"

During the evening of June 10, Lugo's second night in jail, his attorney contacted Sergeant Jimenez at the homicide bureau. Lugo was prepared to reveal the hiding place of the bodies if the police would mention his helpfulness to a jury during any potential criminal proceedings. An agreement was drawn up and signed by Lugo, his lawyers, the police, and the State Attorney's Office. It was after midnight when the prisoner took the detectives to southwest Miami and the drainage ditch, where they found three submerged 55-gallon barrels.

The next morning at the Dade County Medical Examiner's Office, the metal drums were opened and the torsos extracted from the tar-and-acid mixture. But the hands, feet, and heads of Frank Griga and Krisztina Furton were missing. Detectives were not amused by Lugo's semantics. In their negotiations he had never mentioned the significant facts about the amputations, which denied police positive identification of the victims, short of DNA testing. The prisoner declined to cooperate further.

During the autopsy of the female torso, however, medical examiners discovered breast implants. They recorded manufacturer's information from them and were able to trace the implants to the doctor who'd performed Krisztina's breast-augmentation surgery. (It would be the first time in Dade County that primary identification of a murder victim was developed through breast implants.) It took another month, though, for information to surface about the missing body parts. On July 7 an anonymous male caller said the victims' hands, feet, and heads had been put into buckets, sprinkled with acid, and placed alongside Alligator Alley between the Sawgrass Expressway and the Seminole Indian Reservation. The caller also claimed to know who had transported them there: Adrian Doorbal and a Dade County corrections officer.

During the summer and fall of 1995, police made more arrests. Carl Weekes and Stevenson Pierre, who'd participated in the Schiller abduction, were hauled in. Sun Gym owner John Mese, who'd been released after his initial interrogation, now found himself in police custody. So did Lugo's mistress, Sabina Petrescu. Cindy Eldridge faced charges, too.

The cops went after minor players as well: "Little Mario" Gray, who'd helped dump the barrels in the channel. A Sun Gym member who'd altered the VIN number on Diana Schiller's BMW. A former trainer at the gym who'd been paid to be an "intimidator" during the Schiller kidnapping. These individuals quickly cooperated with prosecutors and received relatively light sentences. Gray hadn't known what was in the barrels, after all, and was an unwitting accessory after the fact. He received a year's probation. Illegal alteration of the VIN number merited the same. The "intimidator" pleaded guilty to armed kidnapping and received a two-year sentence. For her cooperation Sabina, who no longer had any illusions about her lover's CIA employment, faced just one charge: theft of a motor vehicle. Moving up the food chain, prosecutors also struck deals with Weekes and Pierre, who told all they knew about the Schiller affair and were let off with ten-year sentences.

On March 27, 1996, a Dade County grand jury returned a 46-count indictment against the leaders of the Sun Gym gang for conspiracy to commit the murders of Frank Griga and Krisztina Furton, and the kidnapping, extortion, and attempted murder of Schiller. "It was all planned, organized, deadly, and mean," said State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle after the indictment became public. The indictment also included RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) charges. The Schiller kidnapping-attempted murder and the double murder were deemed part of a continuing criminal enterprise: "The defendants did the same thing to Schiller as they did to the couple -- except he lived," explained Rundle. "We will use [RICO] to show a pattern of violence conducted by the defendants, who collectively had become a criminal enterprise that targeted unsuspecting wealthy victims."

That day corrections officer and disposal "expert" John Raimondo was placed under arrest. Police suspected it was he who'd taken Griga's Lamborghini out to its final resting place in the Everglades. He later pleaded guilty to one count of kidnapping and was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Jorge Delgado was the first of the major defendants to crack. He gave a confession to Assistant State Attorney Gail Levine and, in turn, received just fifteen years for the Schiller crimes, and a concurrent five-year sentence for his role in the Griga-Furton case. It was a sweetheart deal for the state's star witness. Prosecutors were unable to link him to the plot and violence against Frank Griga and Krisztina Furton, only to accessory activities after the fact. But he could testify about what had happened to the couple in Doorbal's townhouse and at the warehouse.

