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
Chapter 1: 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.
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Paul Pringle face in reporting the story?
Paul had never encountered this level of secrecy from the Pasadena police or any police department for that matter. I started door knocking all over town, trying to find the police officer or officers who responded to the overdose. Same thing with the paramedics. Untransparent as the police department was, USC was at a whole other level.
I made an initial inquiry, complete silence, to the point where they wouldn't even acknowledge receiving my phone calls and emails, just so I could say in a story that they didn't respond to this request. I wanted to make sure that they got it. They wouldn't even do that. Paul was completely stonewalled. The Pasadena police, the city, and USC all refused to talk about the incident.
I mean, there's no question USC is very influential throughout Southern California and even beyond. Its board of trustees at the time I reported this story had 12 billionaires on it from various industries. It's always been a major part of the fabric of L.A. going back to the 19th century when the school was founded.
In some ways, the strategy of silence worked. A tip from the hotel manager wasn't enough to build a story. The LA Times isn't a gossip column, but the silence was also a signal. If there really was nothing to the story, why were Pasadena and USC so tight-lipped? What were they trying to hide? So, Paul kept pressing.
Eventually, I got a breakthrough by going sort of behind the scenes with somebody in a position of authority at the city and just making a case that, you know, this story is now about the city. It's not just about USC. The city of Pasadena is a public institution, and it's not behaving that way. So...
After I made those sorts of inquiries and made that case, I finally got a police report that was written three months after the incident. So a retroactive police report, which I've never heard of. And even then, I didn't get it for nearly two months after they wrote it retroactively. I also got an evidence report that again confirmed that methamphetamine was found in the room.
But in this case, it also included the name of a witness to this, and that witness was Carmen Poliofito. His name is now on the record. So now I had enough for a story.
In the end, Paul's persistence paid off. He obtained 911 call records, including one featuring Carmen's voice, the same one you heard at the start of the episode. Maybe this would be a straightforward story after all, even if it was taking longer than usual. Paul could now definitively report this.
The dean of USC's prestigious medical school was in a hotel room with a young woman as she overdosed. And just three weeks later, he resigned.
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Chapter 4: How did the silence from police and USC impact the investigation?
Imagine if you could ask someone anything you wanted about their finances. How much do you make? Who paid for that fancy dinner? What did your house actually cost? On every episode of What We Spend, a different guest opens up their wallets, opens up their lives, really, and tells us all about their finances. For one week, they tell us everything they spend their money on.
My son slammed like $6 worth of blueberries in five minutes. This is a podcast about all the ways money comes into our lives and then leaves again, which of course we all have a lot of feelings about. I really want these things. I want to own a house. I want to have a child.
But this morning, I really wanted a coffee. Because whatever you are buying or not buying or saving or spending, at the end of the day, money is always about more than your balance. I'm Courtney Harrell, and this is What We Spend. Listen to and follow What We Spend, an Odyssey original podcast. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Emma Greed and I've spent the last 20 years building, running and investing in some incredible businesses. I've co-founded a multi-billion dollar unicorn and had my hand in several other companies that have generated hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. The more success I've had, the more people started coming to me with questions. How do you start a business? How do you raise money?
How do I bounce back from failure? So it got me thinking, why not just ask the people I aspire to the most? How do they actually do what they do? I'm so incredibly lucky to know some of the smartest minds out there. And now I'm bringing their insights along with mine unfiltered directly to you.
On my new podcast, Aspire With Emma Greed, I'll dive into the big questions everyone wants to know about success in business and in life. Through weekly conversations, you'll get the tangible tools, the real no BS stories and undeniable little hacks that actually help you level up. Listen to and follow Aspire With Emma Greed and Odyssey podcast available now, wherever you get your podcasts.
The election has come and gone. Now we're in a new era. It can be easy to get discouraged, frustrated, but you can't afford not to pay attention. You need trustworthy, independent journalism to cut through the noise and hold power to account. I'm Mary Harris, host of What Next from Slate.com.
We are a daily news podcast with a kind of transparent, smart, yet tongue-in-cheek analysis you can only find at Slate. Follow and listen to What Next wherever you get your podcasts. It's mid-February 2017, nearly a year since the overdose. Paul has spent months digging into the story, only for it to be killed.
Unfortunately, this newspaper was sold to the Tribune Company, and things just started going downhill. At the time, the news team didn't trust the editor-in-chief, who also happened to be the publisher of the paper, a violation of journalistic norms.
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Chapter 5: What role did Sarah Warren play in this scandal?
And he, yeah, he ended up basically controlling her life. So she was more or less a captive in that world. And Sarah was willing to admit all of this, on the record, with her name attached.
And it was a very brave thing to do. She was going to be named in this story. She was going to admit to her own criminal behavior with drugs, her brief time as a prostitute. And she thought that needed to be done. And she was more concerned about other people, starting with her brother. The final piece Paul needed was something from Carmen himself.
He was keeping his hooks into the family this whole time, and he was constantly warning them about talking to me. He wanted to know what I was doing, what they might have told me. As it turned out, Carmen's constant hovering provided the perfect opportunity.
He wanted to have lunch with Mary Ann, and she asked me, should I do it? Of course, I can't give her legal advice or anything like that, but I said, if you do do it, I'd like to help. She was frightened of the guy, very frightened of him. So they were really putting a lot of faith into us, the Warren family. In the end, she was just all in.
