McMillion$

My name is Jared Jacobson, and my father is Jerry Jerome Jacobson.

Come here, boys. Come here. Bailey, come here.

I grew up in Miami. Once my mom got divorced from him, he cut all ties.

I was three years old when they got divorced.

So this is a picture of me as a baby with my dad and my mom's dad.

My mom called him and requested for back child support when I was 13,

and that's when he popped on the radar.

That's when I really met him for the first time.

During the summer, I would go fly up to Atlanta and spend

three or four weeks up there with him, getting to know him a little bit.

I believe he was living with Alison.

This is a picture of the wedding party when my dad and Linda got married.

That's my mom in the picture with me and him.

I think it's one of the only pictures I had with the three of us together.

My mom is Carol Cody.

Do you remember if she was the first wife? Second wife?

I was his third marriage. Really, I was his fourth.

Out of I think we counted seven.

Wait a minute. Phyllis, Carol,

Daryl, me,

Alison, and Linda. He's been married six times.

If he was married with that marriage license down in Miami, it's seven.

The first time I got the text about the possibility of a documentary series

within two minutes, I got a phone call saying,

"Hey, if anybody calls or talks to you

or wants to talk about this thing, don't do it."

I'm not gonna call him and ask permission to do this with you, guys.

I think this is my way of...

Having maybe a little bit of closure.

This is definitely gonna put the nail in the coffin for our relationship.

And you know what? I'm okay with it.

MCMILLIONS

I tried to keep my mouth shut but it didn't work.

I knew that I had to do something. She was gonna run with the money.

So, the FBI said you threatened to kill her.

- Did you talk to your wife about it? - No. I didn't threaten to kill her.

I just told my wife, "We can't do this in the airport."

I meant we can't confront her in the airport.

I didn't mean anything other than we cannot confront her in the airport.

Turned out to be a misunderstanding, but you still have to run it out

to make sure.

The long and short of it is it wasn't a valid threat.

Right after that, my wife took her sister to the bank to cash the check

and was attached at the hips

with her until she did the right thing with the money. Yeah.

So after that airport drama we started to focus on Dwight even more.

So were up on these wiretaps.

And Rick and I hear something's happening with Uncle Jerry.

A phone call was intercepted between Jacobson and Dwight Baker.

The conversation was that Jacobson and Dwight

were going to meet for the exchange of a winning piece.

That exchange was going to happen somewhere in Georgia.

They say on the phone, "I'll be there in an hour and fifteen minutes,"

or something like that. We had that window.

They didn't name the place where they were gonna meet but they gave hints.

The usual place.

- You mean along the highway? - Yeah. Along the highway.

So we hurried up, we got on the maps,

and we figured out that it was somewhere along 85 near Atlanta.

We had a certain area, but we didn't know. We thought but we weren't sure.

So I got on the phone with Atlanta to tell them,

"Hey, this is what's coming up." So they were cued up and ready.

They mobilized quick.

They had to get there and get visual.

Then we had air support, surveillance group down in their cars.

We're looking at rest areas, places on the side of the road, everywhere.

It was on.

I remember looking at this golf resort north of Atlanta.

It's got to be this place. Seems to be about halfway. It's got to be.

Where would you guys meet? Would you go to his house?

We met at his house one time, Chateau Elan,

a winery between here and there. It's halfway.

FBI surveillance Chateau Elan

Sometimes we'd eat, or we'd sat in the car and trade and trade money.

Yeah.

We had an FBI pilot up in the air,

and could see Mr. Jacobson handing Mr. Baker something in a folder.

And there it was. And off they go.

The video evidence speaks volumes of the illegal acts they were doing.

It's pretty short but sweet.

We got you now.

It was about the end of the summer, and the game is ending.

We weren't gonna have another game. We already have identified Jerry.

We had identified Mr. Baker in fair play. We had identified Mr. Glomb.

We had identified and videoed Mr. Hoover.

And we had several others.

Devereaux is good. He's laying out the indictment, the arrest warrants.

We're gonna take this through the grand jury, get the true bills

which is the indictment, and we're gonna go out and effect these arrests.

In this case, the charges were conspiracy and mail fraud.

If you use the United States mail

in furtherance of a scheme and artifice to defraud,

that's penalized by up to 20 years in prison.

The initial stage was the indictment of the first eight.

So the first thing that was gonna make the news, and alert all the winners

that, "Hey, the gig is over," was the end of August, August 21st.

Everybody was spread across the country,

and so we ended up having to request the assistance of numerous offices

spread entirely across the United States.

You have to provide those agents enough information to make arrests.

So in anticipation of the takedown,

we had prepared a very, very lengthy communication.

So it's our whole plan. It's the background of the investigation.

