In case you owned a telephone in America over the past 40 years, there’s a good likelihood you bought a name from Richard L. Zeitlin.
He ran a telemarketing empire out of Las Vegas, utilizing computer systems that mimicked human callers to boost cash for charitable and political causes. Police and police canine. Vietnam veterans and breast most cancers victims. Lacking kids and disabled kids and kids with most cancers.
He raised greater than $145 million, primarily small items from small donors, however he stored a minimum of 80 p.c of it. For essentially the most half, Mr. Zeitlin did that legally — exploiting free guidelines and lax regulation of fund-raisers, and changing into an notorious instance of how donors’ generosity could possibly be quietly siphoned into non-public arms. He appeared to relish the position of antihero, suing his personal regulators and organising a web site to criticize journalists who reported that he had stored a lot of the cash he raised as an alternative of serving to others with it.
Then, after years of skirting the legislation, Mr. Zeitlin broke it — and introduced down the entire empire.
“My whole life, I’ve been afraid of being broke,” he instructed U.S. District Decide Lewis A. Kaplan on Tuesday afternoon in New York. Mr. Zeitlin, 54, was asking for lenience, after pleading responsible in September to at least one depend of fraud. “It made me make some very bad decisions.”
Zeitlin, 54, is a Wisconsin native who began in telemarketing as a youngster. His operation relied on soundboards — computer systems pre-loaded with dialogue from voice actors. The operator “talked” by enjoying snippets. Mr. Zeitlin wrote that the computer systems, not like a human, would by no means misinterpret the script, by no means argue, by no means insult a donor.
In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court docket dominated that the First Modification barred states from setting any limits on a charity fund-raiser’s charges. Mr. Zeitlin took benefit.
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