The victims’ dismembered torsos were found stuffed in oil drums and dumped in the canals that crisscross South Florida.
Recommended Videos
In a macabre coda, their hands, heads, and feet were left in buckets deposited around Broward and Dade counties.
This was the vile handiwork of the Pain & Gain gang or, as they were known in the Miami newspapers, the Sun Gym Crew.
The gang was a steroid-fueled version of my late friend Jimmy Breslin’s crew of inept mobsters he memorialized in The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight. There was not a ton of intellectual firepower percolating beneath their thick skulls.
Eventually, Pain & Gain would be made into a blockbuster movie starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
Daniel Lugo was the juiced-up manager of a North Miami workout joint called the Sun Gym. Lugo had been busted in the early 1990s for fraud and served some jail time for posing as a Hong Kong banker.
Others in the cabal were part-time gym employees Noel “Adrian” Doorbal and Carl Weekes who moved to Miami to live with his girlfriend’s cousin, Stevenson Pierre, a desk clerk at the gym. Rounding out the roster was personal trainer Jorge Delgado.
***
Marc Schiller was a wealthy businessman who had just opened a deli near Miami International Airport. Schiller and Delgado had once been business partners who were so tight that the gym rat knew the security codes to the businessman’s house.
But in 1994, Lugo told the crew that Schiller was into him and Delgado for $300,000. Schiller was snatched and forced into a van by Lugo and Doorbal as he left his business. The thugs were wearing Ninja Warrior outfits and Halloween masks.
They zapped the terrified man with a Taser and beat him before taking him to a warehouse. There, they hogtied Schiller using handcuffs and proceeded to torture him for days while withholding food. The muscled-up maniacs wouldn’t let Schiller go to the bathroom and force-fed him booze while he was chained to a wall.
Schiller came to the conclusion he was going to be murdered.
“They said they’d kill me. They were jovial that they had caught their fish,” Schiller later said. “They called someone and said the eagle has landed.”
***
By the end of his month-long ordeal — which wasn’t reported to cops — he had signed away his home, cheques totalling $1 million, and his $2 million life insurance policy (benefiting Lugo’s ex-wife). Then the bodybuilders decided he had to go.
The musclebound bozos tied his hands to a car steering wheel, tied his foot to the gas pedal and sent the vehicle with Schiller inside slamming into a concrete wall where it exploded.
When he emerged burning from the car, they ran him over with the getaway van. Somehow, Schiller survived, but cops initially didn’t believe his story.
It later emerged that before snatching Schiller there had been seven botched similar abductions.
***
In early January 1995, Lugo was the owner of Schiller’s mansion through his bogus Bahamian company.
Now, the Sun Gym Crew were on a roll and Lugo and Doorbal conjured up another scheme. Hungarian immigrant Frank Griga, 33, had made millions in the phone sex game and was one of the wealthiest men living in posh Golden Beach.
Lugo recruited gal pal Sabina Petrescu who believed her paramour was a CIA operative. He told the gullible gal that Griga was an international sex trafficker.
But like much of what the crew touched, things went off the rails and Griga was beaten to death on May 20, 1995. His leggy 23-year-old former stripper girlfriend, Krisztina Furton, was fatally drugged with horse tranquilizers.
At the warehouse, the couple was dismembered with chainsaws and their body parts were scattered around South Florida.
***
Griga’s housekeeper raised the alarm but it was a friend who spotted the phone sex impresario’s yellow Lamborghini in a three-car convoy that triggered troubling questions. He followed them and recognized Daniel Lugo.
Marc Schiller made a reappearance and told cops what he knew. The gang was arrested the next day and Lugo was picked up by the U.S. Marshals in Nassau.
When he returned to Miami, he began singing like a canary and revealed where the bodies were hidden. Lugos thought he’d catch a break — he was dead wrong. They identified Furton through the serial number on her breast implants.
On Oct. 2, 1996, Lugos and Doorbal were sentenced to death.
***
Twenty-eight years later, the duo remain on death row. Last week, in Miami, they began a desperate bid for their lives even though they had been sentenced to death twice.
Prosecutors outlined the gruesome yarn. Defence lawyers didn’t deny the meatheads’ guilt but noted both have been model prisoners for the past three decades.
Doorbal’s lawyer Bruce Fleisher claimed his client was manipulated by Lugo. He too pointed the finger at steroids. Tiny Doorbal’s weight exploded from 125 pounds to nearly 250 pounds, making him look like a fire hydrant.
“His personality changed. He was more irritable, aggressive. He kept getting bigger, bigger and bigger with the steroids,” Fleisher said. “He just followed what Lugo had to say to him.”
The duo was slated to catch the night train to Nowheresville in 2017 but a change in law caused their sentencing ordered to be re-tried. However, after the brouhaha of high school shooter Nikolas Cruz escaping the needle, the law changed back.
But remember: No pain, no gain.