Everything Is Bullshit: The Greatest Scams on Earth Revealed (21 page)

Then it got ugly: a third eviction was issued — a
“Sheriff’s notice.” The Sheriff posted a “notice to vacate,” and gave
Inge
five days to leave; when she failed to, she was
forcefully removed, and all of her belongings were taken out of her unit and
placed in a storage unit. “It took three truck loads to get her stuff out,”
recalls
Withrington
. “And the help of a whole team of
social workers.”

With the unit successfully vacated, the landlord proceeded to
convert it into a workshop. This consisted of ripping out the kitchen and
converting the full bath into a half-bath, at a cost of $10,000, according to a
building report filed with the DBI. In total,
Withrington
estimates he spent upwards of $40,000 on remodeling, lawyers’ fees, permits,
lost rent, and utilities.

Only a few months after the eviction, he listed the property for
sale.
Inge’s
once-illegal in-law unit was now
advertised as a “legal work studio.” After less than ten days of being on the
market, an offer “considerably higher than the asking price” of $1.4 million
was made. Though it would’ve been difficult to sell the property with
Inge
squatting in it, the landlord claims the sale was not
premeditated and had nothing to do with the recent eviction. “My brother, who
was a co-investor and resident in the main property, had just had a baby with
his wife,”
Withrington
tells me, “and they wanted to
sell and find a more suitable place to raise a family.”

It's a
Good Time to Be Bornstein & Bornstein

Throughout
the eviction process,
Withrington
was represented by Daniel Bornstein, one half of the highly
controversial Bornstein and Bornstein law office
. For 20 years,
Bornstein has been evicting tenants on behalf of landlords in San Francisco and
has become the heralded leader in this space.

He even runs a free “Eviction Boot Camp,” in which he rallies up
disgruntled landlords and coaches them on how to appropriately (and legally)
remove unwanted tenants. One client expresses why she prefers to use Bornstein
in dire straights:

"If my gentle persuasion does not work, Daniel provides the
big stick. An eviction is a failure, and he's brilliant. He can stand up and
[claim] that we're going to be throwing someone out on the street.”

The lawyers’ Yelp page overflows with positive reviews from
landlords who’ve successfully ousted a variety of tenants — “rent
controlled freeloaders,” “illegal dwellers,” and “asshole renters” alike. But
the lawyers’ ethics have come into question on multiple occasions; last month,
Bornstein was fined $12,069 for “deceptively undermining the integrity for
judicial proceedings” — a charge that “indicates gross professional
misconduct.”

But
Withrington
“wasn’t thinking about
ethics” at the time of the eviction — he just wanted the problem
resolved, and when it comes to resolving tenant issues, Daniel Bornstein reigns
supreme. The landlord recalls his impressions upon first meeting Bornstein:

“I thought, ‘he’s just a lawyer doing lawyer stuff.’ It wasn’t
really until later, during the appeals process that I realized he was a
detested character. The Board nearly dismissed me from the room just because I
was associated with him. There’s quite a lot of hatred for that man.”

Nonetheless, it’s a good time to be a Bornstein in San
Francisco: in the past year alone, Ellis Act evictions have risen 170%
;
since 1997, there have been 3,811, and that number is
constantly rising. Fifteen years ago, evictions were, in general, reserved for
extreme cases of tenant misconduct; today, they are commonplace, and are often
used to the benefit of landlords in the high-demand housing market. Bornstein
has been the man behind the curtain, orchestrating tenant removals with
practised
precision.

For his part in
Inge’s
case, Bornstein
charged the landlord $300 per hour; all said and done, his services came with a
$10,000 bill.

Living in
a Volvo With Queenie

And
what became of
Inge
? Following the eviction, the
landlord helped her relocate to a nearby hotel. “It was filthy,” she recalls:

“There was no toilet paper, and they refused to resupply it;
there was a smashed-in window in my room, and the draft was so cold, I had to
bury myself in a sleeping bag to stay warm. It was cash only, and everything
was shady and under-the-table. It was one of the few times in my life where I
didn’t feel safe.”

After a few nights, she couldn’t bear to stay there any longer.
She got into her Volvo station wagon, drove back to Rosemont Street, parked
outside of her old unit, and spent the night in her car.

A look inside her Volvo is enough to curdle a stomach of steel:
trash bags are piled high in the back seat, open packages of food topple into a
litter box full of cat feces, door-sides are crammed full of half-smoked Pall
Malls and prescription painkillers.

Queenie, a seven-year-old cat
Inge
purchased through EBay classifieds, is relegated to the tiny foot space beneath
the glove compartment. “She’s a very strong-willed cat,”
Inge
tells me from beneath her sleeping bag. “It took me about a year and a half to
really bond with her. Now she’s my best friend.” Queenie survives on organic
cat food donated by a “young hipster woman” who lives in the neighborhood.

