True Crime Campfire - When Jocks Attack: The Sun Gym Gang, Pt 1

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

Teamwork makes the dream work. But what if your dream is a get-rich-quick scheme involving kidnapping and murder? And what if your team is a ragtag squad of steroid-swollen gym rats sharing about sixteen brain cells between them? This is the story of what happens when ego meets incompetence, with a generous handful of evil thrown in. Plus: Abs. Lots and lots of abs. Join us for the story of the Sun Gym gang--a case so strange, Hollywood turned it into the movie "Pain & Gain." Sources:Pete Collins, Pain and Gain (3-part longform article) https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/pain-and-gain-6396870Murderpedia, various articles: https://murderpedia.org/male.L/l/lugo-daniel.htmCBS' "48 Hours," episode "Pain and Gain"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Teamwork makes the dream work. But what if your dream is a get-rich quick scheme involving kidnapping and murder? what if your team is a rag-tag squad of steroid swollen gym rats sharing about 16 brain cells between them? This is the story of what happens when ego meets incompetence, with a generous handful of evil thrown in, plus abs. Lots and lots of abs. This is when Jock's attack, the story of the

Sun Jim gang. So, campers, for this one, we're in Miami, Florida, May 26, 1995. Detective Felix Jimenez got a call to take charge of a missing person's case that had just come in. A wealthy, attractive young couple, Frank Griga, and his girlfriend, Christina Furtain. Frank's sister, Zuzana, was worried sick about them. Frank and Christina lived in a she-shy-shund. neighborhood called Golden Beach, and they had a housekeeper, Esther. When Esther had showed up for work that morning, she'd been shocked to find the dog, Chopin,

barking his head off, and in a really aggressive way that was way out of character for him. This freaked Esther out to the point where she went down the street a few houses to ask Judy, one of Christina's friends slash neighbors, to go into the house with her. She could just feel it in her gut that something was wrong. And when the two women got inside, they knew immediately that Esther's gut feeling was right. The house looked like a tornado had been through it. The dog had gone nuts in there. This was not normal.

Frank and Christina adored Chopin. He was their baby. They'd never leave him by himself like this. The whole scene was just telegraphing wrongness, giving housekeeper Esther a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Now, Frank had told her they were thinking about maybe taking a trip to the Bahamas a few days before. It would be super weird for them to leave Chopin unattended like this, but maybe?

Christina's friend Judy had the number for their condo down there, so she gave it a call, hoping they'd pick up and have some kind of reasonable explanation, but there was no answer. And a few moments later, Esther had more bad news. Two round-trip airline tickets to the Bahamas were still sitting on the dresser in Frank and Christina's bedroom, along with their passports. The departure time on the tickets was yesterday morning. Obviously, they hadn't used them. And when they checked the garage, Frank's gorgeous bright yellow Lamborghini, his prime. pride and joy wasn't there. This, along with a trio of cocktail glasses, still sitting on the coffee table, got Judy thinking. She'd been over a couple days earlier to ask if Frank and

Christina wanted to come out to dinner with her, and they'd been having drinks in the living room with a couple of big, musly dudes, one of whom she'd never seen before, one she'd seen around town, a guy called Danny Lugo. Frank described them as potential business partners and said they were just on their way out the door to a dinner to talk about the new venture he was thinking of investing in. The guys had given Judy a bad feeling, so much so that she'd mentioned it to her husband when she got home. There was just something off about him, and Frank had seemed uneasy too. The vibe was weird. Those same cocktail glasses were still right there on the coffee table where they'd been that night. It looked to her like Frank and Christina had gone out to dinner with these

big muscle-bound guys a couple nights earlier and hadn't come back again. Judy told Esther not to touch anything, especially those drinking glasses. She got in her car and zipped over to the Steakhouse where Frank had said they were going with these new potential business partners two days before. She wanted to see if she could spot the Lamborghini. It was nowhere to be found, but she did notice

another familiar car. A gold Mercedes she'd seen in Frank and Christina's driveway that night. Obviously, it belonged to one of the business guys. She took down the license plate number, just in case, and then raced back to her house to call the police. The cops were, as they usually are when a

go missing a little skeptical at first, but that didn't last long, because a day or two after that missing person's call came in, a state trooper came across Frank Griga's yellow Lamborghini, abandoned way out in the Everglades, in a remote area that was notoriously popular as a ritual spot for practitioners of Santeria. The keys were still in the ignition, and the doors were standing wide open. What a way to trade a car that probably cost more than my college tuition. Right. The cops didn't find anything else interesting in the area, just this spectacular car sitting there all by itself in the woods, probably filling up with mosquitoes. Nobody had reported it stolen, and everybody who knew Frank Griga said he sure as hell would have if he could have. So this was a huge flaming red flag. There was still no sign of Frank and Christina. It was looking more and more like something sinister had happened to this fun-loving young couple, who, until now, had been sitting on top of the world. Frank Griego was a classic American success story.

