McMillions (2020) s01e04 Episode Script
Episode 4
I don't know how to describe Jerry Jacobson.
Jerry had a way about him.
You're either gonna love him or are gonna hate him.
There's no in-between.
He can 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 them more times than I knew about.
Jerry Jacobson was actually my stepfather.
He was prone to have a short fuse and a pretty bad temper.
The most vivid memory I have, we're 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 bouncing his head off the wall.
And I was in the room more scared and hoping it didn't turn towards me, 'cause 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, 'cause that's what we carried in Hollywood, and was trading gun parts.
And he told me this himself, because he was gonna shoot me and then 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 know 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 all got to go some time.
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.
MCMILLIONS I was pushed against the wall covered in blood.
I remember looking this way, and there was a policeman and a fireman 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 'cause he was getting cranky.
They said, "Mrs.
Colombo, stay still.
We'll cut you out with a 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 being airlifted to the hospital.
" I said, "Are you sure you're alright?" And 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 to all these machines.
And 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.
Most of the force of the truck hit the passenger's door.
But it seemed like he was gonna be okay which was odd because he's in ICU.
My brother said he had 15 or 20 thousand dollars in the glove box, and then a couple hundred thousand dollars in a suitcase in Robin's mom and dad's home in Jacksonville and told me, "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.
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 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, 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 it and I got that impression, because Jerry was getting a little on edge, 'cause the pressure was on him from someone.
You know what I mean? Something was different.
Being a big guy, when they put him into ICU, 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.
When they caught it, they realized his lung collapsed, his ribs were broken.
Up to that time, he was joking.
It was lighthearted.
He did not seem like he was in shock.
Even till this day, I'm astonished.
Astonished that the man was actively dying.
He was in and out of consciousness.
He had a ventilator, he wasn't able to talk.
They had him on these 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.
" 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 did this on purpose.
You did this.
" Her swearing up and down, "I didn't do it on purpose.
I didn't set this up.
" If it was in fact, and if there was any proof she was involved with that - She wouldn't be here right now.
- I can guarantee you.
The last few days, it was me, my brother, my mom, and dad.
And the last words that he said, he mouthed them to my mom, "Happy Mothers' Day.
" 'Cause it was Mothers' Day.
And once that happened, his body just started shutting down little by little.
There was nothing that no one can do.
And the last couple hours, everyone was in the waiting room, but I was like, "I'm not gonna leave my brother's side and leave him in the room by himself.
" So I stood there.
I sat next to him.
I kept talking to him.
Till this day, 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.
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.
I'm sorry.
Usually, I don't cry.
I couldn't let him sit there by himself.
I couldn't do it.
I stayed there with him.
Hardest thing I've ever done in my life but the best thing I've ever done too.
He always wanted his son, Francesco, to be in karate, and this and that.
And I promised him I was gonna help take care of him.
"I'm gonna look over your son, make sure he grows up to be a good kid.
" And I promised him that he'd be okay.
"It's okay.
I'll take care of him.
I'll watch over him.
" And if he was hearing me, I just want him to know that the one thing he really cared about was his son.
And that was it.
I just want to be 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 gonna 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.
And that was my dad, Jerry, who was being Everybody's talking about him now 'cause 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.
That's no good.
When he got in the accident, three days before my birthday, I was two.
I was in the backseat.
And one thing that always stood out for me is my mom said that my dad took me out of the car seat.
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 nana, she showed me a picture of the accident.
I believe I was like nine or ten.
And that traumatized me.
It's not something a kid should see.
Especially if that's the car their dad was in, and that's why he's dead.
There you go.
There you go.
All right.
My whole life, I've always known that there was 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 So much happened in this first year.
I guess this one.
You like this? I'm sitting there playing with her, and Every day I think about my dad.
I promised my brother that I was gonna 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 didn't want us to be any part of Francesco's life whatsoever.
We were both devastated.
Last I heard, he's had a baby and so forth and so on.
I wish him the best.
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.
- Say, "Hi.
I'm Frankie.
" - Frankie.
Laugh.
Oh, say Frank, "I don't feel good.
" Be sad.
That's who I remember.
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 wasn't thinking about the money.
I was just thinking, "Oh, my God.
What am I going to do? What am I gonna 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 him blind.
We heard your house with Jerry got robbed and everything got cleaned out.
- Did that happen? - Yeah.
Yeah.
There is a bunch of We had a casino.
And they got all our slot machines.
- This happened right after his death? - Yeah.
- Who did this, what happened? - 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 savory kind of people, you know? I don't know.
I don't know.
My grandparents did put point blame at my mom.
And that's not cool.
She lost her husband.
You know, she lost her soul mate.
I, 100%, don't believe that was something that she did on purpose.
Robin had lived the lavish lifestyle when she was married to Jerry.
She had the 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.
Spin the Wheel of Justice.
Let's spin the wheel and see who it lands on this week.
We've come up on Ms.
Colombo.
She's been on the wheel a couple of weeks.
Okay.
