Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: Schifani e la mafia, il palazzo tace

AVVOCATO DEI BOSS Per la politica è tutto normale ma altri dicono: si
dimetta Reputazione
  Schifani e la mafia, il palazzo tace
  di Furio Colombo
     Parliamo del presidente del Senato Renato Schifani.
Del suo passato professionale si è occupato ieri questo giornale con
l’incontrovertibile narrazione di Marco Lillo: storia di un legame
professionale dell’avvocato siciliano con personaggi mafiosi che risale a
quindici anni fa. Quella narrazione – che dovrebbe provocare scandalo –
incontra però due serie obiezioni. La prima. Schifani è un avvocato.
Tipico di un avvocato è difendere chi chiede difesa. La seconda. Quindici
anni sono tanti. In quel lungo periodo di tempo l’avvocato Schifani è
cresciuto in un modo, i suo vecchi clienti in un altro. Lui è diventato la
seconda carica dello Stato. Loro, i difesi di allora, la prima fila della
mafia.
   Propongo a mia volta una obiezione alle obiezioni. Renato Schifani non è
oggi in discussione come avvocato.
Di lui si può dire, per esempio, che è un lottatore deciso a tutto nel suo
lavoro e a favore dei clienti. L’articolo di Marco Lillo racconta in modo
accurato e preciso, lo stile forte con cui il combattivo legale palermitano
ha condotto il suo impegno professionale a favore di un gruppo deciso a
conquistare un terreno e costruire un palazzo nella piena (e purtroppo
frequente) illegalità italiana. Va bene , direte, non tutti i
professionisti, specialmente se bravi (Schifani vince) devono essere
giudicati in base agli scrupoli. Ci sono però un paio di fatti da
considerare. Uno è che tutti i protagonisti del folto gruppo che conta
sull’avv. Schifani sono mafiosi. Non lo si sapeva a Milano. Ma a Palermo,
vigili urbani, prefettura, polizia, già a quel tempo si tenevano alla larga
dal cantiere controverso del palazzo che ospiterà Giovanni Brusca, già
noto fra altri destinati a diventare celebri un po’ più avanti, ai tempi
di Falcone, Borsellino e del bambino Di Matteo dissolto nell’acido.
   E poi il punto più difficilmente eliminabile dalla discussione. Renato
Schifani oggi è la seconda carica dello Stato. Così influente, sul destino
di questo Stato, da suscitare sorpresa quando minaccia di sua iniziativa,
elezioni anticipate, impossessandosi di una prerogativa che spetta solo al
capo dello Stato. Dunque un uomo importante.
   Un esempio fuori dall’Italia. Il celebre costruttore di New York Donald
Trump non ha mai potuto candidarsi a sindaco perché, da giovane costruttore
rampante, aveva minacciato un’anziana signora che non voleva cedere la sua
casetta (61esima strada angolo Lexington) dove Trump voleva un grattacielo.
La civiltà di New York è rappresentata da quell’evento. La casetta
c’è ancora. E Trump non può entrare in politica nonostante i miliardi.
In altri paesi (tutti quelli che noi chiamiamo democrazie) la reputazione ha
un valore altissimo e il passato un peso che non si scioglie nell’acido
del giornalismo compiacente e dell’opposizione conciliante.
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://arianna.libero.it/usenet/


======================================================================
IL MANIACO CIALTRONE MORPHER ERNESTO BANANA BOMBARDA CON ALIAS DIVERSI
======================================================================
Fatti curare vecchio pazzo maniaco!
E' questa � la vergognosa farsa accademica del cialtrone Furio Colombo che si
� fatto comprare la cattedra dal suo amico Gianni Agnelli.
THE NEW YORK OBSERVER
� 1993 The New York Observer Company Inc.
________________________________________
JULY 19-JULY 26, 1993
________________________________________
A Columbia Professor by His Own Fiat,
Agnelli's Man in N .Y.  Wears Out Welcome
By Antony Shugaar
Furio Colombo, who holds the San Pao�lo Chair of International Journalism at
Co�lumbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, has an impressively
eclectic r�sum�: former chairman of Fiat USA, chairman of the publishing
company Fab�bri Bompiani, and longtime columnist for La Stanpa, a Turin dai�ly
and one of Italy's most respected papers. Mr. Colombo is, more�over, the
director of la Rivista dei Libri, the Italian-and the only,
foreign-language---edition of The New York Review of Brooks, a joint venture
of the American publication with Fabbri Bompiani. He is the di�rector of the
Italian Cul�tural Institute, which is mai rained by the Ital�ian consulate in
New. York, And when, two years ago, he was ap�pointed to the San Paolo Chair,
The New York Times gushed that Mr. Colombo, then 60, had "added yet an�other
facet to his career."
