Information about Pallotta TeamWorks' AIDS ride fund-raisers and reports from past rides have been taken down from the company's Web site and replaced with a notice that the site will cease operations at 5 p.m. Pacific time on December 30. Pallotta TeamWorks, the for-profit event-organizing company that coordinated several fund-raisers for AIDS and cancer charities, closed its Los Angeles office and laid off its more than 250 employees in August. The firm also had canceled its AIDS Vaccine Rides in July and ended its Avon Walks, sponsored by Avon Products and benefiting breast cancer research, in May.
Pallotta TeamWorks had been steadily losing beneficiaries from its various AIDS ride fund-raisers in 2001 and 2002 because of concerns over the high costs of staging the events and low returns to the charities--beginning with the former beneficiaries of the California AIDS Ride, who decided to launch their own bicycling fund-raiser in 2002. Since 1994 Pallotta TeamWorks had raised more than $220 million for AIDS- and breast-cancer-related causes.