Inge
has an
amalgam of health issues, the most serious of which is her high glucose levels.
She has to take daily insulin shots, which must be chilled on ice.

“It’s not the type of environment I can take my medications in.
I have to keep the damn things chilled on ice, so that’s a problem. Sometimes,
a young lady down the street brings me ice. Other times, I have to go by
Safeway or a hotel and raid an ice machine. I don’t know how I’m surviving. I’m
losing so much weight.”

Luckily, when
Inge
was a Teamster taxi
driver all those years ago, she opted to take a pay cut to qualify for free
health coverage through Kaiser; today, she still enjoys that benefit. In
addition, she receives about $1,300 per month in disability and social security
pay, and has "about $3,000 in quarter rolls" tucked away in a safe at
her friend's apartment. But she claims this isn’t enough to find a market-rate
apartment that caters to her needs as a disabled elderly woman and cover her
other expenses. Her settlement money comes in small increments, so it is
difficult for her to save up.

She usually stays parked on or around Rosemont Street in the
Mission District and receives street sweeping tickets on a weekly basis. She
pays about $46 per month for her car insurance, and also pays $300 per month
for the storage unit that has housed all of her belongings since the eviction,
but she can't remember where it's located.

Occasionally, she’ll splurge for a night at
a
the
Civic Center Motel Inn, where she can capitalize on a free
continental breakfast and clean herself up (when we met her, her nails were two
inches long and black with grime from cleaning her cat’s litter box). This runs
her about $80 per night.

With an eviction on her record,
Inge
is convinced she won’t be able to find a suitable place, but has social workers
“begging away on computers” for her. We accompanied her to one resource center,
Episcopal Community Services, where she was promptly told her only option was a
homeless shelter for the night.

Her landlord's actions weren't intentionally malicious;
Inge
was by no means a perfect tenant, and even trended
toward destructive at times. For years, the
Withringtons
cooperated with her, and they offered every resource they could during the
eviction process: legal assistance, housing leads, and social service contacts.
When we spoke with them, they were sympathetic and kind.

The Way
Things Used to Be

Inge
remembers the day she first moved into her
place on Rosemont 20 years ago:

“I had just settled my things, and I was exhausted but very
happy. I had this little record player, and I put on my favorite album. It was
this little number by a Brazilian singer named Simone — she’s a trip, I’m
just nuts about her — called ‘Bye Bye
Brasil
.’”

She listened to the album for hours, flipping it from side to
side, reflecting on life. “Of all the things I’ve got in that storage unit,”
she says, “
the
only thing I care about is my box of
old records — the songs of escape, as I call them.”

Since the eviction,
Inge
has been
contemplating her own escape. Still a citizen of Germany, she has the option of
repatriating to her homeland, which has a free program for nationals wishing to
relocate. She’d be able to get off the plane, connect with social services, and
get subsidized housing and medical coverage. But for 50 years, she has built a
life for herself in San Francisco, and that’s something she doesn’t want to
give up.

Inge
drives
from a social service center back to Rosemont Street, where she parks her car
out in front of her old home. Queenie leaps up from the floor of the car,
navigates through the mountain of trash on the passenger seat, and presses her
paws against the window like a puppy.

"She remembers it," says
Inge
,
"she wants to go dance in the garden."

19.

THE MCDONALD'S

MONOPOLY FRAUD

T
he
McDonald’s Monopoly game is one of the most successful marketing promotions of
all time. Every year, for a limited time only, customers can win big money
collecting Monopoly pieces from the packaging of McDonald’s products. Although
the odds are in the same league as winning the Mega Millions lottery jackpot,
someone who peels a Boardwalk off her medium soda and a Park Place off her
cheeseburger will win $1 million. More often, customers win less lucrative
prizes like a Filet-O-Fish.

The game has a cult following; even a number of people who
despise fast food go to McDonald’s each year to collect the pieces and take a
shot at winning $1 million. The promotion is so successful that McDonald’s has
run it for over two decades. But from 1995 to 2001, the game had only one real
winner: Jerome Jacobson, who cheated at McDonald’s Monopoly to a tune of $20
million.

Careful
Who You Let Be Banker

The
key to a successful promotion like McDonald’s Monopoly lies in the
probabilities. Prizes need to be ubiquitous enough that the game is fun, but
grand prizes need to be few and far between so that the bump in sales more than
offsets the cost of the prizes.

Promotions usually achieve this by giving out lots of cheap
prizes and only a handful of grand prizes. McDonald’s Monopoly does the same by
doling out sodas and medium fries to 1 in 4 instant winners, while some years
no one finds the pieces necessary to win the $1 million grand prize.

