AJ GLOMB: Somebody offers you a million dollars,
you're gonna take it.
Unless you gotta kill somebody then you might not...
You know, you might not be interested, but...
(CASH REGISTER DINGS)
One of the early middle men was Jerry Colombo.
In order to do this scam,
Jerry Jacobson started finding other middlemen.
AJ Glomb, then Dwight Baker.
DOUG MATHEWS: We were up on Dwight's phone.
We start to figure out
is there anything with this person George Chandler?
Yeah, there might be something there.
Dwight came to me with the million-dollar
winning ticket.
He asked me would I be interested
in buying the ticket from him and then redeeming it.
So, I did it.
He didn't need to have any knowledge of anything.
I tried to protect him from the truth of it.
Then on one day, Jerry told me there was a
half-a-million-dollar game piece and I wanted it.
Made arrangements with my wife's sister, Brenda, to split it.
She turned in the game piece
and decided that she was gonna run with the money.
INTERVIEWER:
Yeah.
CHRIS GRAHAM: So, we found out
that Dwight Baker made a phone call to Brenda Phenis.
Didn't quite disconnect the phone.
WOMAN: He's following her to the airport.
There was a lot of concern on that.
What are we gonna do if they are really gonna harm her?
You have to intervene,
but one little slip up could shut it down.
[bright tone]
[wind blowing]
[birds chirping]
[dog whining]
My name is Jared Jacobson, and my father is
"Jerry" Jerome Jacobson.
[dramatic music]
Come here, boys.
Come here.
Bailey, come here.
♪ ♪
I grew up in Miami, Florida.
Once my mom got divorced from him,
uh, he cut all ties.
I was three years old when they got divorced.
So this is a picture of me as a baby with my dad
and my mom's dad.
My mom called and had him arrested
for back child support when I was 13,
and that's when he popped on the radar.
That's when I really met him for the first time.
During the summer, I would go fly up to Atlanta
and go spend, you know,
three or four weeks up there with him,
kind of getting to know him a little bit.
I believe he was living with Alison.
This is actually a picture of the wedding party
when my dad and Linda got married.
That's my mom in the picture with me and him.
I think it's one of the only pictures I have
with the three of us together.
My mom is Carol Cody.
I was his third marriage.
Really, I was his fourth,
out of... I think we counted seven.
Wait a minute.
Phyllis, Carol,
Daryl, me...
Um, Alison, and Linda.
He's been married six times,
and if he was married with that marriage license down in Miami,
it's seven.
The very first time I got the first text
about the possibility of a documentary series,
within two minutes,
I get a phone call saying,
"Hey, if anybody calls or talks to you
"or wants to talk about this thing,
don't do it."
♪ ♪
Obviously I'm not gonna call him
and ask permission to do this with you guys.
I think this is my way of, um...
My way of having maybe a little bit of closure.
♪ ♪
This is definitely gonna put the nail in the coffin
for our relationship.
Um, and you know what? I'm okay with it.
♪ ♪
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[indistinct PA announcement]
♪ ♪
I tried to, uh, keep her mouth shut,
but it didn't work.
I knew that I had to do something.
She was gonna run with the money.
♪ ♪
[indistinct chatter]
[baby crying]
♪ ♪
[laughing]
No, I didn't threaten to kill her.
I just told my wife, I says,
"We can't do this in the airport."
[laughs]
I meant we can't confront her in the airport.
I didn't mean anything other than we cannot confront her
in the airport.
♪ ♪
Turned out to be a misunderstanding.
I mean, but... but you still have to run it out
to make... you know, to make sure,
and you know, the long and short of it is,
it wasn't a valid threat.
Right after that,
my wife took her sister to the bank to cash the check
and was attached at the hips,
with her until she did the right thing with the money.
Yeah.
So after that airport drama,
we started to focus on Dwight even more.
So we're up on these wiretaps,
and Rick and I hear something's happening
with Uncle Jerry.
A phone call was intercepted between Jacobson
and Dwight Baker.
The conversation was that Jacobson and Dwight
were going to meet for the exchange
of a winning piece.
That exchange was going to happen
somewhere in Georgia.
And they say on the phone,
"I'll be there in an hour,"
or an hour and 15 minutes, or something like that.
We had that window.
They didn't name the place where they were gonna meet,
but they gave hints.
"The usual place?" "You mean along the highway?"
"Yeah, along the highway."
So we hurried up, we got on the maps,
and we figured out that it was somewhere
along 85 near Atlanta.
We had a certain area, but we didn't know.
I mean, we thought, but we weren't sure.
So I got on the phone with Atlanta to tell them,
"Hey, this is what's coming up,"
so they were cued up and ready.
They mobilized quick.
They had to get there and get visual,
and we had air support...
