Original subtitles

If you were around back in the 90s,

you heard it everywhere.

The game Monopoly is back at McDonald's, bigger and better than ever. This year,

there's more prizes than ever.

McDonald ran the Monopoly game.

For years.

Hey, collect the right game pieces and win two million dollars.

But no one knew the truth about the game being played.

No one.

People everywhere are winning me.

The McDonald's prizes could be cars, boats, $100 ,000, up to the million

dollars.

But from 1989 to 2001, there were almost no

legitimate winners of the high -value game pieces in the McDonald's Monopoly

game.

I mean, how crazy bullshit is that?

It's me.

Jacksonville FBI had a little bit of a reputation of being a sleepy hollow

retirement office.

There was a slower attitude there, very undersized, a fraction of a

Miami or an Atlanta or something like that spread very thin.

At the time, in 2001, I supervised a squad of approximately 12 agents charged

with investigating white -collar crime, bank fraud, health care fraud, public

corruption.

Even before I got there, I kept hearing about this legendary guy, Rick Dent, mid

-career senior agent, and his partner, Doug Matthews, a newly assigned agent to

the division.

I'm Special Agent Matthews. When you pull Jacksonville as an officer going

know what I heard was, good luck with that.

For big cases, man, you're like duct taping stuff together just because you

to make it happen.

That's the type of division you were in.

I was lucky to link up with Rick Dent early on and have him as the old guard,

you know, my training agent.

He's a mathematician and has about as much personality as this piece of wood

right here.

Very matter of fact. And so he and I were kind of opposites there.

You know, I'm always looking for another fun ride, right?

If you guys get to Rick Dent, I'm telling you, he's going to be yes.

No.

Don't recall.

The priority for the FBI at that particular juncture was health care

We're working a one - to three -year type case.

That's a long time.

Sometimes I have that ADD thing, the shinier object or whatever.

So I see this note in the corner part of his desk, and all I saw was McDonald's

Monopoly fraud with a question mark. And I go, what is that?

Because I'm bored to death with this health care garbage, right?

It's important, but...

I was ready to move on. I go, is this the McDonald's Monopoly game?

He was like, yeah.

Eventually I was going to get around to it.

So what he told me was that there was an individual who had called in and had

this story that the Monopoly game was fixed.

That was pretty much it.

I go, give me that damn thing. I'm going to go check this out.

I'm seeing the fun meter with that. Like, that's got to be more fun than

shit that I'm looking at.

Dad thought it was just some BS story.

So, yeah, here, run with this for a little bit, young man.

I contacted the source of this call, and the source gave me

three names that were previous million -dollar winners.

and said, I know this is fixed because these people are related. They're on the

family tree somehow with all different names.

And the person who's controlling this is this nebulous name of Uncle Jerry.

So I come back, like I'm excited, right? I got the biggest case ever, right? And

I said, look.

All million -dollar winners.

We need to be on this. Screw that health care. I think I probably said that.

Screw that health care shit we're working, right, or something like that.

Rick, I don't know if that was it, or I know you would never agree with that.

But like any senior agent goes, and this happens even in today's bureau, the new

young guy goes out and finds a nice piece of gold. The old agent goes, give

that back and let me look at this. And that's about how it was.

Truth be told, I was a little skeptical.

You know, fast food, promotional game fraud was not making any list of

priorities anywhere.

I don't think anybody had really even seen anything like this before.

So there's always a risk that I turn these guys loose on this and turns out

not true and that I've expended resources.

But, you know, I think we all realized if this is true, this is, you know, this

is big.

What Rick did was immediately get in touch.

with the U .S. Attorney's Office and Mark Devereaux, because if you don't

an interest from a prosecutor, you're wasting your time.

Devereaux was the go -to guy that prosecuted all of our white -collar

If there's a chance this thing can be indicted and prosecuted, even if it's a

difficult case, he's going to be the guy to do it, because he's the guy behind

the wheel.

That part of the cell, to get that prosecutor on, that was a big deal.

I don't even know if Devereaux knew what Monopoly game was. I have no idea.

You know, I think he was a Burger King guy. I don't know.

My name's Mark Devereaux, assistant U .S. attorney for almost 30 years.

In this case, it was, you know, I don't know if this is real or I don't know if

it's just somebody trying to get family members somehow interviewed and get them

in trouble.

