The mere thought of telemarketers might make your chest tighten or eyes roll. Annoyance might wash over you because of intrusive strangers interrupting your day. But when Sam Lipman-Stern thinks of his time as a caller at a fundraising center in New Jersey, he envisions utter chaos.
Lipman-Stern started at Civic Development Group in 2001, as a 14-year-old high school dropout. His parents urged him to get a job, and when McDonald’s and Burger King said he was too young to flip burgers, he landed at CDG in New Brunswick. That business is at the center of Lipman-Stern’s three-part docuseries “Telemarketers” premiering Sunday (HBO, 10 EDT/PDT and streaming on Max).
There were a few employees his age, says Lipman-Stern, but the majority were former convicts. “I’d have a murderer sitting to my right, a bank robber sitting to my left,” Lipman-Stern says. “They were selling massive amounts of drugs out of the office. There was a heroin kingpin that was working there. … There was prostitution in the office.”
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Physical fights broke out between callers and managers, Lipman-Stern says. Employees would get high at work. “I was told by owners of other fundraising companies, and then also managers at CDG, that drug addicts make the best salespeople,” Lipman-Stern says. “They know how to get whatever they want out of people.”
Audiences are introduced to Lipman-Stern’s co-workers and CDG’s shady practices in Sunday’s premiere. Then the docuseries filmed over two decades shifts to the telemarketing industry at large. “They didn’t care what we would do as long as we got those donations,” Lipman-Stern says, adding that his former employer set donation goals of approximately $200 per hour.
CDG would call on behalf of organizations like the Fraternal Order of Police, charities benefiting firefighters, veterans, and those battling cancer. The organization would receive 10% of a donor’s pledge and CDG would keep the rest. Lipman-Stern noticed that some of the charities CDG fundraised for were caught in controversy.
“I started looking into some of the other charities we were calling on behalf of,” he says. “They were rated some of the worst charities in the United States. That was like, ‘What’s going on here?’”
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Lipman-Stern says around 2007/2008, he and his colleague Patrick J. Pespas decided to partner for an investigation into CDG and telemarketing practices after seeing news stories fail to cover the scam in its entirety. Both were new to investigative journalism and self-funded the project for many years. At times, they sourced camera crews from Craig’s List with the promise of a film credit, lunch or copy of the documentary on DVD.
They paused their investigation when Pespas fell back into drugs but resumed the project in 2020, Lipman-Stern says.
CDG owners Scott Pasch and David Keezer did not participate in the docuseries, though Lipman-Stern says he reached out for interviews. In 2010, the businessmen were banned from soliciting donations and forced to pay $18.8 million for violating FTC restrictions and telling donors the organization would receive “100 percent” of their offering. To help pay down their debt, Pasch and Keezer turned over $2 million homes, art by Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh, and numerous high-end vehicles.
Lipman-Stern says today’s telemarketing industry is even wilder than during his tenure, thanks to the integration of AI and robocalls. He believes the industry could be transformed through regulation and hopes his docuseries educates donors and pushes them toward reputable charities. “We want the money to be going to the right place.”
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