Pain & Gain: the true story behind the movie

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At no point during the production of Pain & Gain, the new black comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson, did Marc Schiller get a call from its makers. This surprised the Buenos Aires-born businessman as he was the victim in the true-life story of kidnapping, torture, extortion and, ultimately, redemption upon which the film is based.

“Since they decided not to talk to me they got the personalities of all the main characters wrong,” says Schiller from his office in Boca Raton, Florida. “I knew all these guys.”

Instead, the film has been loosely based on a series of articles that ran in The Miami New Times in 1999, which detailed the crimes of The Sun Gym Gang, a group of recidivist body builders who connected through a love of hard workouts and easy money. The gang conspired to kidnap Schiller, a former business partner of one of the men, force him to sign over his life and then kill him.

Daniel Lugo, played by Wahlberg, was the conniving leader and according to Schiller a “lethal manipulator”, while in the film he is nothing more than a vehicle for Wahlberg’s now trademark brand of comedic tough guy.

“In reality Lugo was a very difficult person to like. He almost had a neon sign on his forehead that said: ‘Don’t Trust Me.’ He was a conman and that is all he knew,” says Schiller. “After my kidnapping, in the warehouse, he would go into wild mood swings, one minute a nice guy and the next a raving lunatic. You never knew which Lugo you were dealing with.”

Noel “Adrian” Doorbal, played by Anthony Mackie, was his meek best friend and partner in crime, literally the Robin to Lugo’s Batman – codenames that the two assumed during Schiller’s captivity and torture. “The real Doorbal was a loud sadist that did not like being pushed around by Lugo,” says Schiller. “He liked hurting people and volunteered to kill me twice.”

Dwayne Johnson’s character is an amalgamation of three other men involved in the crime, including Jorge Delgado, Schiller’s former business partner who masterminded the kidnap and extortion scheme.

In the film, they come across like the three stooges practising a bizarre act of steroidal slapstick that spills over into violence. In reality, they became the worst combination of manipulation, muscle and murderous intent.

It was Delgado who owned the warehouse where Schiller was taken after his abduction, and where he was subjected to a catalogue of physical and mental abuse that Quentin Tarantino would have been proud to pen.

“I’ve ended up calling it Hotel Hell,” says Schiller. “They tasered me, they punched me, they pistol-whipped and burned me with a lighter. They played Russian roulette against my temple and performed mock executions. I was blindfolded throughout. In fact, they kept adding duct tape so that in the end I must have had up to two rolls around my eyes and face.

“From week two on, I also had a bag over my head and balls of wax in my ears. It was only taken off twice: once to put a sanitary towel under the tape because my face was bleeding so badly, and in the end when they changed to bubble wrap and tape in preparation for my murder.”

The men had no intention of killing him at this stage, not before they had forced Schiller to blindly sign document after document, one of which was granting Jorge Delgado the power of attorney over all his business affairs and bank accounts. The men also presented him with a series of spoken “scripts” that he would be coerced to repeat over the phone to his family and business partners until there was nothing left of his life. The gang held a gun to his head while they listened in on an extension.

About the author

Olivia Wilson
By Olivia Wilson

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