But lo and behold, when we received a list of all

the winners, we were able to show to different databases that these

were related.

They had family connections.

In the local Jacksonville area, in my world, you don't believe in coincidences

very much, and the chance of having numerous family members and relatives

win the game was just astronomical.

Basically, you've got less of a chance than you do of getting struck by

lightning in Florida.

At that point in time, we knew there was a problem. How big was that problem?

We had no idea.

The information that we were compiling is that their contest had been infected

years before we became aware.

I mean, we're talking, you know, altogether, potentially hundreds of

dollars of these prizes. Well, how much of that is fraud?

Once Devereux said, yeah.

I'm interested in this. He's on for everything, all the strategy sessions.

Some prosecutors, you see that space, you know.

Devereaux, you got no space.

Right all up in there with you.

So we start with where could there be the opportunity to steal the game piece?

We weren't sure if there was somebody inside with McDonald's. where that

was, how many, and how far that went.

How many suspects do we have? We have to figure out who makes the cups, who

makes the fry box, who makes these game pieces that you would pull off. How many

people are in this chain?

There's all kinds of possibilities.

This could be the driver, the delivery people, people in the factory, or even

somebody in corporate at McDonald's.

We didn't close out anyone.

So there reached a point where there was a ton of questions, but it was, I mean,

very difficult to pursue that further without putting some action to it. There

wasn't a lot of like, let me just, you know, at the time, get on the Internet

and do something. There wasn't a lot of that.

We clearly.

I had to start somewhere, but without compromising the case.

So we needed a source of information on the inside.

There was a big decision to be made, and that was, do we contact McDonald's?

Because we just ran into a dead end.

I would sit back going, don't let them know. I don't want them involved yet.

too soon.

But that's me.

And that was just one little tiny voice, and I mean tiny when I say that.

Of course there's a possibility that somebody in McDonald's is involved or

about this and is looking the other way, but that was a risk we were ultimately

willing to take.

We didn't want to alert too many people at McDonald's,

We contacted their head of global security, Rob Palm, and told him that it

probably be best for you to come to Jacksonville.

Didn't tell him why.

Just told him, you have to come and see us.

That this was need -to -know only.

Do not tell anybody you're coming to see the FBI.

To keep it quiet.

McDonald sent three people.

And I personally picked them up here in Jacksonville.

We drove over to the FBI office in the morning.

Mostly it was just, welcome to Jacksonville, this and that.

Didn't even explain to them what we had.

We got to the FBI office.

Took them up to the conference room.

You know, you're evaluating their body language or whether they're twitching.

Are they genuine? Are they legitimate? Or is there something else going on

At that point, we did not know if McDonald's was involved.

Every organization can have a bad apple.

This part of the investigation was extremely boring to me.

Like, I don't want anything to do with this.

Call me when it's over, Rick, right?

Which was sort of my MO a lot of times. It's way too slow for me.

But I was, no, you've got to be here for that.

And so I think I showed up. I might have had a gold suit on.

I had it in the closet, and I thought, this is a great opportunity. This is

a golden fry suit, right?

Man, when I wore that in there, Mark Devereaux, if he could have ripped it

with his hands, he would. He goes, are you kidding me? But I had a white shirt

on, right? So I thought I was safe.

I wasn't.

Doug has quite a wardrobe.

And there he is sitting there. And lo and behold, he looks like he's a manager

of a McDonald's.

They thought it was cool.

I'm kidding.

So when you're there in that meeting, very tense.

I went up to a whiteboard and started putting names down.

And I asked, do you recognize the names?

No, sir.

All these people are winners on your promotional games.

And then I started drawing lines of... family connections and relationships.

Devereux's putting it right on the whiteboard there. What did you know

know this.

Brothers, sisters, cousins, mother, daughter, that type thing.

This person is married to this person's daughter.

And the names, the last names were all different.

And I remember it was literally jaws on the table.

They just could not believe it.

Even though we...

had it look like our corporate victim here of McDonald's, are they truly a

victim? I mean, there's always that.

And so there was more information there that I would have probably put out

there. Certainly enough for them to be, wow, we have an issue.

Everybody agreed that we needed to keep this circle of individuals that had this

knowledge to the absolute minimum.

You know, Debra was doing most of the talking, as he usually does, and it just

seemed like this meeting just took forever.

