"}\n\n\n\nRemember 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.\u00a0
\n\nAccording to Jacobson, when the computerized prize draw selected a \nfactory location in Canada, Simon Marketing executives re-ran the \nprogram until it chose an area in the USA. Jacobson claimed he was \nordered to ensure that no high-level prizes ever reached the Great White\n North. \u201cI knew what we were doing in Canada was wrong,\u201d Jacobson \nrecalled. \u201cSooner or later somebody was going to be asking questions \nabout why there were no winners in Canada.\u201d Believing the game was \nrigged, he decided to cash in too.
\nNot long afterward, Jacobson \nopened a package sent to him by mistake from a supplier in Hong Kong. \nInside he found a set of the anti-tamper seals for the game piece \nenvelopes\u2014the only thing he needed to steal game pieces en route to the \nfactory. \u201cI would go into the men\u2019s room of the airport,\u201d he later \nadmitted, the only place the female auditor couldn\u2019t follow him. \u201cI \nwould go into a stall. I would take the seal off.\u201d Then he\u2019d pour the \nwinning game pieces into his hand, replace them with \u201ccommons,\u201d and \nre-seal the envelope. First, he stole a $1 million \u201cInstant Win\u201d game \npiece and locked it in a safety deposit box. Then he stole documents \nthat he claimed proved the Canada conspiracy. \u201cI thought I would need \nthat to protect myself,\u201d Jacobson recalled. If his employer ever fired \nhim, he had a \u201cget out of jail free\u201d card.
\n\n\nRobin told me that Uncle Jerry\u2019s money soon funded certain \nColombo-run businesses, including a private members\u2019 club in Hilton \nHead. She thought he was sophisticated and liked the way he dressed. In \nreturn, Jacobson sent other \u201copportunities\u201d to the Colombos, Robin told \nme. Late one night, she was stoned and rifling through the kitchen for a\n snack, when she found in their freezer a mysterious plastic bag. Inside\n was a single gray-colored M&M candy, which was part of a \npromotional contest, she said. In 1997, the Mars candy company launched a\n competition to find an \u201cimposter\u201d M&M, along with a game piece that\n made the winner an instant millionaire. (Mars did not respond to \nenquiries, but records show that Cyrk, a company that produced \npromotional materials for Mars, merged with Simon Marketing in 1997.) \nColombo suddenly appeared behind her, grabbed the bag and yelled:
\n\u201cDo not eat this!\u201d
\n\nMurray was a quick-thinking Midwesterner who had risen through the ranks\n at McDonald\u2019s, and was often the public face of the company during any \ndrama. She was the \u201cMcQueen\u201d of McDonald\u2019s, said Joe Maggard, a \ndisgraced Ronald McDonald actor who was convicted of making harassing \nphone calls while posing as the clown.
Good article.
\nInteresting meta-follow up: this whole article was commissioned by a Hollywood producer in order to auction the story to a film studio:
But\n in the end \u2014 just about 72 hours after the story\u2019s publication, to be \nprecise \u2014 only one group would emerge victorious: 20th Century Fox and Matt Damon and Ben Affleck\u2019s\n production company Pearl Street Films, which bid an eye-watering $1 \nmillion for the 8,700-word online long read (most articles command \noption fees of less than $1,000). That\u2019s the highest price ever paid for\n an optioned article in Hollywood history, according to agents who \nworked on the deal. The plan is for Affleck to direct and Damon to star \n(presumably as Jacobson) with hot-shot Deadpool writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese handling script duties.
Which\n would all be a happy Hollywood ending for any ink-stained wretch trying\n to pump out long-form narrative nonfiction these days. Except this \nwasn\u2019t just good luck or some kind of fluke that \u201cMcScam\u201d had so \nthoroughly connected with Hollywood: Klawans and Maysh had been \ndeveloping the article with the specific aim of turning it into a film \nsince 2016.
Klawans (Nacho Libre, Amazon Prime\u2019s The Legend of Master Legend)\n is the independent movie and TV producer known for his meticulous \nresearch: reading through countless niche journals, RSS feeds, police \nblogs, library microfiche and clippings from news outlets from around \nthe globe in pursuit of ripped-from-the-headlines movie fodder. Seizing \nupon the oddball and the obscure \u2014 often long-forgotten spot news about \npeople with hidden lives doing weird, wonderful, often shocking things \u2014\n he enlists a small cadre of professional journalists to re-research the\n subjects, then write long-form articles that get published in reputable\n magazines, newspapers, and websites. The idea is that articles are \nbetter than pitch meetings \u2014 that development executives will be more \nlikely to open their checkbooks if the \u201cplanted\u201d story is arranged into a\n linear narrative with a three-act structure. Klawans buys the story \nsubjects\u2019 life rights and will often circulate an unpublished article to\n Hollywood production companies before publication to gin up interest.
The foremost example of this M.O.: 2012\u2019s Argo.\n In the late \u201990s, the producer had read the then-recently declassified \ntestimony of CIA exfiltration expert Tony Mendez in a CIA journal, \ndetailing how he helped American diplomats escape the 1979 Iran hostage \ncrisis by posing them as a group of Canadian filmmakers. Hiring \njournalist Joshuah Berman to pitch and \u201cplant\u201d the piece in Wired, Klawans then sold the project to George Clooney\u2019s 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.