Evil CITY: danger and power in the city of angels, by Paul Pringle
“Bad City,” by Paul Pringle, begins in March 2016 in Pasadena, California, with the kind of tip reporters appreciate: an unconscious young woman. A drug-strewn hotel room. An elderly male companion, reluctant to call for help, who turns out to be the dean of the prestigious Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California.
Pringle, an investigative reporter at The Los Angeles Times, believed he could soon bring out a story about a more powerful man who misbehaves, the bread-and-butter job of someone who watches over the city’s most influential people. for a living.
In fact, the hotel episode sparked off a series of facts much darker than Pringle could have imagined. It sucked him into a 16-month reporting saga that eventually delivered an LA noir-esque tale of exploitation, depravity and greed. It also resulted in the impeachment of the newspaper’s editor and publisher, with whom Pringle went to war over the boss’s sociability with USC and its top officials.
Pringle’s Fast Book is a masterclass in investigative journalism, explaining how a reporter grapples with information and documents from unwilling sources and government officials. It’s a grim look at the weakening of local news, especially in The Los Angeles Times. Sam Zell, a notorious vulture investor, had acquired the newspaper’s parent company in 2007 and mortgaged its own employees’ pensions, leaving the company in financial ruin in 2008, before biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the waving paper in 2018. . ‘Bad City’ is an immersive version of this story that you can tear through in a few long afternoons at the beach.
But Pringle won’t let the reader dwell on the lecherous details without considering the many ways in which unchecked power fosters depravity and corruption, a store-bought idea that seems to have new relevance in 2022, as abuse of authority increases and that controls abuse seems less and less likely to win.
Many of the events Pringle describes are already known to readers who follow his work. His articles became national news with a major impact on USC. Five years later, they remain furious.
After being opposed by law enforcement and top USC officials, Pringle and his colleagues managed to collect on-the-record interviews, police reports and video evidence telling the horrific story of Carmen A. Puliafito, the dean of the Keck School of Medicine. , which was seen on videos using crystal methamphetamine, heroin and ecstasy with a group of young companions who had no ties to the university. Additional details in the book make it clear that Puliafito used drugs and money to control them, as well as keep a young woman named Sarah Warren addicted to his sexual needs.
The Puliafito story, which the Los Angeles Times published in July 2017, eventually led the reporters to discover more male employees who either crossed ethical boundaries or committed crimes that the university then covered up. This included a gynecologist at the student health center who for decades preyed on young women and disproportionately Asian women, photographed their genitals and sexually abused them, sometimes in a filthy exam room that reeked of his body odor.
Exposing wrongdoing and forcing corrupt systems to change is the kind of impact that makes journalism essential to a functioning democracy. It’s how the Fourth Estate maintains its influence over the venerable, better-funded institutions it covers. And it’s what editors typically want their reporters to do, especially when they’re reporting on those in power.
But behind the scenes, Pringle claims, he and his colleagues reported and wrote the Puliafito story in defiance of Davan Maharaj, the newspaper’s publisher and editor, and Marc Duvoisin, its editor-in-chief.
USC is one of the newspaper’s primary business partners, the kind of high-paying advertisers that publishers typically look for. Pringle believes it was inappropriate for Maharaj, “the ultimate person for the paper’s business dealings with USC,” to play a part in the Puliafito story, given the conflict of interest. And he accused the top two editors of back-channeling with USC officials, ripping reporters off the story, and using draconian edits to delay publishing the piece for several months. Some of these steps have effectively protected the school from criticism.
Maharaj and Duvoisin denied those allegations after the first Puliafito story came out, and in the book they again dispute some of them.
Pringle and his fellow reporters — Harriet Ryan, Adam Elmahrek, Matt Hamilton, and Sarah Parvini — were left to secretly track down the facts that would become one of the biggest college scandals of this century, careful not to get them together in the office or tell their bosses what they were doing. They received more help from the drug-addicted victims of Puliafito and their relatives than from the police officers, school officials and editors whose job it was to stop him.
An enraged Pringle talks about his fears about Maharaj’s admiration for Max Nikias, the tall rubber-stamped USC president whose own misbehavior would lead to his departure in 2018, and the newspaper’s daring edits to water down the story. Early on in the trial, Duvoisin Pringle would not have the article called a “Times investigation” because, Duvoisin said, “it implies misconduct.”
When Pringle shared his concerns with colleagues, Times-affiliated lawyers and eventually the head of human resources, he helped spark an internal investigation into Maharaj and Duvoisin’s handling of the Puliafito story. While the official findings showed neither editors had done anything wrong, both were pushed out a month after the story aired.
Despite his battle with Maharaj and Duvoisin, despite the newspaper’s still-weak financial position and USC’s power — thanks to its ability to raise money from men like Puliafito — Pringle believes reporters and their sources, no matter how modest they are. , can outsmart even the most powerful people and institutions and mobilize them. And when those institutions collude to protect each other, reporting can be our last hope of accountability.
Pringle delivers his story in a torrent of sharp narrative and fair reckoning that might seem insignificant if the stakes weren’t so serious.
In 2016, The Los Angeles Times was a shell of its former self, thanks to Zell. While the newspaper cut staff through takeovers and layoffs, the university provided financial support to the publishing house in the form of advertisements and to the editor in the form of jobs.
“The Times’ power had always come primarily from the robustness and eternity of its journalism. His strength came from being a to check on power,” Pringle writes. “It was that force that convinced me that Maharaj and his enablers had surrendered to an emerging and emboldened USC”
There were dire consequences when USC prevailed.
During the months that Pringle and his colleagues fought for permission to publish the Puliafito story, the doctor continued to supply drugs to Warren and others. He introduced Warren’s teenage brother to meth and had an addiction that made school and work impossible. And Puliafito’s “No. 2 girl,” a nude model named Dora Yoder, who also provided him with sex to feed her drug addiction, had a baby who died in October 2017, just 25 days old, with meth in his body.
When the institutions responsible for protecting people — like Warren, her family, and her colleagues, such as college students and healthcare patients and the people of Los Angeles — relinquish their responsibilities to the public’s trust, it is all too often the public that has to pay.
Evil CITY: danger and power in the city of angels, by Paul Pringle | 289 pp. | Celadon | $29.99.