I don't even know if I was hungry. I might have been hungry twice in that

meeting.

Proving this case historically, which is what we traditionally did in white

collar cases, where you rely on paperwork, you rely on witness

rely on bank statements, was going to be very difficult.

I mean...

almost monumental.

So we would, in this case, have to think outside the box.

And then we find out that they were on the cusp of running another game.

It was kind of a perfect fit because we were looking to doing something

proactively to essentially catch people in the act.

We told them the only way to identify this criminal enterprise

was to have them run a game.

knowing that there is fraud somewhere involved in this.

We have this. We're going forward. We want your help. If the answer is no,

nothing happens.

My name is Rob Holm, Director of Global Security for McDonald's.

Our brand is throughout the world.

37 ,000 restaurants in 120 countries.

So it's a big responsibility.

When I first learned about our Monopoly game being compromised, I was shocked.

I was utterly shocked.

How in the world could this have happened?

More importantly, was anybody from McDonald's a part of this?

The FBI wanted to run the promotion knowing that it was rigged.

I was hesitant to do that.

Obviously concerned that if this game is rigged, customers are not even going to

get a chance to win the million dollars.

I think we were naive to think that they would agree right then and there and

we'd be off to, you know.

off and running these promotions were of everything mcdonald's one of the bright

spots you know i remember the mad cow and at that time mcdonald's was you know

struggling with some image things concern over britain's so -called mad

disease spread late today to mcdonald's restaurants first mad cow now this

mcdonald's and you mcdonald's and you sharing The

most important thing for McDonald's is their brand name. They're a family

restaurant that can be trusted.

Their golden arches are part of America.

They have to

protect that.

And so if it's on the 6 o 'clock news and the national news.

that McDonald's games are a fraud. They could suffer irreparable damage to their

good name.

I wasn't in their meetings, but I would bet dollars to donuts that there were a

few people that said, we can't do this, shut it off, and nobody ever finds out

about this.

They wanted this big meeting.

And so we went out there to Illinois at their headquarters. They got, like,

great coffee.

Inside, when you walk in their place and you're waiting on them.

I mean, anyway, I know that's a side.

At that time, we weren't sure which way they were going to go. That was a heck

of a decision.

There were so many what ifs.

What if it's somebody within our own company, a traitor? We've got a problem.

They needed to find that out.

Because if they had just shut down, it may have continued.

Look how many people have been playing that thing, and they're going to find

we didn't help burn this down?

McDonald's knew they had a ticking bomb.

Making that call was something that we took seriously.

Our worry all along was that this could be leaked out publicly.

So it was not an easy decision, but ultimately we owed it to our customers

the right thing, which is to run the game one more time.

We absolutely knew that if we didn't get this right, we're not getting another

opportunity. It's not like, don't worry, we'll run this again next month. We

knew that at best we had this one shot to move our investigation.

From that point, it was literally McDonald's. Tell us how this program

But McDonald's makes French fries and hamburgers and milkshakes and apple

They don't make marketing. They outsourced it. They hired a marketing

Diamond Marketing.

Simon Marketing actually produced and came up with the Happy Meal toys back in

the 80s. Your kids will love McDonald's Happy Meal. It's food and fun in a box.

The Happy Meal is going to increase your business, but it's for the children.

I've got a Happy Meal. They wanted a promotion for the adult.

I'm Richard White. I started at Simon Marketing in 1981.

The game Monopoly has come to life at McDonald's. The Monopoly game, we

that game, and it was running once a year. A $2 million grand prize.

Play Monopoly.

It was a ridiculous amount of increase in McDonald's business, like 40 % when

ran the game. People loved collecting.

The Monopoly promotion is much like the Monopoly game you would have at home.

Customers try to match game pieces, like a boardwalk.

and Park Place.

They had their cards, and it'd be full, but they'd be missing the piece, the

piece, the piece, the piece, the piece, because those were the winning pieces.

There was low -value pieces that you could win, food items, beverages, and

some of the high -value pieces, homes, vehicles, and the million dollars.

So they were after that million -dollar winner. People like chance games.

Any game we did for McDonald's always increased their business. We actually

Scrabble one year. Got to where they started doing it twice a year.

How are we going to get our sales back up?

Let's run Monopoly again.

There were very specific rules for how you could obtain the game piece.

