HIGHER CALLING

Scammers with ambition in “Telemarketers” and “BS High.”

- INKOO KANG

Documentarians have made an art form of projecting expertise, and an air of professionalism is often essential to winning the trust of a source— or a viewer. But Patrick J. Pespas and Sam Lipman-Stern, the protagonists of the three-part docuseries “Telemarketers,” on HBO, don’t bother with the trappings of authority. Lipman-Stern is an untrained filmmaker who models himself after Michael Moore; Pespas, Lipman-Stern’s call-center co-worker turned co-investigator, conducts interviews wearing sunglasses and pauses between questions to fidget with his phone. The pair first met in 2003, when Lipman-Stern, a fourteen-year-old high-school dropout, took a job at the only place that would hire him: a fund-raising organization in New Jersey called the Civic Development Group, which would soon be fined for what one news anchor called “the biggest telemarketing scam in American history.” The thirtysomething Pespas had a criminal record and a drug problem; he was also the best in the game.