When Sam Lipman-Stern was a teenager, he dropped out of the ninth grade. His “hippie” parents agreed that he could leave school as long as he got a job. After being turned away by McDonald’s and Burger King, he learned from a 15-year-old buddy that a call center in Brunswick, NJ would hire him.
Lipman-Stern walked into a Civic Development Group (CDG) office a few minutes away from where he grew up, where a manager asked him to read a script. Lipman-Stern was hired on the spot. He was 14 years old.
“It was a place [where] people who couldn't get a job elsewhere — either for having felonies on their records, or because they were eccentric in some way — could get a job,” explains Lipman-Stern.
For seven years, on and off, he worked alongside drug dealers, former bank robbers, kingpins, and fellow high school or college dropouts like himself.
“When I first walked in, I remember there [were] all these really built, ripped guys doing push ups by the water fountains. Then you walk into the office and there's mugshots of the callers, like a badge of honor on the walls,” he recalls. “The office environment was just insane. It was total chaos. One guy, I remember, who got out of prison after doing seven years said that it was crazier than being in jail, working at CDG.”
With aspirations of becoming a filmmaker, and with his manager’s approval, Lipman-Stern started bringing his camera to film his wild workspace, which he would then post on YouTube.
“It started with us just filming the chaos in that office,” he says.
At the time, CDG was the biggest telemarketing company in the United States, with some 50 offices across the country. It specialized in requesting donations on behalf of charities that serviced groups like police, firefighters, veterans, cancer patients, children, and the disabled.
“I thought this is how the cops raised their money, and I thought the charities that we were calling on behalf of were, like, decent charities,” Lipman-Stern says.
Then he and his co-worker Patrick J. Pespas, the breakout star of his office videos, saw a news story about a veteran’s charity scam — the same charity they had been calling on behalf of at CDG.
“It was totally self-serving. The director was pocketing all the money,” Lipman-Stern recalls. “The money wasn't going to where it was supposed to go, which was disabled veterans. So that was the first grain of salt.”
Years of scrutiny, investigations, and two Federal Trade Commission complaints filed with a court-appointed judge shut down CDG’s operations in 2010. That, however, didn’t stop other companies from copying and continuing the fraudulent scheme.
Once Lipman-Stern and Pespas left CDG, they decided to expose the billion-dollar telemarketing industry.
Lipman-Stern shared his original CDG videos with Adam Bhala Lough, a documentary filmmaker who began his career at 19 by shooting music videos for rapper MF DOOM.
“I knew right away… I was Dr. Dre and Sam was Eminem, and he was bringing me the Slim Shady EP on a rough tape,” Lough recalls. “I think probably 99% of producers and studios out there would have just been like, ‘This garbage.’ But I knew it was gold, and I knew there were a few people in the world who would recognize it as being gold too.”
Lough then contacted filmmakers Benny and Josh Safdie to direct it. Instead, they became executive producers on the project, advising the three-episode structure that would become the new HBO docu-series Telemarketers, which premiered Aug. 13.
“For me, early on, it was [about] Pat and Sam — it was the buddy story,” Lough explains. “This is, in a way, a buddy comedy — the relationships between the characters is what is universal. This scam is kind of the backdrop. I had the blessing of being mentored in the Sundance Labs, so what I learned is, characters and relationships are paramount. That's what drives the story.”
Lough ended up teaming up with Lipman-Stern for the directorial task.
“It was a team effort. We had an incredible group of people, a confluence of talent behind the camera and in the edit room putting this thing together,” he says.
Their breakthrough came when HBO Documentary Films picked up the project, where it found a champion in Executive Vice President of Documentary Programming Nancy Abraham — who, it turns out, is also a former telemarketer.
“She was so stoked by this story. She's the biggest supporter of this project,” Lough says. “She was like, ‘In a way, this is kind of like a public service announcement, with a great story wrapped up into it.’”
Telemarketers chronicles the 20-year journey of Lipman-Stern and Pespas from being callers at a chaotic New Jersey call center, to unveiling a multi-billion dollar telemarketing scam that claimed to be raising money for charity. The three-part documentary series is now streaming on Max.