Cindy Eldridge, whose honeymoon had come to such an abrupt end, was the last defendant to enter the prosecutorial fold. She'd been charged as an accessory after the fact for her removal of the bloodstains from her husband's townhouse wall. By November 1997, Doorbal had become romantically involved with a secretary who worked in his lawyer's office, even though he was incarcerated. Cindy filed for divorce. The four-day marriage to Doorbal had never been consummated, she said. Worse, she now realized it had been a complete farce, with the sole purpose of inhibiting her from being able to testify against him. She pleaded guilty to criminal mischief, a misdemeanor, and agreed to reveal all she'd seen and heard.

By now the state had whittled the case down to four defendants: Lugo, Doorbal, Mese, and Raimondo. Because the jail guard wasn't involved in the RICO sequence of crimes, he was severed from the main case.

Jury selection for the trial of Lugo, Doorbal, and Mese began in late January 1998. Two juries eventually were picked, one to listen to the case against Lugo, the second to hear the evidence against Doorbal and Mese. Both trials would take place simultaneously and in the same courtroom before the two juries. It was a complicated situation, Judge Alex Ferrer explained. Lugo and Doorbal had made separate statements at the time of their arrests that implicated both men. But their admissibility was an issue; Lugo's jury might have to leave the room at certain points. Likewise with Doorbal's.

The trial began on February 24, 1998, and for nearly ten weeks the prosecution laid out its case. It was the longest, most expensive criminal trial in Dade County history, and featured more than 1200 pieces of physical evidence and 98 witnesses, including Marc Schiller, who'd been flown up numerous times to help in preparations. His courtroom testimony was crucial. When the prosecution rested, Lugo's and Doorbal's attorneys chose not to present a defense. John Mese's public defender called just one witness. None of the defendants took the stand.

On May 4 of that year, Lugo's jury convicted him of the two murders, as well as sixteen other charges, including racketeering, kidnapping, attempted extortion, theft, attempted murder, armed robbery, burglary, money laundering, and forgery. Doorbal also was found guilty of the two murders, plus thirteen additional charges. On June 1 Doorbal's jury deliberated just fourteen minutes before recommending death. A week later Lugo's panel voted for the death penalty, too. It took them all of eighteen minutes to decide.

John Mese was convicted on 39 felony counts, including two counts of first-degree murder, attempted murder, racketeering, and multiple counts of money laundering, fraudulent notary, and forgery. On the eve of the trial, the prosecution had offered him a plea bargain: nine years in state prison (he'd already served two and a half years in the county jail since his arrest). Mese rejected the deal and on July 21, Judge Ferrer, who overturned the racketeering and murder convictions citing insufficient evidence, sentenced the accountant to 56 years.

When the juries' death-penalty votes came in, prosecutor Gail Levine invited Schiller back to Miami for the final round of arguments before Judge Ferrer, whose duty it would be to make a final determination on the recommendations. Schiller's own attorney advised him that the trip was unnecessary; he'd flown to Miami nearly a dozen times already since June 1995. He'd met with police and prosecutors, provided depositions, sat in on hearings, and offered his testimony at trial. The death sentence was as good as delivered. But Schiller looked at his round trip ticket and saw the final step in his long journey of betrayal, humiliation, pain, and survival. He was going to put Lugo and Doorbal on death row.

The death-penalty hearing took place July 8. First on Judge Ferrer's docket was a petition by Adrian Doorbal to marry the secretary he'd been seeing throughout his incarceration. Denied. Doorbal still had $700,000 of Schiller's money in a Smith Barney account, and the judge didn't want any marital claims to impede the transfer of funds.