Robin Colombo's 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 no money to back them.
And she would write them out and cash them.
And she got caught for that.
I remember Francesco 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 pocket book and just carry it out, because the security wouldn't stop a child.
Or if they did, it was, "Oh, put that down, Francesco.
" Yeah.
"That's not yours.
" She was training him at a very young age 'cause she 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'll admit.
The first couple of days, I had tickets in my hand.
I'm like, "Should I take over his business now?" - Because I could've easily - He could've.
I could've easily went to Uncle Jerry and say, "Hey let's continue this.
" I could've easily kept it going.
But I didn't, 'cause I didn't wanna look over my shoulder.
I thought they had it stopped when my brother passed away.
So I wasn't gonna use them, give them to anybody, or try to sell them.
I just destroyed them, hoping that it was never gonna be found out.
That was my goal.
I said my whole life, 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 like a factory.
Everybody's working.
Everybody's writing.
They're reviewing tapes.
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 middleman was Jerry Colombo who died in a car accident.
Okay.
Now what? The one thing that was still out there was really how mechanically is, is Jerry Jacobson doing this.
And that was kind of this nagging question mark.
We were just building the puzzle from all the pieces, and they were so many different pieces that we were putting together.
We were working a lot with the Atlanta division who had a surveillance team.
Like in the movies, guys parked in cars or following with binoculars, 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.
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 gonna hear you.
" And one day, we were just chitchatting, 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 say, "Hey, Jerry, when did you tell Leo to 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 would wanna tap your phones?" Jerry Jacobson was controlling all the pieces at that point, so he needed to replace Colombo as quickly as possible.
Identification of sources that he could use of recruiters became his fulltime job.
One of the middle men, AJ Glomb, came on the radar, screened fairly early.
After Colombo died, Glomb had a number of telephonic conversations with Jerry Jacobson.
And we follow where the evidence leads you.
My name is Andrew Glomb.
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 was like, "Oh, no, no.
" I said, "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.
How did you get into selling drugs? Actually, that's one of the best parts of the whole story.
First time I ever did any kind of drugs was with Harold Robbins, a writer.
And we were in Monte Carlo.
And he had a bunch of girls.
Women that were talking And his books.
Whenever they were having sex, they always did amyl nitrate before they had an orgasm.
And so I said, "Harold, do you have 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 and this girl says, "Let's dance.
" I said, "All right.
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.
" So that was my first thing with drugs.
So how I got into selling them I had a cousin.
He says, "Can you get me some Quaaludes?" "So let me ask one of my buddies.
" I said, "Steve, can you get Quaaludes?" He said, "Yeah.
How many you want?" And I said, "I don't know.
" I said "How much are they?" He said, "Well, how much do you wanna make?" I said, How much is there to make?" So that's how I got into drugs.
And 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 twelve years for six ounces of cocaine.
I was supposed to report to Montgomery, Alabama.
And they gave me 30 days or 60 days to report, so I just didn't report.
I waited till like almost the last day.
And then I took off for New York 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.
So 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 doughnut 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, "You know, Don, I just got off a parole.
" I said, "I don't think I wanna know anything about it.
" And then probably two or three days later, I said, "Let's meet and we'll talk about it.
" Don was one of my best friends for, oh, jeez, 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 says, "'cause he knows I'm not gonna 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 could cash in for a million dollars, and we'll share it.
" When somebody offers you a million dollars, you're gonna take it.
Unless you got to kill somebody, then you might not be interested.
But I start thinking about it.
I said, "I better not do this to myself.
I don't want to go back to prison.
" So I had a friend in San Diego.
I got a plane and flew to San Diego the next day.
And then I ran it by him, told him how it worked and everything.
And we were gonna split it three ways: me, Don Hart, and Stanley, who I was giving the ticket to.
And I remember he told me the manager said, "The last time somebody won, they gave the ticket to St.
Jude.
" So Stanley says, "Well, it's not happening this time.
It's not going to anybody except me.
" So that was it.
So he mailed it in and after that, I made several trips out to California to get the money from him.
After Stanley was Richard Sokolski, I believe.
Victor Marcitello was the third person I gave a ticket to.
I met him in prison in West Virginia.
The next was Stan Warwick in Chicago, Stan was a heart transplant recipient and these newscasters said, there's a guy with a heart transplant eating McDonald's.
- Free food.
- Yup.
We have free food.
- And another free sandwich.
- Yeah, there you go.
I'm too nervous.
I can't do this.
I don't think I met Jerry until halfway through all these people.
It must've been in '99 at Don's party.
What was your first impression of meeting him? Nothing.
I didn't think nothing on it.
To sort of non-descript.
Then eventually, Don didn't wanna 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 can honestly say I never had a close relationship with him.
Turned out Andrew Glomb was a large recruiter.
Had provided quite a few, had enriched himself and Uncle Jerry, he had a wide net there of individuals who were willing 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.
Everybody got a bill every month with all the long distance calls 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 that each made, there would be, "Wow, they're both calling a common number.