This communication was probably 20 or 30 pages long.

Very, very specific, in-depth. Puts you right there. Everything.

We faxed it. And I'm not going to say who did it. I'll say I didn't, but

there may have been somebody I know closely that did it that would deny it.

Doesn't matter who it was, but...

On the speed dial, which I never use speed dial...

The agents sending that plan thought the speed dial and faxed Greenville FBI

when in fact it said The Greenville News.

It ended up being probably the worst person in the world, a news agency.

This is a big issue now, right? Like all the stuff's out there.

Now, you got people that might be waiting on agents to come arrest them.

It's bad, bad, bad.

Rick Dent's big head was sweating bad. Devereaux was sweating it.

Chris Graham was losing weight over that.

I remember being really, really angry about it.

How in the world, you know? How could this happen?

Now it's, "How do we fix it? How do we keep them from going with the story?"

After all this work, this could really screw things up.

My name is John Boyanoski. In 2001,

I was a reporter for The Greenville News.

I've been there six or seven months. I was the crime and court's reporter.

So anything bad happened, anything that had

an official-looking document that came across the fax, would come to my desk.

I came down Monday morning, and there was a stapled thing on my chair.

And I picked it up and I saw FBI on it.

Three paragraphs in, I'm thinking, "This doesn't sound right."

This is an open investigation. You're talking about surveillance in here.

I thought, "It's the background, no, they're..." I started flipping through,

and it's all surveillance stuff and background information.

"I don't think this is supposed to be going to Boyanoski and The Greenville."

I remember I turned around my chair and I got my boss. I'm like, "Dave,

did you look at this? Where did this come from?" I looked at him like,

"Dave, I think we have an open FBI investigation."

He's like, "What?" When he start looking at it, his eyes go like this.

I'm 24 years old.

I'm trying to make a name for myself, and I wanna write a story. I'm like,

"Yeah," you know? Exclusive.

McDonald's investigation. FBI are looking into a big fraud case.

So Mark Devereaux's first response was

just jump in the bureau plane and slide down to South Carolina.

Each office surveillance squad has usually a Cessna 160 or something.

If you're ever in a Volkswagen bug in the early '70s,

it's like a lawnmower in the sky.

I'm looking at that going, "No way in hell I wanna be a part of that again."

Devereaux being in that controlled-ass environment with him and a Tide bottle,

that's the only way you got to pee, can you imagine that?

That's an awful situation to be in.

Literally, we get in a plane, fly from Jacksonville to South Carolina

to do our best to ensure that

faux pas didn't cause a significant embarrassment.

That plane sucked.

I can tell you, at that point in time,

that news agency had no requirement to keep it quiet.

We did beg, plead asking them if they would be kind enough

basically to keep that to themselves.

There was a little bit of, "What are we gonna get for it?"

Can't say we bribed them, but I will say that we gave them an opportunity

to be able to take a photograph possibly

following the arrest in connection with the investigation.

Their thing was, "If you could just give us the exclusive."

It was something, at least, to sweeten the deal

and thank them for covering up the mistake that Special Agent Mathews,

I didn't say that, may have made.

So I wanna say, now that I'm saying it and remembering all this,

it was not me that faxed that freaking thing over. It was somebody else.

I can promise you every time I'd use a fax machine,

I check it not once, not twice, but at least three times.

If anybody ever knew how close this was just to blowing up,

I know that those subjects who may see this, would go,

"Damn it. How did that not happen?" Too bad, right? It didn't.

We were the good guys. It always works better for the good guys.

We always find a way. Which is what I'm saying happened there.

The night before Attorney General Ashcroft

gave us the go-ahead to take the action.

Day of the takedown, it's a very early morning.

5:00 in the morning, you're getting up and making sure everybody's ready.

Regardless of whether you believe that person is violent or not,

you still have to be very careful as to your tactical approach

anytime that you engage in the arrest of an individual because

you're taking away their liberties and they pretty much know that.

The arrests were scheduled to all go down at the same time

so that there won't be conversation.

And Jacksonville sent agents to each location,

so that somebody that's familiar with the case will be able to be there

to help with the arrest.

My role that day, as the supervisor on the squad in the command post

was really kind of coordinating. And if there was problems out in the field,

any decision about how to handle it is gonna come through me.

I was in charge of the arrest of Brenda Phenis in Indiana.

I had to take down Dwight Baker.

My duty on takedown day was Gloria Brown here at Jacksonville.

I sit in the FBI's office, we can hear them, "We're making the move now."

It sounded like a mid-90s Michael Bay kind of thing.

You're hearing, "Go, go, go."

So I got Glomb.

By far the nastier,

more potential danger of anybody else.