Original subtitles

Things were moving fast. How is Jerry Jacobson doing this? That was the

question mark.

What we had to vet out is who was helping Jerry. Uncle Jerry was getting

tickets and selling them to my brother, and then my brother would sell them to

other people. He took this little small operation and made it huge.

Before my husband was working the Monopoly fraud game, we had my son,

Limbo. Even though I adored my husband, I found out he had a mistress on the

side. I was just so mad.

So I called Uncle Jerry, and he says, you married the wrong guy.

He asked me to marry him.

The next day, Jerry's in the passenger seat. I'm driving.

Frankie's crying. We took him out of his car seat, let him down.

And a little teardrop came down my face.

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

I don't know how to describe

Jerry Jacobson.

Jerry had a way about him.

You're either going to love him or you're going to hate him. There's no in

-between.

He could snap in a millisecond, and you don't even know why he snapped.

My kids did not get along with him.

He laid hands on him more times than I knew about.

Jerry Jacobson was actually my stepfather.

Short views and a pretty bad temper.

The most vivid memory I have, we were in the basement.

I can't remember what the issue was.

It seemed insignificant to me at the time.

And Jerry just kind of lost it.

He picked my brother up by the head and was, like, bouncing his head off the

wall. And I was in the room just kind of more scared and hoping it didn't turn

towards me because I didn't understand it at the time.

I stepped in between them, and I told Michael, my oldest one, to run out the

front door.

And I remember yelling out the front window, just run, Michael, run.

And Michael was like nine at the time.

That was the reason we split up.

We didn't communicate after we split up.

I was still a cop, but he would show up on my police calls.

All of a sudden, I looked around, and there he is.

Nobody knew how he knew where my police calls were.

He was just there.

He made people afraid of him.

He had a .45, because that's what we carried in Hollywood, and was trading

parts, and he told me this himself, because he was going to shoot me and

put his gun back together.

So that if they ran ballistics on it, it wouldn't show that the bullet came from

that gun.

He's a bad man, okay?

And I knew what he had my husband do.

My husband pointed a shotgun at somebody's head by the order of Jerome

Jacobson to collect some money. And that's not the first time.

He is not some sweet little old man sick.

He's a freaking gangster.

Gangster. And I'm not afraid if he's got a bullet with my name on it.

We've all got to go sometime.

There was a rumor going around that it could have been a possible hit to get my

brother out of the situation.

Could it have been?

I don't know.

I was crushed against the wall, covered in blood.

I remember looking this way, and there was a policeman and a fireman right

there.

And I said, give me Frankie, my son.

Jerry had just taken Frankie out of the car seat so he could lay down to take a

nap because he was getting cranky.

And they said, Mrs. Colombo, stay still. We've got to cut you out of the jaws of

life. I said, that's my son.

And as soon as they cut me out and took me out, the pain just went all through

my body, and I just screamed.

And I could look over, and I saw my son sucking a lollipop, so I knew he was

okay.

Jerry actually crawled out of the car with no blood on him.

The telephone rings.

Oh, hey, Jerry, how are you? Oh, I'm okay.

We got into an accident. We're all being airlifted to the hospital.

I said, are you sure you're all right? He said, yeah, I'm fine.

Like, nothing at all was wrong.

I got the call at work.

and raced up there to the hospital. He was in ICU, and they had him hooked up

all these machines.

Robin had, I think, five to six stitches on top of her head.

She had cut her head.

Frankie's arm was broken, and he had, I think, a bump on his nose. Yeah, and

that was it.

Most of the force of the truck hit the passenger door.

But they seemed like he was going to be okay, which was kind of odd because he's

in ICU.

My brother said that he had, I think it was $15 ,000 or $20 ,000 in the glove

box, and then a couple of hundred thousand dollars in a suitcase in

and dad's home in Jacksonville, and told me to take care of this one, take care

of that one. So we went to the junkyard, and there was nothing in there.

Everything was gone.

And the money in the house disappeared.

Everyone claims that it was never there.

Jerry would not tell me that he had money at the house if he didn't have

at the house.

So then I took it upon myself to go to his house.

He made a little detour. I made a little detour without anyone knowing, and I

made some things disappear because I knew things were getting really

ugly.