Look at that.
We have this winner has called AJ Glomb.
So has Jerry Jacobson.
" But yeah, that's how we started finding other middle men.
So then you start looking at Dwight Baker.
Gorgeous subdivision.
I developed it in '87, '88.
Well, half a million, about 450 or not.
I owned all this property on the left at one time.
I was gonna build a little golf course in here.
I'm Dwight Baker.
Developer.
Got a real estate broker's license and builder's license and developed quite a number of projects, probably over 1400 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 and a dock.
Then I sold him a couple lots in another subdivision.
Right below that sign there are the two lots Jacobson owned.
Right here.
It's this property here.
I don't know if there's houses on them now or not.
My family probably not gonna 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.
One of my biggest regret is being involved in this McDonald's thing.
Yeah, I shouldn't have been involved in it.
Yup.
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 was stalled out.
And I went into the big pile of rock.
Put me in the hospital 10 days.
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, "Y'all have to pull up to the door because I got a walker.
" So he pulls up to the back door and we go riding up the mountain.
He said he was representing McDonald's in the distribution of the game pieces.
He knew I was going through a tough time.
So he offered me a game piece if I had a hundred thousand dollars.
I didn't have a hundred thousand, so, he said, "Listen, if you want one, it's a hundred thousand dollars.
It's the only way you're gonna get one.
" He said, "I have the responsibility of distributing, they tell me where to go.
So if you want a game piece, this is how it's done.
" This is the subdivision we were in, traded game pieces and gave him money.
It is a secluded place, yeah.
It's a secluded place.
I knew he was selling game pieces.
And maybe he was doing something illegal.
And I ask him, "Jerry, what happens if McDonald's finds out about it?" He said, "They're not gonna do anything about it.
" I said, "Why is that?" He said, "Because these game pieces increase their sales by seven percent out of twenty-six thousand stores.
Factoring in a million-dollar game piece on that kind of money, eighty-nine million, a hundred million dollars.
They didn't care.
If somebody got it, they didn't care if it went in the trash.
They didn't care about it.
It was factored in.
" That was his story.
I bought it.
I didn't believe there was anything other than we were cheating in a game.
I don't know if it was the oxycodone from the accident, but I took my part.
I didn't know if I was ever gonna walk again, let alone, work again.
"I don't have a hundred thousand, but I might know somebody that does.
" Breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
There's always a line.
- Hey, a Big Mac combo please.
- Yeah.
Serving over 13 million McDonald's customers each year in the US, double 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.
My breakfast, I got my hash browns and coffee, filled it off, and 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.
America.
God shed his grace on thee.
Just like that.
See? They like it.
From sea to shining sea.
We should've brought some more feed to the 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, 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.
We're not talking about ancient history here, we're talking about 1986.
Most people have running water at that point and we were still using a well.
What do you think? Dwight was very successful.
He had a family and he had five kids.
I became friends with his son.
And when I was about 12, I left home and Dwight Baker was foster father to me for a time.
Well, George and I, we went to church together, families so we took him in.
We became foster parents for George and he grew up with our kids.
Being in such a big family and being poor especially, why would I not wanna move in with Dwight? He drove a BMW and had those successful characteristics that I wanted.
George has always been highly special.
He wanted just to absorb knowledge, absorb anything you could teach him.
He knew if he's gonna get out, he needed to work hard.
When I was 15 years old, I quit school.
I grown a moustache to make me look older and called some local employers that I was 18 and I immediately went to work.
I worked sixteen hours a day instead of eight.
That proved to work for me and became an entrepreneur.
Communications company, septic system installers, security company, medical alarm monitoring, industrial programming, residential rentals, commercial rentals.
I probably would've been a millionaire by the time I was 25.
So when Dwight came to me with a ticket, he knew that I was in a position that I had some cash to work with.
This is a million-dollar winning ticket and he's got it in a Ziploc sandwich bag that's not even zipped and he lays it down on my desk, and I take it out, look at it.
It just says one million dollar winner, call 1-800 whatever.
I said, "A friend got this million dollar game piece from McDonald's.
" "He's going through divorce.
" I said, "He offered to sell it to me.
" "I'll split it with her and pay the taxes.
" I said, "I'll sell it for 100K" Because he's going through a divorce and he doesn't think the ticket should be considered marital property.
With Dwight's friend, I didn't know this guy from Adam, never met him.
But I had already gone through a very bitter divorce myself.
So I felt like it was a legitimate concern.
He was already separated and 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 him what Jerry told you? Well, because I didn't want him to know I was involved in it, in something that wasn't real.
That had a tent of I knew Jerry has done something wrong, it didn't feel like it was the right thing to do for me to be involved.
But yeah, I did it out of expediency maybe and I just tried to protect him from the truth of it.
Because if it did backfire and it wasn't going it wasn't right, he didn't need to have any knowledge of anything.
I took that all on my shoulders.
So He basically asked me, would I be interested in buying the ticket from them and then redeeming it.
