No Pain No Gain

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Speaker 7 It's a swampy, desolate area.

Speaker 7 It's a wooded area.

Speaker 9 There's thousands of canals down there.

Speaker 9 It's populated with alligators

Speaker 10 and snakes.

Speaker 9 It's just an area that no one would really want to just go to and hang out.

Speaker 9 It's the ideal spot to dump a body.

Speaker 7 And when we first went down there, it was pitch black. And I shined a flashlight into the water and I was able to see the barrels.
We only had a torso. The head, hands, and feet were missing.

Speaker 6 All right, ready to go? Judge Alex?

Speaker 8 I've tried some of the worst people there are, but this case really got to me. The victims were murdered one night in 1995.
A young, successful, good-looking couple.

Speaker 8 Frank was 32 years old. He made a ton of money.
He was a millionaire. Christina was his 23-year-old girlfriend, and they had everything:

Speaker 8 boats,

Speaker 8 hot cars, Lamborghinis.

Speaker 8 They were living the life.

Speaker 8 This case had everything.

Speaker 8 It had sex,

Speaker 8 it had violence, dark, dark humor.

Speaker 7 We had a group of muscle heads.

Speaker 8 These were a bunch of meatheads. Guys who were working out in the gym, probably taking steroids.

Speaker 7 One of their targets was Frank and Christina.

Speaker 8 Basically the plan was kidnap wealthy people, take everything they have, and then kill them. They got away with over a million dollars.
The most fascinating case I think I've ever tried.

Speaker 8 Hollywood had to make a movie out of it.

Speaker 11 Once I was how you paid your rent when he was due,

Speaker 8 I got a plan to change that.

Speaker 8 If somebody scripted this, you would say, well, that's ridiculous.

Speaker 8 Except that it actually was true.

Speaker 11 He loved fast cars,

Speaker 11 beautiful girls, and life.

Speaker 10 Susanna Griga can never forget the kidnapping of her brother Frank and his girlfriend, Christina Furton, back in 1995.

Speaker 12 She was very beautiful.

Speaker 11 She was only 23 years old. My heart breaks when I think what she went through.

Speaker 7 Very handsome couple. They look like they were made for each other.

Speaker 10 Felix Jimenez, now retired from the Metro Day Police Homicide Department, was lead detective on the case.

Speaker 7 Frank was the American success story. An immigrant came to this country with $10 in his pocket and made millions.

Speaker 10 He came from Budapest, Hungary, and found a minimum wage job in New York City.

Speaker 12 Visited like a service station, he was changing the oil, washing cars.

Speaker 12 What he accomplished should make everyone proud because he went from nowhere to a millionaire on his own, just by using his own resources.

Speaker 10 In fewer than 10 years, he was living in an upscale Miami enclave called Golden Beach, running a phone sex line empire. He was on top of the world until May 24th, 1995.

Speaker 12 I started calling him and he wouldn't pick up the phone.

Speaker 11 I kind of knew that something really bad happened then.

Speaker 10 The disappearance of Frank and Christina will become one of Miami's most notorious crimes. But who would want to kidnap them? How did this all go down?

Speaker 7 We got a call that there was a missing, a wealthy couple that was missing out of Golden Beach. That was a little strange because in homicide we need a crime scene, we need a dead body to respond to.

Speaker 7 There's few and far between when there's actually a missing person that we would respond. It has to be highly suspicious circumstances and it so happens in this case there was.

Speaker 10 At first the detectives hoped they could find Frank and Christina alive.

Speaker 7 A missing Hungarian couple had said that they were going to the Bahamas the following day. So all their friends assumed that the reason they weren't home was because they were in the Bahamas.

Speaker 10 But that all changed though when police made a stunning discovery.

Speaker 7 Their Lamborghini was found in an abandoned wooded area far outside of Miami.

Speaker 9 At this point, we realized that something bad, something bad had happened to this couple.

Speaker 10 Sao Garifalo, also retired, worked the case for his boss, Felix Jimenez, now both CBS News consultants.

Speaker 9 We got information and we ended up going to Golden Beach.

Speaker 10 So you have a missing Hungarian couple and Lamborghini.

Speaker 7 We had more information than that.

Speaker 7 We had a next-door neighbor that had actually been to the house the last time they were seen alive, and they invited her in, introduced her to two muscle-bound men that were driving a brand new Gold Mercedes, and told them that they were going out to dinner to discuss a business deal.

Speaker 10 That neighbor would tell police, she met the driver of the Gold Mercedes and knew his name. Danny Lugo.

Speaker 7 Danny was a big muscular guy.

Speaker 10 Police would soon learn that Lugo was a Burley ex-convict who had served time for running a phony loan scam operation.