I got a couple of items out of his freezer.

He had about four or five tickets.

Not sure if Robin knew they were in there or not, but I didn't want Robin to

have access to those tickets.

I was not sure if the accident was an accident, was it a setup.

We didn't know.

It could have been a hit.

I really believe that.

I don't have any proof of that.

But I'm thinking something went wrong.

And I was feeling that, and I got that impression.

because Jerry was getting a little on edge because the pressure was on him

from someone.

You know what I mean?

Something was different.

Being a big guy, when they put him a knife to you, they didn't realize he had

internal damage, so they were treating him for his broken leg, and they didn't

catch the internal damage that he had.

And by the time they caught it, they realized his lung had collapsed, his

were broken.

Up to that time, it was joking, it was lighthearted. He did not seem like he

in shock.

Even to this day, I'm just astonished, astonished that the man was actively

dying.

He was in and out of consciousness.

He had a ventilator, so he wasn't able to talk.

They had him on all these different machines.

Robin literally came a couple of times to visit, and that was pretty much it.

The only thing Robin was always worried about was, I got to get to the house, I

got to get to the house.

My sister -in -law didn't give a rat's ass about my brother while he was in the

hospital.

One of the reasons why Robin didn't come around, though, also, there was a

fight.

Jerry's mother.

Basically, you know, you did this on purpose. You did this. And her swearing

and down, I didn't do it on purpose. I didn't set this up. I didn't do this.

If it was, in fact, and if there was any proof that she was involved with

that... She wouldn't be here right now. I can guarantee you she wouldn't be here

right now. I will guarantee you.

The last few days, it was me, my brother, my mom and dad, and the last

that he said, he mouthed them.

To my mom, happy Mother's Day, because it was Mother's Day.

And once that happened, his body just started shutting down little by little.

There was nothing that no one could do.

And the last couple of hours, everyone was in the waiting room, but I was like,

I'm not going to leave my brother aside and leave him in the room by himself.

So I stood there, I sat next to him, I kept talking to him.

Kept talking to him.

Till this day, I mean, I don't know if he heard me or not, but I held his hand

and I stayed there until the last monitor

went down.

And till this day, I don't regret it because he didn't die by himself.

I made sure that I was there. I'm sorry.

Usually I don't cry.

I couldn't let him sit there by himself.

I couldn't do it. So I stayed there with him.

Hardest thing I've ever done in my life. But the best thing I've ever done in my

life.

He always wanted his son, Francesco, to...

be in karate and this and that and all that kind of stuff. And I promised him I

was going to help take care of him. I said, I'm going to look over your son.

going to make sure he grows up to be a good kid.

And I promised him that he'd be okay. I said, you know, it's okay.

I'll take care of him. I'll watch over him.

If he was hearing me, I just wanted him to know that the one thing that he

really cared about was his son.

And that was it.

I just wanted to make sure that he knew.

His heart stopped.

Because he didn't react to the medication.

Were you there?

No, I wasn't actually at the hospital because I was... I really

didn't think he was going to die.

You don't think it.

It was early in the morning.

My mother got the call.

And she told me. And I just lost it.

Yeah.

It was so horrific.

And that was that.

So I had the guilt of driving, the guilt of losing my husband, and my son losing

his father.

It was just too much to bear.

My name is Francesco Gennaro Colombo, named after

Gennaro Colombo.

Everybody's kind of talking about him now, you know, because in the 90s, he's

one of the guys who ran the McDonald's Monopoly scam.

So I'm his son.

Give daddy a punch.

Give daddy a karate kick.

Yeah! Ow!

That's not good.

We got in the accident three days before my birthday. I was two.

I was in the back seat. And one thing that's always stood out for me is my mom

said that my dad took me out of the car seat.

Sure enough, minutes later, we got in the accident, and that car seat was

crushed. So if they wouldn't have done that, then I wouldn't be here right now.

My grandma, my nonna, she showed me a picture of the accident.

I believe I was like 9 or 10, and that traumatized me. It's not something that

kid should see, especially the car that their dad was in, and that's why he's

not here anymore.

Uh -oh.

