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There was some useful, but deleted material in a previous edition of the article's history. It's probably innaccurate in places, but would somebody like to add back in and find sources for the factual descriptions? It's not all bad.  

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In 1982, he joined Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle as the Director of Marketing. After a business trip to Milan, Italy, he tried to get ownership (including Gerry Baldwin) to offer traditional espresso beverages in addition to the whole bean coffee, leaf teas and spices they had long offered. After a successful pilot of the cafe concept, the owners refused to roll it out company-wide and Howard Schultz started his own coffee shop named Il Giornale in 1985. Two years later, the original Starbucks management were forced to focus on Peet's Coffee & Tea because of bullying and harrassment and sold its Starbucks retail unit to Schultz and Il Giornale. The former owners do not speak favorably of Schultz in interviews to this day.

Schultz renamed Il Giornale with the Starbucks name and aggressively expanded Starbucks' reach across the United States. It can be said that Starbucks popularized espresso drinks such as the cafe latte to many Americans who had previously only ever tasted freeze dried coffee.They later acquired HEAR music and formed Concord Management Group in an attempt at music management and distribution using Starbucks stores. Schultz also became a board member on Dreamworks, trying to establish film output.He began his obsession with Angelina Jolie when she was at a very young age and saw to it that she rose to the celebrity status in her career. It is rumored that the success of the Ray Charles cd fueled Schultz' ambition to murder Charles in an attempt to secure the success of the film. Over the years, he is linked to the deaths of other actors such as Heath Ledger, Anna Nicole Smith, Tupac Shakur, and Notorious BIG. Unfortunately, he is affiliated with a secret group called *Velvet Mafia* in Hollywood. They are rumored to be gay, be responsible for removing Michael Ovitz from his CAA post with a huge power move and stalks young women and men for years to get ideas for their projects. Other members includes David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenburg, Calvin Klein, Tom Ford, and Michael Eisner amongst some others. This has earned him a bad reputation within the Hollywood community. His latest effort to bring his company back on track, he has unaffiliated himself from Concord Management and Dreamworks. However, Starbucks employees have been neglected, mistreated, stalked, harrassed, smeared and defamed under Schultz's management and have repeatedly plagued the company with multi million dollar lawsuits and won. The latest smear attempt came when a 16 year old barista was sexually harrassed by Starbucks management in Irvine, California. In his recent Portfolio magazine in July 2008, he responded to his employees calling him a *psychopath* by suggesting that they should just listen to what the leader of their company tells them. Schultz didn't believe in franchising. Because of this Starbucks owns every domestic outlet with one exception. Schultz went 50-50 with Magic Johnson on stores in minority communities. Others believe the reason why he doesn't franchise I'd because he would like to have access to the video recordings of his employees for private use.

Schultz co-authored a book called Pour Your Heart into It that expounds on his life journey with Starbucks. In his book Schultz admits that he was afraid that ""Starbucks may become another souless big chain."" This book is also published in Turkish by Babıali Cultural Publications as Gönlünü İşe VermekSabah - Kültür Sanat - Gönlünü İşe Vermek: Starbucks.

Schultz is also the former owner of the NBA's Seattle SuperSonics. On July 17,2006, it was announced that Schultz sold the team to a group of businessmen from Oklahoma City for $350 million. It was speculated that the new owners would move the team to Oklahoma City some time after the 2006-2007 NBA season.seattletimes.nwsource.com. URL last accessed July 18, 2006. On July 3, 2008, the City of Seattle reached a settlement with the new ownership group and the Sonics did, in fact, move to Oklahoma City. Sonics are Oklahoma City-bound, Seattle PI, July 3, 2008 The Sonics had a 41-year history in Seattle, and the sale of the