60 Minutes - 6/21/2015: The Director, The Cost of Cancer Drugs, Saving History

Episode Date: June 22, 2015

FBI director James Comey talks with Scott Pelley about the need for government electronic surveillance and privacy; then, Lesley Stahl reports on the astronomical price of cancer drugs; and Morley Safer reports that saving Italy's history has become fashionable. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. I believe that Americans should be deeply skeptical of government power.

You cannot trust people in power. The founders knew that. That's the director of the FBI making that statement. James Comey surprised us on many fronts, including questions about government snooping, how Google and Apple devices are testing his agency, the plague of cybercrime, and... When the phone rings in the middle of the night, which I'm sure it does, what's your first thought? Something has blown up. We're in a situation where a cancer diagnosis is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy. He's talking about the astronomical cost of the drugs that help keep cancer patients alive.

How do you think they're deciding the price? It's corporate chutzpah. We'll just raise the price, period. Just a question of how brave they are and how little they want to end up in the New York Times for around 60 minutes. Tonight, the story of the doctor's revolt against the high price of cancer drugs. Italy is home to two-thirds of the world's cultural treasures.

Trouble is, the country is too broke to keep its historic ruins, churches, and monuments from crumbling to dust. But now, some of its most treasured and endangered landmarks are being saved, not by the government, but by a more respected Italian institution. The fashion business. There is a very famous Kennedy speech, no? What is possible for us to do for our country, we need to do now. I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Morley Safer. I'm Bill Whitaker.

I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. James Comey, the director of the FBI, says the Internet is the most dangerous parking lot imaginable, meaning that online you'll get mugged in ways that you never saw coming. Since he first told us that last fall, we've seen what he meant. Hackers stripped Anthem, America's second largest insurer, of 78 million accounts, including names, birthdays, and social security numbers. They embarrassed Sony, leaking private emails and unreleased movies across the internet. Even the U.S. government fell prey to hackers, announcing this month that millions of personnel

files were lost in a hack attributed to China. We had a surprising conversation about our lives online with Director Comey, not only the criminal menace, but also snooping by agencies like the FBI. What does America's top cop think of government surveillance? Well, as we said, it's a surprising conversation. I believe that Americans should be deeply skeptical of government power. You cannot trust people in power. The founders knew that. That's why they divided power among three branches to set interest against interest.

With regard to privacy and civil liberties, what guarantee are you willing to give to the American people? The promise I've tried to honor my entire career, that the rule of law and the design of the founders, right, the oversight of courts, the oversight of Congress, will be at the heart of what the FBI does, the way you'd want it to be. Does the FBI gather electronic surveillance that is then passed to the National Security Agency? That's one of the things.

I don't know whether I can talk about that in an open setting, so I better not start to go down that road with you. You have said, quote, we shouldn't be doing anything that we can't explain, but these programs are top secret. The American people can't see them, and you can't explain them. Right. We can't explain everything to everybody,

or the bad guys will find out what our capabilities are, both nations and individuals. What I mean is I need to be able to explain it either directly to the American people or to their elected representatives, which we do extensively with Congress. There is no surveillance without court order? By the FBI, no. We don't do electronic surveillance without court order? By the FBI? No. We don't do electronic surveillance without court order. You know that some people are going to roll their eyes when they hear that. Yeah, but we cannot read your emails or listen to your calls without going to a federal judge making a showing of probable cause that you are a terrorist, an agent of a foreign power,

or a serious criminal of some sort and get permission for a limited period of time to intercept those communications. It is an extremely burdensome process, and I like it that way. That's a principle over which James Comey is willing to sacrifice his career. He proved it in 2004 when he was Deputy Attorney General. Comey was asked to reauthorize a package of top-secret warrantless surveillance targeting foreign terrorists. But Comey told us significant aspects of the massive program were not lawful. He wouldn't be specific because it's still top secret. This was not something you were willing to stand for? No, I was the Deputy Attorney General of the United States. We were not going to authorize, reauthorize, participate in activities that did not have a lawful basis.