My whole life I've always known that there was something empty. You know,

was always something missing.

And I always felt that that was my dad.

And then the moment that she came into my life, it was instantly filled.

Since I didn't know him, I felt like he didn't know me.

But now that I have a kid, I understand that, you know, so much has happened in

this first year.

I'm sitting there playing with her, and every day I think about my dad.

I promised my brother that I was going to help take care of his son, Francesco.

But there was a lot of things back then that happened. There was a fight over

custody of Francesco. My family, they didn't want us to be any part of

Francesco's life whatsoever.

We were both devastated.

Last I heard, he had a baby and so forth and so on. I wish him the best. If

anything else comes out of this, I want him to know that we desperately did try

to be part of his life.

My dad, honestly, I don't have physical memories of him, but I have a lot of

memories from seeing home videos.

Hi, I'm Frankie.

Oh,

say, Frankie, I don't feel good. Be sad.

That's who I remember.

You know, I don't see this mobster guy who did all these things.

I just see my dad.

Before I knew it, he was gone.

I just didn't even know what to think anymore.

I mean, I wasn't thinking about the money. I was just thinking...

Oh, my God, what am I going to do? What am I going to do?

I don't have anyone to talk to. I don't have anyone to go to.

It's just me.

After my brother passed away, a week and a half afterwards, everything was gone

in his house.

All of the antiques, all of the furniture.

He had Mickey Mantle cards, Babe Ruth cards. He had so many things in that

house.

Everything disappeared.

And Robin claimed that, oh, we got robbed while we were in the hospital.

Really?

I think Robin, as well as friends of hers, stole everything

from my brother. All his jewelry, gone. All his furniture, gone.

There was nothing. They robbed the blind.

They heard.

Your house with Jerry got robbed, and everything got cleaned out.

Yeah. Did that happen? Yeah, yeah.

Your house got cleaned out? Yeah.

I had, there was a bunch of, like, we had a casino, and

they got all our slot machines.

And this happened, like, right after his death?

Yeah.

Who, like, did this? I don't know. I don't know. I didn't care.

When you lose, you don't think about, you don't give a shit. I didn't give a

shit about that stuff at all.

He wasn't messing with the most favored kind of people, you know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

My grandparents did point blame at my mom, and that's not cool. She lost her

husband. You know, she lost her soulmate.

I 100 % don't believe that was something that she did on purpose. That's not at

all.

Robin had lived the lavish lifestyle. When she was married to Jerry, she had

money, she had the car, she had the big house, she had everything.

Once Jerry passed away, that money, that cash cow, you may call it, is gone.

So now at this point, Robin's hungry for that money. So she literally would do

anything at all to have the money. It's in the wheel of justice, but it's in the

wheel to see who it lands on this week.

Looks like we're going to come up on Ms.

Colombo. She's been on the wheel a couple of weeks.

Okay, Robin Colombo is wanted for...

Grand Theft Auto.

If you know where she is or any of the suspects on the wheel, please call Crime

Stoppers. That number is 866 -845 -TIPS.

Officer Hartley, thank you. Always a pleasure.

So she started doing check fraud. She would get checks that were unworthy and

money to back them, and she would write them out and cash them, and she got

caught for that.

I remember Francesco actually explaining this as young as he was about how he

would go into a store and his mom would tell him to pick up a $200, $300

pocketbook and just carry it out because the security wouldn't stop a child. Or

if they did, it was, oh, put that down, Francesco, that's not yours. Yeah,

that's not yours.

She was training him at a very young age because he needed that money.

I went to prison.

I was trying to keep up the lifestyle.

Uncle Jerry never even contacted me after Jerry, my husband, died.

Nope.

I don't, yeah.

I mean, I'll admit the first couple of days I had tickets in my hand. I'm like,

whoa, should I take over his business now?

You know, because I could have easily, I could have easily went to Uncle Jerry

and said, hey, you know, let's continue this.

I could have easily kept it going.

But I didn't because I didn't want to look over my shoulder.

I thought it had stopped when my brother passed away.

So I wasn't going to use them. I wasn't going to give them to anybody. I wasn't

going to try to tell them what have you. I just destroyed them, hoping that it

was never going to be found out.

