Remember those McDonalds Monopoly promotional games that McDonalds used to due during the 90s. Where your meal would come with...
Remember those McDonalds Monopoly promotional games that McDonalds used to due during the 90s. Where your meal would come with little coupons that were supposed to represent properties from the monopoly boardgame that you could combine to win prizes, including a $1 million grand prize? Turns out it was rigged by the mafia. Because of course it was.
According to Jacobson, when the computerized prize draw selected a factory location in Canada, Simon Marketing executives re-ran the program until it chose an area in the USA. Jacobson claimed he was ordered to ensure that no high-level prizes ever reached the Great White North. “I knew what we were doing in Canada was wrong,” Jacobson recalled. “Sooner or later somebody was going to be asking questions about why there were no winners in Canada.” Believing the game was rigged, he decided to cash in too.
Not long afterward, Jacobson opened a package sent to him by mistake from a supplier in Hong Kong. Inside he found a set of the anti-tamper seals for the game piece envelopes—the only thing he needed to steal game pieces en route to the factory. “I would go into the men’s room of the airport,” he later admitted, the only place the female auditor couldn’t follow him. “I would go into a stall. I would take the seal off.” Then he’d pour the winning game pieces into his hand, replace them with “commons,” and re-seal the envelope. First, he stole a $1 million “Instant Win” game piece and locked it in a safety deposit box. Then he stole documents that he claimed proved the Canada conspiracy. “I thought I would need that to protect myself,” Jacobson recalled. If his employer ever fired him, he had a “get out of jail free” card.
Robin told me that Uncle Jerry’s money soon funded certain Colombo-run businesses, including a private members’ club in Hilton Head. She thought he was sophisticated and liked the way he dressed. In return, Jacobson sent other “opportunities” to the Colombos, Robin told me. Late one night, she was stoned and rifling through the kitchen for a snack, when she found in their freezer a mysterious plastic bag. Inside was a single gray-colored M&M candy, which was part of a promotional contest, she said. In 1997, the Mars candy company launched a competition to find an “imposter” M&M, along with a game piece that made the winner an instant millionaire. (Mars did not respond to enquiries, but records show that Cyrk, a company that produced promotional materials for Mars, merged with Simon Marketing in 1997.) Colombo suddenly appeared behind her, grabbed the bag and yelled:
“Do not eat this!”
Murray was a quick-thinking Midwesterner who had risen through the ranks at McDonald’s, and was often the public face of the company during any drama. She was the “McQueen” of McDonald’s, said Joe Maggard, a disgraced Ronald McDonald actor who was convicted of making harassing phone calls while posing as the clown.
Good article.
Interesting meta-follow up: this whole article was commissioned by a Hollywood producer in order to auction the story to a film studio:
But in the end — just about 72 hours after the story’s publication, to be precise — only one group would emerge victorious: 20th Century Fox and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s production company Pearl Street Films, which bid an eye-watering $1 million for the 8,700-word online long read (most articles command option fees of less than $1,000). That’s the highest price ever paid for an optioned article in Hollywood history, according to agents who worked on the deal. The plan is for Affleck to direct and Damon to star (presumably as Jacobson) with hot-shot Deadpool writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese handling script duties.
Which would all be a happy Hollywood ending for any ink-stained wretch trying to pump out long-form narrative nonfiction these days. Except this wasn’t just good luck or some kind of fluke that “McScam” had so thoroughly connected with Hollywood: Klawans and Maysh had been developing the article with the specific aim of turning it into a film since 2016.
Klawans (Nacho Libre, Amazon Prime’s The Legend of Master Legend) is the independent movie and TV producer known for his meticulous research: reading through countless niche journals, RSS feeds, police blogs, library microfiche and clippings from news outlets from around the globe in pursuit of ripped-from-the-headlines movie fodder. Seizing upon the oddball and the obscure — often long-forgotten spot news about people with hidden lives doing weird, wonderful, often shocking things — he enlists a small cadre of professional journalists to re-research the subjects, then write long-form articles that get published in reputable magazines, newspapers, and websites. The idea is that articles are better than pitch meetings — that development executives will be more likely to open their checkbooks if the “planted” story is arranged into a linear narrative with a three-act structure. Klawans buys the story subjects’ life rights and will often circulate an unpublished article to Hollywood production companies before publication to gin up interest.
The foremost example of this M.O.: 2012’s Argo. In the late ’90s, the producer had read the then-recently declassified testimony of CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez in a CIA journal, detailing how he helped American diplomats escape the 1979 Iran hostage crisis by posing them as a group of Canadian filmmakers. Hiring journalist Joshuah Berman to pitch and “plant” the piece in Wired, Klawans then sold the project to George Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures with Ben Affleck starring and directing. Argo went on to gross $232 million and win the best picture Oscar in 2013.
Media gets weird sometimes.