Speaker 10 After his release, he became the manager of a suburban Miami health club called the Sun Jim.

Speaker 7 It's real close to here, son.

Speaker 7 This is where Sun Jim was located. This is what we could call the gang headquarters.

Speaker 9 Danny Lugo was a Puerto Rican Cuban kid from the Bronx.

Speaker 7 He thought he was smarter than anybody else. He had a way

Speaker 7 of convincing people to do things that they didn't want to do.

Speaker 10 The investigation into Frank and Christina's disappearance continued. Detectives learned Lugo was the leader of a group made up of drifters and petty thieves who hung out at the Sun Gym.

Speaker 10 Lugo's main partner in crime was another musclehead, Adrian Dorbal.

Speaker 7 Adrian Dorbal was Danny Lugo's protégé.

Speaker 9 Dorbaugh was just an evil.

Speaker 9 He reminded me of just being an evil guy.

Speaker 7 He was a steroid freak, 5'7 tall, 5'7 ⁇ wide. He did everything and anything that Danny told him to do.

Speaker 10 In May 1995, Danny Lugo and Adrian Dorbel would be at the center of one of the most notorious crimes in Miami history, a complicated and deadly plot that involved kidnapping, money, and murder.

Speaker 8 My name is Daniel Lugo.

Speaker 10 18 years later, the story was too much for Hollywood to resist.

Speaker 11 I've watched a lot of movies, Paul.

Speaker 7 I know what I'm doing.

Speaker 10 In the movie Pain and Gain, Lugo is portrayed by Mark Wahlberg. The film was released by Paramount Pictures.
Paramount is part of Viacom.

Speaker 13 If you're willing to do the work, you can have anything. That's what makes the USFA great.

Speaker 10 The movie captures what Lugo was about in real life, his infatuation with getting rich, says Patty Barrientos, who worked alongside him at a gym.

Speaker 12 He said, I'm going to have a lot of money.

Speaker 11 I want to grow. I want to be somebody very big.

Speaker 10 He was money hungry. Yes.

Speaker 10 And with the little money he had, he spent a lot of it here at the Solid Gold Strip Club. It was here he began an affair with a one-time penthouse model turned exotic dancer named Sabina Petrascu.

Speaker 7 She was a very, very attractive woman. She fell for Danny and believed everything he told her.

Speaker 10 Sabina was another recent immigrant who made a splash in Miami. She was a finalist in the Miss Romania contest in 1990.
then came to the United States to begin a modeling career.

Speaker 10 She made it onto the pages of Penthouse magazine, but filled the rest of her time as an exotic dancer.

Speaker 7 Danny treated her well.

Speaker 10 He gave her a BMW. Sabina would play a crucial role as police continued gathering more evidence connecting Lugo and Dorbal to the disappearance of Frank and Christina.

Speaker 7 We have the housekeeper who was also at the home when the muscle men were there. We have the next-door neighbor.
We show them photographs, they make identifications, so we have a lot to go on.

Speaker 10 So search warrants were executed?

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 10 Search warrants for the homes of of Lugo and Dorble and their associates.

Speaker 9 I mean, we had so many cops, it wasn't even funny.

Speaker 7 In fact, we mobilized right here at this park. Right.

Speaker 10 Police quickly hit Payter in the apartment of Danny Lugo's girlfriend.

Speaker 7 There was some damning evidence there. Bloody clothing belonging to Frank and Christina.
There was the kidnap kit, a case with duct tape,

Speaker 7 handcuffs.

Speaker 7 There was so much evidence in that apartment.

Speaker 10 Soon, Adrian Dorbel was in custody and refused to talk to police.

Speaker 7 The main guy that we're after, Danny Lugo, is nowhere to be found.

Speaker 10 Danny Lugo had given them the slip.

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Speaker 10 This case was all over the news.

Speaker 7 Miami was riveted as to this attractive Hungarian couple, you know, this yellow Lamborghini found in the Everglades, and that they're missing. And they continued to be missing.

Speaker 10 But detectives had lost their lead suspect, Danny Lugo.

Speaker 7 Lugo's gone. We have a warrant for his arrest.
He's just vanished. We don't know where he is.

Speaker 10 They did have one good lead.

Speaker 7 We had his girlfriend, Sabina Petrescu.

Speaker 10 Sabina Petrescu, Lugo's girlfriend, the magazine model turned stripper, had quite a story to tell. She said her boyfriend wasn't a criminal.
He told her he was a CIA agent.

Speaker 7 Number one, she was smitten with Danny Lugo.

Speaker 7 And number two,

Speaker 7 I think she believed what he was saying, that he was a CIA operative, that he was working for the U.S. government in

Speaker 7 kidnapping people that were dangerous to this country.

