The Great McDonald's Monopoly Heist | The Man Behind McMillions

From Airship, I'm Jeremy Schwartz, and this is American Criminal. In the year of 2001, you couldn't turn on a TV without hearing about the McDonald's Monopoly game and how a ring of criminals had rigged it.

The promotion was so beloved that people felt a sense of betrayal. They'd been promised the opportunity to win a slice of the American dream, a million dollars.

But it turned out it was a false promise, and it was one of the biggest stories in the country. But then the attacks of September 11th changed everything.

They didn't undo what Jerome Uncle Jerry Jacobson had done, but they knocked the story off the airwaves. They knocked every story off the airwaves. So what had been a huge deal didn't matter anymore.

Like the rest of the country, the media shifted its attention, and never really returned to a promotional game from a fast food chain. It took almost two decades for the McDonald's Monopoly Heist to finally make headlines again.

And when it did, it was because one man was up late one night, scrolling through his phone, and he read one sentence that blew his mind. After that, he couldn't rest until he knew the full story.

James Lee Hernandez is one of the directors behind the HBO documentary series McMillions, which finally reminded the world about what Uncle Jerry did.

He's been nominated for a couple Emmy Awards for his work, which have included The Big Con, Lala, The Story of Lala Palooza, and of course McMillions.

Our producer Joel Callan, who you might have heard on the show in the past, sat down with James to talk about how he first heard about the case, how we got the FBI to talk about this story, and the experience of interviewing so many people directly

involved in the heist. involved in the heist.

2:34

Crime Justification

The rationalization that you hear from everybody involved on the criminal side, and especially from Uncle Jerry himself, is that McDonald's is a multi-billion dollar company.

Somebody has to win these games. So all we're doing is just deciding for them who is going to win. And it seems like a victimless crime, essentially.

But that is the fallout. Nobody ever saw that far into the future that, oh, by doing this, it's going to bankrupt an entire company. It's going to bankrupt multiple companies.

People are going to be out of the job. You know, there are 53 people who became federal criminals because of this. It is, you know, the tail and the web of all of this was so much bigger than anybody even realized.

And it's interesting, talking to Curtis Fahlgetter, who is the defense attorney for George Chandler, he talked about how, like, we're sitting in federal court and we're looking at the rules of a game from, you know, a fast food company.

That's not federal law, but at the same time, like, you're stealing. Like, you can rationalize it however you want.

And Mark Devereaux has a great way of explaining this in the series, The Federal Prosecutor, about like, look, you are stealing and you're using the US mail, the US phone system, you're using multiple ways of defrauding American citizens who had the

And you know, that legal argument that was made, and I think it was George who was sort of, you know, the one who sort of fought back and was like, no, I'm not pleading guilty.

I didn't do anything wrong.

It was a little frustrating as someone, you know, reading the story and reading newspaper articles and reading your book about it, having the prosecutor be like, yes, this woman that he thought he was taking the money from didn't exist, but that

still makes him a bad guy because he thought she did exist. I'm like, but she wasn't real, you know, it's this weird thing where I'm like, that's not fair. That's like, you're making up rules now, you know?

That whole argument is so fascinating to me because it really does go deep into, like, one of my friends went to law school and he told me one of the first questions they ask in one of the like early 101 classes that they have is if a person walks in

a house, sees someone laying on a couch, shoots them and kills them, and then later finds out they're already dead, is that murder? It's such a mind bending thing to think about these things.

Like, how much is intent compared to like what actually happened?

My mind was sort of doing back bends and stuff trying to figure out like how I felt about each individual person in this story.

But okay, before I forget, I wanted to take a moment and say thank you for joining us today by the way, James Lee Hernandez.

Oh, you're welcome. It's funny. So that's my full name, James Lee Hernandez.

But the only people who say it out loud are people in interviews and my mom if I'm in trouble. So it's always interesting hearing the full thing.

Okay. I'm going to refrain from using the full thing. I won't middle name you anymore.

I don't want to get that cold sweat of being like, oh God, why is my mom middle naming me? You know, what have I done?

Exactly.

Well, so yeah, thank you for joining us for American Criminal. I wanted to take a step back for a second and I want to get to McMillions in a minute. But so you made this incredible series and you wrote this fascinating book about that whole process.

And what was really incredible to me was that was your first documentary series, right?

