Episode 4: The Secret Reporting Team

My first reaction was, Wow, what have I gotten myself into secret reporting team?

In defiance of the.

Top editors who wanted to kill a story because maybe they were afraid of USC.

That's Adam Almarra, an investigative reporter for the La Times. My editor, Matt late had just asked Adam and three other colleagues of mine to join this secret reporting team.

I came home and told my wife what we were doing, and she was kind of terrified. I think we were new parents. Why are we wanting to participate in some sort of secret rebellion that's going to rock the boat?

Is this really what you want to be doing.

Davon Maharaj, editor in chief at the Times, just killed my piece on Carmen Puliaffido, the dean of the medical School at USC. The fact that Puliafido was at a hotel doing meth and having sex with a young woman who overdosed, and that we had nine to one one recordings and first hand accounts. Apparently that wasn't enough, but Davon did say he was theoretically open to more reporting

Look.

I didn't get into journalism to be making a lot of money and for a stable career. If you want a stable career and you want to make a lot of money and all of that, I mean, journalism is really not for you. I knew that I had to participate in this effort to get this story published, Otherwise it would just betray my core values why I'm a journalists in the first place.

My name is Paul Pringle. I'm an investigative reporter for the La Times. This is Fallen Angels, Episode four, The Secret Reporting Team.

I wasn't really thinking about the risks.

I was thinking about getting the story done and doing what it took to get it published.

That's kind of how I felt about it.

Matt Lade is my editor on the Pullia Feido story. It was Matt's idea to put together this team and keep it out of sight of Davon and his deputy Mark Duvason. Shelby Grad, another editor, quietly supports us. The first reporter we go to is Harriet Ryan. She's an expert at digging up documents.

I worked at Court TV.

I was there for nine years.

I learned about court records, how to get them from any court, you know, go any small town or federal or whatever, and just like find the records, and court records are just filled with like little diamonds of information.

Harriet guess that there's some risk to what we're doing, but she isn't phased.

I know, ad like the element of a caper.

It seemed righteous because I knew the management was just so awful.

She had worked on a big investigation into Purdue Pharma, the baker's of oxy content, and she remembers how the editors took two full years to publish it.

I'm not a bomb thrower revolutionary by nature, but by that point, when some of the things happened with Puliafido, like to the echoes of oxy and then just being treated so poorly, just came rolling back.

Matt Hamilton had been part of the Times Pulitzer Prize winning coverage of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. He understands that this Pulia Fido story has to be handled carefully.

It was clear to us that it was sensitive, that it was explosive. I do remember the instruction that this was to be discreet, to be confidential.

Assignment.

It was clear was coming from Shelby and Matt let I don't know what the hell they told the people above them, but it wasn't an assignment that was coming from Mark or Devon.

Matt's in his twenties, just a few years ago, he was an intern. One reason he agrees to join our team is to work with people like Harriet Ryan.

I knew her work, I knew her byline, I had heard her on the radio.

I was just intimidated by her because she's so good.

I felt a high degree of pressure to deliver.

Sarah Parvini is also in her twenties. She'd work with Matt on the San Bernardino stories, and like Matt, Sarah got her journalism degree at USC's Andinburgh School.

I went to USC when I moved to la as a graduate student in the journalism program, and it only became more obvious that USC was really a player in the city. I personally had a great experience attending Edinburgh. I had excellent profess who taught me a lot when it came time to investigate USC and investigate what the institution itself knew. It's not hard to separate, at least in my mind, your experience as a student versus your

Like Matt, she jumps at the chance to work with the veteran reporters, though we do make her nervous.

It was just intimidating to be a young reporter working with the likes of Paul and Harriet, who are incredible investigative journalists and incredible writers. To sort of be thrown in with them and say, well, you know, go do this. It was intimidating in that aspect. The first meeting was just sort of a rundown of what Paul had already accomplished and what he had already found out.

Immediately, people are like, well, have you tried this?

Have you tried this?

And I just remember being around this a comically large conference table was.

Just like the five of us. We were just like off and running from that point.

I remember Harriet basically saying, there's two routes we got here. We go through us like shake a bunch of trees, or behind the girl.

The girl her name is Sarah, and that's all we've got. Devon Kahn, who worked at the hotel. Constance told me that she was blonde, and she was young, probably in her twenties. And the last time you had seen her she was being wheeled out of the hotel on a gurney.

Everyone, on their own accord, did what we call a scrub. Where did you read the story?

