In the summer of 2017, Hernandez tracked down federal prosecutor Mark Devereaux and the FBI agents who worked on the case and asked them if they would be interested in participating in a documentary. Wanting to know more, he filed a Freedom of Information request for the case files, he told Vulture, and waited three years to receive “boxes and boxes of records, evidence, photos, and floppy disks.” Tipped off in 2012 by a Reddit post about the McDonald’s Monopoly scam, Hernandez had spent a year digging through the internet for more information and learned eight people had been arrested but not much else.
When the article published, Hernandez and Lazarte had been working on their project for a year but hadn’t sold it. The scam was almost forgotten until 2018, when a Daily Beast article sparked a Hollywood bidding war resulting in 20th Century Fox and Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Pearl Street Films’ buying the film rights for $1 million. “Like, holy shit, they just put that out there.”Īlthough the arrests were made almost 20 years ago, the story was pushed off the national front pages because of the 9/11 attacks. “There were many jaw-dropping moments, but this was definitely the biggest one,” Lazarte told Vulture. The secret was divulged by her son Frank and his wife, Heather, who explained that after Jerry Colombo died, his mother spilled the beans to the FBI to try to keep her grandson from his mother, Robin Colombo. In highly entertaining detail, co-directors James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte follow the FBI’s investigation, beginning with the young, eager agent Doug Mathews who became curious over a Post-it note on his partner’s desk that simply stated: “McDonald’s Monopoly Fraud?”Īs revealed in Monday’s finale, that note was connected to a phone call made by the mother of the late Jerry Colombo, a member of the Colombo crime family and one of Jacobson’s main accomplices.
#The informant 2020 series#
The six-part series tells the story of how former cop Jerry Jacobson rigged a scheme to steal winning tickets from the popular McDonald’s Monopoly sweepstakes and then sell them to people in his inner circle who would collect the winnings. HBO’s true-crime docuseries McMillions saved its biggest whopper (sorry, McDonald’s) for its final episode: Who was the informant that tipped off the Feds about a $24 million scam to defraud one of the largest corporations in the world?
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