Correct. Yeah, that was the first time I had ever done a doc was McMillions. I mean, I had done small branded content videos with interviews.

I had done a lot of different things like that over the years, but nothing to the scale of this. The thing with McMillions is it was six episodes. Originally when it was Greenlit, it was five.

So it was going to be five 50 to 60 minute episodes, and then it ended up being six. And sustaining a story over that amount of time was quite the feat.

So it was a huge, huge story, but it was one of those things where I've always heard this from any first time filmmaker when they do their big project is, you know, everybody on the project knows more than them, except for I knew the story better

So how did you first hear about this whole McDonald's Monopoly case?

What's fascinating was it was memory hold by everyone for like 20 years. So how did you first get onto it?

6:58

Research Journey

I got into it just as anybody does.

I was like laying in bed. Sometimes if I can't sleep, I'll go on Reddit and just like laugh at dumb cat videos, or like read stupid articles. And there was a TIL.

Today, I learned nobody really won the McDonald's Monopoly game. And I grew up in the 90s, like anybody who grew up during that era was obsessed with that game, specifically like in America.

That was every time it came around, I was convinced I'm winning a million dollars. Like, this is a huge thing, begging my mom to go to like random McDonald's whenever we had to drive far, just because like that might be the place with the piece.

And you have the back of your mind, even though I was a kid, but you have the back of your mind like this is rigged. Like, I'm trying to win this, but like how am I not winning because I am eating more than enough McDonald's.

And I tap on the link and it takes me to an article for a local Jacksonville newspaper. And it basically says the general breakdown of the story, it was right when the arrest happened. So this was an article from back in 2001.

And it said like, this many people are arrested, this many people are being brought in for questioning. Basically, if you play the game between 1989 and 2001, you almost had no chance of winning any of the high level prizes.

And so that article was not enough for me. Like I would have to say, to put it nicely about myself, psychotically research things. So I went down the rabbit hole hard.

I was like, okay, where's the book? Where's the doc? Where's I need all the information I can find on this thing.

And I found a lot of local newspaper things, a few national newspaper things, but not much. And I was really surprised for something that seemed so massive to me.

And so I just kept looking into it over the next couple of years, like digging into it as deep as I could. And then Peter King, who I used to work with at Hallmark, and also then I worked with on McMillions.

And then he worked with me on the Big Con, a bunch of other things since then. And he said, well, why don't you do a freedom of information request with the US government and just see what files you can get? So he helped me out, we did that.

And it only took three years for that to go through. So I first discovered the story in 2012. And then in the summer of 2017, I finally got approved by the federal government, and they started sending me some of the paperwork.

It wasn't a full, full approval, but I got enough to see who the federal prosecutor was, who the lead FBI agent was, and some of the other key figures that you couldn't just Google and find.

Yeah.

And that was the kickoff of like summer 2017. Then I reached out to the FBI agents and the federal prosecutor, and they said nobody has ever reached out to us about this before, and it's our favorite case.

So come on down to Jacksonville and let's talk.

That's wild, because watching the documentary series, you're like, wait, the FBI is so excited to talk about this case.

Well, you have to think, they're usually either sworn to secrecy on certain things, or as Doug Matthews would tell you, talking about health care fraud's not that exciting.

So this is one of those cases that one, isn't ultra dark, and two, is fully adjudicated. So there's no way it can come back in any sort of way.

So it's fully dead, and it just has the fun factor to it in a way that it's not like fun if someone is like, just like a cartel leader killing people. That's not, you know, you're not going to be laughing during that story.

No, not so much. So once you sort of discovered this story, you know, how early on did you sort of think like, oh, I want to make a documentary series about this, or I want to do something with this.

I mean, instantly, once I found out there was nothing on it, I first thought, okay, like my background is in scripted stuff. I'm going to do like a scripted movie on this. I'm going to write the script on it.

And that was just, I was just doing research to like write a script and like do it that way.

And once I found out that there was a tape, that once there was an undercover tape that like could have been gotten, even though it was like a legendary thing, it was almost like Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail.

It was just like a whisper of a thing that exists, but nobody's ever really seen it. And once I found out about that, I was like, wow, this really should be done as a doc, because if that tape exists, people need to see it.

And then once I actually met the agents, because even with pitching this, the first time I told people like, really this whole thing is going to be from the FBI's point of view, and we're going to follow their investigation.

