Hey, here's a man who looks like he has something to say.
- Are we all set, Ronnie? - Well, I bet.
Hey, careful.
Looks like he's got blubber shoes on, too, today.
A wonderful anonymous donor
mailed a Monopoly Game piece.
And right here in the middle of it
was a little winning ticket of $1 million.
Somebody won a $1 million Monopoly Game at McDonald's
and God bless him decided to send that money to the children at St. Jude.
This is a great day. We at McDonald's have a game going which
a person won a game piece in Texas and mailed it to St. Jude's anonymously
and McDonald's worked out a way to pay the game piece
even though it can't be transferred.
It's a wonderful Christmas story that someone would give that anonymously,
not want any recognition for the children of St. Jude.
The McDonald's Monopoly Game went back to 1987,
and so we didn't know how long the contest was fixed.
St. Jude's was listed as a winner which was certainly an anomaly.
We didn't know if this is part of this conspiracy.
We didn't know how Jerry Jacobson was involved in this fraud's game
or if he was Uncle Jerry.
At first you think it's an alias name, but it was at least half of the name.
Hey, help me, Brett, will you? Oh, this is heavy.
Odds of finding the winning piece were one in more than 206 million.
Odds of someone giving it away, heaven only knows.
MCMILLIONS
My name is Marvin Braun. I live in Miami, Florida.
Jerry Jacobson is my stepbrother. Yes, he is my stepbrother.
- And did that make you close? - Yeah.
I mean, we grew up as, I don't think brother-brothers but we grew up close.
We're only a week apart in age.
His dream in life was always becoming an FBI agent.
There I was out on my first assignment.
It never worked out. But it's a funny story.
If you said to me to describe the story, I would say don't believe it,
but it's true.
Don't believe it. Just weird. It's just weird how it happened.
He had discussed about the game pieces one time.
I think it was 1989 and we had discussed
how he would be able to possibly get the $25,000 game piece
and if we could do something with it, whatever.
Month later, six weeks later, I don't remember,
he showed up with the piece and he says, "Cash it in."
There's an 800 number to call which I did. And they gave me instructions.
I went to the post office. I registered it, whatever the words are there,
and everything else, and I sent it in.
I think I was the first person to turn that ticket in.
He knew I'd keep my mouth shut, that's the right way of saying it.
He trusted me with it, yeah.
- Did he tell you how he did it? - No.
No.
So, we were looking into Simon Marketing's Jerry Jacobson.
Once we got the title III surveillance listening to phone calls
we had him on the wire all day all night.
So, we had thought, "Hey, this may be the main guy."
So then we started focusing more on trying to figure out who he was.
After really digging into this Jerome Jacobson background,
we discovered that he had been a police officer in Hollywood, Florida.
To become a police officer, you have to be a level-headed individual,
honesty and trustworthiness is paramount.
Jerry Jacobson was a patrolman.
And he came to me in the parking lot one morning.
At that time I was investigating the death of a newborn baby.
We had no leads at all.
And Jerry told me that he had some psychic friends
that read about the case and that they were willing to assist.
My reaction was I was grateful and I did take him up on the offer.
I don't know that there's anything wrong having psychics as friends.
I thought that was pretty wonderful.
I met Jerry at the Hollywood Police Department.
We both were on the same squad and we started about the same time.
And one day he showed up at my front door
to inform that my boyfriend was cheating on me.
So, that's how I met Jerry.
We dated off and on.
And there were some good times and some bad times,
but we got married in Tennessee.
I think it was '81.
And Jerry became a stepfather to my sons.
What was it that attracted you to him and made you want to get married?
This big long silence isn't gonna be in there, is it?
One day he started to shave
and he couldn't reach all the way up to shave. It was difficult.
And it was getting more difficult every time he tried to move.
By noon, he couldn't lift his arms,
he couldn't lift his arms, period.
So I took him to the hospital
and they ran the test for multiple sclerosis and
Guillain-Barré and a couple of other things.
And he had the Guillain-Barré.
He says he's got MS.
But technically, it was Guillain-Barré.
I took leave from my work and spent time at the hospital with him
because his mother was gonna put him in a nursing home.
I gave him 15 minutes a day to feel sorry for himself
and after that 15 minutes, we're gonna work.
Because I felt like if we kept working, we could stay ahead of the paralysis.