Speaker 10 Danny Lugo had convinced her he was a spy on a secret mission. So for now, she wouldn't tell detectives where Danny was, but it would be just a matter of time.

Speaker 10 In an incredible twist of fate, detectives in another department at Metro Day Police had also been looking at Danny Lugo and Adrian Dorbaugh.

Speaker 10 Their case was the bizarre kidnapping of another Miami millionaire. Now Lugo and Dorbaug were front and center of two cases.
The Miami millionaire was Mark Schiller, an accountant.

Speaker 7 He was Argentinian-born, grew up in the U.S., went to school, got his CPA license. He had a medical billing business that did very well.

Speaker 10 The two crimes would become one huge case, a case that Judge Alex Ferrer, now TV's Judge Alex, and Miami-Dade Prosecutor Gail Levine would never forget.

Speaker 11 This case was... what made me who I am today, a career prosecutor.

Speaker 8 Of all the cases I've tried, this was by far the most fascinating case.

Speaker 10 Schiller would eventually tell police a wild story that five months before the murders of Frank and Christina, Schiller himself had been grabbed by a gang.

Speaker 10 Bound and gagged, he'd be dumped in an industrial warehouse for more than a month. So this is it?

Speaker 8 This is it.

Speaker 10 So this was an empty warehouse that they had rented?

Speaker 7 This is a warehouse that was rented by one of the members of the Sun Jin gang. They drove the van with Schiller inside into the warehouse.

Speaker 11 Mark Schiller was the perfect victim because he was involved in something that was illegal.

Speaker 7 I think he got greedy and started getting involved in Medicare fraud.

Speaker 10 Danny Lugo learned about Schiller from this man, George Delgado, who also worked out at the Sun Gym. Schiller and Delgado had been in business.

Speaker 7 Him and George Delgado started a

Speaker 7 mortgage business together.

Speaker 10 But business went badly. And later Schiller and Delgado had a falling out over a deal.
Delgado wanted revenge and told Lugo Schiller would be an easy mark.

Speaker 8 They basically go, well, he's not going to go to the cops. He was involved in Medicare fraud.
We'll shake him down.

Speaker 10 So what was the plan?

Speaker 11 The plan was actually very simple. Kidnap Mark Schiller, have him write his own ransom, and then kill him.
Simple as that? Simple as that.

Speaker 10 But catching Schiller to shake him down was tougher than it looked.

Speaker 8 It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic because they made these stupid attempts.

Speaker 8 They would hide in his yard under blankets like they were some kind of ninja, waiting for him to come out to get the paper at five in the morning and they were going to kidnap him, only to be surprised that cars were coming down the street and lighting him up with their headlights.

Speaker 8 So then they're running through the yards, you know, screaming aboard, aboard, like they were on some secret mission for the government.

Speaker 10 Hollywood could not resist this crazy scene. The gang used costumes and come and book code names like Batman and Robin

Speaker 10 and tried to stage an accident to kidnap Schiller.

Speaker 8 They were waiting for him to drive by to stage this accident. They turned the car off, and as he's driving by, they're cranking it, and the car won't start.
And he just goes driving by.

Speaker 8 So it's like the Keystone cop's gone bad.

Speaker 10 Finally, after multiple attempts, the gang that couldn't shoot straight enlisted some serious muscle and planned to take Schiller down outside a restaurant he owned.

Speaker 11 They waited in a van

Speaker 11 and they had their biggest gym rats come out.

Speaker 6 I'm a good-hearted person. I just made a mistake.

Speaker 10 The man who we agreed to obscure and alter his voice worked with the Sunjim gang to kidnap Schiller.

Speaker 6 I was pretty hardcore.

Speaker 10 At your peak, you could bench 475 pounds?

Speaker 6 505.

Speaker 10 505. How big were you?

Speaker 6 I was like a lean 270 pounds.

Speaker 10 Big guy?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 10 Intimidating?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 10 He was desperate for money and sometimes worked at the Sun Gen. Back in 1994, Lugo and his gang were offering cash for a little help.

Speaker 6 He told me, look, I got to talk to you about something. He owes me money and I need you to come with me and help me collect.

Speaker 10 He agreed and in November of 1994, brought his gun. So you had your 45 with you?

Speaker 6 I always carried mine, my firearm.

Speaker 6 We were parked right there, and as soon as he came out of his restaurant, they saw him, so they said,

Speaker 6 there he is. There he is.

Speaker 6 It was one of those days in Miami where a storm was coming in.

Speaker 10 Schiller, a man who cheated death and whose harrowing ordeal was dramatized by actor Tony Shaloub in a recent movie.