[helicopter whirring]
Surveillance group down in their cars.
We're looking at rest areas,
places on the side of the road, everywhere.
It was on.
I remember looking at this golf resort
north of Atlanta.
It's got to be this place.
Seems to be about halfway. It's got to be.
♪ ♪
At his house one time.
Uh,
Chateau Elan, a winery,
between here and there is halfway.
Sometimes we'd eat.
Sometimes we'd just sit in the car
and trade money and game pieces.
Yeah. [chuckles]
We actually had an FBI pilot
up in the air and could actually see
Mr. Jacobson handing Mr. Baker something in a folder.
There it was,
and off they go.
♪ ♪
The video evidence speaks volumes
of the illegal acts that they were doing.
It's pretty short but sweet.
We got you now.
[wind blowing]
It was about the end of the summer,
and the game is ending.
We weren't gonna have another game.
We already have identified Jerry.
We had identified Mr. Baker in Fair Play.
We had identified Mr. Glomb.
We had identified and videoed Mr. Hoover,
and we had several others.
♪ ♪
All right, Devereaux's good.
He's laying out the indictment,
the arrest warrants.
We're gonna take this through the grand jury,
get the true bills, which is the indictment,
and we're gonna go out and effect these arrests.
In this case, the charges
were conspiracy and mail fraud.
If you use the United States mail
in furtherance of a scheme and artifice to defraud,
that's penalized by up to 20 years in prison.
♪ ♪
The initial stage was the indictment
of the first eight,
so the first thing that was gonna make the news,
that was gonna alert all the other winners that,
"Hey, the gig is over,"
was the end of August, August 21st.
Everybody was spread across the country,
and so we ended up having to request the assistance
of numerous offices
spread entirely across the United States.
You have to provide those agents
enough information to make arrests.
So in anticipation of the takedown,
we had prepared a very, very lengthy communication.
So it's our whole plan.
It's the background of the investigation.
I mean, this communication was probably
20 or 30 pages long.
Very, very specific,
in-depth, puts you right there.
Like, everything.
♪ ♪
We faxed it,
and I'm not going to say who did it.
I'll say I didn't,
but there may have been somebody I know very closely
that did it that would deny it.
It doesn't matter who it was,
but on the speed dial... Which I never use speed dial...
But the agents sending that plan thought
that the speed dial on the fax said "Greenville FBI"
when in fact it said "The Greenville News."
[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
It ended up being probably the worst person in the world,
a news agency.
Now, this is a big issue now, right?
Like, all the stuff's out there.
Now you got people that might be waiting on agents
to come arrest them and all this.
It's bad, bad, bad.
Rick Dent's big head was sweating bad.
Devereaux was sweating it.
Chris Graham was losing weight over that.
I remember being really, really angry about it.
Like, you know, how in the world, you know?
How could this happen?
You know, now it's, "How do we fix it?"
How do we keep them from going with this story?
After all this work,
this could really screw things up.
[birds chirping]
[keyboard clacking]
My name's John Boyanoski.
In 2001, I was a reporter for "The Greenville News."
I had been there about six or seven months,
and I was the crime and courts reporter,
so anything that, you know, kind of bad happened,
you know, anything that had anything...
Official-looking document that came across the fax
would come to my desk.
So I came in on Monday morning,
and there was a stapled thing on my chair,
and I picked it up, and I saw FBI on it.
Three paragraphs in, I'm thinking,
"This... this doesn't sound right."
This is an open investigation.
Like, you're talking about surveillance in here,
and I'm like... So at first, like,
"Oh, it's the background." I'm like, "No, they're..."
and I start flipping through, and it's all surveillance stuff
and, like, background information.
I'm like, "I don't think this is supposed to be going"
to John Boyanoski and 'The Greenville News.'"
I remember I turned around my chair and I go to my boss.
I'm like, "Dave, did you look at this?
Like, where'd this come from?"
And he's like, "Yeah, I kind of looked at it."
I'm like, "No, you didn't."
Dave, I... I think we have an open FBI investigation."
He's like, "What?" And we start looking at it.
His eyes kind of go like this.
I'm 24 years old.
I'm trying to make a name for myself,
and I want to write a story.
I'm like, we have, you know,
exclusive, you know, McDonald's investigation.
FBI looking into a big fraud case.
So Mark Devereaux's first response was,
just jump in the Bureau plane
and slide down to South Carolina.
Each office surveillance squad
has usually a Cessna 160 or something.
If you were ever in a Volkswagen Bug
in the early '70s,
it's like a lawnmower in the sky.
I look at that going,
"No way in hell I want to be part of that again. Shit."
And Devereaux being in that controlled-ass environment
with him and a Tide bottle.
That's the only way you've got to pee.