One of the ways was that you could just walk in and ask for free to get a game

piece. because otherwise it was gambling.

How else can you get the game piece?

You could go in and buy a food product, and you could get the game piece out of

some of the magazines.

Nowhere in the game rules does it say, I can get a game piece from Uncle Jerry.

With a significant case, an undercover operation, or something that involves a

lot of people, you could give it a name. So we had a contest to come up with a

name among the squad.

Some of the names, Operation Unhappy Meal, Ball and Arches.

I think there were a few playing on the Hamburglar, something about stale fries.

I don't think we sent that one up to headquarters for approval. I think

more rational minds prevailed.

The new promotional game was called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to match up

with the TV show. If you remember the TV show, they asked, is that your final

answer? Final answer? Final answer. So that ultimately became the name of this

operation.

Game time. Kickoff has started. We're in the game.

At the time, I was always looking for an undercover angle, even though I was

being told, you don't want that, you don't want that. You know, I was always

asking, what about this one, what about this one? Go get the bad guy, right? I

wanted to burn down the criminal enterprise.

Maybe it's the accountant in him or this Walter Mitty complex, but this was the

opportunity to, you know, be an undercover agent, even before we...

could articulate the need to do any kind of undercover, that there was always

this, you know, somehow, someway we've got to do an undercover in this thing.

Every single meeting, I'm the one over there going, undercover investigation,

undercover investigation.

I didn't think anybody was listening. As a matter of fact, I think a couple of

them started out with Matthews. I don't want to hear anything about an

undercover investigation.

Just sit over there and listen.

Rick always coined that I was the...

George Costanza, because Seinfeld was big back then.

All right!

That's it for me!

You're good, everybody!

I'd come in, I'd say, undercover, and I'm gone. I was out.

You could kind of let him run with things a little bit and then bring him

to reality.

Okay, yeah, that's great, Doug. By the way, I still need that FD -302, you

promised me. So why don't you go get that done, and then we'll talk about

undercover work.

So we get the call from McDonald's that this guy, Michael Hoover, a winner, had

claimed the latest prize.

So we had the advantage of knowing this person's name and were able to do a

little bit of preliminary background.

I think he worked as a pit boss at a casino.

So I guess he would have been familiar with gambling and sweepstakes and

whatnot.

Rick wanted to try to do the wiretap.

It's called a Title III investigation.

The wiretap investigation got up, and you're sitting, you're not doing

and that's a boring situation for me. I don't know how many poems I can write on

a piece of paper to get through it.

So I said, look, what do you think about this? When you win, part of your

signing up as a winner is to say, hey, I'm okay with using my face in the big

check or whatever it is for future promotions.

So I saw that as an opportunity. Let's use that as a platform for us.

I said, I think this is a great opportunity for an undercover

where we do this TV commercial of the winners, like Publishers Clearinghouse,

jumping up, telling us how they won these and what they did with it, that

of thing, so we can do that with Hoover.

You know, we're the production company.

That's how this could roll.

He's like, Matthew, who's going to do this? Are you going to do it? Because

not doing it. And I said, yeah, I'm going to do it. He goes, well, you don't

know anything about that.

And I said, I'm going to be the director because they don't do shit.

And then I'm going to get McDonald's to give me their public relations. That's

all I said.

And Rick goes, wait a minute.

If we're going to do anything, we're going to need SAC authority.

I'm Tom Kinnear. I was the special agent in charge of the Jacksonville office of

the FBI.

In each office, you have the SAC for the office. That's the special agent in

charge. And then you have squads.

Most of the contact is usually with the squad supervisor.

But this was a particular case that I had a lot of hands -on with Chris and

everybody that worked on that case.

Doug was almost brand new at the time, and he'd been given a badge, a gun, and

some credentials, and now he's got a Superman cape, right?

Away he goes.

So the next day, I think I was called, and they said, hey, you need to come up

here. When you hear your name, Matthews, to the SAC's office, never good.

Never, ever good. And everybody knows, it's like the walk of shame to the

elevators or whatever.

Oh, shit, Matthews. I hope you still have a paycheck.

Because they all know it's bad.

And so I come in, and it's SAC, Kinnear, CDC, the Chief Division Counsel, Rick

Dent, Graham, in this room about this size. It's small.

And they all, like, turn and look at me, and I'm like, and I go, I'm sorry.

That's all I said.