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 ones that matchup like Boardwalk and Park Place.
I told Dwight, "Yeah, I'll probably do a hundred thousand dollars.
" You win $50,000 a year for 20 years.
And 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 I'll gain something.
It wasn't a tremendously beneficial thing, it wasn't like I was just gonna get this huge pile of money.
But it was nonetheless still a good business decision, a good business deal.
So I did it.
We were up on Dwight's firm and then we start to figure out, "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.
To the best of my knowledge, all of mine, I believe, were 50,000.
You could go down this list.
I had one, two, three, four, eight, nine, ten winners.
Out of giving away $10 million dollars, I made $614,000.
So how stupid am I? Then we come to Michael Hoover.
August 2001.
Michael Hoover was one of the most generous people we ever met, a great, great friend, just real easygoing, nothing bothered him.
He 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 said, "I got something that you might be interested in.
" 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.
I'm glad that after the beach, I stopped and picked up another one.
He called me and said, this production company did the commercial.
"This girl is really hot.
I think she really liked me.
" I said, "Oh, great.
" I didn't think nothing out of it.
In the wire room, we're listening some of those phone calls to Hoover.
Glomb was on the other side going, "Really? What did she look like?" I think all of the winners thought I really liked them, that's the kind of person I am.
I was interviewing them like a friend, so it was my job to make sure that they felt comfortable.
She was sick to her stomach.
That was her reaction and 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.
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 where the people, the hospitality, the neighborliness and 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.
Good job, Gary.
Nice job, Gary.
Nice job.
To tell 'em exactly why I'm innocent.
This is the McDonald's where it all happened.
There was a press conference, a party and a real Ronald McDonald was here.
It was kind of surreal.
He said, "Mom, I won a million dollar," I said, "Prove it!" He said, "Mom, it's real.
" I didn't he was serious, I was like, you're not serious.
As a single father to eight-year-old Russell, George Chandler says he will use his 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 done a lot more harm than good, and I already run up a business in town, and I was surrounded by this notion that I was a millionaire now.
I didn't need to work, I didn't need any new customers.
I had to put out a hundred thousand dollars of my own money for this thing.
And I had no question whatsoever about the authenticity or legitimacy of the ticket or the origination None ever occurred to me, and we're talking about Dwight Baker.
I didn't take any cut out of the money.
And it was all Jerry's.
I told him, I said, "George, listen.
" "You just give me a Navigator and a laptop and I'll be happy.
" Didn't want George to think bad of me, for actually having a little larceny in my heart.
I didn't won a whole lot, I just won a little laptop and a Navigator.
Then I went to Ronnie Hughey and offered it to him.
And that's how my greed kicked in.
Ronnie was just a high roller.
He was going through a divorce and he said, "I'll take two or three of this.
" That was probably the real where I really stepped over the boundary was when Ronnie said, "I'll take one, or two, or three of that.
" And I knew he could.
And I remember Jerry telling me, "You're getting a little greedy.
" Yeah.
Each time is a little different.
From Ronnie Hughey I got a lake lot or two.
Jerry brought me fries and a drink, and you had the game pieces on.
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 got the tickets? Never asked him.
Jerry used to say all the time, this is gonna be the last one.
"This is gonna be the last one.
" And then one time he said, there's gonna be a five-million-dollar prize that they're gonna give.
You take that one And I don't know how we're gonna split it, but he said, then that's it.
We'll ride into the sunset and forget it so Jerry was very proud but very secretive.
He never talked about anything with anybody else.
I knew he was selling the game pieces, but I didn't know to what degree.
Jerry told me, "There's a half-a-million-dollar game piece, with a McDonald's issue on $500,000 check cash.
And we didn't have to wait 50,000 a year.
" And I wanted it.
And so, I made arrangements with my wife's sister, Brenda.
And I said, "Cash that check and we'll split it.
" I thought it was gonne be a tough sell, but it wasn't.
And we created an address for her in Asheville, North Carolina.
She turned in the game piece, 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 piece.
And I said, "I'm gonna go up to Asheville and see what's going on.
" And I went up there.
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 gonna keep all the money, run with the money.
That scared the shit out of me because I knew Jerry wasn't gonna be happy.
Jerry told me, "If there's a problem, I'd get a visit from his cousin Guido.
And I took that pretty serious.
I 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.
Because she looked at it as 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 Phenas and for whatever reason didn't 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 Phenas was running around the Indianapolis Airport and Dwight was looking to bury her somewhere.
They're saying he's following her to the airport, he says he's gonna kill her, but there was a lot of concern on that.
What are we gonna do if they are in fact really gonna harm her? We've obviously have to intervene.
But that would have serious consequences for the investigation.
One little slip up 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.
He can't be trusted what he have.
Okay! George George! George! Let's have fun, y'all.
She got run over by a damn yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I'll hang around as long as you will let me.
Oh, sounds good.
And I never minded standing here in the rain.
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 could blend in the crowd at the airport ready to take action.
