I didn't understand what was taking so long, because he literally had all the information. So much time had passed. I washed my hands of the situation, felt like I had done everything I could do.
Devon Khan had been my original source for the story about Carmen Puliafido, but the top betterers at the La Times cut him.
From the story.
The reporters Me, Harriet Ryan, Matt Hamilton, Sarah Parveni, and Adam Mawarack are furious. We're talking about keeping our bylines off the story, but that would just give the editors an excuse.
Not to publish.
Devin had told me from the start that he needed to remain anonymous. Now it seems like the editors are looking for any pretext to cut him. For one thing, they argue that I don't have a phone record to prove this person actually called the office of USC President Max Takias.
I know I can get that record from.
Devon within hours, but he's just about had enough.
I'm really kind of getting kicked off with him, actually, because he's asking me questions that he's already asked me numerous times at the time, like, hey man, I've given you everything I could possibly give you what is this?
Devon sends me the record of his six minute phone call to the office of Maxakias.
This seals the deal.
The editors who are foot dragging on the story, Davon Maharaj, Mark Duvason and Matt Dorig, they can't say we don't have overwhelming evidence to support the anonymous whistleblowers claims, but their delays continue. So I decide to do something I've never done in my forty years in journalism, something that will cause even more trouble than a secret reporting to you. I decide to go to HR. My name is Paul Pringle,
and this is Fallen Angels. This is a story of an investigation that starts in a hotel room in Pasading to California and reaches all the way to the top of two of the most powerful institutions in the city of Los Angeles. This is episode seven, publication day. It's June twenty seventeen, more than a year since the incident at the hotel Constance, and four months since Davon Maharaj killed the story, and there are real stakes to more delays.
The Warrens are afraid that Pulliofido could burst back into their lives at any moment and jeopardize Sarah's sobriety. I'm angry all the time. I go to bed angry and wake up angry. It gets to the point that even my family can't take it anymore. My daughter finally says, if you're so angry, why don't you do something about it?
So a day or two later, I file a formal complaint with the Times office about the actions of the top editors for many months, I write, Davon and Mark unconscionably delayed publication of my reporting on a dangerous drug abusing former dean of USC's medical school. The head of publishing refers me to Cindy Ballard, the director of HR for Trunk Media, the company that owns the La Times. We meet and she takes my claim seriously. She calls in my fellow reporters as well.
I went in and I sat down at this little desk, and Cindy Ballard was at the desk.
She seemed very like competent and like a nice person.
Reporter Harriet Ryan and I.
Remember she was eating this like giant panini. I don't know she ate it through my whole interview, even when she was like patting me on the hand. She was just like real aggressive, like let's go, let's get to the bottom of this, and like she had so many appointments that she was eating the panini because she wasn't taking lunch. I knew a lot of stuff about what happened with Puliafito, but like I saw all this other
stuff that had happened before. And when she he ask me what happened with this other story of the popsy story, I mean I literally got like two sentences out and I just started crying because like it was so fucked up, and like nobody ever acknowledged it, And here was like a person in power saying like Okay, that's not okay. Nobody should speak to you that way.
Meanwhile, Mark Duvason continues to try to undermine our story. He now says, we can't report that Pulliofido uses drugs on a regular basis, despite the fact that we have three on the record sources confirming that he does, and we have photos and videos that show him literally using drugs and admitting to it on camera. We point this out to Mark, not that we should have needed to,
and he doesn't budge. Then a couple of days before we're scheduled to finally publish, Mark goes back into the story and deletes all but one of the references to Pulliafido supplying drugs to other people. The fact that he gave other people drugs is the worst of the allegations against Pulliafida and the most legally damaging to his employer USC. When we protest, Mark claims that's the advice of the
paper's internal legal counsel. But when I asked the lawyer, he says Mark hat approached him and asked him to come up with, quote, the most conservative version of the story possible. Our editors don't care how well we've nailed this down. By this point, it's too clear that if this story is going to be published at all, it'll have to be this watered down version, one that skips over most of Puliafido's own drug use and says next to nothing about him supplying drugs to other people, including
seventeen year old Charles Warren. Finally, July seventeenth, we publish, and everything explodes.
