Behind every billionaire there is a story!

An Italian affair with ties to Clintons

Charming Italians who parlay supposed Vatican ties into financial gain are nothing new. When I was a correspondent in Italy in the 1980s, Roberto Calvi played that game. He ended up hanging from Blackfriars Bridge in London.  Raffaello Follieri, from the spur of Italy’s boot, is alive and kicking in his $40,000-a-month duplex on Fifth Avenue. Age 29, he used empty claims of church ties to befriend Douglas Band, a top aide to Bill Clinton. Band then smoothed the way to Clinton’s moneyed entourage, including the California billionaire Ronald Burkle.

That relationship birthed the unhappy union of Burkle’s Yucaipa investment operation, of which Clinton is a senior adviser, and the Follieri Group in a venture to acquire church property Follieri said he’d get on the cheap.

From mid-2005, Burkle plowed $55.6 million into this enterprise, only to conclude Follieri was devoting a chunk of it to good living. A lawsuit filed by Yucaipa in Delaware in May contends Follieri has been “systematically misappropriating the assets” to indulge in “massive charges for five-star lodging,” “dog care” and “inappropriate jet travel” for himself and “his actress girlfriend.” That’s Anne Hathaway, of “The Devil Wears Prada.”
read the rest published by Pressdemocrat here:

http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/article/20071225/NEWS/712250326/1033/NEWS01