In a lot of cases, really bad things happen.
Things go wrong, they always do.
Jerry had a way about him.
You're either gonna love him or are gonna hate him.
There's no in-between.
He can 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 them more times than I knew about.
Jerry Jacobson was actually my stepfather.
He was prone to have a short fuse and a pretty bad temper.
The most vivid memory I have, we're 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 bouncing his head off the wall.
And I was in the room more scared and hoping it didn't turn towards me, 'cause 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, 'cause that's what we carried in Hollywood, and was trading gun parts.
And he told me this himself, because he was gonna shoot me and then 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 know 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 all got to go some time.
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.
MCMILLIONS I was pushed against the wall covered in blood.
I remember looking this way, and there was a policeman and a fireman 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 'cause he was getting cranky.
They said, "Mrs.
Colombo, stay still.
We'll cut you out with a 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 being airlifted to the hospital.
" I said, "Are you sure you're alright?" And 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 to all these machines.
And 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.
Most of the force of the truck hit the passenger's door.
But it seemed like he was gonna be okay which was odd because he's in ICU.
My brother said he had 15 or 20 thousand dollars in the glove box, and then a couple hundred thousand dollars in a suitcase in Robin's mom and dad's home in Jacksonville and told me, "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.
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 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, 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 it and I got that impression, because Jerry was getting a little on edge, 'cause the pressure was on him from someone.
You know what I mean? Something was different.
Being a big guy, when they put him into ICU, 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.
When they caught it, they realized his lung collapsed, his ribs were broken.
Up to that time, he was joking.
It was lighthearted.
He did not seem like he was in shock.
Even till this day, I'm astonished.
Astonished that the man was actively dying.
He was in and out of consciousness.
He had a ventilator, he wasn't able to talk.
They had him on these 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.
" 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 did this on purpose.
You did this.
" Her swearing up and down, "I didn't do it on purpose.
I didn't set this up.
" If it was in fact, and if there was any proof she was involved with that - She wouldn't be here right now.
- I can guarantee you.
The last few days, it was me, my brother, my mom, and dad.
And the last words that he said, he mouthed them to my mom, "Happy Mothers' Day.
" 'Cause it was Mothers' Day.
And once that happened, his body just started shutting down little by little.
There was nothing that no one can do.
And the last couple hours, everyone was in the waiting room, but I was like, "I'm not gonna leave my brother's side and leave him in the room by himself.
" So I stood there.
I sat next to him.
I kept talking to him.
Till this day, 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.
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.
I'm sorry.
Usually, I don't cry.
I couldn't let him sit there by himself.
I couldn't do it.
I stayed there with him.
Hardest thing I've ever done in my life but the best thing I've ever done too.
He always wanted his son, Francesco, to be in karate, and this and that.
And I promised him I was gonna help take care of him.
"I'm gonna look over your son, make sure he grows up to be a good kid.
" And I promised him that he'd be okay.
"It's okay.
I'll take care of him.
I'll watch over him.
" And if he was hearing me, I just want him to know that the one thing he really cared about was his son.
And that was it.
I just want to be 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 gonna 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.
And that was my dad, Jerry, who was being Everybody's talking about him now 'cause 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.
That's no good.
When he got in the accident, three days before my birthday, I was two.
I was in the backseat.
And one thing that always stood out for me is my mom said that my dad took me out of the car seat.
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 nana, she showed me a picture of the accident.
I believe I was like nine or ten.
And that traumatized me.
It's not something a kid should see.
Especially if that's the car their dad was in, and that's why he's dead.
There you go.
There you go.
All right.
My whole life, I've always known that there was 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 So much happened in this first year.
I guess this one.
You like this? I'm sitting there playing with her, and Every day I think about my dad.
I promised my brother that I was gonna 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 didn't want us to be any part of Francesco's life whatsoever.
We were both devastated.
Last I heard, he's had a baby and so forth and so on.
I wish him the best.
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.
- Say, "Hi.
I'm Frankie.
" - Frankie.
Laugh.
Oh, say Frank, "I don't feel good.
" Be sad.
That's who I remember.
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 wasn't thinking about the money.
I was just thinking, "Oh, my God.
What am I going to do? What am I gonna 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 him blind.
We heard your house with Jerry got robbed and everything got cleaned out.
- Did that happen? - Yeah.
Yeah.
There is a bunch of We had a casino.
And they got all our slot machines.
- This happened right after his death? - Yeah.
- Who did this, what happened? - 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 savory kind of people, you know? I don't know.
I don't know.
My grandparents did put point blame at my mom.
And that's not cool.
She lost her husband.
You know, she lost her soul mate.
I, 100%, don't believe that was something that she did on purpose.
Robin had lived the lavish lifestyle when she was married to Jerry.
She had the 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.
Spin the Wheel of Justice.
Let's spin the wheel and see who it lands on this week.
We've come up on Ms.
Colombo.
She's been on the wheel a couple of weeks.
Okay.
Robin Colombo's 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 no money to back them.