A former dean at USC is now to a drug overdose with his alleged prostitute girlfriend. He was the dean of the university's School of Medicine until he resigned last year.
Now his secret life is being revealed that don plan involvement.
That CBS affiliate in Sacramento is just one of many news outlets from California to Japan to the UK that pick up the story of the hard partying dean of the medical school at USC.
I remember not sleeping the night before and just like sweating in my bed.
It felt like just a relief that it was out.
There, Matt Hamilton, something that was known to only a few people internally was now suddenly public. I had no concept of what the reaction would be. I knew it would be shocking to people, but I didn't anticipate. I didn't know where it would lead us.
The reaction of CBS Sacramento was fairly typical. People are stunned by the news.
Andel.
This is nothing short of remarkable.
These allegations very.
Shocking stuf hear you, guys. And the dark side of this dean did come to light following an overdose by an alleged prostitute in his presence. In a report by The La Times, the woman claims the world renowned doctor paid for her living expenses, bought her drugs.
And devon khn. It's been a very long road. It's his information that got this story started.
I felt a sense of justice. I was also very pleased that it was on the front page, above the fold, which I understand is prime real estate in newspapers. There was nothing there that would indicate that I was the person that it given the information.
And now US can no longer sweep it under the rug.
We are outraged and disgusted. The first public comments from USC President Max Nikias about a scandal at the medical school, he revealed USC is now moving to terminate Puliaffido, and USC has hired a former federal prosecutor to investigate who knew what and when and why the school took no action for so long.
The k CAL nine report pretty much sums up the crisis control going on in the office of Max to Kias. There are layers to it. One, make it clear the university is done with Puliafido. Two, launch an investigation into how this could possibly have gone unchecked.
For so long.
What's not Inni Kiyas's statement is any concern for Sarah Warren or the other young people Pulliafido did drugs with, but it does offer some tender words for Puliafedo himself. The school says, quote, we hope that Carmen receives care and treatment that will lead him to a full recovery. Doctor William Tierney, a professor emeritus with USC, remembers the reaction among the faculty.
That first article in the La Times.
I mean, who could believe that?
I mean even the picture of him with the pill out his tongue. So Max sends a letter out to the whole university saying I'm shocked, shocked. I so hope he gets the counseling he needs. Really, that's like a cardinal finding out that there's a child abuse in his diocese and he says, I'm so amazed that you know, father Smith is molesting children. I hope he gets help. So that was kind of tone deaf.
The day that an.
Article came out, I called Max and he didn't talk to me. I've never spoken to him since. I mean, it's crazy. The one quality of a leader should be to talk to your critics, even loving critics, and say where have I gone wrong? And you can reject what they say, but where have I gone wrong, but instead he's stonewalled.
USC's internal investigation might be a pr move, but the Medical Board of California seems to want to actually get to the truth, acting in our reporting, opens an investigation into Puliofido. The passing A Police department faces some backlash too. In response to our story, the city manager sends a memo to the mayor and city council noting that the article quote reflects poorly on the city and the pasading
A Police department. And now the city admits it actually has another police recording from that incident at the hotel constance. This one features Pullifido in conversation with a police officer at Huntingdon Hospital where Sarah Warren was taken after she odeed.
How do you know her family friend Ruth Dan and you're a friend or day.
You guys have a romantic relationship between each other.
No, no, just friends, just friends, thinking that's probably why he's the con turner.
The release of this recording way after to the fact just makes me that much more suspicious that this was a deliberate cover up. Now the story is out and it's an investigative coup for the La Times with a huge readership.
Here's Matt Hamilton.
