If you’ve been to a McDonald’s since 1987, you’ve probably seen or played their McDonald’s Monopoly game. You tear the little game piece off your drink or carton of french fries and hope you’re a winner. All you’ve probably ever won is a free McFlurry. The odds of winning big prizes like Jamaican vacations, boats, new cars and even the ever elusive $1 million are very very low. But for 12 years there was a McDonalds Monopoly Scandal (a McScam, if you will) going on behind the scenes where a complex web of insiders worked behind the scenes to rig the McDonald’s Monopoly, and steal over $24 million.
Today we’re exploring the sensational story of how one man and a merry band of mobsters, psychics, strip-club owners, Mormons, and drug traffickers managed to win nearly all of the McDonald’s top prizes for over a decade, and the undercover FBI operation that uncovered the whole damn thing.
So let’s touch on those odds of winning the $1 million prize: they’re 1 in 250 million. You could win the grand prize by either matching the Park Place and the unbelievably rare Boardwalk game pieces or by getting an “Instant Win” game piece. Winners get to either take a heavily taxed $1 million lump sum or $50,000 every year for the next 20 years.
The monopoly game was developed for McDonald’s by Simon Marketing, the geniuses who first put toys inside Happy Meals. The McDonald’s Monopoly was the fast food giant’s best marketing campaign since they introduced the Happy Meal and after the contest began in 1987, it quickly became clear that it was…well…a winner.
But as with all things involving free money, McDonald’s realised that the game would be the target of thieves and fraudsters. So with that in mind, they hired Dittler Brothers Printing, a secure printing firm who were already printing U.S. postage stamps and lottery tickets. Together with Simon, Dittler created a complex and highly secure set of safeguards to keep the winning game pieces from getting burgled. The high value pieces were kept in a vault only accessible by two people entering an individual code at the same time. The game pieces were also intentionally made with imperfections and watermarks that could only be seen under a black light. When they were ready for transport the pieces were placed in an envelope with a tamper-proof sticker and the envelope was entrusted to one single employee.
That man was Jerome “Jerry” Jacobson, a former cop who went into private security and eventually became head of security for Simon and Dittler Brothers. Jacobson oversaw the production of all the monopoly game pieces and personally delivered all of the high value tickets to factories where they would be put on cups, bags, magazine adverts and more.
Now this whole story was documented in extreme detail by Jeff Maysh for the Daily Beast in a 2018 article. We highly recommend you go read the whole thing because it’s fantastic. And the scandal has also been the subject of the HBO documentary series McMillions this past March. The documentary is great because every single person involved in this case from the culprits to the FBI agents to the trial attorneys are all fantastically entertaining to watch and it helps to put faces to people in the story and there are a lot of people involved.
Jeff Maysh spoke to nearly everyone involved in this case and by their accounts, Jacobson was known to be obsessive about loss-prevention. He would check workers’ shoes for stolen game pieces and made sure that truck drivers transporting pieces were even accompanied in the bathroom. Jacobson later told investigators, “It was my responsibility to keep the integrity of the game and get those winners to the public.”
All of Jacobson’s obsessive security activities related to the winning game pieces was overseen by an independent auditor. Everywhere he went with game pieces, she went with him watching his every move. Yet even with the oversight Jacobson managed to steal winning pieces.
He started small. In 1989 he gave his step-brother, Marvin Braun, a game piece worth $25,000. When Jacobson’s butcher found out he was in charge of the winning pieces the butcher asked to be a winner. Jacobson agreed to a scheme that had one of the butcher’s distant friends claiming a $10,000 prize and then giving Jacobson $2,000 for the stolen ticket.
But again, the game became the target of theft including by restaurant employees, so they started handing out game pieces from behind the counter. This change lasted until 1995 when McDonald’s ramped up the size of the promotion and Jacobson was once again put in charge of “seeding” the winning pieces.
With Jacobson back in the game, 1995 proved to be pivotal. During the 1995 prize draw, the computer programme used to randomly pick the factory the winning piece would go to chose a factory in Canada. But Simon Marketing re-ran the programme until it chose a factory in the US. Jacobson said he was told to make sure none of the game’s high level prizes ended up in Canada. He said he felt that excluding Canadians from winning was wrong but he also noticed that nobody seemed to question why nobody was winning in the Great White North.