That was my goal.

Like I've always said my whole life, if you can get away with something over and

over and over, you only got to be caught once.

You get caught once, you're done.

At this point, Operation Final Answer was moving fast.

Everything was on the table.

It's kind of like a factory. I mean, everybody's working, everybody's

they're reviewing tapes.

I mean, it's a whole elaborate team effort process.

In order to do this scam, Jerry Jacobson needed what we refer to as middlemen.

One of the early middlemen was Jerry Colombo, who passed away, died in a car

accident.

Okay, now what?

The one thing that was still out there was really how mechanically is Jerry

Jacobson doing this?

And that was, you know, kind of this nagging question mark.

We were just building the puzzle from all the pieces, and there were so many

different pieces that we were putting together.

We were working a lot with the Atlanta division who had a surveillance team.

Kind of like in the movies, guys parked in cars or following with binoculars and

cameras, painting the picture of this guy, his background, and who he was.

Undercover tapes and the video were coming in.

Conversations on the wiretap were coming in. A lot of moving parts.

Jerry was paranoid.

He's been talking about his phone being tapped ever since we were in Florida.

He would always say, Don't say that. Our phones might be tapped. Somebody might

be listening. You never know who's going to hear you. And one day, we were just

chit -chatting, and I said something.

I didn't think it was a big deal. And he said, watch out. Don't say it like

that. So in a few minutes, I finally said, hey, Jerry, when did you tell Leo

go kill the president?

And he hung up on me.

I'm thinking to myself, why do you think somebody would find you so?

Interesting that they wouldn't want to tap your phone.

Jerry Jacobs was controlling all the pieces at that point, so he needed to

replace Columbo as quickly as possible.

Identification of sources that he could use of recruiters became his full -time

job. One of the middlemen, A .J. Glum, came on the radar screen fairly early

after Columbo died.

glum had a number of telephonic conversations with jerry jacobson and we

you know follow where the evidence leads you

my

name is andrew glom i go by aj one day a

friend of mine called me up and he said i have something you might be interested

in write down this number, and go to a phone booth and call me. I said, oh, no,

no. I had enough of that in my life.

Come on, I just got off probation a couple years ago.

I had just finished up a drug sentence, and I didn't want anything to happen.

And how did you get into selling drugs?

Actually, that's like one of the best parts of the whole story.

First time I ever did any kind of drugs was with Harold Robbins, the writer, and

we were in Monte Carlo.

And he had a bunch of girls with him, and so we're talking, and I says, in

books, whenever they were having sex, they always did amyl nitrate before they

had an orgasm.

So I says, Harold, is she having amyl nitrate?

He said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you want some? I said, yeah.

I didn't know what I was doing.

So I'm sitting there.

This girl says, let's dance.

So I get up.

I said, oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Everybody said, what's wrong? What's wrong? I said, I don't know.

So I called my friend. I said, Steve, get me out of here. Get me out of here.

So that was my first thing with drugs.

So how I got into selling them.

I had a cousin, and he says, can you get me some Quaaludes?

I said, let me ask one of my buddies.

I said, Steve, can you get Quaaludes? He said, yeah, how many do you want?

I said, I don't know. I said, how much are they? He said, well, how much do you

want to make? I said, how much is there to make?

So that's how I got into drugs.

Then in 1982, I had sent some drugs out to a friend of mine, a

customer of mine.

They were selling to somebody who was on the hook to the DEA,

and they followed him to the airport.

Next thing you know, boom!

DEA comes out of everywhere.

So I got 12 years for six ounces of cocaine.

I was supposed to report to Montgomery, Alabama.

And they gave me like 30 days or 60 days to report.

And I just didn't report.

I waited until like almost the last day.

And then I took off for Europe for 16 months.

I was a fugitive.

You're always worried looking over your shoulder every time you see two guys

with suits on.

You think it's over.

It's like this could be your last day.

before you go to jail so just live it to the fullest it's like a movie you're

living a movie but then i bought a ferrari in germany

and i shipped it to long beach anyway i got arrested in a donut shop

in san diego

When I got out of prison, my friend, Don Hart, called me and said that he had

something that I might be interested in, this Monopoly game.

