How Alan Friedman, Italy’s Professional American, Put Manafort in Jail

FLORENCE, Italy — Alan Friedman is Italy’s professional American. A former journalist with a baritone voice and perfect, if heavily accented, Italian, he has for decades provided the American perspective to Italians.

He hosted and produced Italian television shows, ran in elite circles, wrote the authorized biography of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and still contributes columns to the country’s most prestigious newspapers.

But for all his fame and influence in Italy, few had heard of Friedman in the United States until he helped land President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, in jail.

Documents filed last month by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, as part of the investigation into Russia’s influence campaign in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, showed that Friedman worked closely with Manafort in creating the so-called Hapsburg Group.

That was the informal name of a group of European politicians said to have been surreptitiously paid through overseas accounts controlled by Manafort, starting in 2011, to lobby American politicians to support Viktor Yanukovych, then the leader of Ukraine and a favorite of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Neither Manafort nor Friedman registered as lobbyists, a potential violation of a U.S. law intended as a bulwark against foreign agents peddling influence in U.S. politics.

“I never registered as a foreign agent because I never was one,” Friedman told The Guardian newspaper. “I was a communications guy.”

Manafort faces prosecution for his failure to register as well as for financial crimes related to Ukraine. His trial is expected to begin Tuesday.

When the group was revealed in February, Manafort desperately sought to give Friedman a “heads up about Hapsburg,” Friedman’s lawyer has said. That included messages on WhatsApp saying “This is Paul.”

Friedman told investigators that he considered the messages an effort to “suborn perjury.” A judge agreed and in June revoked Manafort’s bail for witness tampering.

Now Friedman, 62, has gone uncharacteristically silent on the issue even as he travels around Italy promoting his book, “This Is Not America,” which begins with his 2016 interview with Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate.

Manafort and his associate Rick Gates had a hand in arranging the interview, which was outside the usual media channels and led campaign aides to question its purpose, according to a person familiar with the issue who was granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

As he arrived at a recent book tour event at the Villa Bardini gardens in Florence, Friedman declined to comment about his relationship with Manafort.

“There’s nothing to find out. I have nothing for you,” Friedman said, adding, “As a colleague, I would be doing everything you are doing.”

But Friedman stopped being a reporter long ago. Instead, he has become an American exemplar of Italy’s transactional culture, its sometimes provincial sensitivity to the view from abroad and its porous lines between journalists, publicists and political operatives.

The sources Friedman cultivated as a reporter became his clients or instruments of lobbying pressure for Manafort. According to the documents Mueller filed, they are alleged to have included Romano Prodi, a former Italian prime minister, former president of the European Commission and longtime acquaintance of Friedman.

“Of course I know Alan Friedman,” Prodi said in a recent interview, before adding that he had never heard of the Hapsburg Group. “He is writing books about Italian politics since 20 years. How can I not know Alan Friedman?”

Friedman, the son of Jews who escaped Germany after Kristallnacht, attended the Bronx High School of Science and New York University before graduating from the London School of Economics and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.

He made his name in journalism at The Financial Times, where he became the Italy correspondent in 1983. In 1988, he published “Agnelli: Fiat and the Network of Italian Power,” a book about Italian mogul Giovanni Agnelli. Apparently he learned a thing or two.

“He became a famous person,” said Dietmar Alfons, who was Friedman’s companion for nearly 20 years. “It was the first time somebody attacked the Agnelli family, rightly so. And at the end, they made peace and they became friends.”

In 1994, The International Herald Tribune, then jointly owned by The New York Times and The Washington Post, hired Friedman as an economics columnist. He impressed some editors with his intelligence, showed entrepreneurial energy and started an IHT television show.

But it was in Italy that he became a star. “He understands better than others the Italians,” Alfons said.

In 1998, Friedman formed Fact Based Communications, which produced television programs in London and Rome. But his side jobs and consulting bothered Walter Wells, then the IHT’s editor.

“I didn’t like the mix of his business and our journalism,” said Wells, who fired Friedman in 2003, the year The Times took full ownership of the newspaper. He said Friedman had responded, “Are you going to leave a nice note on the bulletin board?” The next year, Friedman joined The Wall Street Journal while continuing to pursue his own business. But in 2011, he suffered setbacks.

That spring, Friedman hired Alessandro Proto, a real estate agent to the stars, to help him sell an estate he shared with Alfons in the hills of Tuscany. Proto, who was eventually convicted and jailed for fraud unrelated to his business with Friedman, said in an interview that Friedman had hoped to sell the villa for 18 million euros, or about $21 million at current exchange rates.