If nobody was asking questions about zero winners in Canada AKA America’s Hat, Jacobson figured the game was already rigged, so he might as well cash in.
The first piece he stole was a $1 million “Instant Win” piece that he put in a safety deposit box. And in hopes of creating a “get out of jail free card” for himself, he also stole documents that he said proved the Canada conspiracy. And then Jacobson stole another $1 Million piece. Instead of cashing it in, Jacobson sent the piece to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee. Though the rules of the game prohibited the transfer of game pieces from one person or entity to another, McDonalds was satisfied that the piece was legitimate after a thorough investigation and donated $1 million to St. Judes to honour the game piece.
That same year, while waiting in the Atlanta airport, Jerry Jacobson met Gennaro “Jerry” Colombo. The two Jerrys struck up a conversation. Colombo was going to Atlantic city with a bag stuffed with $100 bills. He told Jacobson he operated nightclubs, underground casinos, and a sports-betting ring in South Carolina but he’d been raised in Brooklyn and was a member of the infamous New York Colombo mob family.
Jacobson, in turn, told Colombo that he worked in promotional gaming. Colombo was immediately interested, he loved gaming the system and bending the rules, and he loved making money. Colombo had a history of creative schemes including turning one of his strip clubs into a church called The Church of Fuzzy Bunnies when Ladson South Carolina, outside of Charleston, outlawed strip clubs. The Jerrys became fast friends and by November of 1995 Colombo had given Jacobson the nickname “Uncle Jerry” and Uncle Jerry had given Colombo a winning game piece for a new Dodge Viper. Colombo even appeared in a commercial for McDonald’s celebrating his win.
From this beautiful friendship blossomed a churning scheme, soon Colombo was finding gobs of friends, family, and acquaintances to be “winners”. He travelled with friends from South Carolina, Atlanta, and Jacksonville Florida to other parts of the country to “claim” their winning tickets in an attempt to keep the winners spread out. He gave his father-in-law a $1 Million game piece. And, do yourself a favour and watch the McMillions documentary, if for no other reason than to watch Colombo’s wife Robin’s interviews. She is quite possibly the most delightful, no-bullshit, badass Mob Wife I’ve ever seen, and a truly stand out part of a documentary full of big personalities. Colombo recruited one of Robin’s friends, Gloria Brown, to be a $1 Million winner. Robin’s Brother-in-Law in Virginia also became a millionaire.
But, obviously, Uncle Jerry wasn’t just stealing and giving these pieces away for free. For every winner, Uncle Jerry got a cut of the prize or a cash payment for the ticket upfront. For example, Gloria Brown was a single mom working hard to make ends meet for her son. When Colombo recruited her to the scheme he told her she’d need to pay for the chance to be a big winner. He asked her how much money she could come up with, and after mortgaging her house, she handed over $40,000 on the side of a highway. She travelled with Colombo to South Carolina from Jacksonville FLorida to claim her prize and listed her cousin’s South Carolina address as her own on her winners claim form.
While Jerry Colombo was living large and riding the tide of the McDonald’s Monopoly scam, the other Jerry was keeping his extracurricular activities largely quiet. He hadn’t even told his wife, Linda, what was going on. But he had continued to give his step-brother, Marvin Braun, several more winning game pieces. Braun reached the point where he claimed he didn’t want any more money and started giving away pieces to places like the salvation army. Jacobson even claims to have flushed a million dollar ticket down the toilet. Jacobson continued to branch out through his family tree to keep the cash rolling in. His nephew, Mark Schwartz took a $200,000 game piece, with Jacobson claiming $45,000 of it. With Jacobson continuing to sell game pieces or claiming a cut he reaped the rewards. Jacobson bought lavish houses, scenic plots of land, expensive cruises and more cars that could be kept count of.
