The game Monopoly has come to life at McDonald's.
Win a McDLT, Coca-Cola, or $1 million.
Remember the McDonald's Monopoly games?
The game was big back in the '80s and '90s,
and McDonald's was giving away
$1 million game pieces around the country.
Well, we had a source.
This guy kept talking about
McDonald's, McDonald's, McDonald's.
And he said, the McDonald's Monopoly games are fixed,
and this guy Uncle Jerry is the person behind it.
The source gave us names and said,
these people are million-dollar winners.
They're all either relatives or live close by one another.
That's not how this game would probably work.
- Can't make this shit up. - [laughs]
There had to be over 100, maybe 150 people
that had been in this huge conspiracy.
Good grief, this is big.
At least $24 million was put out.
How in the world do they do it?
[dramatic music]
In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
♪ ♪
Drug busts,
mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
Get down! Get down!
We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
Mark it.
- Freeze! - FBI.
- FBI! - Action!
But they don't know the half of it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
What really goes down,
we save that for each other
when we're talking agent-to-agent.
♪ ♪
This is "FBI True."
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
This was one of the most unusual cases in all my career.
So you guys are in the Jacksonville office.
And if I remember correctly, in 2001, you guys get a big tip.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
Into my office walks Rick Dent.
And he said a source, that they had been operating
mostly on insurance fraud says
that McDonald's Monopoly promotion games
are compromised.
During his 26-year career with the FBI,
Chris Graham investigated complex white-collar crimes,
supervised the Jacksonville Joint Terrorism Task Force,
and opened the FBI's office in Milan, Italy.
The game was big.
Back in the '80s and '90s, you know,
McDonald's was giving away $1 million game pieces
around the country.
Tom Kneir is a 29-year veteran of the FBI.
He served as the special agent in charge
of the Albuquerque, Jacksonville,
and Chicago offices before retiring in 2004.
People were flocking to the stores to buy their Big Macs
or fries, to pull that--
pull that winning ticket off of there.
Monopoly has come to life at McDonald's
with over $40 million in food, prizes, and cash.
Just order any of these McDonald's food favorites
to get your game piece.
Win instantly or collect and win.
Cruises, Dodge Vipers, cash, a million bucks.
Wow!
So the source gave, like, names?
What did Rick say the source said?
Cindy Coppola is a 23-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked on cases that included
organized crime and terrorism
and took part in multinational investigations
into drug trafficking and money laundering.
The source gave us, like, four names--
Robin Colombo, the recruiter, bringing in winners,
Gloria Brown,
Buddy Fisher...
And uh, Stacy Breegle...
And said these people are million-dollar winners,
and it was all fixed.
They were given the million-dollar
Monopoly game pieces.
They didn't win legitimately.
And this guy Uncle Jerry is the person behind it.
Robin Colombo was married to Jerry Colombo.
He won a car, I think, back in '96,
was on a TV commercial for McDonald's.
People everywhere are winning big
playing the Monopoly game at McDonald's.
Jerry Colombo won a Dodge Viper.
And there are two $1 million prizes left.
Jerry Colombo had also been a recruiter.
Was this Uncle Jerry?
Jerry Colombo was dead.
He had been dead for three or four years
by the time we got into the case.
But the source kept talking about an Uncle Jerry.
Is there another Jerry out there who's doing this?
Are they talking in the past tense about Jerry Colombo
and it's a historical thing?
The source, he said this Uncle Jerry was a former FBI agent.
- Oh, shit. - And we're like--
Not good.
Hopefully that's-- that's not the truth.
- Yeah. - Hopefully it's not.
- But-- - You never know.
Right.
♪ ♪
What were your first steps?
We got subpoenas.
We got some phone records that tied those initial four
or five people in together.
You start digging in. They all live in Jacksonville.
All these winners, they're all either relatives
or live close by one another.
That's not how this game would probably work.
Turns out, Buddy Fisher
is Robin Colombo's biological father.
By the time you have Robin, her father,
her best friend Gloria Brown, her cousin Stacy, all related,
all winning within a year or two--
is statistically impossible, right?
If there is such a thing as impossible, it would be that.
You would be hit by lightning before this happened.
Numerous times by lightning.
But now--now we've kind of hit an impasse
because we need to confirm that they're winners.
And there's no published list of winners
that you can look up.
Then you get into, do you have
McDonald's employees involved?
In most fraud type of cases, you'd go to the victim
company or victim-- - Sure.
And say, hey, you know, we need your help.
With this one, we were a little bit babes in the woods
on how the game even worked.
There was this assumption that McDonald's is running
this game, and somebody on the inside
has got to be getting these pieces, if this is true.
By calling them, are we tipping our hand?
So lots of discussion on,
we need to contact McDonald's...
McDonald's directly.
To take this thing further.
At some point in time, you can't just
keep going in circles here.
You've gotta make some hard decision,
and I think we made the right one.
It was contacting their security department.
But that initial contact was not,
hey, we've got source information
that your game is compromised.