So I fed him and gave him showers,
and walked him up and down the hall, and all of that stuff.
After six or eight months,
he finally turned around before it got to his respiratory system.
It was getting there but it didn't quite take over.
And then the next day, after the next couple of days,
it stabilized and then started turning around a little bit.
There's always a question why somebody leaves a law enforcement career early.
Many times, there's a good reason
but there's always a question. It's not typical.
And in his case we learned that he had
a health condition or an accident that had him go out on a disability.
He moved to Atlanta because there was a doctor in Atlanta or a hospital
that dealt with nothing but MS. I think the MS really threw his life completely
because I think he always wanted to be in law enforcement,
and having the MS completely changed his life.
We moved to Atlanta together.
I got a job shortly after we came here in security.
He started getting better.
And at that point, he wanted to go back to work.
Simon Marketing offered him a job working security
for the Monopoly promotions.
We as the FBI
could not and logically would not march into Simon Marketing
and start asking questions about Jerry and that process.
Generally when the FBI starts asking questions people get a little spun up
and wonder really why.
We were working hand in hand with McDonald's,
just trying to figure out how much they knew about Simon Marketing.
Surprisingly, McDonald's didn't know much about the process
that Simon Marketing went through with their promotional games.
I wasn't familiar with Simon Marketing at all until this investigation began.
After that meeting with the FBI, I realized that
I needed to learn a bit more about Simon Marketing and the promotion.
So I setup a meeting with Simon Marketing
under the guise of trying to learn how the security procedures were in place.
We were able to enlist McDonald's to do these inquiries on our behalf,
but I think also on their behalf, too.
Did you tell them that Jerome Jacobson was a person of interest?
Yeah. No, we would have not told McDonald's
because if we're wrong,
we've sullied somebody's reputation for no good reason.
I don't know how much he was making at Simon. His wife was working.
I don't know if he needed the money.
When Jerry talked to you, did he say, "I think I can steal the tickets?"
No, I think he said he has a contact to get them or something.
I think it was contact. It was not him. It was not him.
- It was not him. - Wait, you're saying someone else?
He gave me the idea it was not him stealing the tickets
that he had a contact how to get the tickets.
I was on the impression Jerry was a security for it.
In other words, that another person was taking the tickets or whatever.
I wasn't sure. I thought Jerry was security.
When I met with Simon Marketing we went through the security procedures,
and the procedures at the printing press
had a very thorough and comprehensive operation
for ensuring the security and integrity of our game pieces.
So I was very pleased with what I saw.
McDonald's reports that the facility there was incredibly secure and that
this idea that things were loose or they could walk right out of there
was almost impossible, highly, highly, highly unlikely.
The obvious question was how this whole process worked,
how were game pieces printed, distributed.
Simon Marketing had these game pieces made just north of Atlanta
by a secure printing business.
My name is Jack Sisk.
I was working in security at Dittler for around 15 years actually.
My name is Perry Pealock and I was the bindery supervisor.
My name is Doyle Grant and I was shipping clerk.
My name is Gilben Peeples
and I was the parch clerk in the maintenance department.
Dittler Brothers Printing was a very secure printing company,
and that's how we got into the lottery business.
And to scratch-off games.
And I think that's one of the reasons that we got the US postage stamp job.
The federal government said, "Hey, this place is very much secure."
We got that and it went real well.
And it grew from there three or four years
and McDonald's millions and millions of dollars to pay to print all this stuff.
I was the director of security for Dittler Brothers between 1987 and 2000.
And I worked with Jerry when they were running Monopoly
because Simon and Dittler are real close.
We had people in Dittler Brothers 24 hours.
The Dittler Brothers facility was very secure.
They had to go through a guard check to get into the facility,
you had to sign in when you got into the facility.
Then you had to go through another guard to get into the room
where the state lotteries are being produced along with our game pieces.
When Monopoly was running
it would take everything in the plant running, it would get so big.
That was our large customer by a long shot.
You're talking hundreds of millions of game pieces.
When we did press runs of winners, we pretty much surrounded the press.
They had alarm systems, they had cameras,
the gate was opened and it wouldn't last, an alarm would go off.
We had a big ball when we had the winners in.
There were two locks. It's almost like back in the Cold War,
you'd have two people in a missile silo and it takes two.
Jerry was in there for Simon
to make sure that Dittler Brothers were doing their jobs.