And she would write them out and cash them.
And she got caught for that.
I remember Francesco 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 pocket book and just carry it out, because the security wouldn't stop a child.
Or if they did, it was, "Oh, put that down, Francesco.
" Yeah.
"That's not yours.
" She was training him at a very young age 'cause she 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'll admit.
The first couple of days, I had tickets in my hand.
I'm like, "Should I take over his business now?" - Because I could've easily - He could've.
I could've easily went to Uncle Jerry and say, "Hey let's continue this.
" I could've easily kept it going.
But I didn't, 'cause I didn't wanna look over my shoulder.
I thought they had it stopped when my brother passed away.
So I wasn't gonna use them, give them to anybody, or try to sell them.
I just destroyed them, hoping that it was never gonna be found out.
That was my goal.
I said my whole life, 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 like a factory.
Everybody's working.
Everybody's writing.
They're reviewing tapes.
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 middleman was Jerry Colombo who died in a car accident.
Okay.
Now what? The one thing that was still out there was really how mechanically is, is Jerry Jacobson doing this.
And that was kind of this nagging question mark.
We were just building the puzzle from all the pieces, and they were so many different pieces that we were putting together.
We were working a lot with the Atlanta division who had a surveillance team.
Like in the movies, guys parked in cars or following with binoculars, 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.
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 gonna hear you.
" And one day, we were just chitchatting, 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 say, "Hey, Jerry, when did you tell Leo to 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 would wanna tap your phones?" Jerry Jacobson was controlling all the pieces at that point, so he needed to replace Colombo as quickly as possible.
Identification of sources that he could use of recruiters became his fulltime job.
One of the middle men, AJ Glomb, came on the radar, screened fairly early.
After Colombo died, Glomb had a number of telephonic conversations with Jerry Jacobson.
And we follow where the evidence leads you.
My name is Andrew Glomb.
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 was like, "Oh, no, no.
" I said, "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.
How did you get into selling drugs? Actually, that's one of the best parts of the whole story.
First time I ever did any kind of drugs was with Harold Robbins, a writer.
And we were in Monte Carlo.
And he had a bunch of girls.
Women that were talking And his books.
Whenever they were having sex, they always did amyl nitrate before they had an orgasm.
And so I said, "Harold, do you have 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 and this girl says, "Let's dance.
" I said, "All right.
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.
" So that was my first thing with drugs.
So how I got into selling them I had a cousin.
He says, "Can you get me some Quaaludes?" "So let me ask one of my buddies.
" I said, "Steve, can you get Quaaludes?" He said, "Yeah.
How many you want?" And I said, "I don't know.
" I said "How much are they?" He said, "Well, how much do you wanna make?" I said, How much is there to make?" So that's how I got into drugs.
And 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 twelve years for six ounces of cocaine.
I was supposed to report to Montgomery, Alabama.
And they gave me 30 days or 60 days to report, so I just didn't report.
I waited till like almost the last day.
And then I took off for New York 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.
So 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 doughnut 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, "You know, Don, I just got off a parole.
" I said, "I don't think I wanna know anything about it.
" And then probably two or three days later, I said, "Let's meet and we'll talk about it.
" Don was one of my best friends for, oh, jeez, 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 says, "'cause he knows I'm not gonna 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 could cash in for a million dollars, and we'll share it.
" When somebody offers you a million dollars, you're gonna take it.
Unless you got to kill somebody, then you might not be interested.
But I start thinking about it.
I said, "I better not do this to myself.
I don't want to go back to prison.
" So I had a friend in San Diego.
I got a plane and flew to San Diego the next day.
And then I ran it by him, told him how it worked and everything.
And we were gonna split it three ways: me, Don Hart, and Stanley, who I was giving the ticket to.
And I remember he told me the manager said, "The last time somebody won, they gave the ticket to St.
Jude.
" So Stanley says, "Well, it's not happening this time.
It's not going to anybody except me.
" So that was it.
So he mailed it in and after that, I made several trips out to California to get the money from him.
After Stanley was Richard Sokolski, I believe.
Victor Marcitello was the third person I gave a ticket to.
I met him in prison in West Virginia.
The next was Stan Warwick in Chicago, Stan was a heart transplant recipient and these newscasters said, there's a guy with a heart transplant eating McDonald's.
- Free food.
- Yup.
We have free food.
- And another free sandwich.
- Yeah, there you go.
I'm too nervous.
I can't do this.
I don't think I met Jerry until halfway through all these people.
It must've been in '99 at Don's party.
What was your first impression of meeting him? Nothing.
I didn't think nothing on it.
To sort of non-descript.
Then eventually, Don didn't wanna 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 can honestly say I never had a close relationship with him.
Turned out Andrew Glomb was a large recruiter.
Had provided quite a few, had enriched himself and Uncle Jerry, he had a wide net there of individuals who were willing 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.
Everybody got a bill every month with all the long distance calls 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 that each made, there would be, "Wow, they're both calling a common number.
Look at that.