Speaker 9 I made a lot of money.

Speaker 8 Maybe yourself ought to spend some of it on a salad.

Speaker 7 You know who invented salad?

Speaker 3 Poor people.

Speaker 6 Why are you alive? I guess it's divine intervention.

Speaker 6 I can't explain it.

Speaker 10 Schiller's nightmare started just as he was about to head home after work.

Speaker 6 I walked out to my car. As soon as I opened my door, I'm grabbed from behind by three guys.
And as soon as they grabbed them, the guy grabbed the steering wheel.

Speaker 10 Was he screaming?

Speaker 6 He was screaming. They just kept punching me and they had a taser and they kept tasering me.
They were tasing him. Begging for mercy.

Speaker 10 He was screaming.

Speaker 6 You know, what do you want? What do you want with me? What are you doing? So at that point they dragged me to the van with a white band. They handcuffed my hands behind my back.

Speaker 10 You must have been terrified.

Speaker 6 They thought they were going to take me to kill me. They taped him.

Speaker 6 They put a tape in his mouth and we took off out of here. When we got to the warehouse, they called the boss.

Speaker 10 The boss was Danny Lugo, the same man at the center of the Christina Furton Frank Griega murder case.

Speaker 6 Tell him the eagle has landed. I go, I guess I was the eagle.
When I left, Schiller was sitting in the chair. He was taped up, hands and legs, and we're beating on him.

Speaker 10 Schiller was tortured endlessly. Sometimes it was with fire.

Speaker 6 Doorbell would yell, fire, fire, be real sick, and he'd burn me.

Speaker 8 You know, burned my skin.

Speaker 6 And then he'd do this again, and he would be laughing sorrow. He was crying.

Speaker 10 Other times, they played Russian roulette.

Speaker 7 They would place a gun to his head. They would take a revolver and spin it and pull the trigger.
For the first couple of weeks, he wasn't even allowed to use a bathroom.

Speaker 7 He would have to urinate and defecate on himself. But the worst was yet to come.

Speaker 6 At this point, they talked, well, if you don't give us a list of everything you have, we're going to bring your wife and rape her here in front of you.

Speaker 10 Schiller says he was allowed to make one phone call. He called his family, telling his wife to take their two young children and flee to Colombia.
She chose not to call the police.

Speaker 7 Why didn't she call police?

Speaker 6 I don't know. I think at that point it was prudent not to.

Speaker 10 And for some inexplicable reason, neither did any of Schiller's employees or friends or extended family raise the alarm. With his family safely out of the country, Schiller was still suffering.

Speaker 10 Finally, the daily torture was too much. He gave up giving the gang everything.

Speaker 6 I signed, they told me my death sentence.

Speaker 11 He was signing over everything, including his life.

Speaker 10 How much altogether?

Speaker 11 It was $1.2 million in cash and assets and a $2 million life insurance insurance policy.

Speaker 8 And pretty soon they had everything the man owned. They moved into his house.
They changed the pool contract to their name.

Speaker 8 They were living there and partying in his home, and they were taking some of the furniture they liked and putting it in their own apartments, wearing his jewelry, driving his Dodge Viper and his Mercedes, and just basically living off of his money.

Speaker 8 Well, at that point, can't let the guy live, so they decide that he's got to go.

Speaker 10 Having forced him to sign over his assets, the Sun Jim Gang, led by Danny Lugo, was partying in Mark Schiller's house.

Speaker 10 In the Hollywood feature Pain and Gain, Mark Wahlberg's character depicts the depravity.

Speaker 3 You know what I'm doing?

Speaker 6 They were living in the house, in my house.

Speaker 10 Despite his cooperation, Mark Schiller still remained chained like an animal in the Miami warehouse.

Speaker 7 Schiller was tied to a pipe in a very small bathroom. That's where he spent

Speaker 7 the next 30 days was handcuffed to that pipe.

Speaker 10 The businessman and father was living in kind of a hell associated with a third world dungeon, complete with racial slurs.

Speaker 6 They just told me we got a matzah ball and...

Speaker 10 What does that mean?

Speaker 6 I guess they were referring to the fact that I was Jewish.

Speaker 10 Schiller can't forget the sixth soundtrack that came with his daily beatings.

Speaker 6 While they were beating you? Yeah.

Speaker 10 Did any of your captors show you any kindness?

Speaker 6 Yeah, the guy that was in night did, because they stopped feeding me. I was starved.
I hadn't eaten for like three days. He brought me a can of canned ravioli, which I had to eat with my hand.

Speaker 10 That would be one of the last meals the Sun Jim Gang intended for Mark Schiller to have as Lugo put his final plan into action.