About a decade earlier, he'd immigrated from Budapest, Hungary, got to New York with $10 in his wallet, and got a job at an oil change slash car wash type of place, making minimum wage. But Frank had big ambitions and a ton of drive to make them happen. And less than 10 years later, he was making millions, running a phone sex company in Miami. Totally self-made guy. It was pretty much the original American dream, even if most people don't imagine getting there by way of those 9-7-6 numbers.

Hot, lonely singles are waiting to talk to you, KT. I am a hot, lonely single, Whitney. And Christina, 23 years old at the time of her disappearance, she was a gorgeous, vibrant girl who loved zipping around on her jet ski. She and Frank were a perfect match. They loved their dog, and they loved each other. Where the hell were they now? Detective Jimenez didn't know, but he did have a nice solid lead to start out with. Danny Lugo, one of the last people seen with Frank and Christina before they went missing.

And he quickly determined the owner of that gold Mercedes Judy had seen in the driveway. When the investigators dug into Danny Lugo's background, their antennae started twitching like crazy. Dude had a rap sheet. He'd done time for fraud, running a fake loan scheme. And when he got out, he started managing a place called Sun Jim. The place was owned by a former accountant slash bodybuilder slash former Mr. United Kingdom named John Meese. When he opened the place, his dream was to attract serious bodybuilders like himself. And he succeeded in that.

That was Sun Jim's main clientele. Oh, Lord, I can see it now. Testosterone hayes just hanging in the air along with a popery of ball sweat and baby oil. Yeah, it was the kind of place where if a normal-sized human showed up to work out, they'd get the unironic, do you even lift, bro? And somebody would probably try to sell them steroids in the locker room. Yeah, apparently it didn't take long for Sun Jim to scare away the normie crowd. It was all gorilla all the time. And when bodybuilders came to Miami for a competition, they'd go to Sun Jim to get their pump on first.

You know, make sure those veins are standing out nice and veins. You really want him to pop, apparently. Like, you want people to be a little bit concerned that you might be about to stroke out. That's the look you're going for. Fitness, baby. Sun Jim's owner knew a lot about bodybuilding, but apparently he didn't have the sense God gave a tapeworm when it came to hiring trustworthy employees. It seems like he had one criterion. You had to look like you'd just been exposed to gamma radiation.

That's an incredible Hulk joke. Oh, my God. Okay, fine. You had to be a fleshy brick wall with a head. Yeah. Now, one of his former managers got arrested with about a metric shit pile of cocaine and amphetamines in his car. One, who was also a former cop, by the way, always fun to hear, lured three drug dealers out into the swamps and shot him to death. Another former employee had stolen from the gym. The customers weren't much better either, mostly cops and criminals. A Miami cop who reporter Pete Collins interviewed for his 1999 article, Pain and Gain, told him he could, quote, meet his monthly quota of felony arrests in one night at the Sun Gym just by running a background check on the customers. Ooh.

Into this hot mess express came Danny Lugo, a 30-year-old transplanted New Yorker who talked fast and had a way, as Detective Jimenez would later tell 48 hours, of convincing people to do things they didn't want to do. One of the things John Meese had wanted to do until he met Danny was closed down Sun Gym for good. He'd started the place thinking it would become a real force in the professional bodybuilding scene. What it had become instead was a money pit. But when Danny Lugo came swaggering in one afternoon looking for a job, all that changed. He was chock full of exciting ideas from making the gym into an internationally renowned powerhouse and making John Meese rich beyond his wildest dreams. They were going to go big, start their own karate team, design a line,

