After putting in full days in trying to inform and interpret Wall Street for investors and viewers, CNBC turns to prime time programming that shows the ugly side of this single-minded pursuit of money. “American Greed: Scandals, Scoundrels and Scandals” (CNBC, 8 p.m.) is followed by its own new scoundrel.
“Money Talks” (CNBC, 10 p.m.) is the kind of title that could be used for anything on the network, but in this case it’s sold as a reality show about a Vegas betting firm. It’s run by someone named Steve Stevens, but that’s only the alias for one Darin Notaro, a twice convicted conman, whose claims as being king of the strip is challenged by other more established bettors in Vegas, the sports press and just about everyone else.
He’s a fast-talking braggart, as conmen usually are. But Notaro’s place in hell is reserved by his original business: targeting elderly people, bilking them out of thousands of dollars in fake sweepstakes prizes.
In one, for which he was sentenced in 1999, he got a year in jail and had to pay $12,230 in restitution for his part in a Las Vegas company that swindled at least $234,000 from elderly people. The company, Century Pacific Group, called old people and told them they won a sweepstakes prize, but they had to pay $699 to claim it. At the time of the sentencing, he was on probation for six federal felony counts of telemarketing fraud by wire in 1995. For those, he had to pay $30,000 in restitution, fined $3,100 and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service.
In 2001, he was arrested again for a similar telemarketing scheme that zeroed in on elderly people out of state.
My mother was victim to such a scheme.
She sent about $7,000 over a period of years to such a scammer. She was elderly, and a lifelong contester, who had won quite a number of things over the years due to her persistence and creativity. This is how we won bicycles for all the kids, televisions of all descriptions (the first color TV in the neighborhood in 1965; the first TVs in the households of both sets of grandparents that same decade). But she also had the belief that all of these thousands of contests that they were all on the up and up.
She was used to having people calling and telling her she had won something. So she would always believe she had. (The movie “Nebraska” hit home in this regard, in part because we lived in Nebraska and it involved an elderly man who believed he lived a large cash reward). Paying money to receive a prize is always the red flag for most people though and she was getting hounding calls all the time wondering why the cashier’s check they demanded was not being overnighted to them. Once, both my father and I got on the phone to talk down this charlatan bilking the money and he (and my mother) both told us to get off the line. It was none of our business.
There was a running tension in our family regarding contests. My dad always said she spent too much time on them and that she’d never win. She had prizes to prove she can win and the extra determination to prove him wrong. Her sending those checks to these shadowy companies were her form of independence and proof, just as Bruce Dern’s character’s trip to Lincoln to claim his assumed prize. In the end, she must have admitted she was tricked, since she told us the total of the money she sent. And in my mind, it became the phantom fund for college tuition that I never got.
So here is this convicted scammer with his own TV show. And as such, he appeared on a CNBC panel at the TV Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena in January, where he was asked about these convictions.
“I was doing what they call a sweepstakes telemarketing company,” Notaro said, “a company that was selling, vitamins and skin care. As a result, you were offering an award. Well, out of the five awards, pretty much always everybody got this bracelet that wasn’t worth much.”
He didn’t mention how the suckers had to send in hundreds of dollars. But he was still pretty proud with how effective he was.
“It was my first job I’ve ever done, but I was good at it. My junior year in high school I made, like, $200,000. My senior year I made 300,000. So my sales skill ended up landing me in jail from this company. I ended up going to jail for telemarketing fraud.”
There, he had 18 months to think. He decided to go into sports betting. “I’m still telemarketing, closing deals,” Notaro bragged. “It’s a sale. In other words, I need to convince you to trust me.”
How does CNBC get into business with this guy?
“This is a business about information and also about selling. It’s a sales business,” says Jim Ackerman, CNBC’s vice president of primetime alternative programming. “We are journalism during the day. At night, we go into more of a narrative. It’s more entertainment based. The commonality, of course, is you want to look inside business.”
Even a sleazy business run by a conman not using his own name?
Ackerman says Notaro changed his name to Steve Stevens for the show because that’s the fake name he uses in his business. “It’s his sort of sale name. It’s the character he plays when he’s telemarketing. It’s kind of I guess it’s sort of sometimes people go into their jobs, and they assume a persona. So Darin assumed the persona of Steve Stevens,” he said.
“Steve Stevens isn’t a coverup name for me going to jail or anything like that. They were well aware that I was Darin Notaro when I got this TV show,” Notaro said. “I’m Steve Stevens at my job. It’s like Superman going into the phone booth. I’m Steve Stevens. I’m high powered. I get the money.”
Yeah. But he’s still a jerk.
I told him about my mother losing thousands of dollars to scammers like him and asked how he felt about that.
“Yeah, I do. I feel a hundred percent bad. That’s why I’ve kind of changed my life for the better to make sure that that person isn’t never here again.”
Just under a different name.