A fast food promotion built on peeling stickers off fry cartons became the center of a 24 million dollar organized crime syndicate run by an ex-cop and the mafia. This episode unpacks the McDonald's Monopoly game, from its design of mathematically calculated scarcity to the FBI investigation that finally exposed the man known as Uncle Jerry.

The discussion explains the legal line between a lottery and a sweepstakes, the single supply-chain error that handed Jerome Jacobson the keys to the kingdom, and how a chance airport meeting with a Colombo crime family member built a nationwide network of fake winners. It also covers the bizarre anonymous donation to St. Jude, the sting that indicted 53 people, and how the game moved into a tightly monitored digital era.

• How manufactured rarity made a single winning piece astronomically valu ...