Speaker 8 They give him alcohol to drink, get him all drunk.

Speaker 10 They plied you with alcohol for three straight days.

Speaker 6 It was probably more than that. It was probably like five days.

Speaker 10 And then what did they do?

Speaker 6 The last day, they sat me in a chair and they gave me this concoction to drink.

Speaker 7 Liquor, tequila, vodka, and gave him sleeping pills. And

Speaker 7 Eventually he passed out.

Speaker 10 You were unconscious.

Speaker 6 I was unconscious.

Speaker 8 They put him in his Toyota 4Runner in his SUV.

Speaker 7 They drove the car into a light pole. Durball was driving, and then doused the car with gasoline and set it on fire.
And that was their attempt to kill him.

Speaker 7 They backed out about a block away to watch the car as it was engulfed in flames.

Speaker 8 The problem is they don't buckle him in. The flames revive him enough that he stumbles out of the car and towards the road.

Speaker 10 The surprise Sunjim gang moved in to finish off Mark Schiller.

Speaker 8 And they see this guy that they just lit on fire standing by the side of the road and they yell, run him over, run him over.

Speaker 7 They drive forward and they try to run him over, they miss, but then they're able to back over him and then run over him again.

Speaker 8 And they get back to their place and they go, you think we killed him? And they're looking at the dent on the car and saying, I don't know, it's not a big dent.

Speaker 8 Yeah, but we ran him over and we backed over him. I mean, he must be dead.

Speaker 10 And what do you remember next?

Speaker 6 Waking up in the hospital?

Speaker 10 It would be months before Mark Schiller could grasp the full horror of how he ended up half dead at Jackson Memorial, Miami's top trauma center.

Speaker 6 I was in a coma when they picked me up.

Speaker 10 You were in a coma. Yeah.

Speaker 10 In the frenetic haze of the intensive care unit, burned and bruised, his pelvis broken, Mark Schiller tried to tell his story of abduction and torture to nurses, doctors, anyone who might listen.

Speaker 6 I told him I was kidnapped and they go, no, no, you were in a bad accident. And I go, no, no, no, no.

Speaker 6 I was kidnapped and they just blew it off.

Speaker 10 So how many times did you insist that you had been kidnapped?

Speaker 8 And he's trying to convince a nurse to give him a phone because he says he was kidnapped and she just keeps going, no, you weren't kidnapped. You were drunk and you hit a poll.

Speaker 6 I knew they weren't going to do anything.

Speaker 8 Finally, she gives him the phone. He calls his lawyer.

Speaker 10 From there, it took just moments to figure out Mark Schiller needed a lot more than just a lawyer.

Speaker 14 My name's Ed Du Bois. I'm a private investigator.
We represent desperate people.

Speaker 10 But even Ed Du Bois, with 50 years' experience as a PI, had never heard anything quite like Mark Schiller's story.

Speaker 14 The call was unusual because the story was so

Speaker 14 bizarre.

Speaker 10 The PI met Schiller and believed his story. And soon both men realized Mark Schiller had an even bigger problem.
Lugo and Delgado were intent on finishing the job.

Speaker 6 That was the sitting duck.

Speaker 10 Did you fear that Delgado and Lugo were going to come to the hospital?

Speaker 6 Yeah, and my sister was there and my brother, and we were all in panic.

Speaker 14 I said

Speaker 14 the easy answer is for you to get out of the hospital.

Speaker 10 Why didn't either one of you go to the police at that point?

Speaker 14 Well, we couldn't wait for the police.

Speaker 10 Schiller's sister ripped the medical tubes from his arms.

Speaker 6 And the doctors, you can't move him.

Speaker 14 He's in critical condition.

Speaker 10 Schiller's brother and sister booked an air ambulance, grabbed their brother, and bolted out of Miami, heading north, not a minute too soon.

Speaker 6 We left at 8 o'clock in the morning and I guess they came at 10 o'clock to look for me to kill us all all three of us.

Speaker 10 Delgado and Lugo?

Speaker 6 Yeah at the hospital.

Speaker 10 The now desperate Sun Jim gang had tracked down their former captive.

Speaker 8 As they're walking the halls of Jackson Memorial Hospital looking for him he's on an air ambulance flight to New York.

Speaker 10 A thousand miles from Miami, Mark Schiller, now supported by his family, began to heal. His body and bones fractured.

Speaker 6 First, I can't walk.

Speaker 6 And second of all, there's who knows how many of these people out there.

Speaker 10 Schiller would reunite with his family in Colombia. Weeks would pass, and strangely, despite his ordeal, Schiller did not report it to the police.

Speaker 8 What person gets kidnapped, held for a month, and when he finally gets free, leaves the country and doesn't call the police for four months.