And Rick goes,

you know, I think this might work.

He's going to do it.

And that right then is probably, if I was ever, like, concerned about, I don't

know, man, this might get somewhere. You know, whenever you be careful what you

ask for thing. Maybe that was the moment for me. But it quickly passed, and I

was back in.

We didn't have a lot of undercover agents in Jacksonville.

You know, you could call headquarters and say, hey, you know, we need an

undercover agent down here.

Well, he's not available for three weeks.

And so we just kind of rolled the dice and said, you know what, Doug is a

bit of an actor anyway, so I guess that's when my hair turned white.

No.

Being an undercover agent, it's not just something you raise your hand and

decide to do. You know, there's a stringent process of school, testing,

these things that... didn't exactly mesh with Doug's concept of being

undercover. You know, he wanted to get right up there on stage.

He was not a certified undercover.

But for a specific case, you can get what they call SAC authority to do

undercover work, and that's what Doug Matthews did just for that specific

My name's Janet Pellicciotti, and I was a special agent for the FBI in the

Jacksonville Division.

I was our undercover coordinator also, and I tried to get him to become an

undercover agent because he was a natural.

Undercover was like acting, only it's real. You know, you sit there and

a real threat and somebody could harm you.

They could really harm you.

The Jacksonville Division, if you talk to Agent Pellicciotti, is a small

division that didn't do a lot of this.

This is basically like your one shot to go undercover.

Right, so I got to do all the fun and not have to go through all the bullshit.

Yeah, just make it happen. That's what it was.

Hey, Matthew, just make it happen. I'm thinking to myself, one, my God, really?

And then two is weak.

He wanted to be thrown into the lion's den, and he wouldn't have gotten it if

the SAC did not feel he could handle himself.

So they got some undercovers, you know, to act as a film crew.

My name is Jan Garvin, and I was videographer.

When I answered his call, he said, you're going to love this.

Not, hey, Jan, how's it going?

You're going to love this.

And after he explained what it was, it was like, okay, we can do this.

And yeah, I'm going to love it.

We needed to put together what appears to be a legitimate production company, a

video person, an audio person, a director, and an interviewer.

I'd go, yeah, I need one just to act like they're the lighting person or

whatever. Nobody needs to see that you're Bureau, right? So give me

that's not stupid.

Because, you know, we don't know Jack, right? In my mind, I just thought, you

know, just get on the stage and everything will be fine. He'll just roll

through.

With any production company and any good undercover operation, you need a good

name. And in this case, we came up with Shamrock Productions,

which is good, but I always liked the Bible because you're just lucky.

That was good.

We thought about having everybody in this undercover operation be...

FBI personnel that legitimately tried to make that happen. It just, the way that

this scenario had to run, you needed somebody inside McDonald's with that

background that would be hard to fake.

My name's Amy Murray.

I've been with McDonald's for 22 years.

The FBI investigation happened 17 years ago, and it's been years since I've

talked to anyone. So, in fact, I don't really tell the story that much because,

you know, how do you drop into conversation that you're part of an FBI

investigation?

Back in 2001, I was in the communications department.

I had only been working on Monopoly and games for about six months.

My boss's boss called me into his office and he was like, Amy, the FBI has

contacted us.

They've told us that the game pieces are being stolen and that the entire game

may be compromised by a criminal ring.

And if you can imagine, I was completely shocked.

You know, I felt sick to my stomach.

To break that trust was just devastating.

How could this possibly happen?

I started thinking back to all the answers that I've heard from Monopoly

in the past, and it did seem like they were almost scripted.

Hindsight's 20 -20, and I started to realize that it did seem like there was

pattern.

You know, I used that word pattern, and I think that was when the FBI really

said it would be great to talk to Amy directly since she has so much contact

with the winners.

For a civilian to participate in an undercover operation doesn't happen much

all, for obvious reasons, right? If something happens, you want people who

professionals that are used to being in situations like that?

I was a little concerned because I wanted to make sure that her safety and

security was first and foremost. They said, Rob, don't worry, she will be

We really didn't know how far we would have to go to help the FBI get evidence.

And yes, there were nerves involved, and I was nervous, but I was all in.

You know, I wanted to make it right as fast as possible.

So I would be talking to the FBI sometimes every day, sometimes twice a

People were intrigued, like, what's this special project? I just couldn't talk

about this, not to my family, not to my closest friends, not even to coworkers.

