Scam Likely

The co-director and the star of the docuseries Telemarketers started filming at their own office-even before learning they were part of a nationwide grift.

- Nate Jones

ALL OF HIS COLLEAGUES at the Civic Development Group agreed that Patrick J. Pespas was a telemarketing legend. Before he went into recovery, he would do heroin in the office bathroom, nod off for a second, then jump right into a call-and land the sale. He'd once been busted for growing a few marijuana plants-okay, it was 48 pounds' worth-in a ditch off the side of the highway. There had been consequences: He told a story about OD'ing at the office only to be roused by a boss, who put him back to work. Pespas got into telemarketing in the mid-'90s after seeing a storefront whose windows were completely covered with signs proclaiming JOBS JOBS JOBS. When he walked in, the manager asked how smart he was. He said average. "He goes, I like stupid people," Pespas recalled.

""The reason I like stupid people is if you do everything I instruct you to do, you will do great at this job.""

Pespas isn't stupid, but he still did great. What was his secret? "High energy, loud voice, personable-that's it." He let his teenage work buddy Sam LipmanStern film him making calls and snorting heroin because, well, the kid filmed everything that went down at their office. This was New Jersey in the mid-aughts, and they spent their days at CDG asking for donations on behalf of police unions, children's-cancer charities, and "every paralyzed-veterans chapter you could think of, Pespas said. You had to be a little fucked to make call after call for ten bucks an hour, wringing old ladies for money while absorbing heaps of verbal abuse, so management let employees do whatever they needed to get through it. Besides the open drug use, there were wrestling matches, tattoo sessions, sex work, puppy sales. CDG would hire anyone from excons to literal children like Lipman-Stern, who started working there as a 14-year-old high-school dropout. The only job requirement, Pespas used to joke, was being "able to pronounce benevolent."