And if she wavered a bit, I would have never put any kind of pressure on her. Never, just the opposite. What we mainly hoped to get out of this was, again, enough incriminating material that it would force the top editor's hands further to publish the story. So on St. Patrick's Day 2017, Mary Ann and Carmen arranged to meet for lunch at Blue Gold in Huntington Beach.
The idea was she would pick the restaurant. She would get there early. She would make sure that she was in a booth or a table where we could eavesdrop from the next table over. And I couldn't go because he knew what I looked like. So we had two of the other reporters go, Adam and Sarah.
For Marianne's safety, instead of wiring her, two LA Times reporters sat at an adjacent table, taking notes while Paul anxiously waited outside. It just worked beautifully. I mean, the lunch went on for almost three hours. He said a number of things that were very incriminating. And yes, as they were listening, they were typing texts to me, and I was grabbing them down, you know, on the street.
Carmen admitted that people had in fact been kicked out of rehab because of him. He also claimed he was in love with Sarah and that he quote, couldn't stop helping her. With that, Paul and his team finally had all the pieces for a compelling and damning story. A story that Sarah wanted out as soon as possible to prevent Carmen from putting more patients at risk.
He was practicing the entire time, yes. She would beg him not to go into work as a surgeon because his hands were shaking so bad. So, with the support of the Warrens, Paul and his team presented their new story.
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Chapter 6: How did Sarah's parents attempt to help her?
Well, it should have come before the book festival. It was ready before the book festival, weeks before the book festival, but it didn't. And then he said later in a similar meeting that, again, this story might happen, but it won't happen before commencement. And all this time, Sarah and her family were stuck waiting, with Carmen looming over them.
They had given up on us because month after month went by and I never had a good reason to give them. I couldn't share what was going on internally with them in any kind of detail, certainly, but I couldn't go there. So my excuses were vague and they weren't very compelling.
The Warrens hired celebrity attorney Mark Garagas, who had represented high-profile clients like Renona Ryder, Michael Jackson, and Colin Kaepernick.
When I took that back to the managing editor, he had no concern whatsoever. He actually seemed relieved that they had a lawyer. And our suspicion was that he and his top editor would prefer that this become public through this celebrity attorney than a lawsuit or whatever. And we'd cover it that way.
And that's around the time when I decided I would have to go to corporate and file a formal complaint against these folks. Finally, at his wit's end, Paul filed a complaint with the owner of the LA Times.
My one regret in all of this is I didn't do that sooner. I should have done it in April when they put the brakes to the original second story. But I did it and did it in writing and was prepared for the worst when they called me in. And it was like the next day or the day after that, the HR people called. Cindy Ballard said, no, we're going to take this very seriously.
They worked day and night even toward the end and interviewed, I think, about over at least 50 people. Eventually, as I was told by these folks that the top editor was warned that if this story comes out through Mark Garagos before it does in the LA Times, that's going to be bad for the paper, but it will also be bad for you personally. And sure enough, within days, the story was finally published.
But the story that was ultimately published turned out to be a watered-down version.
At the very last minute, in a very unethical way, they went into the story and stripped out the most damaging material to USC. All the really damaging stuff, I mean, giving... methamphetamine to a 17-year-old, delivering methamphetamine and other drugs to someone in rehab. That all came out. They wouldn't back down, and they did publish that version of the story.
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Chapter 7: What was the outcome of Paul Pringle's investigation?
They tried to soft pedal it. Oh, it was just an addiction problem. These things happen. And where our hearts go out to Dr. Pugliafito and his family, that kind of stuff. And again, they had some cover for that because the editors took out the fact that this guy was a drug peddler.
While USC publicly wished Carmen well, Paul and his colleagues were still hard at work reporting. Remember how Paul had initially planned for run and gun reporting, publishing a story and then following up on tips that came in afterward? Well, that's exactly what happened this time. And it turned out that Carmen wasn't just involved with Sarah and her younger brother.
There was also another woman, Dora, and her newborn son. He was supporting her in every way, including paying her rent. We had very good information that we published, including from Sarah Warren, that he was providing her with drugs, including methamphetamine. And one day the baby didn't wake up.
Fire department, I'm 26. Hello? Yes, I'm here. Baby not breathing. Are you there at the location right now? No, my girlfriend is there. How old is this child, sir? And the baby was later found to have had methamphetamine in his system. Dora's newborn baby died at just 25 days old.
They went to the sheriff's department. There was a very long investigation. Of course, Poliofito denied that he gave Dora any drugs. They weren't cooperating with the investigation at all. We can debate whether the investigation was handled the way it should have been handled. It went on for like two years and eventually they brought no charges.
In fact, to this day, Carmen hasn't been charged with a single crime. The California Medical Board conducted a thorough investigation, revoked his license to practice, and even turned over their findings to the DA. But the DA ultimately chose not to pursue prosecution. Meanwhile, USC remained relentless in protecting the institution.
I found out that when they signed a deal with the Warren family, they gave him a settlement and they had to sign an ironclad NDA. As part of that, they required the Warren family to turn over all of that evidence, you know, all the visual evidence and other things so that they could be destroyed. And that was done at the direction and supervision of USC's attorneys, including the former U.S.
attorney who was working for them at that time.
After all of this, the Warrens left Los Angeles, moving around for a while before eventually settling in Texas. Carmen was finally out of their lives, but addiction itself wasn't. On February 4th, 2023, Sarah Warren passed away. The cause of death was acute pancreatitis due to chronic alcohol use. Just four months later, her younger brother Charles also passed away due to chronic alcohol use.
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