We told a couple people in McDonald's and then our team. Because we still

know, you've got to remember, like this investigation, we still didn't know if

anybody was infected through corporate, right, or who.

So we set up a time for Shamrock Productions to go up and visit Mr.

Hoover.

He had already been in contact with Amy, and he was very amenable to us coming

by to film this commercial that we were putting together.

I'll never forget showing up at an airport in a white van pulled up with

the FBI agents.

And, you know, they're like, you know, hi, Amy. And I was introduced to all of

them. You know, I really had to talk to Doug about this is what a producer would

do. This is what the cameraman would do. And I was just playing myself.

So the first time we're going out there, I think I had like a golf shirt on. I

looked like maybe I'd played nine holes or something like that.

That's what Amy told me, what a director looks like. Looks like somebody that's

just come off the golf course.

So I'm excited, right?

But I have a lot of apprehension as well.

It's the first one. You want it to be seamless, and you don't know what to

expect.

As an agent, you want to carry a gun and wear a bulletproof vest.

But in a situation like this, an undercover operation, that may be too

risk. You can wear an ankle holster and then you sit down in a chair and

somebody sees it.

You had that little extra antenna going up to make sure you don't say anything

or do anything that would trigger the suspect to look at you crossways and go,

hmm.

I had butterflies in my stomach. I was nervous about not wrecking the

investigation. You know, I really wanted to make sure I did a good job, that I

wasn't causing any suspicion.

It's an adrenaline that happens through your system. You know, you feel fully

awake and alive.

She was very nervous. And I'm like, you talk to these people all the time,

right? Well, yeah, but not like this. And I go, it's not like this. You don't

know anything about.

Our investigation, they don't either, so forget about that.

He's laughing. Like, how am I supposed to forget about that, right?

And I said, you've got to forget about that and just do what you normally do.

We're very close to the exit. We know where it is. Just stay as close as you

because I don't know what to expect.

Any civilian that you bring in, you're going to tell them we have a team.

There's always a team outside.

If anything happens, they'll be there immediately.

to make sure you're safe and secure.

We have distress calls, things like that. So if the undercover agent says a

certain word, you know, I feel like a terrible flu is coming on, something's

really gone wrong, we've got a problem.

And so they went to his home.

They came in.

And so you have the FBI agents, unbeknownst to Mr. Hoover, with the

their shoulder.

If we were set up to record, Pretty much anything, we would hit the record

button. You never know what you're going to capture.

Always gold when they don't know it.

The greatest thing in the world about all this is what?

We had a camera rolling.

Take that to your local bank to cash there.

What was that? You think you can take that to your local bank to cash?

I got it.

Amy, she, you know, worked her McDonald's magic, and she had all this

popper stuff and a big check.

We never know whenever we get a call from Amy sort of where we're going to.

always good to find out where she always takes us to a different area.

Good surprise.

That's definitely child -proof.

I mean, it's a big check.

I think it was taller than her, actually.

Everything had to seem very natural.

It had to seem like we had done this a million times.

We made sure that I always called Doug, Doug, and not Agent Matthews because it

would have been really bad if suddenly I was like, Agent Matthews, can you go do

this? Amy was really nervous the whole time, which was good. It was healthy to

be that way. I told her I was too, and I wasn't lying to her. She's used to

this. I'm not.

Even though I said, oh, I got this, right? She had no idea that I had never

this before, but I loved it. There's Mr. Monopoly.

All right, all right. He's got to be sinking in now.

Now for the show, Ronald McDonald, the official signature.

Doug Matthews could talk to a wall and get it to respond.

You know, he's got that little bit of a southern draw and everybody sort of

likes him. He's the, oh, gosh darn, do you want it?

There was no risk that somebody's going to think, well, this guy's an FBI agent

and this is an undercover operation. I mean, nobody, no FBI agent laughs as

as this guy does.

I go, wow, this really looks like there's had a woman's touch here. I

was all this plaid shit, which is probably why I did it.

I said all kinds of stuff. Again, I was trying to move this out, make everybody

seem real comfortable with uncomfortable things, which is what I'm good at.

Tell us the story about how you won at the Monopoly game, everything like that,

in your own words.

Okay.

The day started out pretty peaceful. It was a day off, and I went to the beach

for a while.

