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McMillions review – a rip-roaring romp around the McDonald's Monopoly scandal

McMillions (Sky Documentaries) is McMazing. McHonestly. You will hardly believe your McEyes and McEars. I advise, as with the viewing of all the best true-crime documentary series, a stiff drink before, during and after. You need to be both braced and blurred to be truly receptive to it all.

The central question is set within the first few minutes of the six-part series, and with it the tone. Between 1989 and 2001, the filmmakers James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte inform us, there were “almost no legitimate winners” of any of the high-value prizes (cars, boats, $1m cash) in the promotional Monopoly games that McDonald’s ran for customers over two decades. “How crazy bullshit is that?” says the beaming FBI agent at the centre of the investigation that uncovered the scam.

His name is Doug Mathews, and Hernandez and Lazarte must praise his name every day: he is a gift to the camera and possibly the least filtered speaker in the history of law enforcement. It is fascinating to watch someone hover so near the border between joyously magnetic and absolutely unbearable – part labrador puppy, part the most annoying kid in class. “He’s one of the hardest-working agents I’ve ever met. But he can talk forever,” says fellow agent Janet Pellicciotti. “You kinda want to keep him sedated,” says his boss.

In 2001 Mathews was a new agent, bounding around the FBI office in Jacksonville, Florida. The main business was investigating medical and insurance fraud in a state packed full of retirement homes. “I’m bored to death of this healthcare garbage,” explains Mathews. So when he saw a half-buried Post-it note on his boss’s desk reading “McDonald’s Monopoly fraud?” he snatched it up and ran with it.

It led to a source who told them that the three previous $1m prize-winners may all have had different surnames, but they belonged to the same family. The district attorney, a man as unflappable as Mathews is excitable, Mark B Devereaux, got interested. “In my world,” he notes, “you don’t believe in coincidences very much.”

The game was afoot. After some debate, they summoned McDonald’s company representatives to Jacksonville to tell them the very, very bad news that they had been scammed, possibly for years, possibly for millions and millions of dollars. Mathews wore a gold suit to the meeting. Looking back, he thinks now it might have been a mistake. But the meeting was “so boring!” And so long! “I might have been hungry twice!”

McDonald’s was not involved. But the question of who could be was stymied by the lack of the normal records and documentation that is usually available in a fraud case. But, as luck would have it, McDonald’s was about to run another Monopoly game. Eventually, they agreed to go ahead and allow the FBI to monitor the whole thing. Attention turned to the exploration of everyone in the chain from the production of the Monopoly pieces at an apparently secure printworks, to their final distribution.

From there, the story and the investigation exploded. It involved an undercover operation led by – who else? – Mathews, fake commercials and trips to Vegas, rank amateurism and organised crime, reluctant and eager participants, duffle bags of money, a tiny dog with a foul temper, a mob widow and much, much more.

It is the characters who carry the series, which is remarkably unstylish in execution and rushes through parts of the investigation where you might have preferred it to linger, and lingers where you might have preferred it to pick up the pace a little. Re-enactments are mostly limited to suited men sitting round boardroom tables with their backs to camera. There is some footage of the “commercials” made by Mathews’ undercover FBI film crew, recording winners’ accounts of how they came by their prizes in order to check and challenge their versions later, but there is almost as much time spent screening old McDonald’s adverts and pictures of the outlets of the era. In a crime documentary, a little nostalgia goes a long way. After that, it just gets in the way of the story.

But it is a great story, made even greater by the fact that there is no harrowing suffering, no death, no catastrophic miscarriage of justice shown to be the result of systemic corruption as featured in much of this genre. Defrauding multi-billion dollar companies of some millions is about all I can emotionally bear right now. Plus, unlike many of its predecessors, it comes with a satisfying conclusion. The people who broke the rules get caught and are given commensurate punishment. Although I think that too counts as nostalgia now.