I was very skeptical, and I told him, I said, you know, Don, I said, I just got

off of parole.

And I said, I don't think I want to know anything about it.

And then probably two or three days later, I said, you know, let's meet and

we'll talk about it.

Don was one of my best friends for, oh, gee, it's 40 -some years.

Very wealthy. He was very well respected.

And he had a friend that had access to tickets.

I said, why would the guy give you, of all people in the world, a ticket like

this? He said, because he knows I'm not going to screw him out of anything.

And it made sense. I said, yeah, you're right.

He said, you know, they need winners. He says, I have one, a ticket.

that you can cash in for a million dollars and we'll share it. If somebody

offers you a million dollars, you're going to take it.

Unless you've got to kill somebody, then you might not be interested.

But I started thinking about it. I said, nah, I better not do this myself.

I don't want to go back to prison.

So I had a friend in San Diego.

Got a plane and I flew to San Diego the next day. And then I ran it by him, told

him how it worked and everything.

And we were going to split it three ways.

Me, Don Hart and Stanley, who I was given the ticket to.

And I remember he told me the manager said, oh, you know, the last time

won, they gave the ticket to St. Jude.

Stanley said, what's not happening this time?

It's not going to anybody except me.

And so that was it. So he mailed it in. And then after that, I made several

trips out to California to get the money from him.

After Stanley was Richard Sokolski, I believe.

Victor Marchitello was the third person I gave a ticket to.

I met him in prison in West Virginia.

The next was Stan Warwick in Chicago.

In 1999,

Stan was a heart transplant recipient, and the city's newscaster

said, there's a guy with a heart transplant eating McDonald's.

Free food.

We get free food. And another free sandwich.

There you go. I'm too nervous. I don't think I met Jerry

until...

Probably halfway through all these people.

It must have been in 99 at Don's party.

What was your first impression of meeting him?

Nothing. I didn't think nothing of it.

Sort of nondescript.

Then eventually, Don didn't want to be involved.

He says, I don't want no money. I don't want anything.

I'm out of this.

It was just me and Jerry trying to get other people involved.

But I never...

I can honestly say I never had a close relationship with him.

It turned out Andrew Glum was a large recruiter, had provided quite

a few, had enriched himself.

And Uncle Jerry, he had kind of a wide net there of individuals who were

to participate in this fraud scheme.

So when we're on the phones, we need to be on the recruiters. And that's where

we were focusing our investigation.

Back then, everybody got a bill every month with all the long -distance calls

that you made. And I remember looking at the toll records.

On one part of the ledger is all your winners and their phone numbers. Then on

the other end of the ledger, Jerry Jacobson. And of the hundreds of calls

each made, there would be, wow, they're both calling a common number. Look at

that. We have this winner has called A .J. Glum. So has Jerry Jacobson.

but that yeah that's how we started finding other middlemen so then you

looking at dwight baker

george

subdivision developed it 87 88.

they're all Half a million, about $450 ,000 and up. I owned all this property

the left at one time. I was going to put a little golf course in here.

I'm Dwight Baker, developer.

I got a real estate broker's license and builder's license and developed quite a

number of projects, probably over 1 ,400 at different acres in South Carolina.

I met Jerry when I sold Jerry a piece of property in a subdivision and ended up

building him a house in the dock.

Then I sold him a couple of lots in another subdivision.

Right below that sign there are the two lots that Jacobson owned right here.

I think it's this property here.

I don't know if there's houses on them now or not.

My family.

They're probably not going to be happy with me sitting here and telling this

story.

We were all LDS, which was Latter -day Saint family.

And I had a high profile in the community.

You try to live a good life, you try to do what's right.

Probably one of my biggest regrets being involved in this McDonald's thing.

Yeah, I shouldn't have been involved in it.

Yep.

At that time, I was so successful that one day I jumped on a motor grader

and had an accident.

I was backing up the hill when it stalled out.

And I went into the big pile of rock.

Put me in the hospital 10 days.

And that's when Jerry first let me know what he did.

And it was quite interesting.

He called me while I was recuperating from the accident and asked me

if I wanted to ride up the mountain. I said, you'll have to pull up to the door

because I've got to walk her.

