In 2016, a woman overdosed on meth in a Pasadena hotel room. The man who provided the drugs: Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the dean of USC’s Keck School of Medicine. As one reporter at the Los Angeles Times fought to expose the truth, he encountered a power structure that made publishing the story all but impossible.Read Paul's book about this story: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250824103/badcity/ For a transcript of this episode: https://bit.ly/campusfiles-transcripts 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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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.
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.
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