I ended up actually falling asleep at the beach.

And when I woke up, the wind had come up and I was covered with sand, not a lot,

but a little bit of sand.

And I picked up my belongings and I headed down to the water there to kind

wash my legs off with the sand. And I was a little klutzy.

The People magazine and my towel fell out of the backpack, fell into the water

and got all wet.

I ended up...

throwing those away on the way to the car.

And then after I was coming home, I decided to stop and get provisions for

dinner. So I stopped at the McQuaid supermarket and picked up a few things.

I never got a chance to read the magazine.

And there it was right there at the checkout stand, so I bought one.

And when I got home, I was leafing through it, and we had the McDonald's

Monopoly game.

and it had instant prize winners on it, or it had the quick pick, whatever you

call them. I don't know what they're called.

And the first one I peeled off, I believe, was Pennsylvania Avenue, and

second one I peeled off was a million -dollar instant prize winner. It was

wow, is this for real?

And then I followed the directions and made the calls and talked to the people.

It was for real.

Amy just used to get in the story. But for me, I'm putting legs to that. And he

was mentioning some grocery store.

And so I go, which one?

Is it right here? Hey, can you take us there?

He goes, sure.

He's feeding off the energy part.

No, I wasn't about to stop that. That was great.

It's a field trip, right?

I'm getting calls.

The fuck are you doing?

I mean, why? What?

This is like, are you, and I go, hey, Jan, my camera guy, right? Can you get

this? Yeah, I can get it.

Doug struck me as one of the new breed of agents who thinks outside the box, if

you will, but he was gung -ho from the get -go.

This is where I got the People magazine, and inside we had the Monopoly game.

with the instant $1 million winner.

And it was great. It was fantastic.

He's telling us how he won the prize. It'll be a kids' magazine type thing,

which at the time I didn't even know. I'm looking at her, I go, really? I

thought you got this off the packages.

And Amy's like, did you read any of that shit I sent you, right? And I go, of

course I did, which I may have glossed over.

So I go, hey, what'd you do with the money?

Why? Because I wanted to go seize that stuff, right?

And he's like, I'm buying a boat. And so I go, what name would you have on the

back of your boat? And he was like, Ruthless Scoundrel.

One, two, three.

Thanks, McDonald's. Hey.

So I'm reenacting that, right? And I go, so Michael, you were on the beach?

Yes, and it's right here. It's this beach. And I go, really?

Take us to it.

And I didn't care what that meant to my camera guy, right? He's like, are you

kidding me? I got the damn beach.

There's always somebody that could respond tactically if needed. But if

something went south, between the time something went south and the time they

got there, don't do anything

stupid.

Doug, you know, he was a professional, but he also did like to have fun. So he

loved to tease me and kept me on my toes.

This is what makes my fun meter go.

Amy's back there going, look at these shoes. And I'm not looking at shit like

that. Take your high heels. Why are you wearing high heels anyway? And she's

like, are you? You know, she was getting on to me about, hey, can you plan this

better? But I didn't know.

Can you get enough sound if he tells the story one more time?

Do you need it?

We can try. Okay.

Anybody noticing you yet?

Not really.

Good.

When Doug's at the house, it was a controlled environment.

When you're out in the real world, there's nothing controlled.

You're always a little worried the operation in the case could be

This is where I lost my People magazine.

I'm glad that after the beach I stopped and picked up another one because when I

did, I found the McDonald's Monopoly game, $1 million instant prize winner.

That's great.

Okay, good.

Obviously, this was Doug's very first undercover, and so you'd want to try to

keep him under control, keep him sedated, so to speak.

They don't make it easy.

So I'm like, man, I got plenty. I got enough.

Can I do a couple of artsy things real quick?

Hey.

You know, you stand there smiling, you know, and you're doing all this artsy

stuff. And then some kid ran up and grabbed a check to run away with it.

Like, I'm going to let this evidence just walk?

No way. And I'm trucking down the beach.

And it's like, dude, it's not real.

It was bad news.

That's not a good problem to have, being an undercover agent.

And this guy is hammered. Fortunately, he's running like in the zigzag, so it's

easy to catch.

This kid, he was like full of sand in his mouth and crap. And I'm like, dude,

what? Do you see? Like, I don't know what I'm going to do with all this sand.

And he's like, man, I just saw like all those zeros and dot.