The Times failed to note that virtually all the facets belong to one
Ritz-sized di�amond: Fiat, Europe's largest car manu�facturer and the single
largest corporation in Italy, producing 4 percent of the country's gross
national product.
The Agnelli family, which controls Fiat, owns the publishing house, the
newspaper and the Italian edition of The New York Review of Books.
And the San Paolo Chair was endowed by the San Paolo bank, which is located in
Turin.  Turin is a Fiat company town, and the San Paulo bank does a great deal
of business with the auto�mobile company.
Just what machina�tions underlay Mr. Colombo's appoint�ment to the chair has
been the subject of speculation at the jour�nalism school; sonic sources there
have said that the chair was en�dowed at Mr. Colom�bo's own instigation, and
with the condition that he sit in it. But the appointment has also prompted
questions of journalistic ethics - How independent can an international
journalist be who has for years been on the payroll of the largest
cor�poration in Italy ? - as well as questions about the extent to which
chairs at Co�lumbia University are for sale.
Agnelli's Man at Columbia Wearing Out His Welcome
Professor Colombo, who teaches a course in international  journalism, brushes
aside the suggestion that his relationship to Fiat is closer than a
journalist's should he. " I am an intellectual and the important thing is to
do your work well," he told The Observer. "I know myself, and I know the level
of independence and reliability my life offers. I know what I write, and I
know what I am in the eyes of the Italians "
According to a memo From the jour�nalism school dean's office to the faculty
dated June 30, Mr. Colombo will go on leave next year, ostensibly to work on a
book about China. "I may or may not go on leave next year," he told The
Observer in early July.
"His appointment was on a year-to-year basis. [The professor] was supposed to
change and there 
would be another Italian journalist teaching," said Ken Goldstein, a professor
at the journalism school.
Agnelli Courtier
Mr. Colombo, dapper, urbane, the author of 21 books, is a charismatic and
self-assured man. Among his friends and ac�quaintances he counts Gay Talese,
Henry  Kissinger, Gerald Ford and Umberto Eco. His most important friend,
however, is his patron, Gianni Agnelli, the dynastic head of Fiat and a noted
bon vivant. "He has always been � Agnelli's personal man in New York," said
Claudio Gatti, a correspondent for Rizzoli's Europeo, also
Fiat-owned."Ag�nelli needs to be entertained--he gets bored--and Colombo does
that."
"Agnelli is the King of Italy," said Gay Talese. "He comes out of a Medici
mythology, and so Furio Colombo is a prince of sorts to that court, a cultural
prince, a cul�tural attach�."
The story of Mr. Colombo�s arrival at the journalism school begins in May
1991, with a $17,5 million donation from the Italian Government to Columbia,
intended to renovate the venerable Casa Italiana, a building on Amsterdam
Avenue that is the locus of Columbia's Italian studies and activities, and to
establish a postgraduate res�earch center, called the Italian Academy for
Advanced Studies in America. Along with Mr. Colombo and Susanna Agnelli, Mr.
Agnelli's sister, the academy's board at first featured Francesco Cossiga,
former President of Italy, who resigned last year, as well as seven-time
Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, now under a cloud of scandal and soon
to face charges of or�dering the Mafia-implemented execution of a journalist
named Mino Pecorelli, and Michael Sovern, who stepped down as president of
Columbia--not under a cloud of scandal-- in June. An honorary fellow of the
academy is Gianni De Michelis, ItaIy's former Foreign Minister, now facing
prosecution on numerous corruption charges.
Soon after the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies was established in 1991, a
call was put out for corporate donations from Italian companies with a
presence in New York. The San Paolo bank was one of the first to respond.
(Marisella Lorch, the academy�s  director, had been hopeful of getting a new
endowment for a new chair in either medicine or archeology, from an
association of alumni of Rome's La Sapienza university, an association headed
by Mr. Andreotti, but the project is currently on hold. "The time is not
right," she told The Observer. 'They say to me, let us get out of trouble
first.")
Self-Nominated ?
Here the situation becomes more complex. That the San Paolo Chair of
Interna�tional Journalism was endowed for $1.8 million in June 1991, and that
Furio Colombo now sits in it, are not open to dispute. But sources at the
university and at the bank have said that the gift was not a
no-strings-attached donation; rather it came at the solicitation of Mr.
Colombo himself. "It was Furio Colombo's wish that we set up this
professorship in international jour�nalism," Luisella Giorda, head of the
bank's public relations division, told a reporter from Lingua Franca, not long
after Mr. Colombo�s post was announced.