Jerry would stand behind and look over their shoulder, get their combination.
Then he would raise holy hell because we allowed him to do that.
All the game pieces produced by Dittler Brothers were loaded on trucks.
Security would actually physically lock the back of the truck.
Once that truck left we normally would get on an airplane, fly to that city,
and meet the truck the next morning to unlock it, break the seal,
verify what was loaded.
My name is Brian Littéral. I work security/quality control for
the games that McDonald's usually ran.
We would bring the labels out, free drinks, free fries.
And the two pieces will assemble together. The label on top of the cup.
The higher level winners was done by a different, more secure process.
I would usually get a call saying that
Jerry was gonna be coming in with an independent auditor.
Dittler Security has to be there, Simon has to be there,
the auditor has to be there, and the customer service rep has to be there.
And they all witnessed the winner run.
The auditor will unlock the suitcase,
there was an envelope inside with signatures across the seal
to make sure that it was still the same contents as to when it was packaged.
And inside there, there would be a certain number of seeds.
This is what a seed would look like.
One of which was a high level winner, the rest were commons
and then I would insert them in various production lines.
No one knew and no one was supposed to know where the high level winner was.
So you go into the McDonald's, you open up the game piece
and maybe you're an instant million-dollar winner.
I won!
And so when these game pieces got to the Simon Marketing Redemption Center
and it goes to the process of do we have a real winner?
They literally would be opened by a person with gloves,
it's all being recorded.
And there would always be an error made in the winning game piece,
saying on one corner there's a little chip out of the word.
We also write on the million-dollar winner
a little code on there with a black light pen, you can't see.
So if you show up with a piece that doesn't have the code on it
you're gonna get caught real soon.
We were always a little bit overboard
but yeah, we're protecting McDonald's and that's a major reason they used us.
And of course Jerry was in there telling them how it needed to be built.
How would you describe Jerry when you were working with him?
Everybody liked Jerry, everybody in the office liked Jerry.
Quite a little flashy. We always had Thanksgiving, everybody sort of
brought in a potluck at Thanksgiving.
And Jerry always brought in ribs, and his ribs were delicious.
They would just fall off the bone. Everybody look forward to his ribs but
he didn't seem to be bigheaded at all.
He was always very generous.
If he made ribs for himself he would make them for the whole office.
Jerry was, is a generous fellow.
We got divorced and even when he was married again
and I needed something he would be right there.
There's nothing stingy about him at all.
After we got divorced it was like,
even though he was the head of security for Simon,
he still worked under my guidelines in Dittler Brothers.
I told him if he stole anything, I'd kill him.
When you got your check, what was it like?
Exciting, well, I'm not gonna lie, it was exciting.
I deposited it in, we split it.
Down the road he came to me and he said that he could do bigger pieces.
I had not cashed in anything but a $25,000 ticket,
and I didn't want any parts of them.
At that time I was going to New York
every Tuesday morning and coming home every Wednesday night.
I was buying maternity clothes in New York for my maternity shop.
So I approached two people who were manufacturers in New York
that I dealt with for many, many, many years.
I approached them and they would be interested in doing a deal with Jerry.
- And who were those two people? - I'd rather not mention names.
Do you remember anybody ever calling him Uncle Jerry?
No. I'm pretty... Maybe his nieces and nephews.
No. I never heard anybody refer to him as Uncle Jerry.
For a while the question was "Well, who is Uncle Jerry?
Well, there's a Jerry Jacobson working at Simon, that must be Uncle Jerry."
But there was always this inference maybe that
Uncle Jerry was somehow connected to Italian organized crime
because of the uncle connotation gives almost like
a Godfather-ish moniker.
Then we found out that there was another Jerry involved in this named
Jerry Colombo.
People everywhere are winning big. Play the Monopoly Game at McDonald's,
Jerry Colombo won a Dodge Viper.
And there are two one-million-dollar prizes left.
My name is Frank Colombo. I am brother of Jerry Gennaro Colombo.
And I'm Heather Colombo. And I am Frank Colombo's wife.
I really wanted him to keep the car.
I was a young guy. "Dodge Viper, pretty damn cool, can I borrow it?"
But it was too small. I mean, he was a big guy.
But it was funny because all of my friends were calling me,
"Hey, your brother won the car, oh my God."
And I'm sitting going laughing, at the back of my head going,
"Yeah, okay, he won the car, sure."