I'm just going to go take it. And I can't even remember where he wandered

but he was out of there. We never saw him again.

Sometimes on a case, being lucky is better than being good.

No ASICs, no nothing. And we still caught that dude because he was hammered

we were not.

And we did get the check back.

It worked great.

Amy was phenomenal.

And I'm like, man, undercover is awesome.

It turned out it really tickled our wire up.

Michael Hoover would be on the phones, which was great because then we were

listening to that and recording it. You know, again, it got him comfortable. It

actually worked. You know, all that works.

At that time, I was here in Jacksonville in the, what we call, wire room. We

were listening in for what we hoped to be a telephone call to this Uncle Jerry.

And immediately, there's a phone call by Mr. Hoover to Mr.

Glum down in South Florida.

We were up on three or four phones.

One was this guy, Andrew Glum.

Andrew Glum was a guy with a checkered past.

He had previously convicted for some drug charges on the federal side with

DEA.

He had been in a drug trafficking thing. He was a fugitive for a while,

eventually got arrested. He did some time.

And so Mr.

Hoover had called Mr.

Glum. Ring, ring, ring, ring.

Hello? Yeah, Andy. That's Andy Glum.

Andy, they were here. They believed everything.

Everything I told them about winning the ticket on that People magazine.

I was telling them I did this and I did that.

And at the very same time, I'm on my cell phone talking to Doug Matthews and

telling him, listen to this.

The feeling from him on the phone call was, man, I got them snowed. You know,

was that. It was that. I mean, it was perfect.

Exactly what you're after.

He's talking, man, you're not going to believe it. This director asked about

name of my boat. And I said, Ruthless Scoundrel. And they're just laughing on

the phone how funny that was to them because they knew they had lied and had

stolen this money from McDonald's. In that call, effectively what he's doing

confirming beyond any doubt that, you know, he didn't win it.

It just doesn't get any better than that. It's like high five.

That was why you get up on these wiretaps. So we're hearing how they did

At the time, we didn't know how big this was. We knew of some, but we didn't

know it all.

It was amazing to me how little we did know.

The spider web of all, like we had this Uncle Jerry, everything was very

general, nebulous.

We still didn't know, you got to remember, like we still didn't know who

Jerry person was, if they even was a Jerry.

So all of the newer agents, we were on the wiretaps to find out more about the

depth of this scheme.

Back then, I was a new agent, and my first assignment when I was brought in

to work the wire.

The Title III has to be monitored full -time, 24 -7. You hear the phone call,

you grab your headset, you put it on, you listen to the call.

We're listening in the Y room, and I'm hearing the name Uncle Jerry thrown

around on the phone.

Uncle Jerry, Uncle Jerry.

You don't want to make Uncle Jerry upset.

I do remember clearly feeling like I was in New York and I was listening to a

mobster talking about running.

mafia empire some mafia don because that's kind of how this guy came off so

had to find uncle jerry i mean how do you do that

we

did an analysis of phone records from past winners you look for that common

number we knew when they won the prizes what year And we could probably cord it

off to a month, so I think we backed up two and went forward two.

And we went and pulled the phone numbers coming in and going out for this period

of time.

Lo and behold, each of their phone numbers were calling common numbers.

We saw the activity heavy coming in right before.

The prize was awarded, acclaimed, and then heavy right after, and then

None of them were related. They didn't know each other.

All were hitting that number.

All these phone calls include one person,

Jerome Jacobson, also known as Jerry Jacobson.

the absolute head of security for Simon Marketing.

There was a wide net of individuals who were willing to participate in this

fraud scheme.

It got really big, really fast.

There was one nagging question mark.

Who is Uncle Jerry?

We were racking up incredible evidence and discovering new people.

We found out that there was another Jerry involved in this. He took this

small operation and made it huge.

As soon as I got that job, things changed.

You're going to ride with us, and you're going to do what we say, and you're

going to do it right.

I'm not a dumb person, but I did a dumb thing.

No one can stand in front of a mirror and say they've never done something

they wish they could take back.

Malia McCard's on the table to tell everything.

We were just building the puzzle from all the pieces.

We started finding other middlemen.

The money got too big to not take a bigger piece of that pie.

It could have been a possible hit to get him out of the situation.

A little teardrop came down my face.

I thought, I'm never going to get out of this.