The $12 Million Pasta Sauce Was Extremely Rich

When investigators opened the tomato sauce, they did not find basil, garlic or even an optimistic quantity of oregano. They found bricks of hundred-dollar bills wrapped in plastic.

The cash was part of the $12 million that comedian Dane Cook’s older half-brother, Darryl McCauley, embezzled from him, according to the new documentary Funny Money: The Dane Cook Story. A trailer for the film recreates money being pulled from a container of pasta sauce, giving the phrase “rich tomato sauce” an unfortunately precise meaning.

“There were bricks of hundreds in all the tomato sauce,” a voiceover says in the teaser. McCauley reportedly kept the rest of the stolen money in a safe, which suddenly seems almost disappointingly conventional.

The documentary will examine McCauley’s betrayal of Cook during the peak of the comedian and actor’s fame. McCauley, a former corrections officer, worked as Cook’s business manager during the early part of his career and was responsible for “every aspect of every penny that came in,” according to another voice heard in the trailer.

There were, by then, an increasingly large number of pennies to have aspects of. Cook became famous in the early 2000s through his observational, vulgar and occasionally dark stand-up. His comedy albums Harmful If Swallowed, released in 2003, and Retaliation, released in 2005, were hits. He followed them with the 2006 HBO stand-up special Vicious Circle.

Cook also appeared in romantic comedies including Employee of the Month in 2006, Good Luck Chuck in 2007 and My Best Friend’s Girl in 2008.

“Once [Cook] started going platinum, everything changed,” one narrator says in the documentary trailer. Another describes how the sums being taken escalated: “Initially, withdrawals for $20,000 became withdrawals for $50,000, wires of $100,000.”

Cook says he gradually sensed that something was wrong but could not identify what it was. He describes McCauley as “a person that spent so much time pretending to be something he wasn’t.”

“I was starting to feel something different that I couldn’t really identify,” Cook says. “Was he hiding it in different places? Stockpiling this money?”

The answer, according to the documentary, was yes on both counts. Some of it was stored in a safe, while some was sealed in plastic and submerged among the tomato sauce, in a hiding method resembling a plotline from The Bear but involving a considerably more troubling set of accounts.

McCauley ultimately pleaded guilty and spent six years in prison for embezzling millions from Cook. The documentary will now tell the wider story of how the theft happened during Cook’s rise to fame, how his trusted business manager concealed the money, and how a family betrayal ended with $12 million missing and the world’s least appetising emergency pasta supper.