Can you imagine that?
I mean, that's an awful situation to be in.
Literally we get in the plane,
fly from Jacksonville to South Carolina that night
to do our best to ensure that that, um,
faux pas didn't cause us significant embarrassment.
That plane sucked.
[keyboards clacking]
I can tell you at that point in time,
that news agency had no requirement
to keep it quiet.
We did beg, plead,
asking if they would be kind enough
basically to keep that to themselves.
There was a little bit of, you know,
"What are we gonna get for it?"
Can't say we bribed them,
but I will say that we gave them an opportunity
to, uh, be able to take a photograph, possibly,
following the arrest in connection
with the investigation.
Their thing was,
"If you could just give us the exclusive."
It was something at least to sweeten the deal
and thank them for covering up the mistake that, uh,
Special Agent Mathews... I mean, I didn't say that...
May have made.
So I want to say, now that I'm saying it
and remembering all this,
that was not me that faxed that freaking thing over.
[laughs] It was somebody else.
I can promise you, every time I use a fax machine,
I check it not once, not twice,
but at least three times.
If anybody ever knew how close this was just to...
[mimics explosion] Blowing up, right?
I know that those subjects who are... who may see this would go,
"Damn it, how did that not happen?"
And, like, too bad, right?
Didn't. We were the good guys.
It always works better for the good guys.
We always find a way,
which is what I'm saying happened there. [laughs]
The night before, Attorney General Ashcroft,
he gave us the go-ahead to take the action.
♪ ♪
Day of the takedown, it's a very early morning,
probably anywhere from 5:00 in the morning.
You're getting up, you're making sure everybody's ready.
Regardless of whether you believe
the person is violent or not,
you still have to be very careful
as to the tactical approach any time that you engage
in the arrest of an individual,
because you're taking away their liberties,
and they pretty much know that.
The arrests were scheduled
to all go down at the same time
so that there wouldn't be conversation,
and Jacksonville sent agents to each location
so that somebody that's familiar with the case
will be able to be there to help with the arrest.
My role that day as the supervisor
of the squad in the command post
was really kind of coordinating,
and if there was problems out in the field,
any decision about how to handle it for the most part
is gonna come to me.
I was in charge of the arrest
of Brenda Phenis in Indiana.
I had the takedown of Dwight Baker.
My duty on takedown day was Gloria Brown
here in Jacksonville.
So I sit in the FBI's office as we can hear them,
"Okay, we're making the moves now."
It sounded like, you know,
a mid-'90s Michael Bay kind of thing
and you're hearing, you know, "Go, go, go!"
So I got Glomb,
by far the nastier,
more potential danger of anybody else,
and then, you know with me,
it's always a contest no matter what,
so, you know, I'm gonna get my guy before anybody else.
My guy, Glomb, was behind a fortress.
A legitimate, big-time, cameras everywhere,
big gates.
Chances are he's not gonna open the gate.
At the same time, I wanted to be first.
So we had to find a way
to get Glomb to come out.
The thing we came up with was,
he has to come out and get his paper.
So that gate opens up.
Who do you think walks out and gets the paper?
[dramatic music]
The wife, right? Not him.
So I'm going, "Oh, God."
I'm gonna ram this car through the front gate."
♪ ♪
I had got ready,
was getting ready to leave the house,
and I see somebody walking by the kitchen window.
I look out the door, and it's the FBI.
They haven't knocked on the door yet.
So I went and ran upstairs, told my wife.
I said, "The FBI's out front."
♪ ♪
So when they knocked on the door,
it was Astralaga.
We show him the arrest warrant.
We gained access to the property,
and he is taken into custody.
In the command post, we kept hearing,
"So-and-so's been arrested. So-and-so confessed.
"Can't find this person. So-and-so's arrested.
They're denying everything."
♪ ♪
And so Rick Dent went to Atlanta
to get Uncle Jerry,
Jerry Jacobson.
The arrest of Jerry was in the early morning
at his house, you know.
Knock, knock, knock. "FBI, open up."
♪ ♪
I remember Jerry initially, you know,
doing what you would expect a former police officer to do,
was, you know, clam up.
You know, he realized his goose was cooked,
so to speak.
Eventually he received his jewelry,
silver handcuffs.
At Jerry Jacobson's arrest,
he had some Honda sports car thing
that he was riding around in that we seized,
and just cash in a trash bag in the truck of his car.
Who does that shit?
Who carries that crap around? Really?
♪ ♪
My first interaction with Jerry Jacobson
was at the federal courthouse in Atlanta.
I was in Atlanta because Jerry Jacobson
was the head of the snake,
and I wanted to personally advise him
of the charges against him.
Sources say that the FBI will announce
that it has made arrests in an alleged scheme
to defraud the McDonald's Corporation
by rigging its recent Monopoly game.
