Richard Mellon Scaife

First, he did not create a Carnegie Mellon Law Chair for Starr, as, last I checked, CMU doesn't have a law school or pre-law major. Later: wharfinger /msg'ed me "The 'reward chair' Scaife arranged for Ken Starr was at Pepperdine University, but the offer was withdrawn because people found out and it a little too blatant."

Yes he (or one of his organizations) has given money to some rather dubious people or causes. Although I tend to think when one has billions of dollars (and gives a lot of it away), some might go to places that seem suspicious.

Scaife is well known for several reasons, first he is a very vocal conservative businessman. In my experience conservatives, at least the rich ones, tend to like to move in the background. He also is the Pittsburgh version of Rupert Murdoch, owning several radio stations and one of the city's two major newspapers, The Tribune-Review.

And recently one of his foundations gave ten million dollars to the University of Pittsburgh to set up The Pittsburgh Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases.

In case you feel like contacting him here's the info:

Scaife Foundations
One Oxford Centre
301 Grant Street, Suite 3900
Pittsburgh, PA 15219-6401
phone: 412-392-2900
web: www.scaife.com

"A former Army intelligence officer shot himself to death last month in a restroom outside conservative philanthropist and publisher Richard Mellon Scaife's Downtown offices, and Scaife has assigned a private investigator to determine whether the incident was a bungled assassination attempt."

"The shooting of the 37-year-old Las Vegas man attracted little attention at the time, and Pittsburgh police and the Allegheny County coroner's office quickly ruled it a suicide.

"Since then, though, the Internet has churned with speculation about Kangas. Some Web theorists have drawn parallels to the 1993 death of White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster, whose apparent suicide Scaife has openly questioned, calling it 'the Rosetta Stone' of the Clinton administration."