The demise of the robocall king
By 
Finally, an American story with a relatively satisfying conclusion:
If you owned a phone in America over the last 40 years, there is a good chance you got a call from Richard L. Zeitlin.
He ran a telemarketing empire out of Las Vegas, using computers that mimicked human callers to raise money for charitable and political causes. Police and police dogs. Vietnam veterans and breast cancer victims. Missing children and disabled children and children with cancer.
He raised more than $145 million, mainly small gifts from small donors, but he kept at least 80 percent of it. For the most part, Mr. Zeitlin did that legally — exploiting loose rules and lax regulation of fund-raisers, and becoming an infamous example of how donors’ generosity could be quietly siphoned into private hands. He seemed to relish the role of antihero, suing his own regulators and setting up a website to criticize journalists who reported that he had kept much of the money he raised instead of helping others with it.
Then, after years of skirting the law, Mr. Zeitlin broke it — and brought down the whole empire.
“My whole life, I’ve been afraid of being broke,” he told U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan on Tuesday afternoon in New York. Mr. Zeitlin was asking for lenience, after pleading guilty in September to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. “It made me make some very bad decisions.”
Aren’t we all!
As is so often the case, though, the real scandal here is what was perfectly legal:
In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment barred states from setting any limits on a charity fund-raiser’s fees. Mr. Zeitlin took advantage.
I must say that Riley is one of the extremely rare cases where I would join Rehnquist rather than Brennan — I frankly agree with the dissent that the limitation on unreasonable fees charged by professional solicitors is better viewed as an economic regulation that incidentally burdens speech rather than a pure burden on speech subject to strict scrutiny. Anyway, whether or not one agrees on the merits some of the consequences have been ugly:
“It’s actually so easy to conduct highly exploitative and harmful activities as a charity fund-raiser, without breaking the law at all,” said Laurie Styron, the executive director of the watchdog group Charity Watch.
She said that fund-raisers like Mr. Zeitlin had one main rule to follow: Do not lie.
They were free to mislead callers by implication, telling donors they were calling for a cancer charity, then keeping most of the money themselves. But they could not tell a provable, specific falsehood — saying, for instance, that the donors’ money would be used to buy cancer drugs if it would not.
Zeitlin, however, was unable to resist just outright fraud as opposed to legal exploitation, so he’s headed to prison.