Now, the FBI would only say that it has scheduled
a news conference for 2:15 this afternoon,
but sources tell CNN seven of the eight people
are in custody.
Sources say the eighth has been indicted,
not arrested yet, still being sought.
I'd laid out, "I'm gonna be the first."
I was the last. The last one to get their guy.
So we needed to draw Glomb out,
and then I came up with what I thought was a great idea.
A Broward County sheriff comes to the gate and says,
"Do you guys mind coming down here
"and identifying these guys?
"They were robbing a house here and they want you
to identify them."
I says, "Uh, I don't care."
They didn't bother me.
He said, "It'll only take a couple minutes."
So I said, "Okay,"
and then I went outside,
and of course they grabbed me outside
and they says, "You're under arrest for mail fraud."
I said, "Mail fraud? What's that?"
[laughs]
He says, "On the McDonald's." I said, "Oh, okay."
[laughs]
Didn't have a clue that they were onto this case.
Nothing.
And so he didn't say nothing else.
I says, "Can I get you a cup of coffee or something?"
Mathews was one of the original people
who arrested me.
We had some snippets of the phone calls
just to let him know we had what we had,
and he decided not to cooperate.
One of the very few.
I remember we were arguing in the car.
He said, "You think you're some gangster or something?"
I said, "Yeah, and you think you're Don Johnson."
You know, from "Miami Vice."
And at the end, he was okay.
In the front, he was a little bit of an asshole.
I did. I'm that way.
I'm very friendly. [chuckles]
[coffee maker gurgling]
♪ ♪
It wasn't just the takedown.
There were a number of people
on the initial indictment that we charged.
On top of that,
I needed to have agents going out
to interview all these other winners.
What we didn't want to happen
was somebody who is a "winner"
to be sitting at home and see this takedown
and then have two or three weeks
to think about it. [chuckles]
Think about what they're gonna say,
or worse yet,
hop on a plane and, you know,
move to South America.
If you've played the popular McDonald's Monopoly game
and thought you'd never win the top prize,
you may have been right.
In Washington, the Attorney General and FBI
announced eight people were arrested
for defrauding McDonald's and its customers...
My work said to me, "The FBI's looking for you."
I'm like, "What? Oh, shit."
This is the FBI."
My friends were, like, from Louisiana...
From the swamp, they go,
"We want to hide you out in the bayou."
I mean, but then they were like,
"You can never contact anybody anymore."
It was like a TV script.
"You can't talk to anybody. You can't contact your family."
I go, "Oh, hell no. I can't do that."
And finally they caught up with me.
They finally found me at home.
They were very nice to me.
They were just straight to the point
and they got what they wanted to hear from me.
♪ ♪
I decided I was gonna be the one to go down the street
and interview Buddy Fisher.
He was a little surprised,
but really didn't try to tell us anything
other than what really happened.
Nice guy.
♪ ♪
So through the course of the interview I had
with Dwight Baker,
he implicated George Chandler,
his foster son, in the scheme,
in the illegal activity.
At that point we made a determination
to reach out to George Chandler and talk to him
about his involvement.
♪ ♪
I was on I-20, and my cell phone rang.
My secretary came on the phone and said,
"George, there's two guys in the office here from the FBI
who would like to speak to you."
"Put them on the phone." [laughing]
Who don't want to talk to the FBI, you know?
So this guy comes on the phone,
and his name is Special Agent Astralaga,
and he said, "Mr. Chandler",
"we've arrested this morning Dwight and Linda Baker
"for their involvement in the McDonald's
"Monopoly games scam,
"and we would like to speak to you
about your involvement in it."
And the first thing out of my mouth was,
"If you've arrested Dwight and Linda Baker,
you've got the wrong people."
[phone ringing]
[receiver clicks]
[indistinct speech]
For some reason, I was home that day,
and my sister called me.
So I picked up the phone and called her
and just said, "Are you watching television?"
She said no, and I said, "Well, turn it on."
William Fisher and Gloria Brown
both live in Jacksonville.
Prosecutors say the plot...
And there was my name on the screen.
"Gloria Brown indicted."
I just kind of, like, folded up in the kitchen by myself.
Again, there I was alone.
I'm like, "Okay, God."
Before I can get to even listen
to what was on the television about me,
my doorbell rang.
[doorbell rings]
Open the door, and there was this detective there.
I went, "Oh, my God." [inhales sharply]
Initially she was denying being involved with anything
and I kind of really sped up to the fact of,
"We're not talking about whether you did it or not.
"We're just talking about how much time in prison
"you're gonna serve, so, you know,
you might want to go ahead and start cooperating now."
♪ ♪
And I had decided it's time.
The lie's fixing to be over,
and I just told him.