Speaker 10 I think what's difficult to understand is why you did not go to the police sooner. I did.

Speaker 10 But according to authorities, it wasn't until April 1995, four months after his escape, that Schiller contacted police.

Speaker 6 Well, they want you to come to Miami to report it. I'm like, that's not happening.
Who knows how many of these people out there? I run into them by accident. I'm dead.

Speaker 11 Mark Schiller was asked to come and give testimony under oath four times. And he stood up, not only the prosecutor, but the police, to give that testimony four times.

Speaker 10 Prosecutor Gail Levine would eventually lead the investigation and try the case.

Speaker 10 She says Schiller didn't come forward because he had his own credibility issues due to his alleged involvement in Medicare fraud.

Speaker 11 The victim comes from Columbia. He has a lot of money, more money than I would imagine most CPAs in Miami have.

Speaker 10 So after a while, you and Mark decided to go to the police.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 10 But according to Du Bois and Schiller, when they finally did sit down with cops, they've never listened at all.

Speaker 14 They never went out, never read them their rights.

Speaker 14 They never asked them a question. They never even said, hello.

Speaker 6 Here I am.

Speaker 14 We're breathing down your neck.

Speaker 8 They went to Metro Dade's top unit that handles just crimes of this nature, just the biggest crimes.

Speaker 7 And they just didn't believe them.

Speaker 10 It had been five months since Mark Schiller's ordeal. The muscle-headed gang had trashed his home and burned through his money.
They were now hungry for another score.

Speaker 8 If the police had listened to him and had investigated, Frank Grieg and Christina Furton would probably be alive today.

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Speaker 15 Hey there, we're Corinne Vienne and Sabrina D'Anaroga here to introduce our newest podcast, Crimes of A Crimehouse Original.

Speaker 16 Crimes of is a weekly series that explores a new theme each season, from Crimes of the Paranormal, Unsolved Murders, and more.

Speaker 16 Our first season is Crimes of Infamy, the true crime stories behind Hollywood's most iconic horror villains.

Speaker 15 Listen to and follow Crimes of, available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 10 By May of 1995, five months after his harrowing escape, the Sunjun Jung gang had burned through all of Mark Schiller's money.

Speaker 8 They've been partying and going to strip clubs and dropping thousands of dollars on strippers, and it was all his money.

Speaker 10 With Schiller's fortune spent, the gang targeted their next victims, Frank Griga and his beautiful girlfriend, Christina Furton.

Speaker 8 There was never any pretense. They knew they were going to kill them from the outset.

Speaker 10 The millionaire had it all.

Speaker 8 Lugo and Dorbaugh, on the other hand, they wanted to live that life.

Speaker 10 The life Frank Griga had built on those dial tones of a sex phone empire.

Speaker 12 It made me very proud that my kid brother made it so big.

Speaker 11 You know, we were really poor when we were young.

Speaker 10 It's a true rags to riches story.

Speaker 12 Yes, it is.

Speaker 10 His sister Susanna had seen Frank's love for the glittery side of the American dream.

Speaker 12 Money was there for him to make other people happy and to play,

Speaker 12 to buy toys.

Speaker 10 His wealth did afford him certain luxury arts.

Speaker 12 Oh, he loved cars. Yes, he loved cars.

Speaker 10 Lamborghini.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 10 Frank Griga's yellow Lamborghini was legendary. It was that car that caught the eye of Adrian Dorbal.
He'd been told about it by a woman who once dated Griga.

Speaker 11 Dorball's face lights up and says,

Speaker 11 who has the yellow Lambo?

Speaker 11 And she says, oh, don't you know? That's my friend Frank. He's my old boyfriend.
And he says, how would I know him? Oh, he comes into this dance club, Solid Gold, all the time. Don't you know him?

Speaker 11 Dorbol wasn't that stupid. Bingo, we got our next victim.

Speaker 10 Dorboll and Lugo approached Frank Griga with a phony made-up business scheme. And a meeting was set at the Solid Gold Strip Club.

Speaker 11 And they told him that they were investors and that they had a way to make 20% return on the dollar.

Speaker 10 But the real plan mirrored the violent abduction of Mark Schiller. Kidnap and tortured Grieka until he signed over every nickel he had and revealed to the gang where his assets were kept.

Speaker 11 They also needed Christina.

Speaker 6 Why?

Speaker 11 They needed Christina because if Frank was missing, Christina was going to go to the police. Because why wouldn't she go to the police? Frank was completely legal.

Speaker 7 And it's the one with the balcony.

Speaker 10 Lugo and Dorbal, posing as businessmen, lured Frank and Christina back to Dorbal's apartment. Within minutes, Dorbal was strangling Frank in the bedroom.

