LOS ANGELES AND ROME — Sergio Marchionne is routinely hailed as the savior of Fiat, the man who transformed the Italian automaker from a punch line into a player.
The mayor of Turin, the city in northwestern Italy that Fiat calls home, is a fan -- and not only because Marchionne kept the local car factory open and even gave it a fresh coat of paint.
"One thing he hasn't been able to do is beat me at cards," says Sergio Chiamparino, who occasionally takes on the auto chief in bouts of scopone scientifico, a traditional Italian card game.
Marchionne, 56, is going to need better luck to succeed at his latest automotive challenge. Fiat has struck a global partnership with Chrysler, the struggling American carmaker that on Friday held its first hearing before the New York judge overseeing its Chapter 11 bankruptcy case.
Chrysler suffers from many of the same maladies that afflicted Fiat when Marchionne took over five years ago: falling sales, too much carmaking capacity, fractured finances and a battered image. Fiat didn't bet the house on Chrysler; it's exchanging small-car know-how and technology, not money, for what someday could be a major foothold in the North American market.
But Marchionne's reputation as a turnaround artist is on the line. The classic outsider and number cruncher in a world of "car guys" will have the chance to prove that his success with Fiat was no fluke.
Indeed, Marchionne's track record at Fiat was one of the reasons the Obama administration pushed Chrysler into the arms of the Italian automaker.
"Part of the attraction of Fiat is the quality of its management team and the success they've had in turning around what was a troubled company," said a senior administration official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the alliance. "We expect Chrysler to get the full benefit of that."
Although Marchionne likes fast cars -- he totaled a Ferrari, which Fiat makes, in 2007 -- he didn't study for the role of automotive kingmaker at test tracks or in design studios.
The son of Italians who moved to Canada when he was 14, Marchionne worked as a lawyer and accountant there before moving to Europe to run a couple of Swiss companies. A growing reputation as a restructuring expert landed him a seat on the board of sputtering Fiat. A year later he was chief executive.
