Deleted material 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 Cquote 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 Bab ali Cultural Publications as G nl n e VermekSabah K lt r Sanat G nl n e 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