And it was just amusing, that people believed it.
It worked.
I'm Robin Colombo, my husband is Jerry Colombo, Gennaro Colombo.
He was part of the Colombo crime family.
That commercial almost cost him his life
because he wasn't supposed to do commercial.
And what is Jerry thinking to be in an actual national TV commercial?
Because he's a ham.
He was even gonna be in a movie with Jackie Chan as a matter of fact.
I said, "What? You don't even sound right.
You a big ass Sicilian and a China man in a Western."
I said "Oh my God."
And it was that Shanghai Noon, Night, whatever it is. It was that.
Ma, come get this dog out of here.
The Sicilian culture, of course, it's family first no matter what.
But when I met her I didn't want her to know my last name
because I want her to know me and not my family.
As a matter of fact for the first three to four months
I didn't even know his name.
He would go by a completely different name
and only did I see a bracelet on his wrist one day
and I questioned him on the name that said Frank C
when this is entirely different from the name that he gave me.
Yes. I went by Tony Inadi.
I keep that in the background,
not too many people know who my family is until now.
Five families run New York's Italian- American mafia. The names are familiar.
Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese, and Colombo.
Police in Brooklyn pulled a man's body out of the water,
duct taped inside a blue tarp.
Police say someone also tied a cinder-block to the victim's ankles.
My name is Joe Colombo. I should be treated the same as anybody else.
Joe Colombo. Real estate broker, mafia boss,
and one of the biggest conman in the history of organized crime.
What was your reaction when you learned the shooting occurred at the Colombos?
I just heard about eight shots
and I didn't think they were shots, I thought they were firecrackers.
His high profile caused rival mob bosses to okay his murder.
The man some called An Underworld Boss.
My brother wasn't the normal... When you watch The Sopranos
and it's the guys talking all about,
"Hey, forget about it." Those kind of nonsense.
Forget about it. Forget about it.
Nah, forget about it.
Forget about it.
That's the movies. Now did he do things like that?
Absolutely.
But he did it with humor.
More like... I guess you could figure out,
Marlon Brando and Joe Pesci and put them together,
you'll probably end up with my brother.
- That's pretty much it. - That was it.
ONE MONTH LATER
If you got Al Capone and Rodney Dangerfield and mashed them together,
you got my brother. I think that's a good analogy.
The first time I met Jerry, we looked at each other
and it was like... the chemistry between us
was crazy, like cartoon, everything like boom, boom.
I was having a long distance relationship with a federal agent
who was not that fun.
And Jerry was fun. So, I chose him.
My father was military and strict. Very strict.
So, yeah, that didn't go over so well, but I didn't care.
I rebelled.
We were married in Panama City, Florida.
It wasn't as extravagant as you would think because I was pregnant.
So, no Catholic wedding.
My brother Jerry had his hands in a lot of different avenues.
He had some booking things that he was doing with bookies and what have you.
He was in charge of security at the Taj Mahal for a few years.
That was the old Trump Taj Mahal.
He would gamble and he would win a lot.
I don't know if that was rigged as well,
possibly. Everything is rigged in life.
- Trust nothing anymore. - Yeah.
He was always looking at a way to make some good, easy money.
You know we had the little gray M&M as well, did you know that?
Okay. I used to smoke a half a joint a night.
I need to relax. I need to put on something funny, and just let me chill.
Well, when I would wake up in the middle of the night,
I had to have something sweet.
So, I had Reese's Cups there in the kitchen, right?
He had to let me know there was a gray M&M wrapped in aluminum foil
and he told me, "Don't touch it."
The rules say, if you find gray the impostor M&M's,
the winning deck could be worth one million dollars.
Show me the money.
And then he says, "You're also gonna win a Publishers Clearing House"
when they come to your door and knock.
You have won a million dollars from Publishers Clearing House.
- I can't believe it. - This is so good.
Real people really win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes.
They're probably gonna say, "Oh, bullshit." You know, all that,
but I'm just telling you what my husband told me.
Jerry wanted something big. He kept threatening,
"I can go work for my uncles up in New York."
I'm like, "Well, you know what, I think it's time."
You can spend too much time with somebody and you don't play golf...
And the only golf club he had was about this big and that was, well...
So he went up north and he got with Uncle Dominic who was a Godfather.
So Uncle Dominic, was he an actual uncle?