As Uncle Jerry’s riches were transforming his life to look more like Jerry Colombo’s lavish life, Colombo’s marriage was starting to fall apart. After the birth of their son, Frankie, they fought constantly and Colombo seemed to spend all his time at his strip clubs. Robin turned to Jerry Jacobson during this time and he became her confidant. During one of their conversations, Jacobson proposed to her. This startled Robin, and she and Colombo decided to work on their marriage. They started by planning to leave South Carolina, and on May 7, 1998 they drove to Georgia to look for a place to build a dream home. Robin was driving when they merged onto the highway and a speeding pickup truck slammed into them. Their car was dragged 250 feet and crushed into a concrete wall. Colombo managed to get himself out of the wreck, but Robin and little Frankie had to be rescued with the Jaws of Life by first responders. By the time they got to the hospital, Colombo’s blood pressure had dropped severely. He slipped into a coma and died two weeks later with Robin and his family at his bedside.
With his Mob Man gone, Jacobson had to look for another partner and he found an unlikely one while on a cruise. Don Hart had recently sold his trucking company and had contacts all over the country. Hart was interested, but he was also cautious, and insisted that he never handle the game pieces or the money. Instead, he recruited two friends to help. One, Richard Couturier, was tricked into believing that he was helping McDonald’s find real winners. And then there was Andrew Glomb.
Andrew “AJ” Glomb was a gambler and former drug trafficker who lived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In 1983 he had been convicted of shipping pure cocaine on a flight from Miami to Dallas and escaped to Europe for over a year before serving 12 years for the crime. Don Hart contacted Glomb a couple years after Glomb finished his probation and brought him into the scheme. Glomb then went on to recruit several, shall we say, less than savoury characters, including one million dollar winner who had previously pled guilty to distributing 400 pounds of cocaine. Eventually Don Hart dropped out of the scam entirely and Glomb became Jacobson’s biggest collaborator.
Jacobson was getting paranoid. This scam he was running was growing exponentially each year, and pretty soon he had dozens of prize winners roaming around the country. He warned them not to participate in McDonald’s press for their wins, but many did anyway, often appearing in commercials. He became obsessed with asking psychics about the future. And even paid someone a $50,000 game piece for chiropractic services and fortune telling, because apparently those are two lines of work that can overlap.
Uncle Jerry’s final major partner was an unlikely match, the devout Mormon family man, Dwight Baker. Baker had been dealing with a long string of bad luck and had recently been in an accident that had damaged his spine in a tractor crash. Jacobson took his recuperating friend to the mountains and told him all about the scheme. Baker wasn’t so sure about the whole thing. His family had lost their home in the 80s and had actually begun collecting Mcdonald’s Monopoly pieces in hopes of winning a prize.
Jacobson convinced Baker to take a $1 million game piece in exchange for $100,000, the biggest payout he’d asked for yet. His justification for asking for so much? “He was a friend, I thought I could trust him.” Baker then recruited his adult foster son, George Chandler to cash in the check. Baker told Chandler that the real winner was going through a divorce and didn’t want the hassle of splitting the winnings with his soon to be ex-wife. He offered to sell the piece to Chandler for $100,000. Chandler only came up with half that, but they cashed it in anyway, and on June 6, 2000 they sent in the redemption forms. Baker warned Chandler not to participate in any promotions for the win, but when Chandler was called to do a giant check ceremony with Ronald McDonald, he couldn’t refuse.
Unfortunately for Uncle Jerry, those all-knowing-back-cracking psychics missed that the FBI had gotten a tip about the McSwindling that had been going on for years. According to Robin Colombo, Jerry Colombo’s family blamed her for his death and wanted revenge. She was also worried they were going to take away her young son. She didn’t want him raised in the mob and tried to cut herself off from the family, and “the family” if you know what we mean. The family sure didn’t like that.
In March 2000, Special Agent Richard Dent received an anonymous tip that someone called “Uncle Jerry” had been rigging the McDonald’s Monopoly for years. Dent worked in the FBI’s Jacksonville Field Office and along with Special Agent Doug Mathews began looking into the game. Again, watch McMillions for Dough Mathews, he is hilarious. They soon realised that many of the winners had ties to the Jacksonville area. And that name, “Uncle Jerry” kept popping up. They decided they needed to approach McDonalds about the fraud. Along with McDonald’s execs, the FBI decided to start an undercover operation in hopes of exposing the scammers. They named it “Operation Final Answer” after the McDonald’s game co-sponsor that year, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Soon enough the operation included wiretaps and a very clever idea from Special Agent Mathews.