We have this winner has called AJ Glomb.
So has Jerry Jacobson.
" But yeah, that's how we started finding other middle men.
So then you start looking at Dwight Baker.
Gorgeous subdivision.
I developed it in '87, '88.
Well, half a million, about 450 or not.
I owned all this property on the left at one time.
I was gonna build a little golf course in here.
I'm Dwight Baker.
Developer.
Got a real estate broker's license and builder's license and developed quite a number of projects, probably over 1400 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 and a dock.
Then I sold him a couple lots in another subdivision.
Right below that sign there are the two lots Jacobson owned.
Right here.
It's this property here.
I don't know if there's houses on them now or not.
My family probably not gonna 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.
One of my biggest regret is being involved in this McDonald's thing.
Yeah, I shouldn't have been involved in it.
Yup.
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 was stalled out.
And I went into the big pile of rock.
Put me in the hospital 10 days.
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, "Y'all have to pull up to the door because I got a walker.
" So he pulls up to the back door and we go riding up the mountain.
He said he was representing McDonald's in the distribution of the game pieces.
He knew I was going through a tough time.
So he offered me a game piece if I had a hundred thousand dollars.
I didn't have a hundred thousand, so, he said, "Listen, if you want one, it's a hundred thousand dollars.
It's the only way you're gonna get one.
" He said, "I have the responsibility of distributing, they tell me where to go.
So if you want a game piece, this is how it's done.
" This is the subdivision we were in, traded game pieces and gave him money.
It is a secluded place, yeah.
It's a secluded place.
I knew he was selling game pieces.
And maybe he was doing something illegal.
And I ask him, "Jerry, what happens if McDonald's finds out about it?" He said, "They're not gonna do anything about it.
" I said, "Why is that?" He said, "Because these game pieces increase their sales by seven percent out of twenty-six thousand stores.
Factoring in a million-dollar game piece on that kind of money, eighty-nine million, a hundred million dollars.
They didn't care.
If somebody got it, they didn't care if it went in the trash.
They didn't care about it.
It was factored in.
" That was his story.
I bought it.
I didn't believe there was anything other than we were cheating in a game.
I don't know if it was the oxycodone from the accident, but I took my part.
I didn't know if I was ever gonna walk again, let alone, work again.
"I don't have a hundred thousand, but I might know somebody that does.
" Breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
There's always a line.
- Hey, a Big Mac combo please.
- Yeah.
Serving over 13 million McDonald's customers each year in the US, double 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.
My breakfast, I got my hash browns and coffee, filled it off, and 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.
America.
God shed his grace on thee.
Just like that.
See? They like it.
From sea to shining sea.
We should've brought some more feed to the 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, 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.
We're not talking about ancient history here, we're talking about 1986.
Most people have running water at that point and we were still using a well.
What do you think? Dwight was very successful.
He had a family and he had five kids.
I became friends with his son.
And when I was about 12, I left home and Dwight Baker was foster father to me for a time.
Well, George and I, we went to church together, families so we took him in.
We became foster parents for George and he grew up with our kids.
Being in such a big family and being poor especially, why would I not wanna move in with Dwight? He drove a BMW and had those successful characteristics that I wanted.
George has always been highly special.
He wanted just to absorb knowledge, absorb anything you could teach him.
He knew if he's gonna get out, he needed to work hard.
When I was 15 years old, I quit school.
I grown a moustache to make me look older and called some local employers that I was 18 and I immediately went to work.
I worked sixteen hours a day instead of eight.
That proved to work for me and became an entrepreneur.
Communications company, septic system installers, security company, medical alarm monitoring, industrial programming, residential rentals, commercial rentals.
I probably would've been a millionaire by the time I was 25.
So when Dwight came to me with a ticket, he knew that I was in a position that I had some cash to work with.
This is a million-dollar winning ticket and he's got it in a Ziploc sandwich bag that's not even zipped and he lays it down on my desk, and I take it out, look at it.
It just says one million dollar winner, call 1-800 whatever.
I said, "A friend got this million dollar game piece from McDonald's.
" "He's going through divorce.
" I said, "He offered to sell it to me.
" "I'll split it with her and pay the taxes.
" I said, "I'll sell it for 100K" Because he's going through a divorce and he doesn't think the ticket should be considered marital property.
With Dwight's friend, I didn't know this guy from Adam, never met him.
But I had already gone through a very bitter divorce myself.
So I felt like it was a legitimate concern.
He was already separated and 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 him what Jerry told you? Well, because I didn't want him to know I was involved in it, in something that wasn't real.
That had a tent of I knew Jerry has done something wrong, it didn't feel like it was the right thing to do for me to be involved.
But yeah, I did it out of expediency maybe and I just tried to protect him from the truth of it.
Because if it did backfire and it wasn't going it wasn't right, he didn't need to have any knowledge of anything.
I took that all on my shoulders.
So He basically asked me, would I be interested in buying the ticket from them and then redeeming it.
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 ones that matchup like Boardwalk and Park Place.