At the time, Comey was in charge at the Justice Department because Attorney General John Ashcroft was in intensive care with near fatal pancreatitis. When Comey refused to sign off, the president's chief of staff, Andy Card, headed to the hospital to get Ashcroft's okay. You got in a car with lights and siren and raced to the hospital to beat the president's chief of staff there? Yep, raced over there, ran up the stairs, got there first.

What did you tell the attorney general lying in his hospital bed? Not much because he was very, very bad off. Tried to see whether he was oriented as to place and time. And it was clear to me that he wasn't. Tried to have him understand what this was about. And it wasn't clear to me that he understood what I was saying. So I sat down to wait. To wait for Andy Card, the president's chief of staff. Yeah. Then White House counsel Gonzalez. They spoke to Attorney General Ashcroft and said that the program should be reauthorized and you were there to argue that it should not be.

How did it end? With the attorney general surprising me, shocking me, by pushing himself up on his elbows and in very strong terms articulating the merits of the matter and then saying, but that doesn't matter because I'm not the Attorney General. And then he turned to me and pointed and said, there's the Attorney General. And then he fell back, and they turned and left. You'd won the day.

Yeah, I didn't feel that way. How did you feel? Probably a little sick and a little sense of unreality that this was happening. The next day, some in the White House tried to force the authorization through a different way. So Comey wrote a letter of resignation to the president, calling the situation apocalyptic and fundamentally wrong. He left the letter on his desk, and he and FBI Director Robert Mueller went to the White House to resign.

Yeah, we stood there together, waiting to go meet the president, looking out at the Rose Garden, both of us knowing this was our last time there and the end of our government careers. Wasn't it your responsibility to support the president? No. My responsibility, I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. This was something the president wanted to go forward with, and you were standing in front of the president of the United States telling him he shouldn't do it, and if he did, you'd quit. Do I have that right? I don't think I expressly threatened to quit at any point, but that was understood. President Bush was persuaded. The program that we've discussed, as I understand it, was in fact reauthorized, but in a modified form.

It was made to conform to the law, in your estimation? Yes. Help me understand the principle at stake here that caused you to write a letter of resignation, to rush to the Attorney General's bedside, to tell the President that he couldn't have what he wanted, and to face down the President's Chief of Staff, what was it that motivated that? The rule of law. Simple as that. We talked with Comey, who is 6'8", at his headquarters in Washington.

In technology, the cutting edge cuts both ways, and Comey told us he's worried now that Apple and Google have the power to upend the rule of law. Until now, a judge could order those companies to unlock a criminal suspect's phone, but their new software makes it impossible for them to crack a code set by the user. The notion that we would market devices that would allow someone to place themselves beyond

the law troubles me a lot. As a country, I don't know why we would want to put people beyond the law. That is, sell cars with trunks that couldn't ever be opened by law enforcement with a court order, or sell an apartment that could never ever be opened by law enforcement with a court order or sell an apartment that could never be entered even by law enforcement? Would you want to live in that neighborhood? This is a similar concern. The notion that people have devices, again, that with court orders based on a showing of probable cause in a case involving kidnapping or child exploitation or terrorism, we could never open that phone. My sense is that we've gone too far and we've gone there. The FBI is spending a lot of its time online these days.

This is a new cybercrime headquarters that the public hasn't seen before. We agreed to keep the location secret. They call it PsyWatch, and it pulls in resources from the CIA, NSA, and others. Comey's agents are running down leads in the theft of government data. Often in cases like that, the suspects are overseas. So the trouble is, in cyberspace, where do you put the handcuffs? It's too easy for those criminals to think that I can sit in my basement, halfway around the world, and steal everything that matters to an American, and it's a freebie because I'm so far away. A lot of those

people are operating in countries where they're not going to be given up to the United States. Yes. Russia, China, elsewhere. A challenge that we face, so we try and approach that in two ways, is one, work with all foreign nations to try and have them understand that it's in nobody's interest to have criminal thugs in your country. And second, again, to look to lay hands on them if they leave those safe havens to impose a real cost on them. We want them looking over their shoulders when they're sitting at the keyboard. When the phone rings in the middle of the night, which I'm sure it does, what's your first thought? Something has blown up. Yeah. It's terrorism that concerns you the most, even after all we said about cybercrime.