There was no need for me to lie anymore.
She basically told us what we needed to know,
and we already knew, again, because we knew the scheme,
and we knew the recruiting formula
and how it happened.
I saw her shoulders kind of sink a little bit.
I'm saying to myself, "Do I need a lawyer first?"
You know, that's the kind of stuff,
"Am I doing the right thing?"
You know, I just didn't know what to do.
I never thought about what to do
once I got caught,
and I was not sure if they was gonna take me with them.
I was waiting on a police car to pull up out front.
When they walked to the door,
I walked to the door with them.
When they said that we'll be getting back with you,
I was so happy right in that moment.
I said, "At least that way I get a chance"
to make some arrangements right quick."
The deal was, if they didn't cooperate,
we were gonna arrest.
If they did cooperate,
we were gonna take their statement
and then go ahead and document it
and then refer, you know, to the case agent
who would then take it to the federal prosecutor.
♪ ♪
[indistinct PA announcement]
I was almost done with my prison time
for doing the fraud that I did,
and I see there's two tall gentlemen in suits.
They said, "We're here for McDonald's Monopoly",
and they had this poster laid out,
and Uncle Jerry was the middle bubble.
They had all these bubbles all around,
and then they had these size bubbles,
and I was that size bubble connected to him,
and it was Jerry Colombo, deceased.
There's my picture, Robin Colombo, incarcerated.
[sniffs]
You know, and I'm looking over it,
and I go, "Mm, okay."
And I said, "I tell you what."
"Give me your card, and if I can think of anything,
I will get in touch with you. How about that?"
And they said, "No, that's not how that works, Mrs. Colombo."
I said... [sniffs]
"That's how this is gonna work right now."
I said, "Let me tell you something.
"I have a little boy out there and a daughter
"and you don't know who you're messing with,
and I'm not gonna put their lives in jeopardy."
I got the card, they go to leave,
and I'm going to leave.
I'm thinking, "Okay, I'm going back down"
to the girls' part, right?"
Well, here come officers from the prison.
They go, "Colombo, come back up here."
And they wanted to shackle me, and I go, "Wait, wait, wait."
What are you doing?"
They said, "Well, your custody level has changed now"
because you're under investigation."
I said, "No, I'm not."
I said, "So whether I talk to them or not",
whatever, this is all..."
And they said, "Yeah." I said, "Hold this."
"No, Mrs. Colombo."
I said, "Leave me alone. I'm calling the feds."
I ran to the double doors
and I kicked the double door open.
I said, "Hey, come here!"
They said, "Oh, you want to talk?"
I said, "Yeah, come on in. Come on."
"Hey, Mike, can I have some coffee?
Can we have coffee? I think they want coffee."
[chuckles]
I said, "You really know more than I do, honestly."
And of course they're like,
"Well, why don't you humor us?"
I said, "Well, let's do this."
I need a cigarette, so let's take a cigarette break."
And I was taking them out every ten minutes.
They're like, "You really got to smoke that?"
I said, "I really do. You got my nerves wracked."
As a matter of fact, I need one now,
talking about it.
And, um, "You really should quit those things."
I said, "Yeah, today is not the day."
6:00 came, and they took me in
where the TV room was.
John Ashcroft came on television
and my knees... I just kind of got weak
and knew it was over.
This morning, the agents
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
arrested eight individuals
in several states for their involvement
in a nationwide scheme
to defraud McDonald's Corporation
and its customers
by fraudulently manipulating
McDonald's promotional prize contests.
We want those involved in this type of corruption
to know that breaking the law is not a game.
That day, everything went, you know,
really literally according to plan.
It made for a very fun, interesting day
and, uh, one I'll never forget.
I want to commend the fine work of the FBI
and the Jacksonville division
of the United States Attorney's Office
for the Middle District of Florida.
Everyone involved in this investigation
has worked hard to break this conspiracy.
How'd we miss this?
There's like seven winners in the 864 area code
in the last four years.
Like, how did we never put two and two together ourselves
if they kept coming from the same darn area?
And we had done stories... Like, big stories
on two or three of the winners,
like the $1 million winners too,
and we had never put it together,
so that was one of the things.
There was a little bit of kicking ourselves
for journalism like, "Oh, yeah."
We just never put that one together,"
so there's a little bit of egg on our face on that one.
Well, this story is going to make a lot of people angry.
Prosecutors say it appears McDonald's customers
never really had a chance to win the biggest prizes.
Frankly, the odds of your winning
that $1 million jackpot at McDonald's
weren't that good to begin with.
The FBI said the odds were really about one in zero.
They need to serve time for that, definitely.
Many of the winners were from the same family
or were closely related.
