NEW YORK — The trailer for the documentary “Funny Money: The Dane Cook Story” oozes intrigue — and spaghetti sauce — in a tantalizing almost-look inside how comedian Dane Cook’s half-brother, Darryl McCauley, stole $18 million from him as his business manager, hid bricks of hundred-dollar bills in spaghetti sauce, and disappeared.

The ominous opening chord gives way to a frantic voice in a recorded phone message: “Dane, it’s your brother. The FBI is involved with something? Dane, what happened, what have you done?”

A montage of stills from family videos then show the half-siblings together, backed by Cook’s voice-over.

“A person that spent so much time pretending to be something he wasn’t,” Cook says. “From the moment he left that bank, my brother disappeared.”

As Cook’s business manager from the 1990s through 2008, McCauley, a former corrections officer, managed every penny that Cook took in as his stand-up career took off, the trailer notes.

At some point, Cook got a strange feeling, “something I couldn’t identify,” the comedian says in the trailer. A wall safe crammed with cash, an allusion to coded messages, and “bricks” of hundred-dollar bills concealed in spaghetti sauce added to the enigma.

Cook soared to the height of popularity as perhaps the best-known comedian in the world during the 2000s. He starred in movies including 2008’s “My Best Friend’s Girl” alongside Kate Hudson and 2007’s “Dan in Real Life” with Steve Carell. He was both adored and reviled.

At one point he was pulling in $20 million per tour, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Unbeknownst to him, his supposed stalwart supporter of a brother was liberally helping himself, scooping cash from Cook’s accounts into his own.

Amid a series of setbacks during the late ’aughts, capped by the revelation of his half-sibling’s betrayal, Cook disappeared from public view in the early 2010s, dogged by plagiarism allegations and backlash to poorly timed and needlessly tasteless jokes.

“I worked with my only half-brother for several years,” Cook told the late CNN host Larry King in 2009 before McCauley’s trial. “Woke up one day and a lot of stuff missing.”

McCauley was arrested in December 2008 and charged with numerous counts of larceny and forgery. In 2010, he and his wife, Erika McCauley, copped to the crimes.

He pleaded guilty to 27 counts of larceny exceeding $250, three forgery counts and a slew of other embezzlement-related charges. He was sentenced to five to six years in prison and Erika McCauley received two-and-a-half to three years on two counts of larceny and other charges. They were ordered to pay $12 million in restitution to Cook.

“Funny Money” starts streaming Sept. 29 on video on demand (VOD) and a number of other services.

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