USC's Drug Peddling Dean
episode
Campus Files: Scandals, Secrets & Crimes at American Universities
35 min
1 speaker
7 chapters
transcribed
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What happened in the Pasadena hotel room on March 4th, 2016?
It was a cool mid-60s day in Pasadena, California, March 4th, 2016. The afternoon was quiet at the historic Hotel Constance, a nearly century-old landmark on Colorado Boulevard. For Devon, the manager on duty, everything seemed routine. Then, a call from housekeeping. They needed him in room 304 immediately. The room was registered to a man named Carmen. Inside, a woman was unconscious. My girlfriend here had a bunch of drinks. Is she breathing right now? Yeah, she's absolutely breathing. But the woman Carmen calls his girlfriend wasn't just asleep or drunk. She was overdosing on GHB. Is she vomiting at all? No. She was sitting up in bed and passed out. I mean, I'm a doctor, actually, so... And Carmen, he wasn't just any hotel guest. He was Dr. Carmen Pugliafito, the Dean of USC's Keck School of Medicine. I'm Margo Gray. This week on Campus Files, the story of USC's drug peddling dean and the reporter who fought for a year to expose the truth.
I'm an investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times and the author of Bad City, Peril and Power in the City of Angels, which is a look at a major corruption scandal in Los Angeles. I've been working at the LA Times for just shy of 24 years.
Who is Dr. Carmen Puliafito and why is he significant?
That's Paul Pringle. He's being a little humble here about his credentials. Paul has received journalism's highest award, the Pulitzer Prize, three times, one of those for his reporting on USC. He's been a reporter in the LA area since 1984. And in that time, he's reported on the University of Southern California, or USC, on more than one occasion. One thing that we did was an investigation of the athletic director, Pat Hayden, who had taken over a charity for poor kids and in time began using the charity to pay himself and family members a significant amount of money out of the charity's funds. So I did have that history with USC. And it was a difficult history in terms of the school was not cooperative with me.
And that became even more so when I got onto this latest scandal. So in the spring of 2016, when a tip about USC came to the paper, Paul was an obvious choice to investigate. Well, the tip actually came through a photographer at the paper, and he just happened to bump into someone who worked at a hotel in Pasadena at a family party. And this person, Devon Kahn, the hotel employee, was on duty when a young woman overdosed at the hotel. Ordinarily, the LA Times might not report on an overdose, but this case was different. The room where it happened was booked and occupied by Carmen Pugliafido. He was the dean of the medical school. He was a major fundraiser for the school. Carmen's expertise in fundraising, combined with his background as an eye surgeon, earned him a spot among the top 25 highest paid research university executives in the US. He regularly spoke at national conferences, served on the governing board of the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, and managed thousands of professors and clinicians at USC.
So given Carmen's background and the fact that it was a Thursday afternoon just before spring midterms, it was especially odd to find him at the scene of an overdose. Carmen tried to talk Devon Kahn, again, the hotel manager. Out of calling 911, he refused that, and he did call because, you know, there were illegal drugs found in the room. And again, this young woman was in real distress. Fortunately, the woman was taken to the hospital, but the hotel manager was no less shaken because Carmen wasn't arrested, despite the meth found in the room. He did everything he could to get it addressed. He filed a complaint with the city attorney's office. He contacted the president's office at USC and gave a detailed account of what he witnessed. So he was just about ready to give up when he bumped into my colleague at this party.
So when this tip landed on Paul's desk, covering the incident felt like a no-brainer. Number one, it was news that there was a dean of the medical school was in this hotel room on a, I believe it was a Thursday afternoon in the middle of the school year with a young woman who overdosed. Oh, the other thing is that he resigned as dean three weeks after the overdose. And again, this was in the middle of the school term. That just doesn't happen.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What happened in the Pasadena hotel room on March 4th, 2016?
0:05–1:50
2
Who is Dr. Carmen Puliafito and why is he significant?
1:50–6:08
3
What challenges did Paul Pringle face in reporting the story?
6:08–10:03
4
How did the silence from police and USC impact the investigation?
10:03–19:37
5
What role did Sarah Warren play in this scandal?
19:37–24:28
6
How did Sarah's parents attempt to help her?
24:28–27:56
7
What was the outcome of Paul Pringle's investigation?
27:56–35:27
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Campus Files: Scandals, Secrets & Crimes at American Universities
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