You read everything Paul's forwarding to us, and just do some like initial digging based on your own instincts. And I remember Sarah and I taking an approach by scrubbing their social media and other digital foot prints. Puliaffido's friend list on Facebook was public. We're kind of going through and seeing usual suspects of like medical professionals, kind of people in the Pasadena community. But then we find these really odd characters in his Facebook friends.

It's like people with a bunch of tattoos just palpably different people.

How is that person friends with Puliafido who lives in like a very tony area. Pasadena is a top official at USC and you just see like people that look like they're from the other side of the train tracks, so to speak. It struck us is like, what's the connection. It was like, this is like a girl who looks like she might be an escort. We were going through that specifically to find people named Sarah or a name that sounded like Sarah, or young women with blonde hair.

Paul would forward them to Devin Kahn and be like, is this her? Is this her? Is this her?

Paul starts sending me photographs and you know, I'm telling no, this isn't her.

I have the Times Library again, do sweeps of public record databases. None of the names from Facebook checks out. But suddenly, for the first time, there's a woman named Sarah linked the Pullifido in those databases, Sarah Warren, twenty two years old listed as a quote associate. I searched Sarah Warren on Facebook. There are a lot of them, but there's one who's young and blonde and lives in Pasadena. I text her photo to Devon Khan.

After sending me I think maybe two or three photos, eventually he sends me a photo of Sarah, and I'm like, that's her.

It's been a year since the overdose at the Hotel Constance, ten and a half months since I met Devon Khan, and four months since I filed the first draft of my story. Now, finally we found Sarah. But who is she and how did she end up in that room doing drugs with the high flying dean of the medical school at usc Each member of the reporting team is working a different angle. Harriet Ryan is digging into USC's

To figure out why is USC so invested in this guy? Just cut him loose if he has all these problems. One of the things we're looking at was hit the role that he played in this lawsuit between the University of California and San Diego and USC. US under Maxnichius and under Carmen Fulifito at the medical school had this focus on transformative faculty, so they were not going to like gradually work their way up the ladder of prestigious

UCSD is devastated.

It's hundreds of millions of dollars, more than three hundred millions of dollars of federal funding. But UCSD decided to do something just that they filed a lawsuit against USC. You have two big academic schools fighting over this poaching of academic stars, and key witness in that case was going to be Carmen Pullifiedo.

It wouldn't help USC case if it became publicly known that this key witness had been caught up in a drug overdose of a young woman in a hotel room. And three hundred and forty million dollars in grand funding is a big incentive to keep things quiet.

So at the time that the school forces him out and it has to reckon with all of his problems, the highest levels of university knows that he's a key witness in this big case that you see has brought against USC, and the University California is seeking like one hundred and eighty million dollars in damage, so that they want serious compensation and key to adjudicating this is going to be the testimony of Carmen Pulia Fido. So when you think about when USC is like weighing like.

What are we going to do about Puliafito?

And one thing has to weigh is like we're going to need this guy to testify for us.

Meanwhile, Adam, Matt, and Sarah are looking for connect between Puliafido and Sarah Warren. She's still the only one who can really tell us what happened in that hotel room.

We started scrubbing Sarah Warren and her family. There was some case involving Sarah in Texas that we found records for, and then I looked through the database and saw Sarah Warren had been arrested several times in La County.

That revealed a number of other cases that we had to pull records for.

Sarah Warren had several arrests in La County. She was in and out of rehabs.

She had been signed up on like a sugar baby kind of website, and that it was associated with an email address that we had found in court documents. So what we knew of Sarah was what we had seen in the court filings in terms of rehab and then also the association with this sugar baby website.

The website is called Humaniplex and it's for prostitution so Sarah Warren is or has been a sex worker.

What was most interesting to me was her attorneys in these cases were very reputable private counsel.

She wasn't using public defenders.

Someone's paying for her lawyers, and someone's paying for these very tony rehabs. Like this is not like state insurance funded rehab centers. This is like high end rehab centers.

Then we find something else. In one court filing, we discovered that Sarah had been arrested with someone named Kyle Voit.

I was entering names from the Venmo list and the Facebook page into our internal database, being like, maybe there's a hit here, and I eventually struck gold with Kyle fot.

There were several arrests and they were all.

Drug related, possession, identity theft.

You know.

It wasn't one arrest for like a dy.

This was someone who got a criminal record, an extensive one, and he was friends with Pulliffido in some way or associated with him. He didn't have a lot of Venmo friends, but one of them was Kyle Voight.

