BAD CITY

The salacious tale of a major university mired in scandal.

In 2016, Pulitzer Prize winner Pringle, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times since 2001, received a disturbing news tip: A young woman had overdosed in a Pasadena hotel, where she was staying with Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the well-known dean of the Keck Medical School at the University of Southern California. The police and fire departments arrived, and the woman was taken away, but there had been no reporting about the event, no charges filed about the drugs and paraphernalia found in the hotel room, and no information about whether the woman survived. Pringle recounts in vivid detail his monthslong investigation into the coverup and the obfuscation, stonewalling, and power dynamics that threatened to stop him. He and his colleagues documented, finally, a sordid story of corruption and duplicity that involved not only Puliafito, but also the police, prosecutors, USC administrators, and his own newspaper. “Arrogant, egomaniacal, and quick to anger,” Puliafito had plied his young lover with drugs—bringing them to her even when she was in rehab programs—in order to keep his hold on her. As medical school dean, he hobnobbed with the rich and famous, including USC’s “bloated board of trustees,” which included “ultrarich industrialists, sports and entertainment moguls, bankers, construction barons, real estate investors, and financiers.” The author also discovered that he was surrounded by a “circle of addicts and criminals.” After Pringle wrote his story, he faced repeated frustration from his editors, who refused to publish a piece that would upset the imperious president of USC. The newsroom drama is as juicy as the dramas at the university. Besides the Puliafito affair, Pringle found out about a longtime gynecologist in the university’s health services who sexually abused patients and, in an episode known as “Varsity Blues,” how wealthy parents paid huge sums to have their children admitted as star athletes.

A brisk chronicle of sex, lies, and betrayal.