The Monopoly setup, however, makes the odds behind grand prizes
more deceiving. To win one, customers need to collect a full set of properties
from the Monopoly game. An entire generation of parents has argued with
children who demand McDonald’s because they just need one more property to win.
But everyone is just one game piece away from a grand prize. Rather than make
each piece appear with the same probability, McDonald’s makes one piece from
each set extremely rare. So each year, thousands of people with 3 out of the 4
railroads are all searching for Short Line Railroad, with only 1 in 150 million
odds of finding it.

The setup draws scammers, who put out Craigslist ads or post on
forums that they have Park Place and want to team up with someone who has the
extremely rare Boardwalk piece. Occasionally someone ignorant of the odds
agrees; he or she sends the rare piece and never hears from the scammer again.

Jerome Jacobson had a simpler idea. Jacobson worked as head of
security at Simon Marketing Inc., the company entrusted with running almost
every McDonald’s promotion from Happy Meal toys to the Monopoly game. Simon’s
internal policies called for 2 or 3 people to oversee the production and
distribution of game pieces, but Jacobson alone oversaw the distribution of
Monopoly pieces around the country. In 1989, two years into the running of the
promotion, Jacobson stole a piece worth $25,000 and gave it to his stepbrother.
By 1995, the former police officer was stealing all the pieces of value.

Fourteen years later, an article in the Florida Times-Union
would reveal how Jacobson made off with the valuable real estate:

Jacobson oversaw a security process that began at a printing
plant where pieces were made, separated by value and stored in a vault. He was
responsible for transporting those pieces in sealed envelopes to plants that
manufactured McDonald's food cartons and cups, where the pieces were supposed
to be attached.

But Jacobson would slip into airport bathrooms, lock himself in
stalls and carefully open the envelopes to steal the pieces. He received cash
kickbacks for stealing 50 to 60 pieces and bought homes, cars and other
property.

Jacobson couldn’t redeem the pieces himself, nor could his
family without attracting attention. Instead he sold the pieces to people he
recruited through friends and family. Some of the recruits mortgaged their
house to pay a mysterious figure they knew only as “Uncle Jerry.” The prizes
included $10,000 cash prizes, cars, and even the rare $1 million prize that
McDonald’s awarded with much fanfare.

In 1995, St. Jude Children’s Hospital received an anonymous gift
in the form of two McDonald’s Monopoly pieces. A receptionist nearly threw the
unmarked envelope away before discovering their value: the $1 million grand
prize. Who was the anonymous donor behind this generous gift? Uncle Jerry of
course.

Uncle
Jerry Gets Caught

The
scheme worked for six years, until someone recruited by Jacobson and his
friends to win a 1996 Dodge Viper revealed the fraud to the FBI. The agency in
turn launched “Operation Final Answer,” in reference to Who Wants to Be a
Millionaire, the television show that inspired another McDonald’s promotion
that Jacobson scammed.

The FBI informed McDonald’s, but asked the fast food chain to
continue running the contest so agents could collect evidence. Wiretaps, phone
records, and (according to the FBI) “some of the most sophisticated and
innovative investigative techniques available” helped the agency prove that the
mysterious mastermind at the center of the scheme was Jerome Jacobson. The
pattern of
prize winners
mortgaging their house just
before they won provided evidence of Jacobson’s scheme. Agents also followed
several suspects as they met with recruiters, in one case going to, in the
words of the FBI director, “a secluded lot in, of all places, Fair Play, South
Carolina.”

In court, Jacobson apologized for his actions. He earned $1
million himself from the fraud, which he returned as a result of the case. He
was sentenced to 3 years in federal prison and was released on October 21,
2005. Some 51 other members of the conspiracy were indicted, and many pled
guilty. Yet few faced stern sentences. On appeal, a Florida judge overturned
the criminal sentences for four of the most central members of the plot.

McDonald’s
Monopoly Lives On

Uncle
Jerry’s actions didn’t deter enthusiasm for the McDonald’s Monopoly promotion.

McDonald’s reacted to revelations of Jacobson’s actions by going
on damage control. It fired Simon Marketing Inc., taking its $500 million
contract elsewhere, and announced an additional cash giveaway promotion worth
$10 million in 55 cash prizes as an apology to players who for years had played
a rigged game. (McDonald’s did continue to pay St. Jude $50,000 installments on
its million dollar prize, even though it was fraudulently won.) Most McDonald’s
customers kept playing the game, oblivious to the fact that Jacobson had rigged
the game for years. The McDonald’s Monopoly promotion is now over 25 years old.

Law enforcement and the media, meanwhile, had a hard time maintaining
a serious tone during the investigation. Attorney General John Ashcroft
stressed in an
announcement that
“We want those
involved in this type of corruption to know that breaking the law is not a
game.” CNN’s reporter deadpanned that “Jerome Jacobson allegedly monopolized
McDonald's winning real estate.” But the local Florida Times-Union probably
said it best: “It's a scam only the
Hamburglar
could
love.”