No. They called that out of respect.
He wasn't an actual uncle.
But he loved my husband
because my husband was old school, full-blooded Sicilian.
He was hooking him up with everything.
My name's Jennifer Etheridge.
Robin Colombo's my mother, Jerry Colombo is my stepfather.
You couldn't help not to like him
and especially with his career that he was into.
It was definitely intriguing at the time.
He would show me duffel bags of money and whip it out,
"Here you go. Go buy you something nice."
And then I'd say, when I was about 15, 16 years old,
that's when Jerry got into the Monopoly thing
and then that definitely was a big deal.
He had promised me a million-dollar ticket whenever I turned 18
because nobody could have the same last names.
And since my last name was Etheridge
I was gonna be able to win a million-dollar ticket and I was like,
"Oh, heck yeah, absolutely."
Your brother, how did he introduced to this whole situation?
With the Monopoly situation.
Uncle Dominic worked for family members in the New York division
and a mutual friend of his said,
"Hey, I got this guy that's doing this and this, you might be interested."
And that was Jerome from Simon Marketing.
He was getting the tickets.
Do you think that Uncle Dominic had found Jerry Jacobson?
Like that this was something that Uncle Dominic initiated?
I don't know. Could've been.
I think Jerome possibly started it on his own in the beginning
and then people got wind of what he was doing, and then they said,
"Hey, let's see if we can use this as an avenue to expand it,
and I believe that was brought to my brother's attention and said,
"This guy's doing this and let's see if we can expand the horizon."
But then Jerry, my Jerry, received a phone call that Uncle Dominic died.
How did that happen?
You don't really talk about that.
So anyway, my Jerry and Jerry Jacobson
became partners on the Monopoly thing.
Two Jerrys?
Working any case is like a big puzzle. You start with a little piece
and you've got to try to vet whether that is legitimate,
whether it has any merit to it.
The undercover portion with Michael Hoover went beyond expectations.
We had Michael Hoover calling AJ Glomb.
We suspected Glomb was a recruiter and
he probably didn't just recruit Hoover.
Is there a connection to Uncle Jerry?
We started looking into him and then we expanded into other phone lines.
We had coverage on many lines including Jerry Jacobson, AJ Glomb,
and a number of the winners.
The spider web of... we didn't know how big this was.
We had this Uncle... Everything was very general, nebulous.
So inside the wire room people sitting there, getting ready to listen
and nothing happens, right?
You put all this effort into it and nothing happens
where you're spending your weekend doing that.
Unfortunately, in these conversations on the wire, the winners mostly had
innocuous conversations that have nothing to do with the crime.
So we start coming up with,
"How do we get past winners to recount how they allegedly won these pieces?"
And I said, "Look, we can do this.
Why don't we bring all these past winners to Vegas?"
I just said, "Vegas." That's all I said.
I don't know why I picked Vegas, probably because it's the fun thing,
which is the immediate, no. But I said, "Just hear me out.
Let's do a reunion of all these past winners.
Let's bring all these people together and tell us."
Because we didn't know their stories, tell us how they won these
and what they did with it. Because McDonald's has big pockets,
they get some all expenses paid trips to Vegas,
balloons falling, the confetti and they love that shit.
And the questions were, "Matthews, where are you gonna do this?"
Embassy Suites. Take the whole floor. Rope everything off, right?
Just in case stupid shows up and you have them all lined up in these rims,
and just arrest them all at the same time, right? Great thing.
No. No way in hell.
No, Doug. Not gonna do that.
How much is that gonna cost us? We did have some budgets to deal with.
I can't remember what it was. It was like, "Get him out of here."
I can't believe you said that."
Doug is one of the hardest working agents I've ever in met my life.
Very creative, he'll do anything, he'll try anything, and he can talk forever.
He is relentless.
This idea of "hosting" a reunion of past winners
in Las Vegas seemed so outlandish upfront and then we realized,
"Wait a minute, if you're not gonna follow through with it,
you can promise some pretty elaborate things. Everybody likes to go to Vegas.
So in preparation for that wonderful conference that we were gonna have,
all-expense paid, we could contact these winners,
go out and film them to capture their so-called story
and then you get this trip to Vegas.
Rick was freaked out about it, but I wasn't. I'm the guy that's just...
I know this is gonna work because I know it is, right?