Suddenly this like ban of five reporters who had been kind of persona on grata were like welcomed with open arms into Javon's office with Mark and other editors present, and it was like the fights and conflict of the past few months had not even happened, and that they had been champions of the story all along. It was really disorienting, actually, because suddenly the follows couldn't come fast enough.
Suddenly, you know, where are you.
Going to take the story?
A lot of the things that we thought were important hadn't been in the story, and so it was like, now this like rush to try to nail those things down follow a bunch of tips that we.
Had Adam l. Mark.
Mark said something like going forward, we're not going to have five people working on this. When this story was published and it was this massive hit, there was no question as to having five people and even more working on it.
It was like, wait, did you not just live through the last few months. It just it was really clear that the editors were basking in the public accolades of the story. It just seemed like they were trying to memory a hole the last few months of contentious edits.
But there's one person Davon and Mark haven't forgotten, Shelby grad, the editor who supported our work for months, but they were trying to kill the story.
They're basically going to fire Shelby, like move him to some job that was going to suck, and then they were going to replace him with like one of their friends. Me felt that he was being punished because they couldn't really do anything to us, like what can you do to a reporter, but like he was being punished for having not kind of dropped the hammer on us and not told us, like stop working on it.
The top betteritor's treatment of Shelby doesn't play well in the newsroom, and Cindy Ballard, the HR director, starts to hear from many more reporters than just us, and.
Then when other people have heard they were trying to punish Shelby, other people started writing their own complaint letters. I mean I remember seeing that, like people could write letters together and the multiple people would sign them, and the people that were in other bureaus were just like, yeah, this has to stop. And most of the people had not had a specific they weren't involved in the pussy,
they were involved with Uxy Hutton. They just you know, heard like, finally somebody is standing up to these guys, and I want to be a part of it.
Trunk intervenes to stop Shelby's emotion, and the pressure starts to mount on Davon and Mark. At one pm on Monday, August twenty first, the staffers of the La Times receive an all company email from Tronk's CEO. It says that Davon, Maharaj, Mark Duvasan, and Matt doug will all be leaving the paper.
The atmosphere in the newsroom was just it was almost like festive celebratory. You know, people were high fiving, people were hugging each other. It was like one of the happiest days in the newsroom I'd ever witnessed.
I don't want to dance on their graves or anything like that, but I felt that the way that the Oxy Project had handled and then sc was really unprofessional, and that it was completely defensible to show them the door. I just thought it would never happen.
In the email, Tronk's management doesn't say anything about the HR investigation, or the move against Shelby or the delays in publishing several important stories, but we do feel vindicated and finally able to get back doing our jobs as investigative reporters. Now, the question is what will USC's response be to the revelations about Pulliufido. Will anyone actually be held accountable?
The State Medical Board has suspended the license of former USC Medical School Dean Carmen Puliaffido. This is in response to an La Times investigation that found that Puliafiedo was regularly taking meth and other drugs with other people having parties in hotel rooms. The Times now reports the board is working on a final decision about whether or not he will be able to continue to practice medicine at all.
About two months after the story comes out, we break more news. CBSLA picks up on our reporting that the State Medical Board is suspending Pullifido's license. The Warrens believe he should be in jail, but at least he won't be able to treat patients. The Warren family hires celebrity attorney Mark Gerago to represent them in a threatened lawsuit against Pulliofido and USC. He tells the mer civil claim could be worth ten million.
Dollars or more.
The Warrens also provide USC with the images of Pulliafido's smoking meth with Sarah. In a new statement to the faculty, USC leadership says the images are quote extremely troubling and we need to take serious action. The powerful US board says nothing. Doctor Tierney is not surprised the.
Board was really in the president's pocket. That's the classic example of what happens to an administration under fire. Anybody who says anything is a bad person.
It is a privilege to be sworn into office on the University of Southern California campus. I think President Nikias now USC represents so much to me. It has been like the iconic center of some of the most important events of my life.