Yeah, I think that's right, because it's terrorism that can have the most horrific immediate impact on innocent people. In the age of terrorism, the budget of the FBI has doubled, adding capabilities like this reference library for bombs. Since 2003, they've analyzed 100,000 bombs sent here from 40 nations. From blasted remains like this circuit board, they can piece together the what and the how that lead to the who. It's just some of the 21st century technology that is transforming the 106-year-old Bureau. We also saw a new virtual world where agents are put through any nightmare that instructors can program into their goggles. To their mind's eye, they're in an alley or they're in an apartment building

or they're coming into a house because the computer can create that through the virtual reality glasses that they wear. It's a great way to be able to train lots of people for lots of different missions, all in a big empty room. FBI, let me see your hands! We're told that the deadliest avatar is a little old lady with a handgun. Subject detained! We also traveled to a town that doesn't exist on any map. It's a crime scene training ground.

And when we were there, the agents were using lasers to figure out from which direction shots were fired. A fog machine reveals the beam in daylight, but in this indoor town, it can be night, if need be. With what the FBI can do expanding so rapidly, James Comey keeps this memo right on his desk to remind him of what the Bureau shouldn't do. Marked secret, it's a 1963 request from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, titled, Martin Luther King Jr., Security Matter, Communist. Hoover requests authority for technical surveillance of King.

The approval is signed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. There was no court order. It was the signature of the FBI Director and the signature of the attorney general. Yep, and then open-ended. No time limit, no space restriction, no review, no oversight. And given the threats in the world today, wouldn't that make your job so much easier? In a sense, but also in a sense we would give up so much that makes sure that we're rooted in the rule of law, that I'd never want to make that trade. Some of the worst of the FBI's history is in its investigation of Dr. King. So on Comey's orders, FBI Academy instructors now bring new agents here

to talk about values lost in the pursuit of the man who became a monument. Character, courage, collaboration, competence. We have to be able to call on those tools in our toolbox to be able to make sure that we are correcting some of the things that happened in the past. What's the lesson? The lesson is the importance of never becoming untethered to oversight and accountability. I want all of my new special agents and intelligence analysts to understand that portion of the FBI's history, the FBI's interaction with Dr. King, and draw from it an understanding of the dangers of falling in love with our own rectitude. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history. I do that through storytelling. History

That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck, available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. Cancer is so pervasive, it touches virtually every family in this country. More than one out of three Americans will be diagnosed with some form of it in their lifetime. And as anyone who's been through it knows, the shock and anxiety of the diagnosis is followed by a second jolt, the high price of cancer drugs.

They are so astronomical that a growing number of patients can't afford their co-pay, the percentage of their drug bill they have to pay out of pocket. As we first reported in October, this has led to a revolt against the drug companies led by some of the most prominent cancer doctors in the country. We're in a situation where a cancer diagnosis is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy. Dr. Leonard Sahls is chief of gastrointestinal oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the nation's premier cancer centers, and he's a leading expert on colon cancer. So are you saying, in effect, that we have to start treating the cost of these drugs almost like a side effect from cancer?

I think that's a fair way of looking at it. We're starting to see the term financial toxicity being used in the literature. Individual patients are going into bankruptcy trying to deal with these prices. The general price for a new drug is what? They're priced at well over $100,000 a year. Wow. And remember that many of these drugs, most of them, don't replace everything else. They get added to it. And if you figure one drug costs $120,000 and the next drug's not going to cost less, you're at a quarter of a million dollars in drug costs just to get started.

I mean, you're dealing with people who are desperate. I do worry that people's fear and anxiety is being taken advantage of. And yes, it costs money to develop these drugs, but I do think the price is too high. The drug companies say it costs over a billion dollars to bring a new drug to market, so the prices reflect the cost of innovation. The companies do provide financial assistance to some patients, but most people aren't eligible, so many in the middle class struggle to meet the cost of their co-payments. Sometimes they take half doses of the drug to save money or delay getting their prescriptions refilled. Dr. Sals's battle against the cost of cancer drugs started in 2012, when the FDA approved Zaltrap for treating advanced colon cancer.