of sun gym workout clothes, open a juice bar, sell their own vitamins and supplements. Is this Sun Gym or Cobra Kai? Yes. And even better than that, Danny said he had techie expertise. He was in the process of designing software that would make managing the place a breeze. It would help him keep the most meticulous records of payments and past due balances, expenditures and profits, and it had helped him keep track of their members, too, which seems to me like they could do that last part just by checking out the latest mugshots

on the Miami PD's website, but okay, this will work too. Danny Lugo was slicker than the baby oil sheen on the eight-pack abs of a professional beefcake, and it didn't take him 20 minutes to get John Meese under his spell. So much so that Meese didn't trouble himself too much about Danny's criminal history. As we told you earlier, dude had just gotten out of prison after serving about a year and a half for fraud. He was on probation now. He had to pay restitution to the victims of the loan scam, and he wasn't allowed to open any lines of credit or rack up any debt without his probation officer's written permission.

He'd gotten off easy, if you ask me. His crime was gross. He'd preyed on people who were either running small businesses or hoping to start one. People who were in desperate need of a cash infusion and he did it by posing his venture capitalist David Lowenstein who just wanted to help plucky small-time entrepreneurs achieve their dreams. Beware of people who say that, by the way.

I just want to help people. He'd take money from his victims up front, telling him he needed it for insurance fees and stuff like that, and then he'd just take the money and run. He never gave anybody a dime in actual loans. He took his victims for about $71,000 all told. And according to his plea deal, he'd done something similar a couple years earlier in Oklahoma. And the hall was even bigger there, almost a quarter of a million dollars. And this is one of my very favorite Danny Lugo details.

At his sentencing, he made a weepy apology to the judge, Pinky's wearing he'd never ever tell it lie again, and then immediately lied about having graduated from Fordham University with a computer science degree. Like a second later. In reality, he had dropped out of Fordham long before graduating.

So, anywho, apparently none of that bothered John Meese very much because he hired Danny on the spot. I mean, in addition to his kaleidoscope of great ideas, dude was pretty much a walking advertisement for the gym. He was 6 to 250 pounds of solid muscle. And he had charisma, which we all know by now is a red flag the size of a semi.

Initially, Meese hired him as a trainer, but before long, he was running the place as manager. And as far as Meese could tell, you know, from taking a look at the account books, Danny so helpfully put together via his very own software program, it was going great. Yeah, within a year or so of hiring Danny, Sun Jim had started up that juice bar. And they were selling a different kind of juice in the locker room. A generous cornucopia of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Steroids. Or, as I like to call them, the devil's tick-tacks. Yay, fitness!

Yay, fitness. Steroids can be great if they're prescribed for the reasons they're intended for and used accordingly. And by great, I mean, they're really good for lung issues and inflammation while turning you into a moody, hungry monster. Yeah, and anabolic steroids, which are the type that they were using, are good for, like, if you're aging and your testosterone level is starting to drop and you still want to, you know, keep fit, then that's the kind of stuff that those are intended for.

But in the hands of a bunch of meatheads who just want to look as scary as humanly possible, it's basically like giving chimpanzees a bunch of cocaine and hand grenades and then telling them, no bananas until you write Shakespeare. As far as you could tell from looking at the books, the gym was doing great. They had 571 members. I mean, how could they not be? Problem was, they didn't. They were, as Pete Collins put it in his Miami New Times article, hemorrhaging clients.

Funnily enough, most people did not enjoy coming to the gym after a long day at work, only to have guys the size of dumpsters look at them like my cat looks at a plate full of the wrong brand of cat food. Like, you know that look, right? Like, what the fuck is this shit? And why am I being forced to look at it? In my own home.

But letting owner John Meese know just how fast his business was circling the drain didn't fit in with Danny's plans. So for the moment, he was in the dark. Now, let's talk about a guy named Adrian Dorble. Adrian was Danny's brother from another mother, his one true bromance. Danny was married to Dorbel's cousin, Lucretia. She and Dorble had both come to the states from Trinidad on temporary visas, and Danny and Adrian were workout buddies, as well as ride or die best buds.

So when Danny got the gig as manager at Sun Jim, one of the first things he did was hire Dorible part-time. And the second thing he did was score his buddy a shitload of cash. Like over a million dollars kind of cash. Dang. How in the sweet flying fuck did he swing that? Well, one of the son Jim regulars was a dude who had a long, illustrious history of white-collar crime. He'd just gotten out of prison too, so I guess he and Danny had that to bond over. And before long, they were putting their little heads together.

get it because they're on stairways, little tiny little heads. And coming up with a brand new scam. They started 10 fake medical companies. Then they rented a slew of PO boxes. From one of their fraudster buddies, they bought a binder full of names, birth dates, social security numbers, and addresses. And then they started billing Medicare for treatments these people never really received. Ugh, gross. Yeah.

