![]() The ruse allowed the FBI to check in, with cameras and questions, on past false winners and provides plenty of archival footage, which Hernandez and Lazarte pepper in amid hazy re-enactments and interviews. The focus, instead, is the daring tactic to keep the investigation under wraps: a fake production company fronted by Mathews to stage a fake “winner’s reunion”, with help from McDonald’s executives. The three episodes available for review lead you deep into a morass of shady connections, strip clubs, stolen Monopoly pieces and side-of-the-road dealings with no clear explanation for how, exactly, Jacobson and his conspirators pulled it all off.įBI Special Agent Doug Mathews in McMillions. “How do you take this extremely small kernel of information and blow it out to this massive case? We wanted to make sure we were never ahead of the FBI investigation, so you could live it as they lived it.” The viewer, then, learns new information on the mechanics of the scheme and the colorful characters involved (besides Mathews, there’s a campily dressed mob ex-wife, among others) in the same chronological order as the FBI. “We were just fascinated by their investigation,” said Hernandez. Though the facts of the case are by now well documented, the six-part series unfolds through the eyes of FBI investigators as they attempt to assemble a series of loosely connected clues – an anonymous donation of a $1m Monopoly piece to St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee, a tapped phone call referring to a mysterious “Uncle Jerry” – into a coherent picture. Hernandez teamed up with a fellow film-maker, Brian Lazarte, to start interviews, eventually linking up with Mark Wahlberg’s production company Unrealistic Ideas and HBO. In 2017, he reached out to FBI agents and prosecutors, who all “said this was their favorite case they’ve ever worked but nobody’s ever reached out to them”, he said. Hernandez put in Freedom of Information Act requests with the federal government, which took three years to materialize and revealed names of those involved in the investigation. “In this day and age, if you can’t learn every single thing in two seconds on the internet, it drives you crazy. ![]() The missing information “set me on fire”, he told the Guardian. There wasn’t much – an article in a Jacksonville newspaper about the mail fraud indictments of false “winners”, but nothing with a bird’s eye picture of the story or FBI investigation. The McMillions co-director James Lee Hernandez didn’t hear of it until 2012, when he scrolled through Reddit to kill time before bed and saw a post in the TIL (Today I Learned) thread: “Today I learned nobody really won the McDonald’s Monopoly game.” As someone “obsessed” with the game as a child – his first job was working for his local McDonald’s – Hernandez started digging. Though the story seems tailor-made for an Adam McKay movie or bestselling book, it remained largely hidden for years, in part because news of the investigation dropped right before 9/11. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |