paolo
08-06-2007, 04:28 PM
Read this news, and please remember that ths center right politician 2 years ago battled to make even marjuana a felony: This is a minister of Parlament from the center right ( with a pregnant wife and 3 children) who gets caught with a prostitute who had a cocaine overdose.
Here is the beginning of the story from Times:
When Cosimo Mele, an MP for a centre-right party close to the Vatican, took a call girl to a chic Roman hotel for the night, he thought it would prove to be “an adventure”. Today he is under investigation in a sex and drugs scandal that saw the young woman rushed off in an ambulance, suffering from a cocaine overdose.
The affair has fuelled a growing sense of outrage with the country’s political class among ordinary Italians growing weary of a hypocritical elite oozing with extravagant perks and dogged by sexual scandal. Unusually for Italy, the scandal involving Mele, a balding 50-year-old building entrepreneur, has generated many headlines and much ridicule. Unlike Anglo-Saxon cultures, the sexual adventures of politicians - including the supposed amorous “prowess” of former premier Silvio Berlusconi - are normally quietly tolerated by the public and largely ignored by the media.
But as an MP from the southern Apulia region for the Christian Democratic UDC party, Mele had campaigned to "defend our Christian values and identity". After just five days away from his pregnant wife and three children, he succumbed to a night with a Roman woman named only as Francesca Z, 29, whom he met in a wine bar.
Last weekend Mele took her to the glamorous Flora hotel on the Via Veneto - a haunt of film legends Elizabeth Taylor, Rich-ard Burton and Anita Ekberg in the Dolce Vita era of the 1950s and 1960s. Mele denied paying Francesca, but admitted making her a “gift” of £300.
According to Mele’s account, Francesca called a friend, a young Russian woman, to join them in their suite. He said he had watched television while they chatted and that he was sleeping when the two started snorting cocaine. Mele said he insisted on calling an ambulance when he realised Francesca was hallucinating.
Francesca’s version was radically different. She said none of the three slept that night: “We stayed, three of us in the room, from 2am until 5am.” Asked whether Mele called for medical help when she fell ill, she replied: “You must be joking. He tried to grab my mobile phone out of my hands. I called my boyfriend and my brother for help.”
Mele, formally placed under investigation for drug pushing, a crime that carries a sentence of 6-20 years in jail, has fared far worse than two previous political figures caught up in sex scandals...
The rest of the story is
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2199257.ece
Paolo
See also
http://my.lifeinitaly.com/showthread.php?t=1422
Here is the beginning of the story from Times:
When Cosimo Mele, an MP for a centre-right party close to the Vatican, took a call girl to a chic Roman hotel for the night, he thought it would prove to be “an adventure”. Today he is under investigation in a sex and drugs scandal that saw the young woman rushed off in an ambulance, suffering from a cocaine overdose.
The affair has fuelled a growing sense of outrage with the country’s political class among ordinary Italians growing weary of a hypocritical elite oozing with extravagant perks and dogged by sexual scandal. Unusually for Italy, the scandal involving Mele, a balding 50-year-old building entrepreneur, has generated many headlines and much ridicule. Unlike Anglo-Saxon cultures, the sexual adventures of politicians - including the supposed amorous “prowess” of former premier Silvio Berlusconi - are normally quietly tolerated by the public and largely ignored by the media.
But as an MP from the southern Apulia region for the Christian Democratic UDC party, Mele had campaigned to "defend our Christian values and identity". After just five days away from his pregnant wife and three children, he succumbed to a night with a Roman woman named only as Francesca Z, 29, whom he met in a wine bar.
Last weekend Mele took her to the glamorous Flora hotel on the Via Veneto - a haunt of film legends Elizabeth Taylor, Rich-ard Burton and Anita Ekberg in the Dolce Vita era of the 1950s and 1960s. Mele denied paying Francesca, but admitted making her a “gift” of £300.
According to Mele’s account, Francesca called a friend, a young Russian woman, to join them in their suite. He said he had watched television while they chatted and that he was sleeping when the two started snorting cocaine. Mele said he insisted on calling an ambulance when he realised Francesca was hallucinating.
Francesca’s version was radically different. She said none of the three slept that night: “We stayed, three of us in the room, from 2am until 5am.” Asked whether Mele called for medical help when she fell ill, she replied: “You must be joking. He tried to grab my mobile phone out of my hands. I called my boyfriend and my brother for help.”
Mele, formally placed under investigation for drug pushing, a crime that carries a sentence of 6-20 years in jail, has fared far worse than two previous political figures caught up in sex scandals...
The rest of the story is
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2199257.ece
Paolo
See also
http://my.lifeinitaly.com/showthread.php?t=1422