I mean, instantly you think FBI agents are basically like robots that wear suits. Like they're not very exciting. Even in movies, like the most exciting FBI agent still is like the boring part of the movie, and then you get back to the fun criminals.

But these guys were amazing. They were totally atypical of what I ever expected, especially Doug Matthews, but I mean even Mark Devereaux, Chris Graham, like all these guys, Doug Astralaga.

They all had these interesting personalities, and I started to realize like, it's so fascinating. They take this one little clue, and it somehow blows up into this huge investigation.

You know, the FBI, you always think like, they just know everything at all times. Like they make two phone calls and that's it. You know, crime is solved.

But to watch them actually use different techniques and investigate and work together, I thought it was so awesome. So like, okay, we need to do this as a doc, and then we'll figure out the movie later on.

So I'm interested to know, cause you said you started thinking about it as like a scripted feature or a limited series.

I'm interested to know, what was the process, like sort of the learning curve for you of like taking this story that you're thinking, oh, I'm gonna make this into a feature and then translating your skills as a storyteller and going like, okay, I'm

gonna make this a documentary series now. Was that difficult to sort of shift gears like that?

13:07

Filming Challenges

Well, I'll let you in a little secret.

I approach it exactly the same way. One, it's helpful that the story is outrageous and has all these natural twists and turns and all of that.

But when Brian and I first started working together, he had been working in documentaries, editing high level documentaries for about a decade. And I used to work for his wife at Hallmark. She was the head of production there.

And so when I got access to the FBI and the agents were like, yeah, come to Jacksonville, I reached out to her and I knew him just from team dinners and things like that.

And he and I went to lunch and I kind of broke down everything and I said like, I've never done a doc. Like what steps do I take? And he basically laid out like, okay, you need to go like interview with them.

You need to lock in, if you can lock in life rights and do all these different things. And so I started doing all of that. But at the same time, you also need to make a pitch deck and a sizzle to actually like sell the project.

And so I went about writing a pitch deck and a write up. Like I was writing a Bible for a TV show. Like the original write up of this whole story is about 70 pages long.

And it turned into the book, because I put so much detail into it in a way that I didn't realize people don't normally do. I just was like, I need to know the whole story. Like, how does it lay out?

What are all the different pieces? Who are the key people within it? And that was a huge help then later on with like getting anybody involved.

Anytime we brought an editor in or a story producer, it's like, here's the 70 page Bible, read through this whole thing and you'll be able to catch up immediately with where we are in the process and how the story goes overall.

And even now today, with the Big Con, with Lollapalooza, all these projects that I do, I always end up writing basically a script for the entire thing. And then it morphs and changes.

And of course, in a documentary, once you get into an edit, that's a whole other thing of like documentaries are written in the edit. But it really does help to have that backbone.

And of course, networks do appreciate it because they know where you're going and don't expect any huge curveballs.

Right.

15:19

Production Surprises

Speaking of curveballs, was there anything that really shocked you and surprised you while you were making McMillions? Like anything that came out in an interview that you were like, oh, I was not expecting this piece of information.

That happened all the time. The first things that pop into my head of shocking moments, one was showing up to Robin Colombo's house. She lived in this, not the best part of Jacksonville as she would admit.

During the time she's moved into a better place since then, but we roll into her tiny apartment and everything is red. And she's like in her room getting ready. A friend of hers was there and let us in.

I was like, oh, she's getting ready. Just like hang out here for a second. So we're looking at like where to set the camera, you know, kind of evaluating everything.

And then she walked out wearing an all red dress with red hair. And then she had her red couch and red dress. Like, I feel like people are going to think I told her to do this, but this is a hundred percent her.

I had no say in that. So that was pretty awesome. And then, you know, another big curve ball was Lee Cassano.

When she told us that she was the one that, well, at least at the time, she thought she was the informant because she told the IRS.

That was a mind-blowing thing because we had heard all these different whispers of who they thought the informant was and all this different stuff. And, you know, it was pretty wild to hear her side of the story of how everything went down.

That was crazy. And there's tons of other wild moments, but those two popped out right away.

Yeah, I loved, you know, going, because I watched the documentary series when it came out. And then in preparation for this series from when I was writing, it was like, okay, I'm going to sit down and watch this again.