You got a big problem on your hands.
No. - What did you tell them?
It was, hey, can you confirm that a few people
are winners in this game?
Good grief, they were.
They said these people won.
They gave us dates and times when they--
places they claimed it from.
It was unbelievable. Like, wow. Holy crap.
Did they claim them all in Jacksonville, or no?
New Hampshire, Tennessee, South Carolina.
We knew at that time most of them
lived in Duval County, Florida,
but they gave McDonald's fake addresses in these states
that they claimed to have won in.
McDonald's would, for whatever reason,
have to have winners in different regions.
So they would say, we need a--we need a winner
in the Southwest, or we need a winner in the New England.
Sure.
New Hampshire, to use that example.
Which answers the question, why would they claim
to win in another part of the country?
Robin Colombo, she was in jail for some sort
of insurance fraud when we opened this thing up.
- Oh, really? - Oh, yeah.
And we look at jail logs, and look who's name shows up.
Oh, my God, it's Gloria Brown, winner of a million dollars.
And so we knew the source was on to something.
Okay, we need more from McDonald's.
So we go back to McDonald's again, to their security folks,
and said, can you tell us
how these games are produced and where?
And they revealed they contracted out
to Simon Marketing, a marketing company in Atlanta.
[suspenseful music]
And then there was also a printing company that would--
that would do the secure printing,
named Dittler Brothers.
When McDonald's went to Simon Marketing,
they said, oh, by the way, the head of security,
the guy who handles all the high-end pieces,
his name is Jerry Jacobson.
Of all things, he was a police officer
somewhere in South Florida and went out on a disability.
So you start, as they used to say, connect the dots.
Now we're--we're-- wait a minute.
Now, is this--we heard about uncle--is this Uncle Jerry?
What do you guys do next, then?
We're, like, March, April of 2001.
McDonald's is starting to get wind
that there's a problem here.
Why is the FBI asking about winners?
We never told them the whole story.
McDonald's went to Simon Marketing
and did essentially an onsite audit
of how this process worked and came back and said,
it's tight. It's secure.
We can't figure out, you know, anything fishy about this.
That million-dollar piece had some different markings
on there that you couldn't just, you know,
go home and print your own piece.
There was, you know, some invisible ink.
There was a little, uh, notches
out of letters on there.
So they--I mean, again, the process was really pretty good.
With Simon Marketing, they had two people
that would actually go and get the high-value game pieces.
They'd then get on an airplane and fly.
If they were supposed to win in Indiana,
they'd fly up to Indianapolis and put one
in a fry box and one in, you know,
go over to Fort Wayne and stick it on something.
So do you guys work with McDonald's to figure this out,
or what are next steps?
Now we know a little bit about
Simon Marketing and Jerry Jacobson.
We know, thankfully, he's not an FBI agent.
But he's still a player in this.
You gotta connect Jacobson to the winners.
McDonald's calls us in April and says,
we just had a million-dollar winner.
His name is Ronald Hughey.
He claimed it in Tennessee.
We run him down.
Turns out--[laughs] It turns out
he doesn't live in Tennessee.
But he had connections back to, of all places--
remember this.
What's the name of the town in South Carolina?
- Fair Game or Fair Play. - Fair Play.
Fair Play, yeah.
Fair Play, South Carolina.
I mean, you can't make this-- you can't make this shit up.
[laughter]
So we run these phone numbers against each other
and look for common numbers.
Eureka moment's here.
They do the analysis, and right around
the time of the winning-- - From Ronald Hughey.
Ronald Hughey's winning in April,
there's all these calls to a common number,
also in Fair Play.
A guy named Dwight Baker, and then his wife, Linda Baker.
Jacobson's calling Dwight. Dwight's calling Hughey.
Hughey is calling Dwight.
Baker, he's the-- I call it the middle man,
the recruiter, bringing in winners.
So now we see there's many more people
involved in this scam than just the first four
or five that the source mentioned,
and all the signs are pointing to Jerry Jacobson
as being Uncle Jerry.
We've moved the ball along,
but we still, you know, we still
have to make another big decision on,
how much do we tell McDonald's to get them
to start being on our team?
We invited McDonald's to come to Jacksonville.
We're gonna open up the books a little bit more
at this meeting to tell them, you know,
you guys got a real problem,
and we're trying to make a case here,
and we want you to run another game.
We said, what do you have planned?
They said, we have a game planning to be in the summer.
That's a tight deadline, but it's an opportunity for us.
So we decide if we go up on a wiretap on Jacobson, on Baker,
we're gonna catch them in the act on the next game.
♪ ♪
[upbeat music]
The relationship with McDonald's was almost
like early stages of dating.
You're kind of feeling out, do I trust this person?
You know, how much do I tell them?
Well, now we're asking them to marry us,
and that's a big-- that's a big commitment.
We said, you know, we need you to run the game
because we're gonna catch these guys.
I thought they'd say yes right away at that meeting.