Once the scam wrapped up, Danny dumped a million bucks worth of the take into a mutual fund he took out in Adrian's name. Wouldn't want your probation officer to find out about your sudden windfall of cash, huh, buddy? Especially since you're supposed to be paying restitution. Okay, so when you say he scored his buddy Adrian a shitload of cash, you mean... Yeah, he used his name to hide his own stolen money. Yeah. He's a real prince, this guy. Oh, and one more little detail from that particular escapade, the white-collar crime weightlifter guy who ran the Medicare scheme with him.

The reason he walked away from it after a while, despite the crazy amount of money they were raking in, was because, according to him anyway, Danny was bragging about having a guy killed. Oh, yeah. The guy had screwed him over, Danny said, and Danny just went right out and found a hitman. Problem solved. So his partner in the Medicare scam was like, eh. And I'm out. Don't blame him. Okay, so we've got Sun Jim manager, Danny Lugo, and his buddy, Adrian Dourble.

Now let's talk about a guy named Carl Weeks. This one's got an ensemble cast, y'all. But look, don't stress out too much about remembering who's who. Mainly, you just need to know that Danny Lugo was the lead dipshit. Yeah, just a little tip. As you're trying to picture this case, just imagine, like, a bunch of Batman goons with, like, one slightly larger goon with a name tag that says Danny on him. Like, that's what I do.

That will work perfectly. So, like Danny, Weeks was a transplanted New Yorker who came to Miami for a new start. Allegedly, he went down there to escape drugs and crime, two things he had ample experience with in New York. But if that's the case, Miami probably ain't the freshest start he could have, but whatever. Weeks had originally immigrated to the states from Barbados, and he had a capital P passed. Burglary, armed robbery, addictions to crack, and alcohol. He'd done a year in the Marines, but they kicked a matter. on his ass when he's threatened to kill his sergeant.

Good job, man, smart move. Yeah, they really kind of frown on that in the military. But after he got out of the Marines, Weeks drug use eventually led to a really serious seizure, which scared the living piss out of him as it would anybody. He decided that was it, no more drugs. Went to rehab, kicked his habits, and when he got out, he found religion, too.

Started going to church. But, of course, this didn't magically make his problems go away. He was still in dire financial straits, and his girlfriend was pregnant with their third base. So when his girlfriend's cousin, Stevenson Pierre, offered to give him a place to stay in a job in Miami, he jumped on it. He figured he'd go down there and work for a while, save some money, and eventually he could bring his girlfriend and the kids to Miami and they'd get their own place. Not a bad idea, really. Cousin Pierre gave him a room in his house, even though he secretly thought Weeks was kind of a braggy twat, and said he could probably get him a job at the place where he worked.

Where? Son Jim, of course. But Danny Lugo wasn't hiring at the moment, probably because Weeks was a little skinny guy, not at all dumpster-shaped enough to inspire the clients. You must be this wide, to goon. Exactly. He said something might open up in a while, though. He'd give him a call if so. So over the next few months, Weeks got more and more financially desperate as he tried to find a job, which, as we know, ain't easy for people with any kind of criminal record.

And then finally, Danny Lugo called, said, a proposition for him and his cousin Pierre, too. They figured it was some kind of work at Sun Jim, but as it turned out, not so much. There was this guy, Danny told him, Mark Schiller, a total piece of shit. Schiller had stolen 100K from Danny and another 200K from one of the Sun Jim regulars, a buddy of Danny's named Jorge Delgado. They wanted to, as Danny put it, take Schiller down and get that money back. And if Weeks and cousin Pierre wanted to help, they could make themselves a cool hundred K in just a couple days. Sounds great, right?

What could possibly be the catch? Well, the catch was what Danny Lugo wanted them to do was kidnap Mark Schiller, take him to a storage warehouse Jorge Delgado owned, beat the shit out of him, make him give up the info on where he put their money and how to get it back, get him to sign over his house and cars

and every other godforsaken thing that the motherfucker owned and then probably kill him and dump his body somewhere. Yeah, sounds great, right? Weeks and cousin Pierre weren't so sure. But how'd the detective describe Danny Lugo earlier, the type who could talk you into anything? Well, he worked that magic on him and promised that once they helped him take care of Schiller, he'd help him make some smart investments with their 100K.