Proto claimed to have cooked up a scheme, for which he says Friedman paid him more than 40,000 euros, to plant stories in the Italian media that the villa would be used as a honeymoon locale by Prince William, second in line to the British throne, and Catherine Middleton after their wedding. Friedman, he said, took to calling the effort “Operation Royal Misdirection.”

Friedman declined to comment.

The royal honeymoon story appeared in Corriere della Sera and other publications. Emails provided by Proto to The Times showed that Friedman took an active role.

“I understand the question is very interesting to the Italian press,” Friedman told the Corriere reporter. “But really I can’t say anything.”

Months later, in August 2011, The Independent, a British newspaper, reported that the Malaysian government had paid Friedman’s company millions of euros to produce television programs, a fact he had withheld from the BBC, which aired the programs. Embarrassed, the BBC suspended the programming.

Even before that falling out, Friedman was pursuing new ventures. On June 25, 2011, he had written a memo to Manafort proposing a strategy to help bolster Yanukovych, the embattled Ukrainian leader.

The two signed a contract that paid nearly 1.2 million euros, or about $1.4 million, to Friedman’s account in the British Virgin Islands, linked to a bank in Zurich, for a lobbying campaign “aimed at media, decision makers, think tanks and business and political leaders in Europe and the United States.”

By June 2012, Friedman had begun “to assemble a small chorus of high-level European third-party endorsers” to act on Ukraine’s behalf, he wrote Manafort in an email, according to documents filed by the Justice Department.

He informed Manafort that Alfred Gusenbauer, the former chancellor of Austria, would disburse funds and that he “embraced the idea of what he called ‘underground commenting.'”

In subsequent emails , Friedman told Manafort that a member of the group would be “happy to speak” with a U.S. senator to “delay or tone down or stop the resolution” condemning Yanukovych’s jailing of a political opponent.

In March 2013, the same month Friedman’s parents and sister came to Italy for his marriage to Gabriella Carignani, the descendant of a noble Tuscan family, Friedman helped arrange a lobbying trip to Washington for Prodi.

In February 2014, he wrote to Prodi asking him to “please review” an opinion piece for submission to The New York Times that would appear under Prodi’s name. The article argued that Yanukovych could bring Ukraine back from the brink of collapse and that European leaders should not threaten sanctions against him or the nation.

Friedman then wrote Gates, in an email now filed as Exhibit K in the government’s case, that Prodi had requested to make a change in “the very last sentence.” Weeks later, opinion page editors at The Times wrote a representative of Prodi that in order to publish the piece, they needed evidence for some of Prodi’s assertions.

The Times Op-Ed page said that Prodi’s representative, redacted in the court documents, was Glenn Selig, the president of Selig Multimedia. In 2017, Selig became a spokesman for Gates. And in January of this year, he was killed in a terrorist attack on a hotel in Kabul, where his colleagues told The Tampa Bay Times he was working on a potential counterextremism project for a government agency.

The paper’s requests to Selig made their way to Gates, who then wrote Friedman that he had addressed the concerns, but that Friedman should “make any changes you deem necessary.” He added, “No pride of authorship here.”

In a recent interview, Prodi said, “I wrote the article,” and added of Friedman, “Maybe we exchanged some language, but the article is mine.”

Prodi said he received payment for his advocacy through Gusenbauer, and assumed the project was funded by European businessmen, not Ukraine. He said he had no official relationship with Friedman and was sure “I didn’t receive one dollar by Alan Friedman.”

“If you ask me whether Alan Friedman mentioned a lobby group and so on, I tell you never. Never, never, never,” Prodi added, saying he didn’t know “on which side Alan was working.”

In the motion to revoke Manafort’s bail, the government said that Manafort’s goal had been to notify members of the Hapsburg Group to say, if contacted, that they lobbied “exclusively in Europe.”

Asked by a reporter on Feb. 24, the day Manafort called Friedman, whether he had ever talked to American officials, Prodi said, “No, no, no, no.”

Later that day, as news reports revealed his trip to Washington, Prodi called back and said he had forgotten about the trip. “Let’s clear that up,” he said.

Involvement with Manafort, while a headache now, paid off then for Friedman, not least with his coveted interview with Trump. But Friedman had concealed his business arrangement with Manafort.

In a video posted on his website on July 12, 2017, Friedman spoke in Italian about how Donald Trump Jr. had convened Manafort for a suspicious meeting with a Russian lawyer.

“When you accept help from a foreign and hostile government in a campaign, it’s a crime,” he explained.