And it was so fun going back and watching it again, because there are so many moments where you're like, oh crap, like this is the big reveal of the series.

And then the next episode, you're like, wait, no, no, no, that wasn't the big reveal of the series. It's still coming up, you know, it's a lot of fun.

Well, first of all, thank you for watching it when it originally ran and getting us those viewing numbers. I think at the time, I don't know what it is now, but we were the highest, the most watched documentary or documentary series in HBO history.

Did you have an inkling that it was going to be huge, that everyone was going to gravitate towards it because of the hugeness of the McDonald's Monopoly promotion?

Yes, I was endlessly confident in this project. I knew that if I was this into the story and I was this blown away, because I was living the episodes as they happened basically.

I'd be in these interviews and be like, this person is amazing, this person is amazing.

I just had an innate feeling that all of this stuff was, people are going to feel the same way about it that I do, and as a person who's basically watched everything that comes out since I was born, I have to think I have a pretty good read on what's

interesting and what's not, and I had a feeling that you combine an unbelievable story and unbelievable characters with the idea of this huge brand, two huge brands, with Monopoly and McDonald's, and something that was so big and widely loved during

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22:31

Game Fraud History

We're back with James Lee Hernandez, Co-Director of the Hatred documentary series, McMillions.

It's such an interesting story to look at from, you know, just sort of symbolically, you know, you've got these two big markers of American capitalism and consumerism with McDonald's and Monopoly.

There's two huge success stories, and Monopoly is already this game about screwing people over, and its history is in this guy who screwed this woman over.

But you've also got them combining to give people millions of dollars at the end of the 80s, you know, this decade of excess. But then it turns out it's also this like big, you know, fraud. You mentioned like all these interesting characters.

So you and your directing partner, Brian, spoke to a lot of people who were directly involved in the story. You know, you had people from McDonald's head office, you had FBI agents as we've talked about, and people who took part in the heist.

I'm interested to know who was the most eager to speak with you about their experience. It sounds like it was the FBI, but...

Yes, the FBI agents. So, the first person I talked to was Chris Graham. So, he was the squad chief of the White Collar Crime Squad at Jacksonville.

And coincidentally, he lived in Santa Monica at the time. So, it was awesome. It was like, I hit him up on LinkedIn.

He was very receptive. And we met at Barney's Beanyery on 3rd Street in Santa Monica. And to me, this was the first person I'm meeting from this story that I've been obsessed with.

And it was like Elvis walked in. I was like, Oh my God, this is so amazing. I can't believe I'm going to be.

And he was so cool and really broke everything down in a way that I didn't fully understand. Cause if you're not in the FBI, you don't totally get how it all works.

And then right after that, I got in communication with Mark Devereaux and Mark Devereaux was awesome. And he, again, was like, this is my favorite case. This is amazing.

Like nobody's ever reached out. Let's like, yeah, totally down to talk about it. And then on that call, he said, you know what?

I should loop in Doug because he was the, even though he was a rookie and Rick Dent was a senior agent, he was really like the main person on this whole thing.

And he three way called him and two seconds into Doug being on the phone, I was like, I'm coming to Jacksonville tomorrow. You guys are unbelievable.

It's interesting. You talked about the first guy walking in and feeling like Elvis. I remember that same feeling on our first series for American Criminal.

We did the Menendez Brothers and we got to speak to Hazel Thornton, who was one of the jurors for one of Menendez Brothers. And that was a case that I had a lot of strong passions about years ago.

And so getting to speak with her was very cool for us. You know, it was like, oh, my God, this is a real person. You know, we get to sit there and ask all the questions.

It is pretty wild.

I mean, it's like celebrities have the same problem. And in this case, you know, even like starting as an editor, is that like, you know everything about a person before you meet them.

Was there anyone you wanted to interview who really took some convincing?

Yes. Look, the FBI side of this, it's all fun and games for them. But on the criminal side, you know, for a lot of them, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to them or one of the worst moments of their life.

So almost every single one of them was very difficult to get. Varying degrees are very difficult.

George Chandler, I talked to him a few times, and then I started to realize that, look, this stuff's not going to be solved over the phone the same way the FBI agents were like, oh yeah, just come to Jacksonville and let's hang out, and then you can

do an interview. And so with George and a few other people, like AJ Glum and even Marvin, Marvin Braun, I just couldn't get through to them, because you get a phone call from somebody who lives in LA and works in entertainment.