They'd be flush in no time. Now, by this time, both Weeks and his cousin were unemployed, so it didn't take much of this to sway them, and soon they were meeting up again with Danny and his friend Jorge Delgado to iron out the details of the plan. Now, in reality, Schiller hadn't, or probably hadn't anyway, stolen any money from Danny or Delgado. But Delgado and his wife had worked for Mark Schiller at his accounting firm for years, and Delgado and he had become close friends. They went in on a few different businesses together, company that sold vitamins and supplements, a new accounting practice, and it had been great for Delgado and his wife.

According to Pete Collins article, they'd gone from living with her parents to a big house of their own in a nice neighborhood, and Delgado's wife had been. had gotten to quit her job so she could focus on starting a family. Delgado and Schiller were such good buds that Schiller had given him the alarm code to his house, and during one of his many social visits, he'd happen to discover where Schiller kept his safe. And he'd gotten a peek at Schiller's bank details, including a couple offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands. Everything was going great until Delgado joined son Jim and met Danny Lugo. God, this guy is actual literal poison. He really is.

Everything he touches gets contaminated. Even though he was general manager at Sunjin, Danny still trained clients sometimes, and he became Delgado's trainer. And before long, Delgado became a total Danny Lugo fan girl. He was just such a cool guy, you know? Probably. Delgado became such a total simp for Danny that he tried to talk Schiller into bringing him into their business. He introduced them, but Schiller pretty much hated Danny Lugo on site. Thought he was crude and bragy and kind of creepy, too. The kind of dude who just reeked of jail.

The kind who'd get you into major trouble if you let him into your inner circle. But Delgado wouldn't let it go. He wanted his new bromance to blossom. And he felt like the best way to do that would be to offer Danny a plum job at the accounting firm. Schiller put his foot down. Absolutely fucking not. This dude is not working with us. Eventually, Delgado got so insistent about hiring Danny that Schiller gave him an ultimatum.

You're going to have to pick between this creep Danny Lugo and me. I'm sure he thought it'd be a no-brainer. I mean, he and Delgado had been besties for years, made a ton of money together. And also, Lugo just got out of jail for fraud, for God's sake. Yeah. It's just crazy. Like I said in the intro, 16 entire brain cells, so... Yeah, oh yeah.

We're not dealing with super intelligent, perceptive people here. This one's not about Mensa members gone bad. This one's the opposite of the opposite of a Mensa, a Mensa member murder. The anti-Mesa murder. And yet they all make the same mistakes. Really, it just shows that Mensa's a good organization. That's very true. So, nope.

Delgado had stars. in his eyes for Danny. Total man crush. And it pretty much ruined his and Schiller's friendship. They parted ways, both his friends and business partners at Schiller's insistence. And Delgado, whose wife was Prego at the time, interpreted this as Schiller stole 200 grand from me, the bastards taking food out of my future child's mouth. Yes.

Right. Stole. By letting you sit with the consequences of your own actions, you absolute numb nuts. probably literally because of the steroids so he and his new BFF Danny decided to take Schiller for all he was worth and he was worth a lot a house worth 300k full of nice electronics and furniture a million dollars in an offshore bank a hundred grand in another account nice cars a schlotsky sandwich shop mm an investment stake in a luxury condo complex enough to set the Meathead gang up very, very nicely. When Delgado met with Danny, Weeks, and cousin Pierre, he told them he was fine with kidnapping Schiller and killing him too if they needed to. Remember campers, this is a guy who gave him and his

wife jobs and made them a ton of money, a guy he'd once described as his best friend. He knew Schiller's wife and kids, like knew them well. And now, he was talking about killing the guy with the same nonchalant attitude you'd use to talk about your golf game last week. And he spent an hour or two filling the boys in on everything they needed to know about Schiller's life and routines. And man, did they ever plan this shit out? It was Oceans 11 over there at the Sun Gym. One of the first things they did was head over to a place called, and I swear to God, we're not making this up, the spy shop. Which sold the kind of stuff.