I told Dwight, "Yeah, I'll probably do a hundred thousand dollars.
" You win $50,000 a year for 20 years.
And 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 I'll gain something.
It wasn't a tremendously beneficial thing, it wasn't like I was just gonna get this huge pile of money.
But it was nonetheless still a good business decision, a good business deal.
So I did it.
We were up on Dwight's firm and then we start to figure out, "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.
To the best of my knowledge, all of mine, I believe, were 50,000.
You could go down this list.
I had one, two, three, four, eight, nine, ten winners.
Out of giving away $10 million dollars, I made $614,000.
So how stupid am I? Then we come to Michael Hoover.
August 2001.
Michael Hoover was one of the most generous people we ever met, a great, great friend, just real easygoing, nothing bothered him.
He 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 said, "I got something that you might be interested in.
" 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.
I'm glad that after the beach, I stopped and picked up another one.
He called me and said, this production company did the commercial.
"This girl is really hot.
I think she really liked me.
" I said, "Oh, great.
" I didn't think nothing out of it.
In the wire room, we're listening some of those phone calls to Hoover.
Glomb was on the other side going, "Really? What did she look like?" I think all of the winners thought I really liked them, that's the kind of person I am.
I was interviewing them like a friend, so it was my job to make sure that they felt comfortable.
She was sick to her stomach.
That was her reaction and 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.
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 where the people, the hospitality, the neighborliness and 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.
Good job, Gary.
Nice job, Gary.
Nice job.
To tell 'em exactly why I'm innocent.
This is the McDonald's where it all happened.
There was a press conference, a party and a real Ronald McDonald was here.
It was kind of surreal.
He said, "Mom, I won a million dollar," I said, "Prove it!" He said, "Mom, it's real.
" I didn't he was serious, I was like, you're not serious.
As a single father to eight-year-old Russell, George Chandler says he will use his 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 done a lot more harm than good, and I already run up a business in town, and I was surrounded by this notion that I was a millionaire now.
I didn't need to work, I didn't need any new customers.
I had to put out a hundred thousand dollars of my own money for this thing.
And I had no question whatsoever about the authenticity or legitimacy of the ticket or the origination None ever occurred to me, and we're talking about Dwight Baker.
I didn't take any cut out of the money.
And it was all Jerry's.
I told him, I said, "George, listen.
" "You just give me a Navigator and a laptop and I'll be happy.
" Didn't want George to think bad of me, for actually having a little larceny in my heart.
I didn't won a whole lot, I just won a little laptop and a Navigator.
Then I went to Ronnie Hughey and offered it to him.
And that's how my greed kicked in.
Ronnie was just a high roller.
He was going through a divorce and he said, "I'll take two or three of this.
" That was probably the real where I really stepped over the boundary was when Ronnie said, "I'll take one, or two, or three of that.
" And I knew he could.
And I remember Jerry telling me, "You're getting a little greedy.
" Yeah.
Each time is a little different.
From Ronnie Hughey I got a lake lot or two.
Jerry brought me fries and a drink, and you had the game pieces on.
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 got the tickets? Never asked him.
Jerry used to say all the time, this is gonna be the last one.
"This is gonna be the last one.
" And then one time he said, there's gonna be a five-million-dollar prize that they're gonna give.
You take that one And I don't know how we're gonna split it, but he said, then that's it.
We'll ride into the sunset and forget it so Jerry was very proud but very secretive.
He never talked about anything with anybody else.
I knew he was selling the game pieces, but I didn't know to what degree.
Jerry told me, "There's a half-a-million-dollar game piece, with a McDonald's issue on $500,000 check cash.
And we didn't have to wait 50,000 a year.
" And I wanted it.
And so, I made arrangements with my wife's sister, Brenda.
And I said, "Cash that check and we'll split it.
" I thought it was gonne be a tough sell, but it wasn't.
And we created an address for her in Asheville, North Carolina.
She turned in the game piece, 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 piece.
And I said, "I'm gonna go up to Asheville and see what's going on.
" And I went up there.
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 gonna keep all the money, run with the money.
That scared the shit out of me because I knew Jerry wasn't gonna be happy.
Jerry told me, "If there's a problem, I'd get a visit from his cousin Guido.
And I took that pretty serious.
I 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.
Because she looked at it as 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 Phenas and for whatever reason didn't 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 Phenas was running around the Indianapolis Airport and Dwight was looking to bury her somewhere.
They're saying he's following her to the airport, he says he's gonna kill her, but there was a lot of concern on that.
What are we gonna do if they are in fact really gonna harm her? We've obviously have to intervene.
But that would have serious consequences for the investigation.
One little slip up 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.
He can't be trusted what he have.
Okay! George George! George! Let's have fun, y'all.
She got run over by a damn yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so I'll hang around as long as you will let me.
Oh, sounds good.
And I never minded standing here in the rain.
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 could blend in the crowd at the airport ready to take action.
In a lot of cases, really bad things happen.
Things go wrong, they always do.