Mathews began working with Amy Murray, a McDonald’s marketing spokesperson, to build a fake video production company, Shamrock Productions. Murray, Mathews, and a small team of videographers who were actually undercover FBI agents went to interview winners. The first “lucky” winner they visited was Michael Hoover, a casino pit boss who lived in Westerly, Rhode Island. Hoover had called the prize hotline and claimed to find a $1 million game piece. When Murray and Matthews interviewed Hoover in August 2001, the man told them the story of how he had won.
According to Hoover, he had fallen asleep on the beach and when he woke up, he gathered his belongings and went to the water to wash off the sand. In the process, he dropped his copy of People Magazine in the ocean. He tossed it in the trash, but on the way home stopped at a grocery store and decided to buy a new one. It was inside this magazine that he’d found the instant win game piece. It was an incredible story, but none of it was true, and Murray and Mathews pushed Hoover for more and more detail, catching every single one of his lies on camera.
And George Chandler? The video of him receiving his giant check from Ronald McDonald ended up at the FBI office as well. In March 2001 the Who Wants to be a Millionaire version of the game began, but this time McDonalds was notifying the FBI about each major winning claim. Soon enough, Operation Final Answer started to see patterns emerge. Baker traded a plot of land to Uncle Jerry for a few game pieces. Baker gave a $1 million prize piece to a friend and a $500,000 piece to his wife’s sister. He taught them how to set up fake lives in other states and how to claim their prizes. But soon the FBI knew their names. Dent and Mathews found that even though the winners claimed to live in Tennessee and North Carolina, they actually lived in towns just a few miles away from the last game’s big winner, George Chandler. With these three winners, the FBI was able to create the classic crime map with pushpins and all. They discovered that the area inside the triangle created by the latest three winners was a hotbed of suspicious McDonalds winners. And can you guess who was right in the centre of it all?
Yep, it was Uncle Jerry, who had a lake house smack dab in the middle of the triangle. Then the FBI asked McDonald’s to hold back sending out checks to the latest winners. This proved to be a brilliant move because when the money stopped coming, everyone started talking. And they started talking over their FBI wiretapped phone lines.
The case was starting to really come together, but the FBI needed McDonald’s to run one more game. Jack Greenberg, McDonald’s CEO at the time hesitated at first. It seemed like a potentially dangerous idea to let the game go forward knowing it was actively being rigged. To suspect was one thing, to know was another. Ultimately, Greenberg gave the green light and in July 2001 McDonald’s launched the “Pick Your Prize Monopoly” game. This time there were supposed to be two $1 million winners who could claim their winnings as cash, gold, or diamonds.
But Uncle Jerry already had the two million-dollar pieces. He sent one out to AJ Glomb and one to Dwight Baker. Baker passed the piece along to his friend he had already made a winner, Ronnie Hughey. Hughey then planned to give the piece to “his man in Texas”. The FBI was listening to all their conversations and when they heard Texas, Special Agent Dent looked at the list of numbers recently dialled by Hughey. There was only one number from Texas, and it belonged to Hughey’s brother-in-law, John Davis.
The FBI set up a surveillance team to tail Baker and Jacobson and they all ended up in a town called Fair Play, South Carolina. I swear to god this story is too good to be true. They were hoping to witness the cash/piece exchange, but the area was too forested. They then followed Baker to Hughey’s house. Eight days later Amy Murray called Dent. She told him someone had claimed the $1 million prize.
Dent told her to hold on and asked if the winner’s name was John Davis. It sure was. They had cracked the game piece pipeline. Now they just had to trap the winners. That’s when they came up with their fake interview scheme and ended up on the beach in Rhode Island with Michael Hoover, AJ Glomb’s final million-dollar winner pick.