It sounds like they would. and buy the place out. They told the cashier they were security for a famous band, which is hilarious, and they got walkie-talkies, tasers, and handcuffs. Yikes. They also bought ninja-style outfits, you know, so they could skulk around all incognito. Nothing more inconspicuous than a bunch of refrigerator-sized dudes in ninja outfits, right? Good call. And Danny rented a van, because for any abduction-slash-mur-murder.

scenario, you gotta have a van. It wasn't a white one though. They got that part wrong. It was red. Probably why the plan failed. Anywho, their plan was to follow Schiller around until they had a perfect opportunity to grab him and toss him into the van. Then they'd take him to Delgado's warehouse and go to work on him. Seems simple enough, right? But it did not go well. Probably because these dipshits were, as you said, all trying to share one brain cell between all four of them and they kept forgetting whose turn it was to use it. Campers, it took these dudes eight times. Eight tries to lay hands on Mark Schiller. Eight. And I'm just going to give you a few highlights, okay, from those eight times.

Eight times. On Halloween night, they put on their ninja outfits because I swear to almighty God, this is true. They were going to trick or treat in Schiller's neighborhood and grab him when he answered the door with the bowl of like mini snickers or whatever the fuck. And to God, this is true. Fully grown ass men. Now that didn't work because they decided, eh, fuck it, it's Halloween, let's bag it for the night and go to the titty bar instead. They probably realized, like, oh, I guess trick-or-treating's for kids or something, like, there's a ton of kids around. Another time, the plan failed because the van broke down.

Yet another time, because they were tailing Schiller down the freeway, and he, you know, took the exit ramp, and they missed it. Now, you'd think it couldn't get any dumber than the trick-or-treat idea, but you'd be wrong. Another time, they got all gussied up in their ninja outfits again, Added camouflage makeup. Hold on. Hold on. I know.

I swear to God, it's true. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Residential neighborhood. Yeah, yeah. Like a nice. Yeah. Camouflages for like the woods.

I'm sorry. Put on for their ninja outfits, added the camo makeup and headed over to Schiller's fancy neighborhood like right before dawn in the wee hours of the morning. They were planning to break in and hold Schiller and his whole family hostage until they could get him to sign over his assets. The wife and two kids, too, by the way. These guys were dumber and half-done biscuits, but let's not forget they were all so seriously evil.

So, anyway, they had their ninja suits and their camo, and they'd brought some blankets to, I guess, hide under while they belly crawled across Hitler's lawn in the rain. But the whole operation went tits up when, to everyone's complete shock, cars were driving by here and there. You know, because it was a residential neighborhood, not a goddamn alfalfa field in the middle.

of nowhere. You knew this. They hadn't planned for an unprecedented contingency like this, and it rattled him so bad that Luko got on the walkie-talkies and screamed, Abort mission! Abort mission! Until they finally managed to belly crawl their way back to the van, y'all, I swear to God, I'm not making this up. I love the idea that one of Schiller's neighbors was probably having morning coffee at the kitchen window with his wife, watched all this go down. Oh my God, yes. It's like, Mavis, come here, look at this.

There's a bunch of guys wriggling around under blankets in the Schiller's front yard. George, did you take your pill yet? No, I'm telling you, come look. Oh, no, there they go. They're leaving. Well, time to take the dogs out. Thank you. In scene.

Now, like any great leader, Danny Lugo used a carrot-stick approach to try to get his men in line. Sometimes it was the strip club and rhapsodizing about how rich they were going to be when they finally managed to pull off this little caper. Sometimes it was yelling and threatening to call the whole thing off. Because, of course, none of it could be Danny's fault, right? There had to be a weak link in the chain somewhere. Eventually, Weeks and Adrian Dorbill decided it was Cousin Pierre, who hadn't been super excited about the plan from the get-go, and who, by the way, was kind of skinny and, like, didn't even lift, bro, and they voted him off the island for the rest of the season. Cousin Pierre seemed relieved, but I noticed he didn't like go to the police or anything or try to warn Mark Schiller.

To replace Pierre, Beavis and Butthead brought in a pinch idiot, a guy named Mario Sanchez. He was a Honda Civic-sized gem rat, of course, and a licensed private investigator. Whose business had failed, but still, he had skills, probably, and a concealed carry permit. And the boys happened to know he was in financial trouble. calling a fresh dip shit in off the bench. You know you're in trouble when you're down to the B team. So you got to build a good bench when you're planning a kidnap murder. Come on.