Speaker 11 Dorbal, not knowing his own steroid strength,

Speaker 11 either broke his neck or suffocated him.

Speaker 8 And she screams, and Danny tackles her and injects her with horse tranquilizer, which they had basically bought to tranquilize the two of them.

Speaker 10 And it killed her.

Speaker 11 Not initially.

Speaker 9 They had a dead person and another one, another person near death.

Speaker 10 23-year-old Christina Furton, who loved animals, swimming, and had dreams of being a professional diver, was now shot full of horse tranquilizer.

Speaker 10 Then Lugo demanded she give up the access code numbers to Frank Riga's house.

Speaker 8 And Dorbaugh goes and speaks to her, and he comes back, and he says his exact words were, the bitch is cold. They had injected her with enough horse tranquilizer to kill four 1,000-pound horses.

Speaker 8 And now they're both dead, Frank Riga and Christina Furton, and these two guys don't have a dime.

Speaker 10 So what do they do with the bodies?

Speaker 11 Well they got creative.

Speaker 7 These were some of the items that we were able to recreate from a Home Depot receipt that we found as to items that they purchased to use in dismembering the bodies.

Speaker 10 With the help of George Delgado, Dorbel and Lugo stuffed the bodies of Frank Griga into a couch and Christina Furton into a large cardboard box.

Speaker 7 So here you have these two muscular guys and on a Saturday morning during the middle of the day it looks like they're moving and they're moving boxes and they're moving a couch and what they can contain are two bodies.

Speaker 10 They took the bodies to an empty warehouse. The horror was just beginning.

Speaker 8 So they went to Home Depot and they bought a chainsaw. And they come back and they're going to use this to dismember the body.
But the chainsaw doesn't have enough power.

Speaker 8 So these geniuses take this chainsaw back to Home Depot and return it.

Speaker 6 You're kidding me.

Speaker 9 And they brought that back and they ended up buying an electric chainsaw.

Speaker 10 It boggles the mind that they would return a chainsaw that they were going to use to dismember these people.

Speaker 7 There's a lot about this case that boggles the mind.

Speaker 10 But the second chainsaw jammed in Christina Furton's beautiful thick hair. That's when Dorbo and Lugo reached for an axe.

Speaker 11 And they started chopping the body parts

Speaker 11 for hours.

Speaker 8 And then they disposed of the torsos in one part of the county in oil drums.

Speaker 11 And they left those hands, heads, and feet in buckets at the 31 mile marker.

Speaker 8 In the Everglades, on the alligator alley that goes from Fort Lauderdale to Naples.

Speaker 11 I have never passed that mile marker without saying a little prayer for Frank and Christina.

Speaker 10 Another gang member would dump Frank Riga's yellow Lamborghini on the side of the road in the swampy Florida Everglades.

Speaker 10 Police didn't need a GPS. The map was clear and it led straight to the Sunjem gang.

Speaker 11 And I remember saying, we don't have a missing persons, we have a very major homicide.

Speaker 10 And soon Frank's big sister Susanna was on a flight to Miami.

Speaker 12 The bodies were found that day.

Speaker 10 The day you arrived? Yes.

Speaker 12 Sergeant Jimenez and

Speaker 12 Sal Garofalo came and picked me up at the airport and they explained that they just had, you know, that they had the bodies. Yes.

Speaker 12 sorry

Speaker 11 it's still very hard after 70 years

Speaker 10 as investigators put the pieces together mark shiller's kidnapped story echoed like thunder they said uh we got another case just like yours could you come down to miami i said yeah i'll come to miami The Sun Jim gang left a massive bloody trail of evidence.

Speaker 10 The last of the muscleheads would be busted when Denny Luco's girlfriend, Sabina Petrescu, told police that Luka was hiding out in the Bahamas.

Speaker 11 We're trying to complete this investigation as quickly and as fast as we can.

Speaker 10 The crimes and the trial would captivate and horrify all of South Florida.

Speaker 8 It was disturbing on every level.

Speaker 8 And I've tried serial killers, but this case really got to me.

Speaker 10 Almost four years after he was left for dead, Mark Schiller faced off again against the Sun Jim gang.

Speaker 8 I had jurors coming out to about here. It was just rows of jurors.

Speaker 8 In the morning, Lugo and Dorball would be brought across the bridge here from the jail.

Speaker 10 In February 1998, almost three years after the gruesome murders of Frank Griga and Christina Furton, Danny Lugo and Adrian Dorbaug were set to go on trial.

Speaker 11 It was so encompassing.

Speaker 10 The case would be career-defining for prosecutor Gail Levine.

