Karl Puschmann: Doco series Telemarketers a wild ride of drugs, scams and charity

Patrick Pespas and Sam Lipman-Stern in Telemarketers. Photo / Neon

Bic Runga’s Sway is a lovely song. Heartfelt. Emotional. As capable of jerking tears out of its listeners now as it was when she released it over two decades ago. Today, though, the only emotion it’s eliciting out of me is a searing hot, murderous rage.

I am on hold with telco 2degrees. I have been on hold with telco 2degrees for what is now ticking up to an hour. In this hour I have heard Runga’s lovely song Sway a handful of times. Its charm hasn’t just worn off, it’s threadbare.

My call, apparently, is important to them but, apparently, their call centre is experiencing “unexpected demand”. Considering how long I have been sitting at my desk listening to Sway and waiting for someone to pick up I can only believe 2degrees management expects no more than one caller at a time. Oh, to have such belief in one’s own service.

Perhaps, I thought as Runga’s angelic voice floated above the sweet melancholy of her guitar and I gritted my teeth, 2degrees’ call centre was run by the same sort of employees as that of the American telemarketing company Civic Development Group. CDG hired druggies, dropouts, delinquents, ex-cons and pretty much anyone prepared to pick up a phone and talk to people. This thought was fleeting. CDG’s call centre was astoundingly competent.

They were also criminals. This is explained and laid out in the three-part, insider documentary series Telemarketers, which is now streaming on Neon. It was made by a dropout and a druggie who both worked at CDG in the early 2000s. They were uniquely placed and qualified to expose what they experienced there while also being active participants in the utterly debauched and degenerate work culture of the place.

It was truly a wild place to work. People openly did hard drugs in their cubicles, drank hard liquor and gave each other makeshift tattoos. The company didn’t care what went down as long as targets were hit. Failure was the only fireable offence.

The brains behind the doco is Sam Lipman-Stern, who went to work there after dropping out of college. A skater and graffiti artist, he got a camera to, “film me and my scumbag friends being little pieces of shit”. Instantly recognising that his workplace was exceptional, he got into the habit of taking it to work where he filmed himself and his scumbag work colleagues being fraudulent pieces of shit on the phone.

The druggie is Patrick J Pespa, his mentor, best friend at CDG and lauded telemarketing legend thanks to his supernatural ability to convince people to donate money, even while half-asleep in a heroin-induced coma. Something we actually see thanks to Lipman’s ever-present camera.

CDG pioneered the aggressive, prompt-led style of telemarketing that provided its callers with an answer for everything short of physically hanging up the phone. They spawned an industry dedicated to fleecing good-natured and big-hearted people out of their cash. Their business model was calling people to raise money for charities, usually for various police or firefighter associations, and then pocketing most of the moolah for themselves. Sometimes up to 90 per cent.

As the doco explains, the police associations went along with it because 10 per cent of something is better than 100 per cent of nothing. But as Lipman-Stern and Pespa’s ramshackle investigation lurches along they come to believe that the police associations are actually in on the scam. This brings dirty cops and intense paranoia into the doco.

Neither of the pair knows how to make a documentary but make up for it with an unbridled enthusiasm and love of being on camera (Pespa) as well as a righteous drive to expose the truth about the shady practices going on (Lipman-Stern).

Unfortunately for them they are beaten to the punch by the government which shuts down CDG when word got out that they were encouraging their employees to pretend to be cops on the phone. But this doesn’t deter them. They simply pivot from wanting to bring down CDG to wanting to bring down the entire, predatory industry.

Working from a table at either McDonald’s or Dunkin Donuts, the only places they have wi-fi, the pair begin to uncover a conspiracy. They start interviewing key players from charity watchdogs, the US government and even an incredibly sketchy telemarketing company boss who boasts about scamming an 87-year-old man out of $80,000 in one month.

Pespa is not a good interviewer and Lipman-Stern is not a good camera operator but by golly do these two incredibly unlikely whistleblowers get the goods.

Telemarketers is made up almost entirely of Lipman-Stern’s handycam footage from the era, giving a real DIY charm to the documentary. Far from being as dysfunctional as its creators, the series spins an engaging and highly entertaining yarn. One that keeps you hooked and wanting to know how sketchy, dodgy and just plain detestable things are going to get. Spoiler: Very.

Perhaps its greatest gift is that next time a telemarketer calls you won’t feel at all bad about hanging up on them.

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