Later that day Doorbal approached Sanchez in the gym and asked him outside to talk. They climbed into the van with Weekes, and Doorbal laid out his offer: He needed an "intimidator" because he planned to collect money from a drug dealer who welshed on a debt. Sanchez would earn $1000 in one afternoon.
"What is this, a big drug dealer we're collecting money from, Adrian?" asked Sanchez. He knew that approaching a dealer with a "money claim" wasn't the safest way to spend an afternoon. "I don't want to go collect from any guy in the Colombian cartel. I don't want to wind up dead, my picture on the front page of the Miami Herald with flies and maggots in my mouth."
Schlotzsky's Deli, owned by Schiller, wasn't doing such hot business
The taser helped convince Schiller to sign over assets, including the deed to his home
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Following that meeting Doorbal and Weekes unexpectedly showed up at Sanchez's apartment. He was still reluctant to participate: Are you positive you aren't going to hurt this guy? But Doorbal assured him he could pick up a quick grand for doing what he did nightly at Hooligan's -- merely "looking big and mean" -- and maintained they just wanted to settle a legitimate debt.
Sanchez agreed. The holidays were coming and he wanted to give his son a nice Christmas present.
That same afternoon Marc Schiller was waiting at Schlotzsky's to meet with a prospective buyer of the franchise delicatessen. Despite its location near the airport, the eatery attracted little evening business, and he'd already had to lay off several employees.
Schiller's problems were fairly normal: coping with a broken swimming-pool pump; trying to sell his failing deli; wrapping up his CPA work early so the family could travel to Colombia to join his in-laws for Hanukkah. He was anxious that day to get home to his wife and the kids. Freakish, late-season Tropical Storm Gordon was beginning to surge over Miami. Still he waited for the buyer. Doorbal, Weekes, and Sanchez drove to Schlotzsky's and parked in the back lot.
It was just past 4:00 p.m. when Schiller gave up hope that his buyer would show. He walked across the parking lot under a leaden sky to his 4Runner, and just as he opened the door, the three men grabbed him and began to stun him with tasers. Each zap carried 120,000 volts. He tried to hold on to the steering wheel but was violently yanked away. "Take my watch, my money ... my car!" he yelled, thinking this was a robbery or a carjacking.
Nothing. Just more shocks and punches.
"What the fuck do you guys want?"
"You," Schiller heard as they dragged him toward the van. He struggled, he screamed at them, at any possible passersby. They forced him over to the van and heaved him inside. Someone jammed a gun barrel to his temple and told him to keep his eyes shut, or he'd be dead. They drove off and eased into heavy rush-hour traffic at a relaxed speed.
With his head pressed to the floorboard, Schiller felt two of the strangers shackle his ankles, then handcuff his wrists behind his back. The hot, blurred moments of his abduction were the last sights Schiller could remember as they savagely wound duct tape around his head, over his eyes and ears. After this, time and space became conjecture. Someone pulled off his Presidential Rolex, took the wallet from his back pocket, ripped off his Star of David necklace. "We've got ourselves a genuine matzo ball!" one of his captors announced.
They laughed and taunted him as they hit and kicked him. Someone kept asking him, "Why are you taking food out of a baby's mouth? How come you're allowed to have so much money while we have so little?" But Schiller -- hyperventilating, his face smashed against the floor in this sudden, brutal reversal of fortune -- was in no mood to debate the evils of anti-Semitism or theories of American capitalism. He kept silent. A mover's blanket was thrown over him. Systematic doses of electricity seared into his right heel.
As he neared unconsciousness, Schiller realized the van had come to a stop. A voice in the front of the vehicle spoke into a cell phone: "The Eagle has landed." Schiller didn't know it then, but he was at Delgado's warehouse. The Eagle would soon undergo his first interrogation.
Marc Schiller was born in Buenos Aires but left Argentina with his family when he was four and grew up in New York City. After obtaining a business degree from the University of Wisconsin, he took a series of accounting jobs before becoming a comptroller for a U.S.-owned oil pipeline company in Bogotá, where he met and married Diana.
In 1989 his boss had been kidnapped and held for ransom by the Army of National Liberation (ELN), a guerrilla group that regularly attacks foreign-owned oil pipelines and foreign employees in Colombia. Negotiations between the ELN and the company's attorneys dragged on (the settlement took months to reach) and U.S. employees of the company were ordered back to the States.
Schiller and his wife moved to Miami. They began raising children. He set up a successful CPA practice and dabbled in other businesses: the franchise deli and the nutritional-supplements company.