On August 22, 2001, the FBI made eight arrests including Dwight Baker and his wife Linda, John Davis, AJ Glomb, Michael Hoover, Ronald Hughey, and Baker’s sister-in-law, Brenda Phenis. And in the early hours of the morning, FBI agents surrounded Jerome Jacobson’s house and knocked on his door. Uncle Jerry was taken away in handcuffs and charged with conspiracy to commit mail fraud.
The story of the scandal and arrests made national news at the time. While the media made jokes about grilling the suspects, the FBI was interrogating their ring leader. Because despite all the time they put into the investigation and all the information they’d uncovered, they still didn’t know how he’d stolen the pieces. So how did Uncle Jerry hamburgle nearly $25 million from the world’s largest fast food chain?
Remember how 1995 changed everything? Along with the Canada discovery and meeting Gennaro Colombo, Jerry Jacobson received a life changing package in the mail. Sent from Hong Kong to Jacobson by mistake was a package full of the anti-tamper stickers used on the game piece envelopes. With stickers in hand Jacobson would go into the men’s bathroom at an airport on his way to the winning factory. The bathroom was the only place the female auditor couldn’t follow him. In one of the stalls he would break the seal, remove all the winning pieces from the envelope and replace them with “commons”, non-winning pieces, making sure that the same number of pieces were in the envelope after the exchange. He then used one of the new stickers to reseal the envelope and continue on the trip, ultimately placing the common pieces onto food packaging all while making a big show of how secure the entire process had been.
After the reveal of the McScandal, McDonald’s did what they could to regain the public’s trust and ran a special $10 million instant giveaway. This time there were no game pieces, simply a tap on the shoulder in one of McDonald’s many locations, chosen entirely at random.
The trial was held in Jacksonville Florida and it was poised to be a media circus. But it started on September 10th, 2001, and the events of the following day’s terrorist attacks wiped the country’s memories of the scandal away completely.
After it was all over, more than 50 people had been convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy. Jacobson’s major recruiters like Glomb were sentenced to a year plus one day in prison and saddled with heavy restitution fines. Glomb says in McMillions he’s still paying off his debts today, $160 at a time. Dwight Baker was excommunicated from the Mormon church but received only probation and fines. Baker’s foster son, George Chandler was also convicted but had it overturned on appeal, successfully arguing that he had no idea that the game piece he had turned in was stolen.
And what about Robin Colombo? She was tried as well, and sentenced to 18 months in prison. At her sentencing she tried to make a break for the door and even made it to the hallway before she was nabbed by US Marshalls. She served her time and found religion in prison. She later wrote her autobiography, Froma Mafia Widow to Child of God.She was later reunited with her son Frankie, who much to her relief, didn’t join the mob.
And what about the man, the myth, the legend, Uncle Jerome Jerry Jaconson? He was facing 104 years in jail, but took a plea deal and in exchange for his testimony in court and pled guilty to three counts of mail fraud and conspiracy for a total sentence of 15 years. He was also required to pay back $12.5 million in restitution. He ended up serving 37 months in prison and still lives in George. He has multiple sclerosis and is 78. The kingpin had been taken down, but if it hadn’t been for that one anonymous tip to the FBI his scam could have kept running for years.
So who was the tipster? Robin thinks that it was the Colombos who tipped off the FBI that her father, cousin, and friend Gloria Brown had illegally won their Monopoly prizes. And in McMillions, Jerry Colombo’s brother Frank backs this up. He says that it was his mother, known affectionately as “Ma”, a Sicilian born mafia matriarch who called the FBI as revenge against Robin for her son’s death.
And that is the wild, wacky, incredible story of how Uncle Jerry and his merry band of misfits defrauded the Golden Arches of $24 million.
FURTHER READING:
How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions
McDonald’s Monopoly game rigged, scamming chain of $24 million: report
McMillions: the bizarre story of how one man stole $24m from McDonald’s
McDonald’s Monopoly Scandal: The Story of HBO’s McMillions
McMillions: Official Website for the HBO Documentary Series
The Official McMillions Podcast
The ‘McMillions’ Monopoly Scheme, Explained
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