He said, okay. So he pulls up to the back door.

and we go riding up the mountain.

He said that he was representing McDonald's in the distribution of the

pieces.

He knew I was going through a tough time, so he offered me a game piece if I

$100 ,000.

I didn't have $100 ,000, so he said, listen, if you want one, it's $100 ,000.

That's the only way you're going to get one.

He said, I have the responsibility of distributing. They tell me where to go.

if you want a game piece, this is how it's done.

This is the subdivision that we were in.

Traded game pieces, gave him money.

This is a secluded place.

Yeah.

This is a secluded place.

I knew he was selling the game pieces. And maybe he was doing something that

would yield.

And I asked him, I said, Jerry, what happens if...

McDonald's finds out about it. He said, they're not going to do anything about

it. I said, why is that?

He said, because these game pieces increased their sales by 7 % out of 26

stores.

Factoring in a million -dollar game piece on that kind of money, $89

$100 million, they didn't care. If somebody got it, they didn't care if it

in the trash. They didn't care about it. It was factored in.

That was his story.

I bought it.

I did not believe that there was anything here other than we were

game. I don't know if it was the oxycontin from the accident, but I took

on it because I didn't know if I was ever going to walk again or let him work

again.

I said, you know, I don't have $100 ,000, but I might know somebody that

Breakfast, lunch, or dinner, there's always a line. A Big Mac combo, please.

serving over 13 million McDonald's customers each year in the U .S.,

that globally.

So you can imagine how rare it is to see this.

George Chandler of Walhalla just won a million dollars in the hatch match and

win game right here in West Union.

And Chandler was all smiles.

We bought our breakfast, and I got my hash browns, coffee, whatever, and

it off.

There it was.

Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, for

amber waves of grain, for purple mountain

majesties. Come on over here, girls. Across the fruited

plain, America, come on.

God shed his grace on thee.

Just like that.

See, they like it.

From sea to shining sea.

We should have brought some more feed, shouldn't we, girls?

I'm a pretty lucky guy.

It's not within my personal capacity to have achieved a lot of things I've been

able to do in life.

I don't know, you know, they say God looks after...

Fools and children, I don't know which category I fall into, but it's one of

them.

All right, where do we go from here?

I'm George Chandler.

I grew up in abject poverty.

I was raised Mormon, one of eight kids, and we grew up here in rural Oconee

County, South Carolina, and we were poor. I didn't have running water until

1986.

So, I mean, we're not talking about ancient history here. We're talking

1986. Most people running water at that point in time. We were still using a

well. What do you think?

Dwight was very successful. He had a family. He had five kids.

I became friends with his son. When I was about 12, I left home.

Dwight Baker was a foster father to me for a time.

Well, George and I, I mean, originally we went to church together, families.

So we took him in. We became foster parents with George, and he grew up with

kids. You know, being in such a big family and being poor especially, why

I not want to move in with Dwight?

You know, he drove a BMW and, you know, had those successful characteristics

that I wanted.

George has always been highly special.

I mean, he wanted to just absorb knowledge, absorb anything you could

He knew if he was going to get out, he needed to work hard.

When I was 15 years old, I quit school.

I'd grown a mustache to make me look older and told some local employers that

was 18, and I immediately went to work.

I worked 16 hours a day instead of 8.

That proved to work for me and became an entrepreneur and got in a lot of

different things.

Communications company, septic system installers, security company, medical

alarm monitoring, industrial programming, residential rentals,

rentals. I told him I wanted to be a millionaire by the time I was 25.

So when Dwight came to me with the ticket, he knew that I was in a position

I had some cash to work with. I mean, this is a million -dollar...

winning ticket, and he's got it in a Ziploc sandwich bag that's not even

And he lays it down on my desk, and I take it out, look at it. I mean, it just

says $1 million winner. Call 1 -800 -whatever.

I said, George, a friend of mine got this $1 million game piece from

and I said, he's going through a divorce. I said, he offered to sell it

Because he's going through a divorce, and he doesn't think the ticket should

considered marital property with Dwight's friend. I didn't know this guy

Adam. You know, never met him.

