Strip club owner Gennaro Colombo, who claimed to be connected to New York’s Colombo crime family, was the man who would “industrialise” Jacobsen’s Monopoly scam after a chance meeting at an airport.Ĭolombo, who even appeared in a McDonald’s commercial waving a giant key after being slipped a winning game piece for a Dodge Viper, died in a car accident in 1998. Knowing he could not cash them in himself, Jacobsen sold the pieces to people recruited through friends and family - some of whom mortgaged their houses in order to make a down-payment - ultimately redeeming more than $US24 million ($32 million). While en-route to the chosen factory, Jacobsen would slip into the airport bathroom - the only place he could escape from the female auditor tasked with monitoring the process - take the winning pieces out of the envelope and replace them with “commons”. In 1995, believing the game was already being rigged to exclude Canada, he set his plan in motion. He first stole a piece worth $US25,000 in 1989 “to see if I could do it”, giving it to his brother-in-law at a family gathering. Players can either win by finding one of the ultra-rare game pieces such as the Vacuum, or by completing a set of properties by finding the extremely rare odd-one-out - the odds of finding Boardwalk, for example, are about one in 600 million.Īs the head of security for Simon Marketing, the company responsible for running the promotion, Jacobsen was the man entrusted with transporting those pieces from the printing plant to the packaging factories, where they would be randomly attached to McDonald’s cups and cartons. “All I can tell you is I made the biggest mistake of my life,” Jacobson said during his trial, which started on Septemand largely disappeared from the public consciousness in the wake of the World Trade Centre attacks the following day.įirst launched in 1987, McDonald’s Monopoly is one of the fast-food chain’s longest running and most successful marketing promotions, with customers flocking to stores to collect peel-off Monopoly pieces for the chance to win up to $1 million. JEROME Jacobsen is the real-life Hamburgler.Ī former police officer, Jacobsen was the mastermind of a sophisticated scheme to rig McDonald’s Monopoly, falsely claiming more than $32 million in cash and prizes through a vast network of conspirators that included cocaine traffickers, housewives, mobsters and Mormons.Ī detailed new account published in The Daily Beast by crime reporter Jeff Maysh, who spoke to a number of the people involved, has reignited interest in the scandal more than a decade after Jacobsen was released following a three-year prison sentence for fraud.
0 kommentar(er)