They have all these ideas of what that type of person is. And so I said, you know what, I'm coming out. Next week, are you available?

I will fly to you. No strings attached. We'll go to lunch.

You can never talk to me again. And so flew into South Carolina, met and stayed with George for a couple of days. And he was obviously very skittish at the first time we met up.

And the lunch that we had with him, Dwight Baker also came. And Dwight was the person who roped him into it. And they had not seen each other in like a decade.

Oh, wow.

So it was, I wish I could have filmed that, but it was, you know, having a conversation, sitting down and a key thing with getting anybody involved with, you know, a person to do an interview on a project is like anything else.

It's all about trust. Like, how do they trust that we're not just going to make them look either terrible or do some salacious version of something and not just tell a 360 degree view of a story.

And part of it is just, you got to know you're a real person. Like, I may live in LA, I may work in entertainment, but I grew up like most people did in America.

Like, I'm not trying to, like, ruin their lives, but at the same time, like, this is a story that happened. It is public knowledge. Anyone can Google their name and find this information out.

So this is a way for you to tell your story with your own voice and stop having people second guess or come up with their own conclusions. Like, Gloria Brown is a single mom.

You know, she was trying to make ends meet, and she gets involved in this whole thing. But if you Google Gloria Brown, it comes up federal criminal, and you might think she's some criminal mastermind.

But when you hear her story, you see that, like, you know, she kind of turned a blind eye to something that wasn't 100% up and up on the up and up. But she's not like, you know, with a gun robbing a bank or anything like that.

But it's hard to know until you hear the story.

Yeah, she's perhaps the most heartbreaking figure in this whole thing. You just like, everything you learn about Gloria, you just think, oh, this poor woman, she made one wrong mistake. She said yes to the right friend and...

I know.

So to like actually answer the question of all of it is that all of the criminal side were difficult, but Marvin was the hardest.

Okay, interesting.

He was the one that took the longest and we filmed with him almost right up against the deadline of when the edit was going to be finished. So we were really far along.

Yeah. And sort of to round out that this sort of trio of questions, was there a White Whale interview subject for this project? Like the person you really wanted to get and tried really hard, but you just couldn't get on camera?

Of course.

It was Uncle Jerry. Spoiler alert for anybody. We ended up talking to him on the phone a couple of times and, you know, he just didn't want to do it.

It was unfortunate. And like in some ways, though, I always look at it the same way as like a scary movie. Like, you know, when you meet him and talk to him, at the end of the day, he's just a regular guy.

But the idea of what everybody thought of him and how everything, like that's much bigger than like the myth is much bigger than the reality.

Yes. And so that brings me nicely to the next thing I wanted to talk to you about was, you know, was there ever a point that you sort of started to worry for your own safety while you were researching the story?

And I asked this because in episode four, I think it's Jerry Jacobson's wife starts telling stories about how violent a man he was and how he threatened to shoot her.

And then he said, you know, like, oh, I'll take my gun apart and put it back together in the way that they'll never catch me. And I don't know how possible that would be.

But does stuff like that weigh on you when you sort of are going through the investigation and going like, oh, am I, am I in danger here?

You know, I didn't think that there was only one time, but like specifically from him or anything else, I don't know, I guess it was a certain level of like, I was just so focused on telling the story and like putting all the pieces together that it

kind of made me blind to that possibility. But the one time that I felt not safe, Brian and as well as Jeff Dolan, our cinematographer can attest to this one, we were doing our first shoot and technically we weren't greenlit yet.

So just on our own dime, we were talking between HBO and Netflix on who we're going to go with on this. And I just wanted to start moving. I just knew like, you know, we need to start talking to people.

And so we went out to Florida, got a bunch of files and things from Mark Devereaux and different evidence pieces that he was able to like help us get access to.

And then we drove down a little bit further, like by Daytona Beach, Florida, to meet with the Colombo family.

And on the way to the airport, while I was still in LA, I got a text, like, I don't even know how they got my phone number, but they had a text like, hey, if you want the real story, I'm in Florida, let's meet up and talk.

And it was from Frank Colombo. And I was like, oh, funny enough, I'll be in Jacksonville in literally like six hours. So let's meet up, you know, a couple of days from now.

And he's like, okay, great. So we're messaging back and forth, you know, we're getting the evidence blah, blah. So we're gonna, we're like a day out from meeting him.

And like, okay, what time works for you? Do you want to do like breakfast or lunch or a dinner? And he's like, show up at my place at 10 p.m.

It's like, okay, that's a little late for a meeting, but whatever, if I'm a night person. So we drive down there, we turn on this block, and there's no street lights.

And we're in like, it's a neighborhood, track homes, but in Florida, like kind of by a swamp. And it's very dark. We pull up in front of this house, and there's six cars in their driveway.

And that was the first time, like, wait a minute, like, could this go bad? Like, is there something, like, is the Colombo family like gonna be in there and TARP's gonna be down? Like, what's happening here?

And of course, I've seen every mafia movie ever made. So, you know, my brain's jumping to conclusions like crazy. And we go inside, like we knock on the door, we go inside, and it's Frank, his wife, and his two sons.

And they were super nice. Like, there was no real threat other than the fact that they're actively drifters, like, you know, Tokyo drifts style. And so all those cars were theirs.

They each have their own drift car, along with a regular car. So they're just a family that loves cars. And I was jumping to conclusions for no reason.

No, I would have done the same thing.

Anywhere without streetlights. I'm like, no, I'm sorry. I can't find it.

I'm sorry. I have to go back to my hotel.

Yeah, Brian was with me. It was me, Brian and Jeff. And Brian's like, I'm going to text my wife just the address, just in case.

That's probably a good idea.

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33:39

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We're back with James Lee Hernandez, co-director of the HBO documentary series, McMillions. Okay, I wanted to shift gears for a second, because in case it's not obvious, I'm Australian.

And I remember in 1999, there was a scandal with the Australian version of the McDonald's Monopoly promotion. When I was 12, I sort of peeled off a game piece, and I was like, oh, this is King's Cross.

We've got the four railway stations, we get a camcorder. And so we sent it in, and McDonald's sent it back to us, and they're like, no, this isn't valid, this is an old game piece.

And it turned out that there were old game pieces in circulation still, and there was a big lawsuit.

And so I remember when I first heard about the McDonald's Monopoly scam, and specifically in relation to your documentary series in 2020, I was like, oh, this is about that. This is about, you know, the same thing must have happened in America.

Completely different though, and it's wild that it was sort of happening right around the same time.

And so, I was curious whether, you know, because you would have been doing such a deep dive into this, did you come across any other instances of these kinds of promotional games not working as intended?

Yes. So we heard about the Australia. We looked into that and saw the Australia piece of it.

There was a part that was brought up in court on this specific case of Jerry Jacobson claimed that McDonald's was purposely trying to not have anybody in Canada win, so only American people won it. The FBI looked into it.

They talked about it a ton and they found nothing on that. That was Jerry's claim. And there was no there, like we were never able to substantiate it.

We never found any evidence of any wrongdoing. They never found it. So who knows what actually happened.

But we talked to the woman who is the head of receiving for Simon Marketing. So whenever a game piece, somebody won it and you made that phone call, you called her and then she had to evaluate the piece.

Because as we show in the documentary series, there's all these different safety protocols, because people would try to do fake pieces all the time.

They would send encounter fit pieces or try these different little tips, like get a real piece and then try to adjust it. But they never passed. They had all these great security measures that nothing like that ever happened.

But those are some of the things that we had seen.

I mean, I wanted to sort of move into some specifics from the story itself, that I was like, I'm curious to know if you had any insight that you could give me for a couple of these things.

So for people like Gloria Brown, who got their winning game piece from Jerry Colombo, do you know if their situation changed after his sudden death?

Because, you know, the way it sort of it seemed like he was maybe sort of demanding that she give him money for as long as she was receiving it.

Do you know if anyone sort of stepped into his shoes to try and claim payments from Gloria after that, or did it just kind of, did she just sort of cease all contact with that family after that?

After that, that just sort of ended everything. Like there was nobody that we had heard of that tried to step in and really try to take over.

Jerry had a couple of like, quote, you know, goons, like guys that he always worked with, but he was really the brains of the operation. So once he was gone, it kind of just like everybody just moved on with their lives.

Right. Okay, and my second one of these is about Dwight Baker and his sister-in-law, Brenda. The last big thing we have is, you know, in your series and in your, you've got the scene in the book as well.

