CultureThis is surely almost a victimless tale - a bit of harmless fraud which mainly impacted McDonald's executives
Thursday, 21st May 2020, 4:43 pm
Can a story ever be too good for documentary? The McDonalds McMillions case is one of the great modern frauds, an almost-victimless tale to warm the heart of everyone who hears it except perhaps McDonalds executives and a few innocents who were unwittingly caught up in a federal crime.
Over an astonishingly long period, between 1989 and 2001, a disgruntled ex-cop called Jerome Jacobson defrauded Ronald & Chums of many millions of dollars through the chains popular Monopoly promotion, in which diners would collect prize tokens attached to McDonalds packaging.
The scheme was ingenious. As the head of security for Simon Marketing, the company that ran the Monopoly game, Jacobson was charged with transporting the winning tokens. They were kept in a secure briefcase, and in theory Jacobson was accompanied at all times by a McDonalds accountant.
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But their work involved lots of flights within the US. While they waited for their flights to be called, Jacobson would excuse himself to use the bathroom and take the briefcase with him. In the cubicle, he would swap the winning tokens for non-winning ones. Then he would sell on the tokens for a percentage of the winnings, at first to family and friends, then later to an expanding ring of criminals.
Between 1995 and 2000, he and his accomplices won almost every top prize in north America, including cash and sports cars, to a value of $24m. More than 50 people were convicted. Youd need a heart of stone not to laugh, and I write as someone who played McDonalds Monopoly a lot between 1995 and 2000.
The story begs for the screen treatment. Jacobson was convicted on 10 September 2001, so the news was buried by other events. It only came to wider attention after a Daily Beast article in 2018. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are said to be working on a film.
In the meantime, we have McMillions, a six-part HBO documentary that retells the story through interviews with some of the people involved and anonymous reconstructions. Its well made, but it suffers from its angle of approach.
Our eyes and ears are the FBI agents and McDonalds employees who set about uncovering the scam.
Except for the most egregious crimes, it always feels a bit iffy to find ourselves on the cops team. When the victim is a multibillion-dollar hamburger corporation, it rankles. Theres a reason Oceans 11 takes the side of the robbers, and one rarely sees Robin Hood told from the Sheriffs point of view.
We long to know what makes the fradster tick
Documentaries with difficult or ambiguous subjects work best when we see both sides. The most gripping moments in Ken Burns epic documentary about the Vietnam War were the interviews with the Viet Cong soldiers. Burns criticised The Last Dance, ESPNs recent documentary about the Chicago Bulls, for complicity with its main subject, Michael Jordan.
The hole at the heart of McMillions is Jacobson himself. We long to know what made him tick.
As with the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? scam, there were questions about whether a crime was being committed, especially by the people who bought the winning tickets. Is it a federal fraud, or just canny players discovering a few tricks against McDonalds? The brilliance of James Grahams Quiz was to present the Ingrams, Chris Tarrant and the ITV executives as rounded human beings without passing judgement.
A documentary without the Ingrams wouldnt have been half as interesting. When it comes to recounting real-life events, sometimes only drama will do.
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