It's all shamrock, baby. Shamrock.
I was the direct contact with the winners
so I could legitimize all of the information.
It was all recorded, and it was 17 years ago.
So it was a big tape recorder
that I carried around in a black McDonald's briefcase.
I even carried it to my friend's wedding in Jackson Hall
because I had to be able to tape the calls whenever they came.
It's like I had to flip the tape and I'd be like,
"Can I put you on hold for a second?"
And then I'd flip the tape and then put them back on.
Amy would call them up and say,
"Hey, look, we're putting together this media release
of previous winners. How they won it, what they did with it,
some of their story that hasn't been really told.
We'll come to you or you can come to us.
Wherever we were gonna do it, whatever hotel that you want."
Nobody said no to that, most everybody was like,
"Tell me when we're going to Vegas."
Obviously we were not gonna do a reunion,
but to the winners, we told them "We're planning this big reunion."
And we started to get them actually excited to be going to Las Vegas.
That was kind of fundamental that it was a bit of a ruse.
We didn't make reservations in Las Vegas,
I think the pitch was we're gonna put your story up on the big screen
over at dinner and everybody's gonna clap,
and are you interested in the reunion of winners, and of course they are.
Locking them into a story on camera takes a
B-minus case and makes it an A-plus case.
My name is Doug Astralaga. I'm an FBI agent and I was the lighting guy
for the Shamrock Production in the McDonald's case.
So this is a little... Yeah, I remember this.
Douglas Astralaga was a
relatively young agent, real enthusiastic, charismatic guy.
When I came out of Quantico, I wanted to do something exciting.
Originally, I had stuck him with the admin agent on this Title III,
which is of all the jobs probably the most thankless.
It really is a brutal job. But there's a reward process that happens.
In Doug's case, we let him work on the undercover
with Doug Matthews as the "lighting guy."
I had no idea what I was doing.
I was using this light meter, pressing something and going, "It's great."
I still have no idea how to use one of these.
Excellent. But I do believe we need more lighting over here.
Really the point was to engage them in conversations. That had to reconcile
with what they had originally stated for McDonald's to win the prize.
We recorded these interviews with them
so the FBI could then match the timeline, match the facts,
what they originally told McDonald's, what they're telling us on camera,
what the FBI sort of already knew.
So that once we had the evidence showing that
you didn't win this legitimately, you've lied to the FBI
and here's the evidence to prove it, they'd be more willing to cooperate.
Can you explain the difference between entrapment and what the FBI did?
The FBI was merely... When the FBI took a film crew to a winner,
that winner had already contacted Simon Marketing
hence McDonald's claiming to have been a winner.
They're already saying, "I did this,
and this is how I obtained this game piece."
An individual could never claim that's entrapment because
they did it before the law enforcement was involved.
Entrapment is to have law enforcement put the idea into the person's head
and to get him to do something they otherwise wouldn't have done.
We weren't saying, "Say this, say this, and say that."
We were saying, "How? What? Where? Who?"
Those are just opportunities for him to fill in the blanks
and tell us what he wants to tell us.
- Remember, just keep looking at me. - Okay.
If you mess up or you feel like you wanna say it again, we can start again.
I'm not trying to put my hand gestures, sometimes gets in there.
Why don't we go back to that day that you won in New Hampshire?
And can you describe the day for us?
What you were doing in the morning and at work, and then...
It was a summer day.
No, I wasn't working. It was Sunday, as a matter of fact.
And there wasn't a whole lot of work to do,
so, just browsing through the Sunday paper as I am one to do.
He was fumbling through and trying to figure out
how he won that particular piece.
In reality, a life experience like that is drilled into your memory forever.
Nobody wins a million dollar on a regular basis.
I found the insert
and I found the little tear-off tab
and I got cold, very cold.
He was sweating so bad.
I know at some point Amy even said to me,
"Every time you ask him a question, I got to get the towel to dot his head."
It was pouring out because he was lying about everything.
Well, suffice to say, I just got cold all over.
And then did you go to the McDonald's to say that you had won or...
No. First, I wasn't so sure about it,
I went to a lawyer.
I did. I brought... You need to protect yourself.
- Do you remember who that was, Buddy? - No, I don't.
- Was it a lawyer in Litchfield? - No, it was...
Over in...
You could zoom in, because we did...
Zooming in on his forehead and you could just see the sweat.