Kyle Voight, who had been arrested fifteen times in the past seven years, pleading guilty or no contest to possession for sale of meth, heroin, oxycodone, fentanyl, and ecstasy. So Matt digs into Kyle's court records.

I knew the clerk at the Valley Courthouse and she let me come back, and I remember sitting there and kind of lift going through the pages, figuring out what's important.

And I remember seeing.

A court form that he filled out and he put an address in Pasadena on those rope lists, and then thinking that address looks really familiar and.

It's Pullifido's address.

Why would he list this five million dollar mansion in Pasadena.

Kyle Voight was mull time drug dealer lists this address.

How is Kyle Voyd, who appears to be arrested on a semi frequent basis in the orbit of USC's Medical School team.

All the reporters on this team have covered crime stories. This kind of low level drug dealing is pretty routine and it's not much of a story. What makes this different is Pulliaffido, an important guy bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars to USC doing meth and delicate eye surgeries. Turns out Kyle Voyd is sitting in men's Central Jail. So Sarah Parvini and Adam Almark decide to pay him a visit.

I had never gone to a jail or a prison before to speak with someone who was incarcerated there. That was definitely intimidating. Adam and I went down together.

It's kind of like, what else does he have to do? He's sitting there in jail.

I was very glad to have Adam there with me because Adam had way more experience as an investigative reporter than I did. We basically had to, you know, request the time, and then Kyle would have to be okay with speaking to us. I remember just being shocked that Kyle would even speak with us.

He's behind the plexiglass.

It's a visitor's kind of room where it's just rows of plexiglass, and you have to pick up the phone, and he picks up the phone, and so you start talking to him through the phone behind the glass.

We had to disclose who we were.

We had to disclose it.

It was for a story that we were working on. We were investigating usc we were investigating Fulia Fido. But he almost seemed shocked that almost like, hey, how did you find this out? How did you link us together?

How do you know Sarah? How do you know Carton?

He was a reluctant kind of source, so he would kind of just kind.

Of sit there and listen and then maybe say something.

We will be able to confirm that this is not a one off kind of relationship. This is Pulifido regularly associating with this circle of drug users, in this case a dealer.

He called him Tony. He said that Tony's always there.

Kyle tells Sarah and Adam that Sarah Warren is his girlfriend. They hang out in Pasadena on Huntington Beach with a bunch of other drug users, and Pulliafido is part of their scene. The reporters ask Kyle about some of the other names they've come across on Pulli Fido's social media, people who seem out of place in a world of money and prestige, and Kyle knows a lot of them.

We would drop a name of one of you know, Puliafido's associates, and he would go, oh, yeah, you know I remember the son so, or oh yeah, wow, you know that person.

But what's strange is that even though this Tony is someone they hang out with all the time and he's listed on Kyle's council form. Kyle seems to hate him. He says that Carmen Puliafido is a quote monster.

He would make sort of ominous kind of remarks. He would say Carmen's evil, that the guy is, He's a really bad guy.

He noted that the relationship between Sarah Warren and Harmon Puli Fido was a toxic one.

Kyle won't confirm that he sells drugs to Puliafido, but he says he has plenty of dirt on the former dean.

Kyle did, in that moment tell us that there were photos or videos or both that would link Juliafido to basically what we were investigating, to his relationship with Sarah Warren, his relationship with others including Kyle, in this sort of circle of partying and doing drugs.

What Kyle Voyd gave us was enough of an indication to know that the medical school dean at USC was leading a secret double life with this circle of people, which all of a sudden makes the story much more interesting than one night in a hotel.

Room, and it'll make it that much harder for Davon and Mark to kill the next draft of.

This story, you can write a story that explains why having a powerful person who's also an eye surgeon in a position overseeing young students and doing all these drugs and associating with criminals is not an ideal situation.

I think there was an initial idea that we would be able to turn this around pretty quickly.

Reporter Harriet Ryan.

And so on any given day, Sarah and Adam would be like out doing one thing, and then Paul be doing something else, and if not would be doing something, then we would like be writing, and just seemed like the days are really full of activity.

But we still need to keep our reporting under wraps.

We made sure that we couldn't be seen. We met a lot of the time in a little office that was like just kind of a spare room. It was kind of out of the way. We would meet in the cafeteria. We took steps to make sure that it was obvious that we were all working together on something major.

Then Matt Lay, who championed the creation of the team, tells us he's leaving the La Times for a job at CNN.