Jackie Lacey is a District attorney for La County in twenty seventeen. Like a lot of powerful people in La she's a USC alum, proud of her connection to the university, and she has helped raise funds for the school, as you can hear in that clip from the DA's office. She even had her swearing in ceremony on US's campus. The Puliafido case, along with the State Medical Board's recommendation of criminal charges lands on Lacey's desk in October, but
Lacey declines to press charges. In a brief memo, prosecutors say that quote, the current state of the case does not establish sufficient evidence to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt. It's clear to me there wasn't much of an investigation, if any, there's no indication that authorities ever searched pullia Fido's car or home for drugs, and the DA's office abandons the case without once speaking to the warrants. Devon con at least gets some satisfaction as far.
As I was concerned, As long as he wasn't the dean, as long as he wasn't in charge of the new doctors going out into the world, that was good enough for me.
As for that ten million dollar lawsuit, the Garrigos firm tells the Warrens the best it can do for them is a settlement for one point five million, six hundred thousand, of which goes to the firm, and it comes with a strict non disclosure agreement. The Warrens have to agree to never speak publicly about their experiences with Pulliaffedo and to wipe their devices of the videos and other images featuring his drug use. That's a nice deal for Pulliafido
in USC. As the weeks pass, I'm bothered by what hasn't happened, because even though he's been stripped of his medical license and he no longer has a big job at USC, there's nothing stopping pull Fido from pushing drugs on vulnerable people. Sarah Warren has managed to break free of him, but in the course of our reporting, we found other young users in his circle, and I can't help but think about them as we learned that he won't face any charges.
One of those young people is Dori Yoder.
Charles and Sarah Warren had told Paul about Dori Yoder.
She was in that circle of people who were addicts and users who were in a lot of the photos. This is a woman who was raised in an Amish household and then had come to LA to become a star.
Dora's sister, Miriam, had moved to La first. It was a long way from the world they grew up in.
We grew up in Pennsylvania. My parents had seven children. I'm the oldest. We were born there and we were part of the Yoder family. We were the second strictest order in Pennsylvania. We didn't have running water, I mean electricity, I mean obviously, we didn't have anything.
We lived on a two hundred.
Acre farm, just lived a very conservative, very hard working, homish lifestyle until my dad decided he wanted to leave. All seven of us left with my parents in nineteen ninety six and I was fifteen. We then moved to the Missouri and I lived there until I was twenty three and I moved to Los Angeles.
Mariam and her brothers and sisters had seen firsthand what drugs could do to people.
So my parents became addicted to meth. We were homeless for a while. I had to take care of all my siblings, and my parents went to rehab and after a couple of years they got out of rehab and became born again Christian. At that point when they came back from rehab is when I left for Los Angeles.
Dora came to LA to live with her sister. A few years later when she was twenty three.
Dora's life, her whole lifestyle during her teen years were wild by people's standards who are not conservative. She was a handful for my family. My parents suggested that she move in with me, and honestly, I don't know why on earth they thought that was a good idea. I think they just didn't know how to control Dora, or I think they were exhausted from her, so they sent
her out to live with me. And I was excited at the time because I had lived here for three years on my own, I had a good job, I had a place for her to stay, and I wanted her to stay with me, and Dora and I always got along, so she moved in with me. She at first worked at my hair salon. Her modeling career started doing well. She started meeting a lot of people. She got hired to model at parties that were private where
she would just be naked. She would only wear a mask in heels and just be naked at the party by herself at a stranger's house.
And that's how.
Dora started getting back into her old habits, and she was just wild in Hollywood, and it wasn't long before her and I were fighting all the time. I believe it was in that period of time when she managed to run into Carmen Puliaffido.
Dora met Carmen Puliafido through her boyfriend Ario Franco. Like Kyle Voyd and Don Stokes, Ariel is yet another drug user in Pulliafido's Rolodex. He's also a heroin dealer and he's been arrested multiple times for possession.
In photos and videos, you could see him like in the circle with Pillifido and Sarah and you know, various high jinks.