So adorable in weeks approached Sanchez one day at Sun Jim and told him, look, we need some muscle to help us collect a debt from a drug dealer. We'll pay you a thousand bucks. Sanchez did not like the idea much. He knew that messing around with drug dealers, especially in Miami, where the cartel guys were all over the place, was not very conducive to a long, happy, fulfilled life. But Dorbel and weeks were persuasive. They were like, come on, we don't actually need you to hurt the guy. Just stand there looking scary. He's the type of guy who will fold like a wallet if he thinks he's about to get beat.

And he knows he owes us the money. It's going to be fine. Sanchez caved. He needed the money, after all, and later that day, they finally made it happen. Mark Schiller was in the process of trying to sell his Schlatsky's deli, and he was over there waiting for a possible buyer when the shipbag patrol, i.e. Adrian Dourble, Carl Weeks, and new guy Mario Sanchez, rolled up in their rented van. Around 4 o'clock, Schiller realized his prospect was going to stand him up, so he headed out to his car. And that was when they grabbed him. He felt his body jerk as three men grabbed a hold of him and started shocking him with tasers over and over again.

He screamed for them to take whatever they wanted, but they just kept shocking him and hitting him again and again, dragging him toward a maroon van. As he tried to struggle out of their grip, Schiller yelled, What the fuck do you want? As they tossed him into the van and slid the door shut, he heard one of the men say, you. Just try and imagine that. moment. Mark Schiller had been going about his ordinary day, looking forward to going to Columbia to spend Hanukkah with his wife's family. Now, he was in a real-life horror movie.

In the van, barreling down the highway, Schiller felt a rough pair of hands winding duct tape around and around his eyes. Another pair handcuffed his wrists and ankles, and someone held a gun to his head. He felt somebody rip his Rolex watch off his wrist. It hurt. And then they pulled off his star of David necklace. He heard one of the captors laugh and then say something anti-Semitic. Now, why doesn't that surprise me?

Yeah, they're champs, these fellas. Schiller was, as anybody would be, terrified to his core. He started hyperventilating, but none of these assholes cared. They just kept shocking him, hitting him, laughing, and staying stuff like, how could you take food out of the baby's mouth? How come you're so rich when we have so little? He was just about to pass out from the pain and fear when the van finally rolled to his top. He heard somebody make a cell phone call saying,

The Eagle has landed. Jesus Jones, this guy's wondering if he's ever going to see his kids again, and they think they're in an action movie, clearly. And by the way, guys, if you're going to use nicknames, you don't give the victim the coolest one. Okay, the Eagle is the coolest nickname. God, you are just such pitiful twats. They were, of course, at Delgado's warehouse.

and Dorwell was letting boss man Danny know it was time to get the show on the road. The tragic thing was, Mark Schiller had left Columbia years earlier to try and escape this exact kind of scenario. He'd known people back in Bocata who'd been kidnapped and tortured, his old boss at an oil company. Now, here he was, with no idea why. Soon, boss man Danny Lugo arrived and the real nightmare began. While one of the gang went to get Schiller's car from the Schlotsky's parking lot and bring it back to the warehouse, the others chained him to a wall, and from that night on, the next month of Mark Schiller's life was pure, unadulterated hell on earth. They kept him bound and gagged all the time,

and blindfolded. They burned him with lighters. They tased him, punched him, beat him with the butt of a gun. They played Russian roulette, spinning the cylinder of the revolver and pulling the trigger against his head. And sometimes, they'd hold a gun to his head and make him call people up. First, his wife Diana. He told her to take the kids and flee back to Columbia and don't tell anyone, especially the police. To get him to do this, Lugo and companies threatened that if he didn't, they'd abduct Diana, bring her to the warehouse, and torture her right alongside him. Fortunately for Diana, she did exactly what her husband told her, and in less than a day she and the kids were safe with her family. That was the only thing that gave Schiller any comfort during his month-long nightmare, but of course it also meant that they had access to his house now.