Sahls compared the clinical trial results of Zaltrap to those of another drug already on the market, Avastin. He says both target the same patient population, work essentially in the same way, and, when given as part of chemotherapy, deliver the identical result, extending median survival by 1.4 months, or 42 days. They look to be about the same. To me, it looked like a Coke and Pepsi sort of thing. Then Sahls, as head of the hospital's pharmacy committee, discovered how much it would cost, roughly $11,000 per month, more than twice that of Avastin. So $5,000 versus $11,000.

That's quite a jump. Did it have fewer side effects? Was it less toxic? Did it have something that would explain the double price? If anything, it looked like there might be a little more toxicity in the Zaltrap study. He contacted Dr. Peter Bach, Sloan Kettering's in-house expert on cancer drug prices. So, Zaltrap, one day your phone rings and it's Dr. Saltz. Do you remember what he said?

He said, Peter, I think we're not going to include a new cancer drug because it costs too much. Had you ever heard a line like that before? No, my response was, I'll be right down. You ran down. I think I took the elevator, but yes, exactly. Bach determined that since patients would have to take Zaltrap for several months, the price tag for 42 days of extra life would run to nearly $60,000. What they then decided to do was unprecedented, reject a drug just because of its price. We did it for one reason, because we need to take into account the financial consequences

of the decisions that we make for our patients. Patients in Medicare would pay more than $2,000 a month themselves, out of pocket, for Zaltrap, and that that was the same as the typical income every month for a patient in Medicare. Copay. Right. Twenty percent. Taking money from their children's inheritance, from the money they've saved. We couldn't in good conscience say we're going to prescribe this more expensive drug.

And then they trumpeted their decision in the New York Times, blasting what they called runaway cancer drug prices. It was a shot across the bow of the pharmaceutical industry and Congress for passing laws that Bach says allow the drug companies to charge whatever they want for cancer medications. Medicare has to pay exactly what the drug company charges, whatever that number is. Wait a minute, this is a law? Yes.

And there's no negotiating whatsoever with Medicare? No. Another reason drug prices are so expensive is that according to an independent study, the single biggest source of income for private practice oncologists is the commission they make from cancer drugs. They're the ones who buy them wholesale from the pharmaceutical companies and sell them retail to their patients. The markup for Medicare patients is guaranteed by law. The average in the case of Zaltrap was six percent. What that does is create a very substantial incentive to use a more expensive drug, because if you're getting six percent of ten dollars, that's nothing. If you're getting six

percent of ten thousand dollars, that starts to add up. So now you have a real conflict of interest. But it all starts with the drug companies setting the price. We have a pricing system for drugs which is completely dictated by the people who are making the drugs. How do you think they're deciding the price? It's corporate chutzpah. We'll just raise the price, period. Just a question of how brave they are and how little they want to end up in the New York Times or on 60 Minutes. That's because media exposure, he says, works. Right after their editorial was published, the drugs manufacturer, Sanofi, cut the price of Zaltrap by more than half. It was a shocking event because it was irrefutable evidence that the price was a fiction. All of those arguments that we've heard for

decades, we have to charge a price we charge, we have to recoup our money, we're good for society, trust us, we'll set the right price. One op-ed in the New York Times from one hospital. And they said, oh, OK, we'll charge a different price. It was like we were in a Turkish bazaar. And they said, this carpet is $500. And you say, I'll give you $100. And the guy says, OK. They set it up to make it highly profitable for doctors to go for Zaltrap instead

of Avastin. It was crazy. But he says it got even crazier when Sanofi explained the way they were changing the price. They lowered it in a way that doctors could get the drug for less, but patients were still paying as if it was high-priced. Oh, come on. They said to the doctor, buy Zaltrap from us for $11,000, and we'll send you a check for $6,000. Then you give it to your patient, and you get to bill the patient's insurance company as if it cost $11,000. So it made it extremely profitable for the doctors. They could basically double their money if they used Zaltrap.

