‘Telemarketers’ Subject Patrick J. Pespas Goes Missing
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Patrick J. Pespas, the gregarious, affable center of HBO’s surprise hit docuseries Telemarketers, has gone missing, as friends and family put out urgent calls on social media for assistance.
Adam Bhala Lough, the series’ co-director, announced Pespas’ disappearance over the weekend, writing Friday night, “Pat is missing, and [Pespas’ wife] Sue, his family and friends are very worried about him. Please put out the word that Pat is missing and help us find him. He was last seen in the Easton, PA area. Thank you.”
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Bhala Lough confirmed Sunday night that Pespas was seen near a bar in Pittsburgh — Knuckleheads bar in Ross Township — “and could be somewhere in Pittsburgh still.” (A rep for the Pittsburgh Police Department referred Rolling Stone to Ross Township police. Ross Township Deputy Chief of Police Brian Kohlhepp tells Rolling Stone that they were made aware of a social media posting “indicating that this individual was seen in our jurisdiction.” “We investigated this claim, and have been unable to corroborate or substantiate it,” Kohlhepp says. “In addition, we have not been contacted by any law-enforcement agency, requesting our assistance or information.” As of Monday morning, Bhola Lough confirmed that Pespas was still missing.
Along with the co-creator and co-director Sam Lipman-Stern, Pespas became the narrative and emotional anchor to the series, which traces a group of telemarketers who discover that their employer — Civic Development Group — engaged in a years-long, billion-dollar scam that siphoned off money allegedly going to charities into their own pockets.
In a recent Rolling Stone profile of the show, Pespas was called a “living telemarketing legend,” able to “charm any caller out of their cash” through his genial disposition and innate charisma. Pespas does not shy away from his history with substance abuse, as the series shows him nodding off at work and using hard drugs. (In the series, we see Pespas subsequently getting clean.) It’s Pespas who tells Lipman-Stern about the scam, as the series finds him interviewing politicians, high-level cops, and others to expose the grift.
Lipman-Stern enlisted Bhala Lough to help compile the twenty years of footage he recorded while working at CDG and beyond starting when he was a high school dropout at age 14.
“What the docuseries ends up delivering is something like three different movies in one,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Fear. “A kind of primer on telemarketing as filtered through an anarchic, Animal House-style raunchfest on a late-capitalism bender; a conspiracy thriller that keeps pulling at the CDG thread and finds that the grift runs way, way deeper than anyone would have guessed; and a sort of buddy comedy that finds the present-day Lipman-Stern and Pespas as amateur muckrakers trying to find answers to it all.”
Bhala Lough is asking anyone with any information to email findpatpespas@gmail.com.
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