How comic Dane Cook lost a fortune in pasta sauce (he wasn’t selling it)

An upcoming documentary on comedian Dane Cook revisits a disturbing chapter from the height of his fame two decades ago.

Cook was one of the first comedians to figure out how to turn the internet into a path to stardom. In the early 2000s, when most entertainers still regarded online file sharing as piracy to be stamped out, Cook embraced it, putting his stand-up on services such as Napster, LimeWire, and Kazaa while cultivating fans through his website and later MySpace.

‘How does this end?’

Secret ingredient

Fans passed his routines around as audio-only clips, and Cook painstakingly cultivated that audience online. By 2005, his second album, “Retaliation,” debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 — the highest-charting comedy album in nearly three decades — as Cook graduated to sold-out arenas and increasingly prominent television and movie roles.

But while Cook was becoming one of the defining comedians of the early internet era, someone close to him was quietly siphoning away the fortune that came with it.

Cook’s own half-brother, Darryl McCauley, was secretly stashing away millions of dollars from the comedian and hiding it like a mobster. A trailer for the upcoming documentary “Funny Money: The Dane Cook Story” reveals a wall safe packed to the brim with Cook’s cash.

Not only that, but there were “bricks of $100s” hidden inside pasta sauce. The video depicts bags stuffed with cash submerged in plastic containers of tomato sauce, all to the tune of $12 million.

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Michael Schwartz/WireImage/NARAS

Jarring discovery

McCauley handled Cook’s finances as his manager from the late 1990s until 2008, with the theft reportedly beginning in 2004 when he began diverting funds to his own accounts from Cook’s.

First, the sums were in lower amounts, but receipts shown in the documentary still included a $22,000 transfer in September 2004. Before long, those amounts increased to $50,000 and then $100,000.

Cook wasn’t even aware.

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

That’s where the sauce technique came in.

McCauley had an accomplice, too. According to an NBC Philadelphia report from 2010, McCauley’s wife was involved in his plot and received between two and three years in prison time.

McCauley himself pled guilty to seven counts of larceny over $250, three counts of forgery and embezzlement, and other charges. This garnered between five and six years in prison. He was 45 at the time, and Cook was 38.

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M. Caulfield/WireImage/LIONSGATE

O brother where art thou?

Even though both brothers wanted to become comedians, McCauley ended up becoming a corrections officer, with Cook describing him as “a person that spent so much time pretending to be something he wasn’t.”

Much of the focus of the new doc appears to be centered around Cook finding out what happened to his brother after his prison stint, when he seemingly disappeared.

“Where is he? What has he done? How does this end?” Cook narrates.

The comedian said that he still believes more money is out there and that other accomplices are likely involved.

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