But I had already gone through a very bitter divorce myself, so I felt like it

was a legitimate concern.

I mean, he was already separated.

It wasn't like he had this while he was happily married.

Why did you think you'd have to tell a divorce story instead of just telling

what Jerry told you?

Well, because I didn't want him to know I was involved in

it, you know, in something that wasn't real, that had a tint

of... I knew Jerry was doing something wrong.

Just probably didn't feel like it was the right thing to do for me to be

involved in it, you know. But, yeah, I did it out of expediency maybe.

And I just tried to protect him from the truth of it.

Because, you know, if it did backfire and it wasn't going, you know, wasn't

right, I mean, he didn't need to have any knowledge of anything, you know. I

mean, I took that all on my shoulders.

Basically asked me, you know, would I be interested in buying the ticket from

him and then redeeming it. I mean, everybody was collecting the tickets.

They're buying and selling these tickets on the Internet.

Not million -dollar winners, but certainly prize -winning tickets, and

match up like Boardwalk and Park Place.

I told Goliath, I said, you know, I'd probably do $100 ,000.

You win $50 ,000 a year for 20 years.

Of course, now I had to pay taxes on this money.

So I had to figure that in my mind. But I felt like somewhere along about the

third year, I would start again. So it wasn't a tremendously immediately

beneficial thing. It wasn't like I was just going to get this huge pile of

money.

But it was nonetheless still a good business deal.

So I did it.

We were up on Dwight's phone.

And then we start to figure out, okay, is there anything with this person,

George Chandler? Yeah, there might be something there. Many times we thought,

well, how much bigger can this get? And it would get bigger. How much further

back could it go? And it would go back further.

I had never seen anything like that and still haven't.

What Jerry did with other people, as far as the money goes, I don't know.

Back to my knowledge, all of mine, I believe, were $50 ,000.

I mean, you go down this list.

I had one, two, three, four, eight, nine, ten winners.

Out of giving away $10 million, I made $10 million. $614

,000. So, how stupid am I?

Then we come to Michael Hoover,

August 2001.

Michael Hoover was one of the most generous people you ever met. Just a

great friend.

Just real easy going, nothing bothered him.

Sold a lot of drugs.

That's how we became friends.

I used to go out to Vegas back in the 70s, and Mike was a dealer.

I called him. I says, you know, I got something that you might be interested

I picked up the ticket from Jerry in Atlanta, and so I went up there and gave

him the ticket.

He claimed the ticket, and they did the filming with the commercial.

This is where I lost my People magazine.

Glad that after the beach I stopped and picked up another one.

I remember him calling me saying, this production company that did the

commercial, he said, this girl is really hot. I think she really liked me. I

said, oh, great.

I didn't think nothing of it.

In the Y room, we're listening to some of those phone calls to Hoover.

And, of course, Gloan was on the other side, I think, going, really?

What does she look like?

I think all of the winners thought I really liked them.

You know, that's the kind of person I am. You know, I was interviewing them

a friend, so it was my job to make sure that they felt comfortable.

She was thick to her stomach. That was her reaction. She goes, what?

How could he ever get that vibe?

I guess she wasn't.

I guess I'm a better actress than I thought I was, you know.

I've been a lot of places, met a lot of people, even been as far away as North

Carolina one time.

But I've never.

been to a place you know where the people the hospitality the

all that are as good as they are here

you

really find out who your friends are when you're down and i've never had the

opportunity with some of those people to give them the entire story

to tell them exactly why I'm innocent.

This is the McDonald's where it all happened.

There was a press conference and a party, and real Ronald McDonald was

It was kind of surreal.

I said, Mom, I want a million dollars. I said, who is it?

He said, Mom, it's real.

I didn't think he was serious. I was like, you're not serious.

As a single father to 8 -year -old Russell, George Chandler says he'll use

winnings to help raise his son.

He'll get $50 ,000 a year for the next 20 years.

It wasn't an immediate thing.

Ultimately... It had done a lot more harm than good. I already run a business

town, and I was surrounded by this notion that I was a millionaire now. I

need to work. I didn't need any new customers.

I mean, I had to put out $100 ,000, my own money, you know, for this thing.