Speaker 11 From the day I got the call, from the day I started investigating it, from the day I met the victim's family, from the day I met everybody involved, from the relationship that I developed with police in investigating the case.

Speaker 10 Lugo's girlfriend Sabina was granted immunity in exchange for her testimony. She knew all the gang's secrets and details of their plots, though she believed they were undercover CIA agents.

Speaker 11 Sabina Petrescu is probably one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen in my life, but she was also one of the most naive women I have ever met in my life.

Speaker 11 She was in love with Danny Lugo, and she thought he was her CIA agent.

Speaker 10 100 witnesses, thousands of pieces of evidence. The case would drag on for 10 weeks, overseen by state's attorney for Miami-Day County, Catherine Fernandez-Rundle.

Speaker 17 When you have a case that's that grotesque and you know people suffered, what do we do to bring justice to the victims of this case, either in their name or for their surviving members?

Speaker 10 And justice was what Mark Schiller got this time. He was in control as the prosecution's star witness.

Speaker 6 Walking in and seeing Lugo and Durbaugh, I realized that I was in the driver's seat. They never imagined that I'd be sitting there accusing them.

Speaker 10 The prosecution rested. Lugo and Dorbal's attorneys chose not to put on a case.

Speaker 8 There are some times when, as a defense lawyer, you don't have anything to go on. You just don't.
You can't claim misidentification. You can't claim anything.

Speaker 10 What was the defense strategy?

Speaker 11 Save their lives.

Speaker 10 Jurors wasted little time making their decision. Within hours, they reached their verdict.

Speaker 18 Daniel Lugo is guilty of first-degree murder as to Christina Fortin. Daniel Lugo is guilty of first-degree murder as to Frank Griga.

Speaker 10 Dorbaug was also found guilty and both men were sentenced to death. A moment Judge Ferrer will never forget.

Speaker 8 As I was sentencing him, Danny Lugo was standing there looking at me and his eyes were watery. Noel Dorbaugh, on the other hand,

Speaker 8 he was joking. He was turning around to his girlfriend and making faces like a goofball.

Speaker 10 You believe the jury got it right?

Speaker 11 100%.

Speaker 8 I think my final words were probably, may God have mercy on your soul.

Speaker 10 Have you gotten justice?

Speaker 12 What sort of justice can be done?

Speaker 12 Okay, short of bringing him back. He was reaching for the skies and the message that he had out there was, you can do whatever you want and this is what these guys broke short.

Speaker 8 Were you satisfied with the verdict?

Speaker 6 Well, guilty, yeah, but I don't believe in the death penalty. I think being in the jail cell for the rest of life is worse punishment.

Speaker 10 But the ordeal wasn't over for Mark Schiller. As he left the court after the trial, he was surrounded by armed FBI agents who arrested him on charges relating to an extensive Medicare scam.

Speaker 10 The Medicare fraud that made Schiller such an easy target for the gang had come back to haunt him.

Speaker 7 It was a sham.

Speaker 14 They never returned the money to Mark Schiller.

Speaker 14 Mark Schiller did not commit that $14 million worth of Medicare fraud.

Speaker 10 In a highly unusual twist, Judge Alex Ferrer stood up for Mark Schiller during the federal fraud investigation. He described how important Schiller's testimony was in bringing down the Sunjim gang.

Speaker 8 He was treated like a prisoner of war, or actually worse. The torture and the beatings and the attempts to kill him and all of that.

Speaker 8 For some reason, it just felt to me that that should be taken into consideration.

Speaker 10 Incredibly, one of Schiller's torturers, George Delgado, the Sun Jim member who had first told Lugo about Schiller and his millions, ended up helping the federal government make their case.

Speaker 10 In a plea deal, Schiller ended up serving two years in federal prison and paying $137,000 in restitution.

Speaker 8 He felt betrayed.

Speaker 11 His jail sentence is what he did, but the pain and suffering that he endured

Speaker 11 That nobody deserves that. Did Mark Schiller deserve to go to prison? I leave that to the federal government.
I wasn't involved in that at all.

Speaker 10 Today, while Schiller refuses to talk about the charges, he does say he lost everything. His health, his home, his millions.
And even now, with a big Hollywood movie, he won't get a dime.

Speaker 17 I'm a self-made man.

Speaker 9 I made a lot of money.

Speaker 6 It's a comedy, which is unfortunate because there was nothing...

Speaker 6 funny that happened to me. These were inept and competent people, but they were at the same time malicious and cold-blooded murderers.

Speaker 10 Ultimately, the rest of the gang went to prison too. This co-conspirator was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for his involvement in Schiller's kidnapping, and Jorge Delgado got 15.

Speaker 10 All told, seven members of the gang would do time.

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