At the center of the fraud ring,
prosecutors say Jerome Jacobson,
assigned to place the winning big cash game pieces
into circulation.
Instead, the FBI says, he stole them.
Passing winning game pieces to his friends,
who then recruited others to come forward
and claim the big prizes.
Jacobson has been given a Go to Jail card
for keeping the winning high-end tickets.
And says the FBI today...
They had a confidential informant
who tipped them off at first.
Someone who had knowledge of the scheme.
McDonald's was devastated by the news,
while a stunned spokesperson for Parker Brothers
had only this reaction.
[laughter]
We want you to have the opportunity
to see who Mr. Jacobs is.
He's 58 years old, and he's married
and has a family.
He knows the seriousness of these charges,
and he also knows that he faces
very serious potential punishment in prison
if convicted of these charges.
We know many of you have attempted
to contact him, his wife,
and his family
and have been in his neighborhood,
and we are asking you
to allow there to be some privacy
for his family and for his neighbors.
Jerry Jacobson had retained counsel fairly quickly,
an attorney by the name of Ed Garland,
and so my involvement was then
talking to the attorney.
Once he has retained counsel,
I've instructed him that I should analyze the case
before he speaks further with the government.
Are you gonna share your motto?
We follow the motto, "A fish wouldn't get caught
if he kept his mouth shut,"
and that that's what a defendant needs to know.
Stop the music.
Stand behind us.
We do the fighting and the talking for you.
We're saying that you have a rogue employee
that embezzles a piece... Steals it, bottom line.
It was pretty clear that Mark was coming full force.
The first conversation was,
plead straight up to the indictment
and bring every penny you have and your wife has.
It was the threats of, "I'm gonna take everything
down to her engagement ring."
Mark is a very effective lawyer,
a very talented lawyer,
and uses his power in a very assertive way
on behalf of his client, the United States.
Ed and I had many cases together,
and he's a very experienced attorney,
but I told him that the chances for Mr. Jacobson
to go to trial and come out without a conviction was zero.
When you deal with a lawyer like that,
you've got to let him know you're unintimidated
and unintimidatable,
so it became tense
and confrontational immediately.
Mr. Jacobs will not be making any statements
about this case until he appears in court.
Yeah, that was a very interesting day.
I sit down in front of the TV,
I turn on CNN Headline News,
boom, picture of my dad,
and, uh, it was like, "Wow."
Um, in the back of my mind,
I was like, I knew it.
My mom and I always knew there was something wrong,
and here it is right here in front of us
now right here on TV.
It's not a surprise.
He was good at manipulating people.
He was good at it.
That's my dad. [laughs]
♪ ♪
I guess I was always questioning
the legitimacy of everything.
It was always something new.
It was always trips and it was always doing,
you know, always just spending things extravagantly,
it seemed like to me.
My mom and I always joked that we always thought
there was something not right about him.
I knew he kept secrets from me.
Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies,
and that's how I dealt with him.
If I didn't ask him any questions,
he didn't have to lie to me.
For instance,
he said that he had this swampland.
He might go out and buy me something,
and I would say, "Jerry, that's a lot of money."
He would go, "I sold a piece of swampland."
♪ ♪
Jerry was always trying to figure the easy way.
How do you get a free lunch?
The moral of the story is, there are no free lunches.
♪ ♪
But there may be some brownies hidden somewhere.
Does that make any sense?
Mr. Jacobson was not helping us,
and so the question was still ongoing.
How did he get the game pieces?
We know he did,
but how did he do it?
We didn't know if Dittler Brothers was involved.
I mean, there was no details to anything.
We don't know if it's just Jerry.
We don't know if it's, you know, everybody in there,
so...
I was furious that Jerry did what he did
because he put all of those people at risk.
♪ ♪
And we took a trip and actually went
to Dittler Brothers because
there might be somebody there inside.
When the FBI came in and shut everything down
and started gathering their evidence,
and somebody came by and said, "The FBI's here.
"You got everything shut down.
You don't go anywhere near there."
[machine whirring]
Somebody's in trouble.
Somebody's in trouble, but I don't know what it...
What effect it's gonna have.
Don't know.
♪ ♪
Well, Roger, first let me underscore the fact
that, um, Jerome Jacobson was not a McDonald's employee.
He was in fact an employee of Simon Marketing,
which was the firm that McDonald's had contracted
to administer its games.
McDonald's says tonight
it has fired the Georgia company
that ran the contests,
and now the FBI is investigating
how many other instant winners weren't so instant after all.
♪ ♪
The deception by Simon Marketing
was unacceptable.
We really trusted them to run the game for us.
We had to end the relationship
to gain the trust back with our customers.
Pretty much, I'd say McDonald's was
98% of our business.
♪ ♪
The FBI showed up one day at the front door
and shut us down.