Oh, my God. All this is accepted industry practice. After about six months, once Medicare and private insurers became aware of the doctor's discount, the price was cut in half for everyone. The drug companies have to put a price on a medicine that reflects the cost of developing it, which is very expensive and takes a long period of time, and the value that it can provide. John Castellani is president and CEO of Pharma, the drug industry's trade and lobbying group in Washington. If you are taking a drug that's no better than another drug already on the market and charging twice as much,

and everybody thought the original drug was too much. We don't set the prices for what the patient pays. What a patient pays is determined by his or her insurance. Are you saying that the pharmaceutical company is not to blame for how much the patient is paying? You're saying it's the insurance company? I'm saying the insurance model makes the medicine seem artificially expensive for the patient is paying? You're saying it's the insurance company? I'm saying the insurance model makes the medicine seem artificially expensive for the patient. He's talking about the high copay for cancer drugs. If you're on Medicare, you pay 20 percent. 20 percent of 11,000 dollars a month. Why should it be a lot more than 20% of $5,000 a month. Well, why should it be 20%

instead of 5%? Well, why should it be $11,000 a month? Because the cost of developing these therapies is so expensive. Then why did Sanofi cut it in half when they got some bad publicity? I can't respond to a specific company. Sanofi declined our request for an interview, but said in this email that they lowered the price of Zaltrap after listening to early feedback from the oncology community and to ensure affordable choices for patients. High cancer drug prices are harming patients because either you come up with the money or you die. Hague Up Contargyon shares the Department of Leukemia

at MD Anderson in Houston. Inspired by the doctors at Sloan Kettering, he enlisted 119 of the world's leading leukemia specialists to co-sign this article about the high price of drugs that don't just add a few weeks of life, but actually add years, like Gleevec. It treats CML, one of the most common types of blood cancer. It used to be a death sentence, but with Gleevec, most patients survive for 10 years or more. This is probably the best drug we ever developed in cancer. In all cancers? So far. And that shows the dilemma, because here you have a drug that makes people live their normal life, but in order to live normally, they are enslaved by the cost of the drug. They have to pay every year.

You have to stay on it. You have to keep taking it. You have to stay on it indefinitely. Gleevec is the top-selling drug for industry giant Novartis, bringing in more than $4 billion a year in sales, $35 billion since the drug came to market. There are now several other drugs like it, so you'd think that with the competition, the price of Gleevec would have come down. And yet the price of the drug tripled from $28,000 a year in 2001 to $92,000 a year in 2012. Are you saying that the drug companies are raising the prices on their older drugs, not just the new ones?

So you have a new drug that might come out at $100,000, but they're also saying the old drugs have to come up to that price too? Exactly. They are making prices unreasonable, unsustainable, and, in my opinion, immoral. When we asked Novartis why they tripled the price of Gleevec, they told us Gleevec has been a life-changing medicine. When setting the prices of our medicines, we consider the benefits they bring to patients, the price of existing treatments, and the investments needed to continue to innovate. This is quite an expensive medication. Dr. Kentarjian says one thing that has to change is the law that prevents Medicare from negotiating for lower prices.

This is unique to the United States. If you look anywhere in the world, there are negotiations, either by the government or by different regulatory bodies to regulate the price of the drug. And this is why the prices are 50% to 80% lower anywhere in the world compared to the United States. 50% to 80%? 50% to 80%. The same drug?

Same drug. American patients end up paying two to three times more for the same drug compared to Canadians or Europeans or Australians and others. Now Novartis, which makes Gleevec, says that the price is fair because this is a miracle drug. It really works. The only drug that works is a drug that a patient can afford. The challenge, Dr. Sals at Sloan Kettering says, is knowing where to draw the line between how long a drug extends life and how much it costs.

Where is that line? I don't know where that line is, but we as a society have been unwilling to discuss this topic. And as a result, the only people that are setting the line are the people that are selling the drugs. Since we first broadcast our story, President Obama asked Congress to change the law and allow Medicare to negotiate prices with drug manufacturers. Few believe, however, that Congress will let that happen anytime soon. Canada for a limited time. It's estimated that Italy is home to two-thirds of the world's

cultural treasures. Trouble is, the country's too broke to keep its historic ruins, churches, and monuments from crumbling to dust. Italy's up to its neck in debt. Taxes go unpaid. Corruption in an overstuffed bureaucracy is rife. But now some of its most treasured and endangered landmarks are being saved, not by the government, but by a more respectable Italian institution, the fashion business. As we reported last October, it stepped in to rescue some of Italy's most iconic sites, among them the very symbol of its rich, violent, and inventive history, the Colosseum in Rome. With its stunning, timeless sites, it's justifiably called the Eternal City,

a holy place to billions, a vast landscape of the sacred and profane. An architectural delight, especially when viewed at sunset. And smack in the middle is the Colosseum, the greatest surviving wonder of the ancient world. A memorial to the rise, decline, and fall of imperial Rome. A place truly colossal. We think it seats about 50,000 people, but this number depends on how wide you think the Roman behind was.