That news was just kind of like a lull. I'm just going to edit us now, who is going to sort of be the steward of this investigation at the editor level and ensure that it's what we wanted to.

Be and who's going to have our back When Dave and Amark find out what we've been working on, I was devastated.

I'm still devastated.

There's part of me that still thinks of Matt Laatee as my editor.

I know we haven't worked together in.

A long time. He's a great person, a kind person, a great reporter on the Oxy story. Like when I was left alone, I was a last reporter working on it, Matt would come on door knocks with me. I just stand next to me to so I wouldn't have to go with myself. Like He's just like an a great person, and I just I couldn't believe it.

Matt Levy makes us feel like the clock is running out on this team. We've got to nail this story down, make it bulletproof, because he won't be there to fight for it.

Discovering the rehab came from the court files. I remember going through files and seeing names of different rehab facilities.

Through court records. Sarah Parvini has been tracking Sarah Warren's various stints in rehab over the past thirteen months. There was Palm Strings and Malibu and San Juan Capestranto. The most recent is in Newport Beach. The place is called Ocean Recovery. Like the lawyers, it's not cheap. That makes us think there's got to be someone bank rolling it.

It was a very dramatic, overcast kind of day. Paul and I had driven down from LA to this place. Looked like an apartment complex, but it was some sort of recovery kind of a place.

Ocean Recovery is in a fourplex right by the marina.

We parked in front of the building, walked up to it.

At the threshold.

There was someone who basically was like, what are you guys doing here? Of course, we can't pretend that we aren't journalists looking for information, so we disclosed that, and of course you know that person was like, well, I can't discuss anyone with you for medical privacy reasons. There were some people who were outside of the building who looked like they were staying there, and Paul asked if

We wanted it to.

This is as close as we've been able to get to Sarah Warren, and we've tried everything, sending her messages on social media, phone calls, door knocking addresses she's associated with. We have one more way in her family. Public records show that the Warrens lived than Huntington Beach, a town that calls itself Surf City, USA. It's about an hour southeast of downtown LA. Sarah's father, Paul, is an executive for logistics company. Her mother, Mary Anne, has a master's

So we show up to the Huntington Beach neighborhood of the Barren family, and I would say a quintessential Orange County neighborhood. It's a gated community, but it's in a pretty isolated area.

It's close to the water. Kind of stuccoe townhouse is Italian? Ain't.

Given the neighborhood. The Warren seem like a typical upper middle class Southern California family.

We drove to the different entry points to this gated community, just trying to figure out, like.

How are we going to do this?

We make our way to the Warren's house and knock on the front door, no answer. Then a young man appears at the door of the garage. It's Sarah's brother, Charles.

Paul gives the spiel like we're reporters from Los Angeles Times. We're trying to talk to Sarah. It's a story about doctor Carmen Platfedo, the dane of UC's medical school. Charles Warren rolled up the sleeves of his t shirt said almost nothing, but pointed to a tattoo that said no snitches.

Just remember being shocked.

Because this is well to do community, gated near the coast of Huntington Beach, very lily white, Orange County community. And here's this teenager acting tough and macho with a tattoo like ready to go, saying no snitches. I didn't know if he was joking or not, and if it was just kind of imitating bug culture or or if he was serious.

And he was totally serious.

We have a feeling why USC might want to protect Carmen Puleofido, the prestige, the money, the risk of scandal. But what about this seventeen year old kid from Orange County. What does the good doctor have on him? Davon Maharaj and Mark Duvison deny that they did anything wrong in their handling of the USC investigation, and they maintained that any negative betrayal of their actions is false. Next time, on Fallen.

Angels, Puliafido had given him meth twenty five to fifty bars of sanax.

The deeper we look, the darker it gets.

Here's a young woman who is struggling not only with substance issues, but also this imbalance of power.

She was discharged, but relapsed on the ride home with Puliafito because he gave her meth and alcohol.

But the people who should be most concerned seem to have different priorities.

We told them two reporters from the only times we'd like to speak with as as, but of course we were turned away.

The money was arriving, so fast enough time for two dollar Times reporters.

That's next time on Fallen Angels. Fallen Angels, The Story of California Corruption is a production of iHeart Podcasts in partnership with Best Case Studios. I'm Paul Pringle. This show is based on my book Bad City, Peril and Power in the City of Angels. Fallen Angels was written by Isabel Evans, Adam Pinkas, and Brent Katz. Isabel Evans is our producer. Brent Katz is co producer. Associate producers are