You've got this great footage of their confrontation at the airport with him and his wife and then Brenda.

And I wasn't sure whether they came to some kind of agreement about the money that Brenda had made off with, this $500,000, or whether they just kind of, you know, had an argument and then left, you know, do you know if they came to some kind of

Yeah, eventually they came to an agreement because they had their specific deal to begin with.

And then Brenda was like, I'm not doing that. Like, peace out. I'm keeping this money.

And so when Dwight and his wife, Linda, when they show up at the airport and like escort her basically back, Brenda then finally was like, okay, fine. Like, well, I'll, we'll do the original deal. Like I'll honor the original thing.

That was something that I was like, I want to know what their conversation was at the airport.

Yeah, it is such a wild thing.

And that was one of those shocking things. I couldn't believe that we were able to get that footage. Like that was, there were certain pieces of this that you hear about things existing and, you know, all this stuff.

And like some things we were not able to get, but we were able to get like the main tapes for the undercover footage. And then, yeah, that security footage was gold.

Well, and it's wild to think about, you know, when that was happening, given what happens in just a few months with the attacks of September 11th, it's fascinating to think about how that scene might have played out differently in a post-911 world.

Yeah, in general, this whole story would be so different if it happened post-911, because would they have taken the time that they took to like figure all this out, or would they have just targeted like, okay, these are the top three people, let's

So earlier this year, McDonald's brought back the Monopoly game for the first time in nearly a decade, and I was interested, were you following that promotion at all?

Were you sort of like, eagerly watching it to sort of see how they did things differently this time?

McDonald's I'm watching, that's all I can tell you. So first of all, everyone I have ever met in my life, text me that, like the announcement that they were doing it, I was flooded with people contacting me about it, like, did you know about this?

Are you watching? What's happening? I think, like, I posted something dumb on Instagram, like, ready for season two, if anything goes haywire, guys.

Right, yes.

Yeah, I went to a McDonald's and I was like, oh, now you have to get the app and scan the tickets in the app. And so it seems like there's more protection there, but I was like, that's not as fun as the stickers.

Yeah, you still have the P loss, but like that only gets you to then go to the app, the whole deal. It does seem a lot safer. Funny enough, I still talk to Doug Matthews, like all of the time.

And the first time I talked to him after that came out, I was like, do you see what came out? And he's like, oh man, that's so much more secure now. So yeah, he's confident and so am I.

And I think the people at McDonald's are wised up to the entire thing.

Yeah, right. Especially having, you know, because they were involved in the documentary as well. They've got to be extra careful.

Yeah.

Having spoken to so many people who were closely involved with the first version of the game, you know, like from the creation of it to the running of it to, you know, the subversion of it.

Why do you think these kinds of games or campaigns, I guess, are so popular? And, you know, for McDonald's especially, but other companies run these as well. I was just interested if you had any thoughts on that.

You know, I've definitely done a lot of thinking on this.

And it's just in general, I don't know if they're as popular worldwide from what I've seen, but specifically in America is, there's a reason the lottery is really popular. There's a reason that gambling is big.

It's just the idea that you can win something for free.

That whole concept of, you know, you had a pretty good chance of getting some French fries or a milkshake, but you could win money or pride, like just that opportunity triggers something in your mind of, you know, we could make food at home tonight,

or we could have an opportunity to win some free stuff by going to McDonald's. Like that whole concept is, you know, it's big. It really is a psychological trigger for people of like, I need to do this thing.

And McDonald's was smart because they made it essentially scarce. They used to only run it once a year. Then they started doing twice a year.

And every time they did it, their sales went up like 40, 50, 60 percent. It's crazy. But people love the idea of the possibility of winning something.

Yeah, I remember as a kid, I wouldn't have a big appetite, so I would always get like a small cheeseburger meal.

But whenever the McDonald's like Monopoly thing was around, I'd be like, I'm going to get a medium one so I can get, you know, I can get a sticker. It was working on me as like an eight year old.

Yeah, I didn't even like Big Macs, but a Big Mac box had the stickers on them. So I started eating Big Macs because of that.

They didn't come on burgers in Australia. They only came on fries and drinks.

Yeah, it was only on Big Macs. And then they eventually started doing Quarter Pounders. And then I switched to Quarter Pounders.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

In Australia, it's not called a Quarter Pounder. It's a, what, Royale Cheese, I think?