If you think that they had big behinds, then you calculate less. Small behinds, you calculate more. This is the Temple of Venus in Rome. Backsides aside, Professor Kimberly Bowes is the director of the American Academy in Rome and an expert on ancient Mediterranean history, who knows every inch of the Colosseum. She's taking us to the very top level, far above where tourists tread,

for a site that over the centuries very few people have seen firsthand. The view is terrifying. The view is terrifying. The view is extraordinary. Look at this. This is where the poor people sat. You really get the scale of this building here, though. Look how big this is. Look how big this is. People are ants. The place was built by the hands of slaves in just ten years,

finished a mere half century after the crucifixion. The performers here were gladiators, wild animals, even comedians. I gather that this place was the entertainment center, the Broadway of its day. Yes? In a way, the whole point is to produce marvels, to produce a spectacle that would have amazed the audience. The people with the most power, the senators, are down at the bottom, and the people with the least power, the slaves and the women, are up at the top. Women? Women. You don't want women to get too close to gladiators.

You have to keep them separate because your greatest fear, you have two fears if you're a Roman man. One is that your slave is going to kill you one day in your bed. And your second fear is that your wife is going to run off with a slave like a gladiator. This is what everyone's afraid of. So you've got to put the women up on the top. So even though the gladiators were slaves, they were kind of the movie stars of their day. They were.

And we turn to Hollywood for an idea of how it all might have looked. There's a moment in Gladiator where Russell Crowe walks out right where we are. Professor Bowes gives the filmmakers high marks for the historical accuracy of their computer recreation of the Colosseum. The whole drama is really the reenactment of Roman conquest, the continual expansion of the empire. Backstage was actually underground, the basement. Until recently, this was just filled with dirt. A labyrinth of corridors, dungeons for slaves, cages for animals, all brought from the far reaches of the empire.

And wooden elevators, raised by ropes and pulleys, leading to trap doors in the stage. There's a wonderful scene in Gladiator where the tiger pops out of the floor. This is exactly the kind of thing that would have been used to wow the audience. Since the 18th century, the Roman Catholic Church has venerated the Colosseum as a symbol of the early Christian martyrs who were put to death for their beliefs. Professor Bowes tells visitors there were indeed early Christians quietly executed elsewhere in Rome. But as for the Colosseum...

We have not one piece of evidence that any Christians were ever killed in this building. Not one. There are, I think, really interesting reasons for this. If you take a group of people who, by all accounts, are extraordinarily brave in the face of certain death, and you put them in this space and put them on display, who is everyone going to cheer for? They're going to cheer for the Christians, right, because they show such extraordinary bravery.

This is not a smart thing to do politically. So I'm in the famous Colosseum. Six million tourists a year visit here, snapping selfies and posing with rented gladiators who pass the time with cigarettes and cell phones. The place has survived fires and earthquakes over the centuries. Now there's a new crisis, finding the money to manage the crowds and keep up with basic maintenance. The director of the Coliseum is Rosella Rea. The money isn't there.

There's very little, totally inadequate funding. Only 5% of what we need. Too little money. And from the Italian parliament, too much red tape. A lot of people say the bureaucracy is so top-heavy. That's the reason why things don't get done. Bureaucracy is not just heavy, it is extremely heavy, and we are the first victims. Bureaucracy for us is a killer. But that scaffolding you saw earlier is a sign that help is on the way. The Coliseum is getting a badly needed facelift with money from an unlikely source. To prevent further ruin,

a benefactor is spending an arm and a leg, $35 million, on a place where 2,000 years ago, gladiators and slaves literally lost arms, legs, and lives, and all in the name of show business. The benefactor is Diego Della Valle, a prominent Italian businessman who knows a lot about the business of showing. Della Valle is CEO of TARZ, the luxury leather goods company. Crafting stylish shoes and bags