And at long last it was Schiller's time to stand before his kidnappers, who sat shackled and handcuffed. He spoke eloquently and in agonizing detail of the weeks he'd spent in captivity, handcuffed and blindfolded. He spoke of his family's suffering, and the scars he still held. The kidnapping and torture had ruined him in every way imaginable. He could no longer visit clients. He could no longer trust a soul in this world. His wife, a frail woman to begin with, was now in failing health, a mere 84 pounds. How could human beings commit such heinous crimes? He would never understand, but he knew one thing: Neither man -- not Jorge Delgado either -- deserved to live in society again.

Schiller finished his statement and said quiet farewells to his attorney and the prosecutors with whom he'd worked for the past three years. With one quick glance back at the defendants, he walked out of the courtroom. A victim, a survivor, he had done his duty.

Outside again in the sultry air, Schiller paused on the courthouse steps. In that brief instant he heard the voices. Men were shouting. Commanding him to stop! Puzzled he turned just as they closed in around him. The old panic surged. And for the second time in his life, Schiller was grabbed and taken away.

The news broke over Miami later that day: Marc Schiller was a wanted man. He'd been a target all along, ever since the arrest of the Sun Gym gang, but the feds had patiently waited until he'd done his business in the courthouse, two birds with one stone, as the saying went.

FBI agents arrested Schiller on charges of orchestrating a fraudulent Medicare billing scheme that generated somewhere around $14 million. He now faced up to 25 years in prison, ten years more than his nemesis Delgado had received for kidnapping and murder.

Yet Schiller's thoughts were not with Delgado in the blurred hours that followed. He was thinking about Assistant State Attorney Gail Levine, and all he could think was that she had sold him out. For three years she had used him, forced him to relive every excruciating detail of his confinement: the starvation, the burns and electric shocks, the beatings, the abject terror, the absolute physical and psychological mortification. She had extracted everything she could, and then she had disposed of him. From his perspective her tactics were not so different or any less brutal than those the Sun Gym gang had employed against him. His attorney had been right. He shouldn't have returned to Miami. The death sentences came in, just as predicted. Schiller got the news while he sat in jail.

In fact the State Attorney's Office had been aware of the federal investigation for at least three years. Fourteen months before the trial began, in October 1996, prosecutor Gail Levine had written a memo to her supervisor addressing the fact that federal prosecutors were targeting Schiller, almost to the exclusion of any other potential Medicare fraud defendants. The feds, she wrote, "just seem like they will plead everyone out -- but Schiller. That's the only person they care about....

On July 17, 1998, more than three years after the murders were committed, Judge Ferrer sentenced Lugo and Doorbal. They each received two death sentences for the murders of Frank Griga and Krisztina Furton, and consecutive sentences for all the other crimes for which they had been convicted.

That wasn't the end of Judge Ferrer's involvement, however. In February 1999, after Marc Schiller pleaded guilty to one federal count of false Medicare billing, the judge took the highly unusual step of providing favorable testimony at his sentencing hearing.

Such testimony from a sitting judge is extremely rare. For Ferrer it was unprecedented, but he was moved to do so out of compassion and, to a degree, admiration. Not only had Schiller demonstrated extraordinary courage and endurance in surviving the Sun Gym gang's torture and attempts to kill him, but he later proved to be indispensable in prosecuting the case against his captors. "I know we can consider anything at sentencing," Ferrer said at the hearing. "This case was a very emotional case to sit through. It still bothers me to some extent. And I know that if things were just black and white, they could have computers do our jobs. But there's something intangible about this case that makes me feel like what he went through should be given some credit, because I don't think it could have been worse if he was a prisoner of war."

Ferrer also spoke of Schiller's haunting testimony. "Schiller was obviously emotionally bothered by it," he said. "It's hard to imagine that anybody would not be emotionally distraught about what happened to him. He tried to keep a very cool composure, but ... I think even just relaying it in court was traumatic to the people that were hearing it."

On Wednesday, March 17, 1999, Marc Schiller was sentenced to 46 months in prison, the most lenient sentence available under federal guidelines.

The Sun Gym case is now closed.