'Furio Colombo is a prince o sorts to [the Agnelli] court,
a cultural prince, a cultural attach�.'  - Gay Talese
Mr. Colombo's post was announced. At any rate, the search for a candidate to
fill the chair was perfunctory at best, according to various of the professors
involved. ''Dean [Joan Konner] said that there was this wonderful man they had
been introduced to as the ideal candidate, ''said Karen Rothmyer, who, as a
professor at the journalism school, was on the committee for appointments, and
is now a business re�porter for Newsday. ''As far as I was ever io}ld Oq
he.ard, there was ever told or heard, there was never any other candidate. I
did make a point of reading the only book [by Mr. Colombo] that I knew of that
had been translated into English [God in America, published by Co-lumbia
University Press], I felt it was not the work of a true scholar, it was pretty
disjointed, and the information was large�ly taken from newspaper clippings."
"His name was not generated by our faculty, but by the Academy," Phyllis
Garland, a tenured professor at the journalism school and another member of
the committee on appointments, told The Observer. 'I am not certain that we
knew he was a member of the board of the Academy. We weren't aware of the
extent of the links to Fiat".�
  He was a present to us, "Ms. Garland continued. "The money did not come from
our budget, and he filled a position that we had not established. If we had
established the position, we would have advertised. But there was no
advertising for this position. He came by a different avenue. "
Joan Konner, dean of the journalism school, had a somewhat different view of
Mr. Colombo's appointment. "A search was done," she told this reporter some
six months ago. "There were definitely other candidates. " However, she could
not recall if the other names where brought before the committee.
However the selection process was conducted, many--on both sides of the
Atlantic--have wondered whether a man of Mr. Colombo's background should be
teaching journalism at all. "We don't con�sider him to be a journalist," said
Giorgio Bocca, a columnist for L�Espresso.  "He is a different sort of
journalist--he's rich, he's powerful, he's anomalous. He is more a
businessman, or a high-Level P.R. man than he is a journalist. He is an
ambassador for the Agnelli family, and he spends much of his time on that."
Mr. Bocca added, "More than a chair in journalism, he should have a chair in
ca�reer advancement."
An American journalist based in Italy for a leading American news
organiza�tion--who asked not to be named--said, "It seems like a conflict of
interest to me. It seems like he can't help but protect [Fiat], even
subconsciously ... That's fine in Italy, that's the way it works over here.
But I think it's bad to have someone teaching American journalists different
standards."
And Ms. Garland said, "One of the problems we saw was that of a different
con�cept of journalism between America sad Italy. There is a different set of
Rules, es�pecially about relations with business. The point of view of someone
 writing about what happens in society must be separate, independent. That was
a major question,"
Ms. Kenny said, "We were aware there was a different environment in Italy.
Cor�porations there are like college campuses. There is a great corporate
contribution to the cultural life of the country."
In his defense, Mr. Colombo said that in Italy, he la a respected and
much-read jour�nalist, and that, furthermore, he does not 
Write about economics or business. "When they made Pablo Neruda the ambassador
to France, "he said, "was he made ambassador because he was a poet, or was he
considered a poet because he was
ambassador ? " As an example of his independence from Fiat, he pointed out
that he wrote books in favor of Israel at a time when Libya' state oil company
had taken a 10 percent share in Fiat. "I don't think any P.R. man has engaged
in soiling strongly opinionated books at odds with the firm that employs him,
"he explained. 'That is La regarding the idea that I ever did P.R. If I was a
P.R. man, I was an extremely in�convenient one. "
Get Me Rewrite !
Mr. Colombo's two years at Columbia have not been smooth sailing.
A professional editor reportedly had to be hired to edit the pieces his
students sub�mitted. "There had been complaints about his editing, " a source
at the journalism school said. "It was presented as a prob�lem with his
English, but a number of stu�dents seemed to feel. Differently."
Soon after Mr. Colombo was hired, a student interviewed him for a piece that
later appeared in the magazine Lingua Franca (and to which this reporter also
contributed). "He presented the matter at a fac-ulty meeting, and said that he
was upset at this inappropriate interview," recalled Ms. �Rothmyer, "We  told
him that a journalist is free to ask any question that the journal�ist wants
to ask, and that that included a student journalist ... I became convinced
that this was someone who didn't under-stand the American way of journalism."
A source at the journalism school said that word was the faculty had
recom�mended that Mr. Colombo not be asked back after this year. Several
professors close to the process at the journalism school would neither confirm
nor deny that such a recommendation had been made, and Ms. Konner did not
return calls seeking comment. But one professor said that a meet�ing between
Ms. Konner and Mr. Colombo took place in late May "to determine what was to be
done. "
-- 
Questo articolo e` stato inviato dal sito web 
http://www.nonsolonews.it

 La civilt� di New York è rappresentata da quell�evento. La casetta