God only knew what they were doing with it. They also made him call various business associates and read from prepared scripts that they'd written. He'd fallen for a hot new lover, he said, a Cuban girl named Lillian. He was mad for her, he told them, and he decided to run away with her and start a new life. This ridiculous story, I assume,

they concocted to make sure people wouldn't miss Schiller when he started missing appointments, and then maybe never came back again. In between torture sessions, they made him sign paperwork, which he had to do blindfolded. This really scared him. Schiller later said that every time he signed,

he felt like he was signing his own death warrant. Although the Sun Jim boys still figured they might have to kill him once they'd cleaned him out financially, they wanted to reserve some anonymity just in case they didn't. So they called each other by nicknames. Lugo was Batman. Dorbol was Robin. Weeks was Sparrow, which damn, dudes, that's just mean.

And Cousin Pierre, who by now was back in the game because Sanchez like fucking booked it as soon as he realized what was going on and they needed somebody else. So Danny threatened to kill his seven year old son if he didn't help out. So cousin Pierre was Napoleon. I have no idea why.

Maybe because he was short. Napoleon wasn't even short. Yeah, that's like not even true, right? So they took shifts to keep an eye on Schiller and continue the torture and eventually despite the blindfold, Schiller figured out who at least one of his captors was. Remember, he'd met Danny

Lugo, back when his former partner and best friend Jorge Delgado had tried to bring Danny into their accounting practice. Danny had a distinctive voice, which Miami New Times reporter Pete Collins called a Mike Tyson Lisp with a New York accent. And one morning, when boss man Batman Danny showed up at the warehouse, Schiller recognized it. And the more he thought about his situation, every inch of his body hurting from the beatings and electric shocks, the more he realized that his former friend Delgado had to be involved too. Longotto wasn't one of the guys guarding him, but he was the only one who could have told the others some of the stuff they seemed to know, like where he banked and the alarm code to his

house. It was clear to him that their goal was to take everything he had, money and property both, and he figured they'd kill him once they accomplished it. They sure as hell didn't seem to have any human empathy in their charred little hearts. Well, actually, later he'd remember that some of his captors were better than others. Sparrow and Napoleon, Weeks and Cousin Pierre, actually did show him some small acts of kindness sometimes. They'd bring him a burger or a can of cold chef boyardie or a bottle of water. Sometimes they'd let him smoke a cigarette. When he mentioned that the duct tape around his head was so tight it was making his nose bleed,

Sparrow put a maxi pad between the tape and his nose, which made it feel way better. But of course, also made Batman and Robin laugh their asses off when they got there the next morning. What was taking so long was the offshore bank accounts. The wire transfers were taking forever, like weeks. And the whole thing was making the gang very nervous. It's not the greatest idea to hold somebody captive for a straight month, and they'd never intended it to go on that long. The longer you draw out an abduction,

especially if there's torture involved, the more serious the crime becomes, the more prison time you're likely to do if you get caught. So as they waited for the wire transfers to come through from the Caymans, the gang argued about whether they'd have to kill Mark Schiller. Weeks and cousin Pierre didn't want to, but Batman and Robin liked the idea of taking him out, as did Jorge Delgado, who was still pissed off about being drummed out of Schiller's accounting business, especially since Schiller had a $2 million life insurance policy, and they'd made him sign it over to Lugo's ex-wife.

They'd also made him call his attorney and, reading from a script they'd written for him, tell the guy he wanted to give his best buddy, Jorge Delgado, power of attorney, to help with the Schlotsky sale. Oh, great. Schiller's assets were theirs for the taking. To keep Schiller more compliant, they told him they were planning to let him go once they had what they wanted, get him blackout drunk,

and put him on a plane to Columbia via a dude that they knew at the airport. He knew they were probably lying. One night, though, they handed him a phone. His wife, Diana, safe with the kids at her parents' place in Columbia, was on the line. Tell her you'll be there soon, the gang told him, and he told her, though he didn't believe a word of it.

and Diana, half in tears, put Schiller's five-year-old son on the phone. When are you coming home, Daddy, the little guy wanted to know. Soon, he said, I'll be there soon. He was already beginning to forget what his family's faces looked like. He hadn't seen anything except the back of a piece of duct tape for weeks. Would this be the last time he heard his youngest voice? The son Jim gang still hadn't decided. So they argued.

And argued. To kill or not to kill. and they waited for their money to come in. We're going to leave it there for part one campers. This is a big story with big perpetrators. And we're going to have to get back to the two missing people we told you about at the start of the episode. Oh, that's right. Frank and Christina. But don't worry, you know we'll have part two for you next week.

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