♪ ♪
When the information came out,
their stock went from approximately $100
to basically 50¢.
God, these... These layoffs are bad.
It was the largest one-day drop
on the American Stock Exchange.
Ensuring that these games are secure,
that is how they make their living.
Two days after McDonald's fired Simon Marketing
from all future promotions,
a second major company has also pulled the plug.
A couple of days later,
Kraft came out and canceled their contract.
There's nothing left.
♪ ♪
So it affected the Chicago,
LA, Atlanta offices here in the States.
We had an office in London, Paris, Hong Kong,
and several manufacturing facilities in China.
The people at Simon Marketing were good people.
They were professional.
We really loved working with them.
So it was devastating
when one bad apple wrecked the lives
of so many people.
They're gone, man. They're gone.
♪ ♪
We spent one night in jail.
For my bail, they asked for $1 million.
The judge said, "For this, you want $1 million?"
He said, "Set it at $200,000."
♪ ♪
I mean, the Lord really blessed me
in a bad situation,
because I had three lots that were free and clear.
♪ ♪
The tax value was exactly $200,000 on those three lots.
So that was... That was just a miracle.
These three lots here,
the lake is over on this side,
but these three lots here are the three lots
that I put up as collateral for my property bond.
♪ ♪
I understood at that time, obviously,
that something was amiss with Dwight's story.
And I immediately called Dwight,
and I remember being
incredulous with him.
Who is the guy that was going through the divorce?
Where'd you get this ticket?
What's going on?
He said, "George, I can't talk about it right now."
"Don't worry. You don't have anything to worry about.
You didn't do anything wrong. It was me."
And...
and I wasn't gravely concerned about it.
The thing that surprised me is they gave me bond.
They never should have gave me bond.
I'm telling you that I was a fugitive back in the '80s.
So that was a mistake.
So I'm home about two days.
There's two guys at the gate with suits on.
I said, "Oh. They came back."
"They came back for me.
That's the marshals coming to get me."
♪ ♪
Here's Jehovah Witnesses.
[laughs]
I was... I was never so happy
to talk to a Jehovah Witness in my life.
I was in my maternity shop in Coral Gables,
and we have a TV going there all the time.
And they broke in the news that the McDonald's thing
had just been busted.
I was fuckin' floored. Fuckin' floored.
Two seconds later, two FBI agents
walked in my store,
Doug Mathews and Rick Dent,
and they said they'd like to talk to me
about the McDonald's case,
and I knew I was fucked.
I knew I was fucked.
I'll be honest with you,
I don't know if Jerry turned me in or not.
Right after it happened, I flew to Atlanta, Georgia.
I said, "Jerry, how the fuck could you do this?"
I says, "How the fuck... I thought we were done,"
and I was really pissed,
because I had thought that night, we were done.
I had hired a local attorney
to go with me to the meeting with the FBI.
And he called me and said,
"George, you've been indicted."
♪ ♪
I was in shock.
♪ ♪
Yeah, you don't know how to react,
because you're being charged with a federal crime.
My name appears in the text of major newspapers
and on major television stations
all across the nation.
Friends are calling me,
family's calling me,
business acquaintances are calling me,
customers are calling me,
employees are calling me.
I didn't know what to tell them.
♪ ♪
I didn't know what to tell my son,
who's eight years old at the time.
Every kid in the school
has a question for my son,
and I don't know how to help him.
It was...
devastating.
♪ ♪
George was, uh...
He was very angry, upset, hurt.
But I tried to explain to him
that I did everything in my power to protect him from this.
Um...
At some point in time, though,
and it was in fairly short order,
you... you snap out.
I snapped out of it, and I took action.
I went down to Jacksonville
and started making phone calls,
looking for what I termed
the best criminal lawyer in town.
[phone ringing distantly]
I'm Curtis Scott Fallgatter. I'm an attorney.
Been an attorney for about 40 years.
I was a federal prosecutor here in town for 17 years,
and I've been in private practice
for some 20 years,
and I've been blessed to have been selected
one of the top criminal defense attorneys
in northeast Florida for the last couple of decades.
In 2001, I met George Chandler.
He was 29 years old.
Ninth grade education,
but he's a brilliant young man.
I was very impressed with his candor,
and he explained how he had been hoodwinked
by his foster father,
which of course demonstrated his innocence.
I thought, "Well, we can probably make this case go away"
pretty easily."
So I picked up the phone and called Mr. Devereaux.
Mr. Fallgatter interviewed me
in January of 1989
when I got hired in this office.
He's been to my house many times.
I've been to his house many times.
At one point in time, we were very sociable.
Not so much anymore.
I explained to him how George had been hoodwinked,
did not know the tickets had been stolen or embezzled,
and Mr. Devereaux's response was,
"Well, if I drop Mr. Chandler's case,
I'd have to drop several others."