Julia Fido became infatuated with Ariel's girlfriend, Dora, and just like with Sarah, he began subsidizing her life in exchange for sex.
Harriet Ryan, she.
Was still very beautiful at this time, very young and stylish and beautiful, and he was like kind of underwriting her life. And that life included like a boyfriend, but also like a house, a rental house in a duplex in Altadena, which is like a pretty short drive from his mansion.
She was living there and just she had no job, but she lived in this house at the time that was pretty expensive rent and she had everything that she wanted and was paying her bills on time. I found that to be odd, and I would go see her and her house was always sort of messy and stuff. And then she'd have a maid come clean it. And I just never understood how she had the money to do any of these things. And at that point, my
sister was not yet a drug addict. She was just her usual normal self, And so I didn't press the issue because I mean, it's Los Angeles.
It didn't occur to Mariam that Pullofdo was the source of her sister's mystery income.
Initially, when I met Puliafedo, I didn't know what his relationship was to my sister. I mean, for all I knew at that moment in time, he was just an acquaintance, or he was the landlord. I never ever would have guessed that he had any sort of romantic affiliation with her. Aside from his age, he just looked like a loser. My sister was like a supermodel.
Dora had recently dated Hollywood director Todd Phillips. Pullofido couldn't be further out of her league, and he certainly didn't look like the dean of a major medical school.
He was wearing some blues shorts and like a white shirt that was really rumpled. It was like a button down and it was just wrinkly, and he just looked like weird and gross. He wouldn't look me in the eye, he mumbled when he talked. He was very strange, and Dora was like, oh, this is my friend Carmen. In a million years, looking at this man, I would never have believed he was the dean of USC Medical. It's insane.
Eventually, Dora told Miriam that Puliafido was paying for her lifestyle.
She said, Oh, he just really likes me, and he's like my other dad, and he just buys all these things for me. And I'm like, Dora, are you sleeping with him? She's like, ew, no, I would.
Not do that.
Puliafido was also supplying drugs to both Dora and her boyfriend Ariel, but at this point it was clear Dora had a serious problem.
The first time I discovered that she really had an actual drug abuse problem was it had been a while since I spoke to her. I went to her house and her house was absolutely disgusting. Food on the stove, overgrown with mold, piles of trash outside. My sister started flaking a lot on me. When we had set up a lunch date. I was really hard to reach her on my phone, and I would show up at her house and knock on the door, and I could tell
she was home, but she wouldn't answer. And at one point she finally let me in to see her, and she was acting strange, and that's when I noticed there were needles drug needles on the floor in her house. And it's then that I started to realize that she wasn't just recreationally using drugs. She had a real drug abuse problem.
Miriam called their parents, with the help of Dora's ex boyfriend Todd, they checked her into rehab, but after three weeks in treatment, Dora left rehab and went back to Missouri.
It didn't last long.
It was not long before she was a mess again, and she decided to leave my mom's house, come back out here and resume her life. And at that time I did not know she was still talking to Puliaffido. I still didn't know at that time, none of us did, that he was providing her with these drugs. I realized she was still on drugs and reached out to my parents again.
Dora's parents brought her back to Missouri, but Miriam discovered that Dora didn't come by herself. Puliafido had gotten on the flight with her.
Somehow, Dora ended up back at their house again, only this time my parents told me that Pulliaffido was at their house and I asked my mom. I was like, Mom, why are you letting this man stay in your house with Dora. I was like, he's giving her endless, limitless money. She's never gonna get off drugs if she has access to that much money. My mom was like, Oh, he's nice, he's nice.
I talked to him.
He's fine, He's not. And this is my mom being so gullible. I'm like, Mom, he's seventy years old. Dora is like twenty five. What are you talking about?
I was living.