- You wanna take a sip of water? - Yes.
- Go ahead and dot your head too there. - Yeah.
- I'm paying attention to that a bit. - I'm leaking.
Yeah, I understand.
I'd say stuff like, "Hey, so nobody called you up and said,
'Hey, we need you to be a winner and he'd go, "God, no, I'd never do that,"
and he just pours, the sweat would pour.
I went to a lawyer, and he advised me to pr...
At all cost, protect my identity.
It just seemed odd to me that
many of the people I talked to did not wanna come forward,
and they seem to have knowledge about what their legal rights were,
about being anonymous or not.
Who is Buddy Fisher?
Buddy Fisher was the father of Robin Colombo
who was married to Jerry Colombo.
I'll never forget it, I was upstairs in my bedroom and my father called me.
And there wasn't many words exchanged, he just said, "I want the big one,"
so I knew what he meant.
He did get one of the million-dollar tickets and he
had never broken a law in his entire life.
One stipulation that my grandfather made, he says,
"Okay, if I get this ticket, I'm not doing a commercial."
But I remember we would be getting phone calls
and they would talk to my grandfather and say
"Hey, we're trying to get all of the Monopoly winners together
for some kind of reunion or something like that."
I wanna say it was Vegas. So he didn't make that trip.
Had your wife or anyone in your family ever won anything like that before?
No.
- Never? - Nothing.
- So this was big? - It was huge.
So you're the luckiest one in your family, huh?
Yes.
So has any of your kids or grandkids played Monopoly or tried to win?
Yes, and they still do. And we still do, yes.
- Have any of them won any cars or... - No. I think I won a cheeseburger.
Would it surprise you to know that he actually did an interview
to possibly use at that reunion?
You said he did do one? I did not know that.
Oh. Okay, yeah, I did not know that.
Okay. Wow.
Is that around?
You know, the greed was crazy here which is great for us.
One night Jerry and I were out with our wives to dinner,
and we went to the men's room together.
It sounds horrible, but we went to the men's room together.
And Jerry gave me a million-dollar ticket.
And I told him, "I don't wanna be involved, I really don't."
I did not cash it in, anything but a $25,000-dollar ticket.
I told him I didn't need the million dollars, I told him I was out of it,
I said, "Jerry, I don't know what you did with these guys,
how much you made or anything else.
There's a time and there's a place, spot, and everything else."
He said, "Well, just do something with the ticket.
So I took the ticket and I flushed it down the toilet."
What was his reaction when you flushed it down the toilet in front of him?
None, zero.
He didn't have any reaction to flushing a million dollars down the toilet?
I didn't either. How's that?
Yeah. How's that? I didn't either. No. I knew I was doing the right thing.
And Jerry had told me it was over, and that was it.
I'm telling you,
the night I flushed that ticket down the toilet, I thought it was over.
I thought it was over.
I swear to you, and everything holy, I thought it was over.
If I even suspected he was taking tickets,
I would've told on him in a heartbeat
and he knew it. I think that's why I didn't know it.
I bet that's why I didn't get a ticket.
After Jerry got sick with this Guillain-Barré syndrome,
there was something different in him.
Even though he was well on the road to mending,
he could have repercussions later on
being crippled, or bedridden, or dead.
So he had nothing to lose at that point.
My husband, Jerry, we got a lot of my family members involved.
And that isn't all.
My family members that won, that was just a little piece of the pie.
You had Al Capone with the prohibition.
You had Mike Franzese with the gas.
And then now you have this, the Monopoly.
That's really the highest three moneymakers of the mob so far.
My husband picked the winners. He had tickets, he flew everywhere.
I think Uncle Jerry even may have got all jealous.
Could you spell that out? Jerry, Jerry, it's kind of...
Uncle Jerry is Jerome Jacobson.
And Jerry is my husband. Jerry Colombo.
Jacobson became Uncle Jerry because that's an Italian thing.
My husband gave him that out of respect.
The general opinion of mankind is running low this holiday season.
Here's a story that might make you feel much, much better about the human race.
St. Jude Children's Hospital in Memphis received a very unusual gift.
Do you remember who gave that winning piece away to St. Jude's Hospital?
Yeah. That's Uncle Jerry.
Hospital officials are calling this a gift from an angel
in the true spirit of the season.
This is a happy day.
If you're out there and you hear me, we love you.