Oh, yeah, of course we'll run it.
They didn't really respond.
Were you surprised that McDonald's said
they had to think about it?
This was a big deal for them.
They knew that this was not--somehow was not
gonna end well for them. - Sure.
Publicity of something like this, that the McDonald's,
you know, game is-- - Disaster.
- Is, you know, compromised. - Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
They came back and they said, okay.
It was pretty clear.
We'll run this game, but you do what
you need to do because it's over right after that.
We make a decision to go with TIII, a Title III.
So who are the lines that you got up on?
Two on the Bakers and one on Jerry Jacobson.
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
Now we've got the order to monitor these phones.
Jerry Jacobson's phone, it's a local
cell phone company in Atlanta.
So we've gotta send the Title III order to that company.
We fax this thing.
[whirring]
We got a call from a guy.
I'm the, uh, you know, I'm the CEO of this company.
Uh, something's been brought across my desk.
Normally, these would go to my administrative assistant,
who, by the way, is Jerry Jacobson's wife.
Oh, you're kidding. So here's your subject--
- What's the chances of that? - Yeah, here we go.
What's the probability of that?
About the same--
- I mean, this-- - That's crazy.
- This case-- - That's crazy.
She happened to be sick that day.
- You guys got lucky. - Yeah.
You talk about finding a four-leaf clover that day,
I mean, having her out.
You know, otherwise we'd have been done.
So before the wire started, Chris,
what was going on with the game?
Was there any other winners
that you guys knew about?
Yeah, Ronald Hughey was a million-dollar winner,
allegedly, from April.
And then, crazy as it sounds, we got another winner in May
for $500,000 instant winner, a woman named Brenda Phenis.
Who turns out-- she claimed the prize
in North Carolina, but she lives in
Fair Play, South Carolina.
And she is the recruiter Dwight Baker's sister-in-law.
So we start the wire, and we got two prizes out there,
one million-dollar one, one $500,000 one,
that have not been paid yet.
The agents are listening to everything.
Did any smoking gun appear?
One of the calls was Jacobson and Baker talking.
Let's meet up at 3:00 today at the place, the exit so-and-so.
So there's a new million-dollar Monopoly
game piece in circulation.
And we figured they might be meeting up so Jerry could give
that winning piece to Dwight.
Chateau Elan is this golf resort
about equidistant between Atlanta and Fair Play.
This is where you're proud to be in the bureau
because you can call Atlanta, you can call Columbia,
and everybody speaks the same language.
So we said-- - We need surveillance.
- Now.
- Quick.
Like, in an hour at Chateau Elan, off the highway,
and can you do it?
You've got an hour and a half,
and you tell Atlanta you need to scramble.
And this was--this was just an incredible,
incredible sequence because we got footage.
We got video footage of Jacobson meeting Baker
in the parking lot together.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
Jacobson giving Baker an envelope.
So what you have, McDonald's started running the game.
And within three days, four days after starting the game,
Jacobson's got the high-value piece,
and he's already working it to his recruiter, Baker.
We figure out from the wiretap
that both Jacobson, the source of the pieces,
and his recruiters are all getting kickbacks
from the supposed winners.
Do you hear anything on the wire about those recent wins
from Ron Hughey and Brenda Phenis?
McDonald's was stalling on paying
the million-dollar prize that Ronald Hughey claimed
and the half-million dollar prize that Brenda claimed.
There's a little bit of angst on the part of Dwight Baker
and Hughey about, where's-- where's my--where's my money?
So there's questions in some of these calls
where Jacobson is asking Baker, you know,
has he got his contract yet?
Or-- - Code word for...
- Code word for the money. - If he's gotten his money.
They're real concerned about that.
[line trills]
Jacobson calls Baker, and he's asking about the status
of Brenda Phenis's money.
Which at this point, she hadn't gotten the check yet.
And Jacobson kind of lectures Baker.
I still remember the Burger King comment.
[laughs]
Like, giving McDonald's a hard time about
dragging their feet about paying--paying Brenda.
McDonald's eventually sent a check to Brenda for $500,000.
And then things really got crazy.
Yeah.
So this was, you know, we start picking this up--
Were you worried that they were going
to go after her or something?
Well, you start picking up on the wire,
they're not real happy with her.
Everybody has to kick money up, right?
So Brenda is not getting $500,000 for herself to keep.
♪ ♪
But Brenda decides she doesn't like that deal.
Chris walked into my office and said,
we could have a problem.
These guys are really mad and, uh--
Dwight's gonna kill Brenda.
Let's create a fake production company.
We're gonna film you describing how you won
that exciting, great day.
He's sweating and stumbling
and can't go through the details of how he won
because he's making it up on the fly.
This Sunday, as a matter of fact.
Uh, and there wasn't a whole lot of work to do.
We are right at the cusp of taking this thing down.
We get a call from a small newspaper in Greenville.
And they say, we've got this document,
and we don't think we're supposed to have it.
Oh, shit.