When a spam call comes in, the voice on the other side is, more often than not, robot-generated. But it still might belong to an actual human, someone who is ringing you from their kitchen table while they pat their dog or scroll through Facebook. Or perhaps they’re at a call center, a boiler room such as the hellhole in Sam Lipman-Stern’s wild and winsome documentary, inspired by his own adventures in the world of telemarketing.
The three-part series Telemarketers, co-produced by a group including Danny McBride and the Safdie brothers, and co-directed by Adam Bhala Lough, comes as a pungent counterpunch to series such as Succession and Billions, which examine American greed through the lens of excess and quiet luxury. It takes a gloriously scuzzy approach to its portrayal of large-scale profiteering, offering a Dickensian portrait of a band of characters who had few options besides clocking in at an outfit that was grooming employees to fleece unsuspecting victims to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Lipman-Stern was a 14-year-old high-school dropout when he started working for Civic Development Group (CDG), an entity whose bland name belied its predatory nature. His parents, a health teacher and a social worker, didn’t ask too many questions. “I never really told them about what happened there,” says Lipman-Stern, who now lives in Colombia. “My brother and I were, I guess, free-range kids.”
The company’s founders, a pair of New Jersey brothers, preyed on the vulnerable – both their marks and hourly waged employees. The CDG gaggle were mostly convicted felons with no better job prospects. They worked and partied in an anarchic space in a nondescript office building in the commuter town of New Brunswick.
The film opens with video that Lipman-Stern shot on a VHS camera that was a gift from a psychic named Phoenix, who was living in his family’s attic at the time. (“They’re hippies.”) The footage is electrifying evidence of a working environment that would have any HR executive ejecting bricks. Baby turtles crawled over computer terminals. Sex workers stalked the bathrooms. Employees chugged beer and took drugs in plain sight. Schmuck style reigned supreme. (Here would be a good place to mention that Lipman-Stern, 36, cut his teeth at Vice media.)
“Have fun, pass the hours, make the sales quota” was the operating principle. “You want a good fucking salesman? Hire a fucking crackhead,” one of the workers is filmed saying. “I’m dead-ass serious. They know how to talk to people, they know how to get what they want out of people.”
Lipman-Stern started shooting footage on the regular at the encouragement of one of the office’s more senior members, “Big Ed”. When Lipman-Stern told his colleague that he harbored an interest in film-making, “he encouraged me to bring in a camcorder the next day. He’s like, ‘Dude, you want to be a film-maker? Bring in the camcorder tomorrow.’”
Nobody on tape is having as wild a time as Patrick J Pespas, who initially presents as something of a court jester, with an off-the-rails energy. He is seen scoring and snorting heroin when we meet him. “Get a little buzzed, make some crazy phone calls!” Pespas says with a gleeful glint in his eyes before he sets in for his next round of calls, asking strangers to contribute $25 to a bogus charity. Pespas is impossible not to root for. He is also a visionary – footage from the early 2000s shows him stressing out about this new thing called global warming.
Lipman-Stern, who was always one of the top performers thanks to his talent for transforming into a low-voiced “cartoon caricature of police officer”, ended up working at CDG for the better part of a decade. “It was like a big, dysfunctional family,” he recalls. “Everyone felt like everyone was there for a reason. Whether you’re a felon or, you know, high-school dropout graffiti writer, everyone kind of felt like losers there, and we all kind of bonded over being in a bit of like dark places. No one judged each other.”
Most of the organizations on whose behalf the CDG callers were working were shoddy nonprofits that only took in about 10% of the money that was raised. The money tended to cover expenses such as golf and amusement-park excursions. Working from scripts, the telemarketers said that all the money raised went directly to the needy.
In 2007, the FTC filed a complaint against CDG. Three years later, its founders paid fines of $18.8m, which they partly covered by selling off their spoils, including artworks by Picasso and Van Gogh, a Bentley, an $800,000 collection of vintage guitars and $270,000 in proceeds from the sale of a fine wine collection.
Many of the employees found work at a new company, with the same call list and scripts, now under a new name and identifying as a “professional management consultant” firm, a designation that facilitated skirting the law. As consultants, callers were now allowed to say they worked directly for the organizations on whose behalf they were calling. The donations poured in. “People want to give to police, not telemarketers,” a former colleague of Lipman-Stern reasoned. (Spam Pacs, a recent innovation, are even less accountable to regulation.)
The world of telemarketing is nowhere near dying down. “It’s bigger and crazier and less regulated than ever,” Lipman-Stern says. “The one silver lining about this industry, in my opinion, was that it offered jobs to people that were unemployable. And with robocalls, that part is starting to disappear.”
A decade after leaving CDG, Lipman-Stern was living in Los Angeles and had dinner, at the urging of his mother, with his cousin. Adam Bhala Lough was an established film-maker with hip-hop documentaries to his credit. He invited Lipman-Stern to his office to pitch ideas, and the notion of Telemarketers was revived.
The two traveled back to New Jersey to find Pespas. “We said, let’s finish it, and he agreed,” Lough recalls. “And then next thing you know, we’re on this cross-country road trip.
Wearing a puffy Giants parka and a porkpie hat, Pespas – by this point in recovery – drove from New Jersey to Florida to Texas, showing up at the home of a former fundraising telemarketer who spoke with a blurred face, offices of police departments known to be in cahoots with fraudulent fundraisers, and a national convention of police unions. Lough recalls the time he came off the elevator at the hotel and saw police officers stalking the hallway and knocking on every door, apparently looking for the crew of troublesome film-makers. “My biggest fear was that they were going to take the footage,” Lough says. As soon as the pack of men disappeared, “I immediately took all the cards out of the camera, put them in my pocket, jumped in an Uber and went to another hotel.”
They also hit Washington for a sit-down interview with Senator Richard Blumenthal, who is known for endorsing bills that target scam fundraisers but whose treatment of Pespas is far from heartening. The film crew came looking for answers. Instead they found an important man who saw a guy who didn’t look like much, and gave him the cold shoulder.
But Lipman-Stern maintains that bringing about policy change wasn’t the primary goal of the project, over two decades in the making. Lifting the lid is an important first step. “It was really to expose this industry to the world, and tell the story.”
Telemarketers airs Sunday on HBO in the US and in the UK at a later date, and on Binge in Australia.
