MIAMI — Three decades after two gym rats were sentenced to death in a murder plot so twisted and gruesome it inspired a major motion picture, the convicted men are again in court fighting to stay alive.

Daniel Lugo, 61 and Noel Doorbal, 52, were found guilty in a bizarre 1995 case that involved the month-long kidnapping, torture and extortion of a Miami businessman and the murder of a wealthy Golden Beach couple whose torsos were discovered in oil drums dumped in a canal, their heads, hands and feet in buckets scattered throughout Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

Doorbal was found guilty of a slew of felonies, including two counts of first-degree murder, racketeering, two counts of kidnapping, attempted extortion and attempted first-degree murder. Lugo was convicted of similar charges. Both men were sentenced to death — twice.

The sensational case involving body builders, steroids and porn spurred a novel written by former Miami New Times reporter Pete Collins, whose book turned into the 2013 movie “Pain & Gain.” Movie A-listers Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson had leading roles.

The strange case has also led to a highly unusual courtroom setting. Lugo and Doorbal are being tried in the same courtroom at the same time. It took almost a month and more than 1,500 jurors before two 12-person juries were seated. Separate defense teams sit side-by-side in the crowded pit. Periodically, one of the juries is removed to avoid hearing some of the testimony.

Monday, after a lengthy jury selection process, attorneys finally began opening statements. Miami-Dade Assistant State Attorney Scott Warfman, the lead prosecutor in the case, offered a lengthy chronology of greed filled with gory details of torture and murder that he told jurors satisfies the requirements for the death penalty.

Defense attorneys representing Lugo and Doorbal didn’t deny the men’s guilt, but asked for leniency, telling jurors the defendants had been model prisoners in their 29 years behind bars. Lugo’s attorney claimed Doorbal did the killing. Doorbal’s lawyer blamed the act on childhood poverty, beatings and an addiction to steroids.

Lugo’s attorney Silvia Gonzalez implored that all life is precious, even Lugo’s.

“This isn’t the time for your anger to take the place of your independent judgment,” she told jurors. “It’s an individual moral decision, one that only you can make.”

Doorbal’s attorney Bruce Fleisher told jurors his client was easily manipulated by Lugo, that Doorbal grew up in poverty and that his mother birthed him at 13 and beat him during his youth. He said steroids caused the diminutive Doorbal to balloon from 125 pounds to almost 250 pounds and altered his character.

“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.”

A man who couldn’t be killed

Through witness testimony, investigators pieced together a plan by Lugo and Doorbal that centered on financial extortion and began with a man who just couldn’t be killed. The duo’s first trials were simultaneous, just as they are now. At the time, it was one of the longest and most expensive trials in Miami-Dade history.

Lugo, according to prosecutors, was a personal trainer at Sun Gym in North Miami. Doorbal worked there part time, too. There, Lugo met a successful Miami businessman named Marcelo Schiller, who had just opened a delicatessen not far from Miami International Airport.

Schiller, the first witness to take the stand Monday, told jurors how he was abducted and forced into a van by Lugo and Doorbal as he headed out the back door of his business toward his car one day in 1994. The men, wearing masks, stung him with an electronic Taser and beat him before taking him to a warehouse in the Hialeah area. Prosecutors told jurors the original abduction plan included wearing Ninja Warrior outfits on Halloween and taking Schiller from his home. But that plan was scuttled.

At the warehouse, they hogtied Schiller, 67, with handcuffs and continued to torture him, barely feeding him, not allowing him to go to the bathroom, force-feeding him booze and chaining him to a wall. Schiller told jurors Monday that duct-tape covered his eyes the entire time he was being held hostage and that he was certain they would kill him. They put a gun in his mouth and forced him walk into walls blindfolded

“They said they’d kill me. They were jovial that they had caught their fish,” Schiller told jurors. “They called someone and said the eagle has landed.”

Schiller said the men were so excited one blurted out, “We got a Matza ball,” referring to Schiller, who is Jewish.

Prosecutors say Doorbal was agreed to help kidnap Schiller after Lugo told him the businessman had stolen more than $100,000 from an acquaintance. During the kidnapping, Schiller told jurors how — still blindfolded — he was forced to sign over his home to the men and sign checks to them totaling almost $1 million. He also said he signed over life insurance policies worth more than $1 million.

Eventually, Lugo and Doorbal devised a plan to kill Schiller. They tied his hands to the steering wheel of a car, his foot tied to the pedal as the car sped into a concrete structure and exploded. But the airbag went off and Schiller survived. After he stumbled out of the car, they ran over him with the van he had been transported in. His pelvis shattered and body burned, Schiller somehow managed to survive that encounter, too.

Schiller said when he awoke he was at Jackson Memorial Hospital barely alive with tubes coming out of most of his body. Fearing they would find him and kill him, Schiller said he contacted his sister, who had him flown to a hospital in New York. During his abduction, Schiller said he was able to contact his wife and convince her to flee to Colombia with their two children.

Police were never contacted, he said, out of fear his family would be killed. Police also doubted Schiller’s story. So he contacted a private investigator who eventually led police to the killers.

But before Lugo and Doorbal were captured, they devised another money-making scheme: The extortion of one of the wealthiest men on Golden Beach, Frank Griga, 33, a Hungarian immigrant who earned his fortune in the 900-phone sex business.

Inside Doorbal’s apartment, the plan went horribly sideways, and quickly. Griga was beaten to death, his skull fractured. His girlfriend Krisztina Furton was fatally drugged with horse tranquilizers. The bodies were transported to a warehouse, where they were dismembered by chainsaws purchased at Home Depot.

After Doorbal and Lugo’s arrest, the Golden Beach couple’s body parts were found in the oil drums in canals along rural highways in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

Changes in law force new trials

Lugo and Doorbal were sentenced to death three years later in 1998. But in 2017, before they were executed, the U.S. Supreme Court found fault with Florida’s death sentencing law, which at the time didn’t require a unanimous vote from jurors to sentence a criminal to death. Florida’s Supreme Court then ordered the sentencings to be re-tried.

Even before that happened, the law changed again. Angered at a jury’s decision to spare the life of convicted Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter Nikolas Cruz, Florida legislators and Gov. Ron DeSantis created a new law that now only requires a super-majority — or eight of 12 jurors — to sentence someone to death.

“The evidence will show,” Warfman, the state’s lead prosecutor told jurors Monday, “the death penalty is the correct, though difficult decision.”

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