It occurred to me that there's more going on than just an exchange of money, because he has a thing for her that clearly he's having a sexual relationship with her and providing her with money. I still didn't know he was giving her drugs, and I still didn't really know who he was. When I met Ril, I was confused because I was like, wait, Dora is having some sexual thing with Carmen. And then and I think I confronted her at one point and she's like, it's not
like that with Carmen. Aril's my boyfriend, and Carmen just gives us money. It just started to become so strange, and I was like, is he giving you more than money? Where are you guys getting drugs from? Because Aril was clearly on drugs, And I just remember Dora getting really upset. We got in a big fight and I threw up my hands at that point and I just stopped talking to Dora.
Dora and Polio Fido went back to LA and finally Miriam figures out who this man is and the reason for his hold on her sister.
I found out shortly thereafter. I found out he's the Dean of USC Medical. I also found out that he was prescribing drugs to my sister while he was at my parents' house. And I think that's when I finally broke through to my parents.
Miriam's parents were horrified by this discovery. Pull your feet on a no longer seemed like an old guy who's otherwise harmless. They come out to LA to help Miriam confront Dora about her involvement with the dean and his connection to her drug use.
We tried again to do an intervention with her. We tried again to get her off of drugs. We show up at our house and her house is just like a fort. At this point, Puliafido is paying.
For her house.
The outside of her door has a biometric lock on it. She's got cameras pointed from multiple directions to whoever shows up at the porch. But my mom lured her to lunch while they were out here, and she told my mom that Puliafido tracks her, records her phone conversations, tracks who she's calling, tracks her vehicle, and knows everything she does. And so my parents started contact the police about what was going on. My father ended up calling the Altadena
Police Department. He made several attempts, but he called them to report the drug use, and specifically the carmen has cameras on our house, that he can't get a hold of his daughter, that he wants them to go do a check on her. I think he did that several times, and the Altadena police responded, but they put as little effort as possible into the whole situation. From day one,
it was very clear they could care less. And so that again left my family wondering how we're going to solve this problem.
Months go by and the older family is still left wondering. Like the Warrens, they just can't get this man away from their daughter and stop him from giving her drugs. Dora seems unreachable. Then Miriam learns that her sister was pregnant with Ariel's child and has already had the baby.
I found out Dora was pregnant about three weeks after she had a baby.
And as far as she knows, Puliafido is still in the picture. But now the stakes are much higher.
I was just horrified and also very lost. How do you begin to fix a situation like this. It's hard enough when a member of your family is a drug addict, but add to that unlimited access to money. I mean, how do you get them out of that situation? They never hit rock bottom. They're under the control of the person giving them the drugs and giving them the money.
They're an adult.
How do you get them out of this situation?
For Miriam and her parents, it seems like the situation could not be worse. But on the morning of October fifth, tragedy.
Strikes Department of Hello, Yes, I'm here.
Baby not breathing yet, Baby not breathing?
Are you there?
At the location right now. My girlfriend there telling us a child three weeks three weeks old boy, but he was just found like this place.
Karen, I don't know you called me crying.
Davon Maharaj, Mark Duvison, and Matt Doyg 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, Matt and Harriet launched an investigation into the death of Doriota's baby.
It's it's not someone who's rattled, but there was something about the call that rattled her.
I mean, a baby doesn't just have mes in its system.
And we get a new tip about another bad doctor at USC.
There's like a long pause and then the person just opened the door and we sat down at the kitchen table and they just laid it out.
There were actually several all instances looking back because I realized, oh.
Everyone, n 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 Pinks, and Brent Katz. Isabel Evans is our producer, Brent Katz.
Is co producer.
Associate producers are Hanna Leebowitz Lockhart and On Paho Locke. Executive producers are Me Paul Pringle, Joe Picarello, and Adam Pinkas for Best Case Studios. Original music is by James Newberry. This episode was edited by Max Michael Miller with assistants from Nisha Venkat. Additional editings, sound design and additional music by Dean White. Harriet Ryan, Matt Hamilton, Sarah ParvE and Adam Almarik are consulting producers. Our iHeart Team is Ali
Perry and Carl Catle. Follow and rate Fallen Angels wherever you get your podcasts