22, 2001, and charged Jacobson with conspiracy to commit mail fraud. Colombo, though, died after a car accident in 1998. The decision paid off, allowing Dent to pin down Andrew Glomb for the first time. The move was fraught with legal risks - the corporation, in its collaboration with federal investigators, already knew at this point that its game was compromised. could track down the final evidence it needed. He found his big lead in 2001, when he mapped out the addresses of three winners - all of whom lived within miles of Jacobson’s South Carolina lake house.ĭent convinced McDonald’s to run one more Monopoly promotion, so the F.B.I. Gloria Brown, Murray found, was also having her annual checks delivered to a Jacksonville address.ĭent launched an investigation that would rope in 25 agents nationwide.
One winner - Colombo’s father-in-law, who claimed $1 million from the contest - told Murray that he lived in New Hampshire, but property records in Jacksonville proved otherwise. Special Agent Richard Dent, based in the F.B.I.’s Jacksonville office, contacted a McDonald’s spokeswoman, Amy Murray, who began trying to verify the winners.
received an anonymous phone tip: Someone named “Uncle Jerry” was rigging the McDonald’s Monopoly promotion, stealing game pieces from the inside and selling them. In March 2000, according to The Daily Beast, the F.B.I. In airport bathrooms - en route to packaging plants - Jacobson would remove the envelope’s original seal, swap out winning pieces for regular ones and resecure the envelope with one of the new seals he was sent. A supplier sent him a package by mistake, filled with the metallic tamper-proof seals - the ones used to secure the envelopes filled with game pieces that Jacobson was charged with delivering. Jacobson came across the materials he needed by accident, according to The Daily Beast article. They became Jacobson’s accomplices, the middlemen who would sell the pieces Jacobson had swiped to various “winners.” How did it work? Jacobson was waiting to board a cruise ship several years later when he met Don Hart, who in turn introduced him to Andrew Glomb at a dinner party. Jacobson, according to The Daily Beast story, said he met Gennaro Colombo, who claimed to be a member of New York’s Colombo crime family, at the Atlanta airport in 1995. Over the years, the fraud grew beyond his circle as he found other conspirators, usually by chance - which made them more difficult to pin down during the F.B.I.’s investigation years later.
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