♪ ♪
I was the first person to turn themselves in.
I mean, they had me.
I was scared as shit,
because just the name Mark Devereaux
just reminded me of those old southern gentlemen.
♪ ♪
I mean, I'll never forget the first time I met him.
♪ ♪
The only thing he said to me:
"Don't ever lie to me."
He said, "Just don't ever lie to me."
I says, "Hey, man, I did whatever I did",
"and I'll tell you everything I did.
I ain't gonna lie."
Because I've never believed in lying anyhow.
I wasn't gonna start then.
The plan is to find a path to victory
if it is there,
to protect the client, to help the client.
So you... if you start out, "I'm just gonna plead guilty,"
you never go through the mental discipline of,
"Can I find a way?"
We probably started out, said, "If you want him as a witness,
give him immunity,"
something like that.
And that would have met head-on
with the 180-degree opposite position.
A plea is always a possibility.
The issue of how he will address these charges
is being evaluated.
♪ ♪
When you talk about what Jerry was facing,
it gets complicated.
If you start adding up all of the different counts
that he was charged with, he was facing a lot of time.
And I know it was well over ten.
♪ ♪
I remember it being...
Having a sense of just huge sympathy
for the ordeal that was being imposed on him,
and the way it was being imposed.
Prosecutors say this is the man who started it all.
Jerome Jacobson faces nine counts of conspiracy
in a plot they say involved 20 million dollars' worth
of McDonald's winning game prizes
stolen and then sold to friends and relatives.
If he could cooperate, it would provide us
just so much information
to find all these other winners.
And winners turned into recruiters,
and most importantly,
to show exactly how he did it.
We could not quite figure it out.
And now we knew he was doing it.
We just didn't know the details
and how he was doing it.
The government always wanted to know how he did it,
and he did not cooperate from the beginning.
He would have, but for the fact that his lawyers
would not allow him to until we worked everything out.
It was the, you know, talk peace but prepare for war.
And...
We were preparing for a war.
♪ ♪
I don't think there ever was an exit strategy to stopping.
He'd been perfecting it for 13 years.
It had just gotten better and probably easier for him to do.
And I mean, the only reason he got caught
was because he pissed somebody off
and somebody went to the FBI and said,
"Hey, guess what's happening."
♪ ♪
"Informant key to unlocking scam
behind the golden arches."
Of course they never named who the informant was,
but that's how it all came apart.
Nope.
I think it's the FBI.
Before this ever went down, there was a box
across the street from my house on a pole,
placed there by Blue Ridge Electric.
I'd always questioned what it was.
I've developed a lot of property.
I'd never seen that box.
I suspected they were eavesdropping on me,
not because of McDonald's
but because of a fellow developer
here on the lakes.
The FBI came in,
the drug enforcement people came in,
everybody came in, tied up all of his shit.
And they... and I was on the peripheral of that.
Within a week after my arrest
and after this went down,
Blue Ridge Electric trucks
came into the field across my street,
and that box is gone.
So that's why, to me,
I've always felt like their story of how an informant,
or how somebody came forward,
I felt like it was bullshit.
Uh, I do.
[chuckles]
- Uh, are we... are we... - Next question.
[laughs]
♪ ♪
Without the informant...
Telling the FBI where to go,
who to look at...
♪ ♪
This case would have never been broken.
- Never broken. - Never.
♪ ♪
I will never tell you who the source was.
You will never get that from me.
If I was a dead body,
you could not get that off my corpse.
That's how much I think about the bureau's program.
It has to work like that, right?
Well, I don't think it was anybody in mind.
If it is, I'd be very surprised, real surprised.
If you're gonna surprise me, go ahead and surprise me.
I know who broke the case.
I... at this moment right now,
I'm not sure if I feel comfortable
saying who broke the case.
I need to talk to some people
and make sure that I'm not in danger
if I say who broke the case,
because right now...
♪ ♪
I don't know if it's gonna come back and bite me in the butt.
Frank Colombo.
We had this big build up of the case in anticipation
of the trial.
- We had him. - ♪ (UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS) ♪
We wanna make sure justice was served.
We're feverishly working on
how could Jerome Jacobson steal winning pieces?
- ♪ (MUSIC STOPS) ♪ - How did he do it?
♪ (MUSIC RESUMES) ♪
Jerry Jacobson, tell the truth. What did you do?
No one knew.
There's real permanent damage.
Without the informant, this case never would've happened.
INTERVIEWER:
Time to tell the truth.
♪ (MUSIC CONTINUES, FADES) ♪
Nobody suspected that.
- ♪ (FINAL NOTE) ♪ - (CASH REGISTER RINGS)