We do have a Quarter Pounder, but we also have a local variation called a McOz, which has beetroot on it, because that's a big thing on burgers in Australia.

43:46

Crafting Narratives

Okay, before we get too hungry, obviously we have a lot of people listening to American Criminal who were very passionate about true crime and history.

And so I was interested to know if you were going to offer any kind of advice to someone who was interested in telling these kinds of stories themselves.

Advice to anybody that is interested in telling stories like these, I would say the first thing is the research of it. Make sure that you really do the deep dive of the research of it.

And the other thing is, like, just remember these are human beings. I've seen a lot of now being in the industry for a while and having done multiple projects.

I always notice, for example, like The Big Con, like when we were doing that project, you know, American Greed, which, you know, they make a cool show, it's really interesting, but they kind of just treat it like a, I don't know, like a salacious,

it's like a tabloid thing. Whereas when we went to Eastern Kentucky and started talking to these people and realized like, yeah, you know, laws are broken.

There are federal criminals, there are a lot of bad things, but these are people that wanted to be treated like a person.

And so the having that attention to the idea that you are talking to a real person, this is their real life, and this is something that happened to them.

And you're just hoping to be a conduit for them to tell their story is a really, really big piece of all of this.

And it has really helped me as far as being able to align and talk to people and get them to go on camera and do interviews because at the end of the day, I'm not trying to ruin someone's life, I'm trying to be a megaphone for them to tell their

story. We always look at it as the 360 degree view of a story is more interesting than just trying to hammer away the one sexy part of the story.

To be able to take the time to talk about the fuzzy bunny, like we do in McMillions, even though it has nothing to do with the game, but you can go down and see these other veins of life.

Yes. Fuzzy Bunny was something I kept in, because this is a three-part scripted series, and Fuzzy Bunny, I was reading newspaper articles about it and watching all these old news clips. I was like, how can I fit this into the story?

I was like, I've only got three 45-minute episodes, I don't have room for it.

But I'm so glad that we have you here, because now I can tell people about it, that you have to go and watch the series, you have to read the books, you can hear about the Church of the Fuzzy Bunny.

It was so mind-blowing. And when we went to Frank Colombo's house, he had tapes of all the news coverage of it from the time, like VHS tapes, and we were watching it, and it was just blown away.

I had known about it a little bit, but seeing the insides of it, it just is so fascinating to me, I love it. I love it, and I also want a sign that says, Preachers Wanted Every Night. That was their sign out front of the church.

It's great.

Before we go, I just wanted to ask, did you have any upcoming or current projects that you wanted to plug, that you wanted to sort of direct our listeners to go and check out?

Well, we have, McMillions is on HBO Max. It's on different things around the world. There's McMillions, the book, which is awesome.

Brian and I wrote that, and it was quite the beast. From doing something totally different, but it was great.

We have a new project that's gonna be coming out in the spring of next year that I can't officially talk about, but just stay tuned to any socials to find that stuff. And then I'm launching a podcast in a couple weeks called Truly Unreal.

It's kind of me talking about the stories that I look into that aren't necessarily big enough for, or they are just, I end up getting pitched or brought or finding all these different weird, quirky stories so I can talk about that.

And then just like different things that I talk to the different FBI agents about, we'll have like cool guests on, it'll be a fun time.

That sounds awesome. I'm excited to listen to that. I'm gonna keep an eye out so I can subscribe as soon as it's available.

Great.

But yeah, thank you, James and Endus.

Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been so much fun talking to you. All right.

Thanks so much for having me.

That was our producer, Joel Callan's conversation with James Lee Hernandez, co-director of the McMillions documentary series and co-author of the book of the same name.

You can find his latest show, Truly Unreal, wherever you listen to podcasts. Now, before you go, don't forget to make sure you're subscribed to American Criminal and leave us a five-star rating.

You probably heard it from other podcasts, but those two little things really help us out a lot. You can also visit americancriminal.com to get in touch and let us know what criminals you'd like to hear about next.

American Criminal is a co-production of Airship and Evergreen podcasts. It's hosted, edited and produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz. Audio editing and sound design by Sean Ruhl-Hoffman.

Music by Thrum. This episode is written and researched by Joel Callan, managing producer Emily Burke. Executive producers are Joel Callan, William Simpson and Lindsey Graham.