has long been an Italian specialty. Having made his bundle, Delevali decided to give some back to the state. Why spend so much of your own money, millions upon millions, to fix this wreck? Why not? Well, I am Italian. I am very proud to be Italian. And there is a very famous Kennedy speech, no? It's the moment that what is possible for us to do for our country, we need to do now. The shoes that made Delevalais' fortune are assembled the old-fashioned way,

by hand, stitch by stitch. And the work he's funding at the Coliseum is also about as low-tech as it gets. It's being cleaned literally inch by inch to get rid of centuries of caked-on dust, grime, air, and auto-pollution. The stone is travertine, a kind of limestone. No chemicals allowed,

only purified water and elbow grease. Days, weeks, months, years on end of scrubbing, built by hand, saved by hand. How long is it going to take? The Colosseum?

Yeah. I think three years from now. And what will it look like, do you think, when they're finished? I am very curious. To get some idea, we were shown a few sections that had been completely cleaned. 2,000 years old and looking almost brand new.

And in the world of high style, it's become fashionable to follow De La Valle's example. An entire parade of fashionistas are bankrolling similar worthy causes. The Fendi Fashion House donated $3.5 million for some new plumbing for a familiar waterworks. It's the Trevi Fountain. Marcello, come here. Where 54 years ago, Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg went wading in Fellini's La Dolce Vita, The Suite Life, forever linking Rome and romance.

This movie helped a lot to build really this powerful image of the Trevi Fountain. Cinema has a big power. Sylvia Fendi's grandfather started the business 90 years ago. And as we spoke, huge crowds had a last chance to throw in a coin before the closing of the site for repairs. It means that you will be in good health in order to come back. So it's very important for us. This country gave us a lot and so it's nice at a point to give back something. Elsewhere in Rome, the Bulgari fashion house is paying to clean and repair the Spanish steps where tourists stop to rest their feet. A Japanese fashion company

with ties to Italy is restoring the Pyramid of Cestius, built to honor a noble Roman two decades before the birth of Christ and after the Roman conquest of Egypt. And in Venice, the 400-year-old Rialto Bridge over the Grand Canal will be cleaned and strengthened, thanks to $7 million from this man, Renzo Rosso. Is the government too poor, too broke to maintain its treasures? No, I think we have to face with the reality. The reality is that they don't have money. Rosso is a farmer's son, a self-made man known as the jeans genius.

As in diesel jeans, he built the brand from the ground up, expanding into other businesses and becoming a billionaire several times over. And I want more shorts. His sleek headquarters rival anything in Silicon Valley. What with the espresso bars and daycare, where kids learn the international language of business. Clap out. Clap in. But the fashion industry is a rare bright spot

in the stagnant Italian economy. And these workers are the lucky ones. Elsewhere, fully half the country's young adults are unemployed. There's corruption, public and private, and widespread tax evasion. The Italian people are tired of this corruption because we have too many people that

steal, too many people that put money in his pocket. We have 40% of people that don't pay tax. Can you imagine? 40%! It's unbelievable! Pope Francis talks about the problem in scathing terms, saying corrupt politicians, businessmen and priests are everywhere. And the country's new young prime minister, Matteo Renzi, has declared war on the political establishment, saying the whole system should be scrapped. Diego Della Valle agrees.

I think it's possible now to open a new way. The old point of view was without any sense. I opened a new point of view. I pushed for the new point of view. But as Della Valle's scrubbers continue their work, it's worth noting that his generous offer to restore the country's greatest monument was mired in a bureaucratic mud for nearly three years before work could begin. This is the real challenge that Italy has. This is why sites are closed and monuments are falling down. The bureaucracy will have to change in order to actually make it possible for someone to come and say, here, do you want $25 million? Without the bureaucracy saying,

well, I don't know, I'll have to think about it. But time is a way of standing still for Italians. Past glories are always present. Food remains superb, and the noble wines still lubricate the conversation. On the surface, it's still la dolce vita, the sweet life. As for the future, that's somebody else's problem. How does 60 Minutes gain access to Italy's treasures? Meet our woman in Rome on 60minutesovertime.com. I'm Scott Pelley. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.