And I had no question whatsoever.

about the authenticity or legitimacy of the ticket or the origination.

You know, that never occurred to me. We're talking about Dwight Baker.

I didn't take any cut out of the money, okay? It was all Jerry's.

I told him, I said, George, listen, I said, you just give me a navigator and a

laptop and we'll be happy, you know? I didn't want George to think bad of me

actually having a little larceny in my heart, you know?

I didn't want a whole lot. I just wanted a little laptop and a navigator.

Then I went to Ronnie Huey and offered it to him.

That's how my greed kicked in.

Ronnie was just a high roller.

And Ronnie was going through the fourth, and he said, I'll take two or three of

those.

That was probably the real...

Where I really stepped over the boundary was when Ronnie said, you know, I'll

take one or two or three of them.

And I knew he could.

And I remember Jerry telling me, he said, you're getting a little greedy,

you?

Each time was a little different.

From Ronnie Huey, I got a lifeline or two.

Jerry, he brought me fries and a drink, and it had the game pieces on it, you

know. And I'd pay him in a brown McDonald's bag.

Cash in the McDonald's bag, money.

Did Jerry at any point ever tell you how he actually got the tickets?

Never asked him.

You know, Jerry used to say all the time, this is going to be the last one.

This is going to be the last one.

And then one time he said, there's going to be a $5 million prize that they're

going to give.

You take that one.

And I don't know how we were going to split it, but he said, then that's it.

We'll ride into the sunset and forget it.

You know, so.

Jerry was, he was very private, very secretive.

I mean, he never talked about anything.

Staying with anybody else.

I knew he just found the game pieces.

But I didn't know to what degree.

Jerry told me, he said, listen, there was a half a million dollar game piece

worth of McDonald's. If you won $500 ,000 check cash, you wouldn't have to

50. A few thousand a year.

And I wanted it. And so I made arrangements with my wife's sister,

And I said, cash that check and we'll split it.

I thought it would have been a tough sell, you know. But it wasn't.

We created an address for her in Asheville, North Carolina.

She turned into Game Peace.

We didn't talk for a while, but time had lapsed.

There was no reason for her to have not been paid on the game, Peter.

I said, I'm going to go up to Asheville and see what's going on. And I went up

there, and the damn FedEx thing had been opened and fallen on the floor. And I

said, she's got the damn money.

Brenda? decided that she was going to keep all the money, run with the money.

That scared the shit out of me because I knew Jerry wouldn't be very damn happy.

Jerry told me if there was a problem, I'd get a visit from his cousin, Guido.

And I took that pretty serious.

Went to my wife and I said, she's running with the money.

And that's what really hooked her in. That's where she got a problem.

She looked at it at her money.

Did you try to stop her?

Yeah.

And my wife could not stay off the telephone.

Dwight Baker made a phone call to Brenda Phoenix and for whatever reason didn't

quite, Disconnect the phone, which we were still monitoring, and it was like

having a bug in their car.

So inside the wire room, we're hearing how Brenda Phoenix was running around

Indianapolis airport, and Dwight was looking to bury her somewhere.

They're saying...

You know, he's following her to the airport.

He says he's going to kill her. There was a lot of concern on that. What are

going to do if they are, in fact, really going to harm her?

We would obviously have to intervene, but that would have serious consequences

for the investigation.

One little slip -up, you know, could shut it down.

To me, Dwight was a man of integrity and character.

It just did not occur to me that he would do something like that.

If you can't be trusted, what do you have?

Okay, George.

Let's have fun, y 'all.

She got Rondo.

Because it's an airport, everything is monitored live. It's a public place, and

we had people on scene there watching the cameras, agents who just can blend

in the crowd at the airport, ready to take action.

You know, in a lot of cases, really bad things happen.

Things go wrong.

They always do.

I didn't have a clue that they were on to this case.

Nothing.

The initial stage was the indictment of the first aid.

The arrests were scheduled to all go down at the same time.

I'm going to get my guy before anybody else.

I mean, we immobilized quick.

He was behind a fortress.

Oh, God. I'm going to ram this car through the front gate.

I ran.

And I kicked the door open.

Does anybody ever knew how close this was just to blowing up?