Bad City
Peril and Power in the City of Angels
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
"Pringle’s fast-paced book is a master class in investigative journalism... when institutions collude to protect one another, reporting may be our last best hope for accountability."
—The New York Times
For fans of Spotlight and Catch and Kill comes a nonfiction thriller about corruption and betrayal radiating across Los Angeles from one of the region's most powerful institutions, a riveting tale from a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist who investigated the shocking events and helped bring justice in the face of formidable odds.
On a cool, overcast afternoon in April 2016, a salacious tip arrived at the L.A. Times that reporter Paul Pringle thought should have taken, at most, a few weeks to check out: a drug overdose at a fancy hotel involving one of the University of Southern California’s shiniest stars—Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the head of the prestigious medical school. Pringle, who’d long done battle with USC and its almost impenetrable culture of silence, knew reporting the story wouldn’t be a walk in the park. USC is one of the biggest employers in L.A., and it casts a long shadow.
But what he couldn’t have foreseen was that this tip would lead to the unveiling of not one major scandal at USC but two, wrapped in a web of crimes and cover-ups. The rot rooted out by Pringle and his colleagues at The Times would creep closer to home than they could have imagined—spilling into their own newsroom.
Packed with details never before disclosed, Pringle goes behind the scenes to reveal how he and his fellow reporters triumphed over the city’s debased institutions, in a narrative that reads like L.A. noir. This is L.A. at its darkest and investigative journalism at its brightest.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The real-life story of how this Pulitzer-winning journalist uncovered an epic scandal is more gripping than any police procedural. Dr. Carmen Puliafito was not only the dean of the University of Southern California’s medical school, he was also a high-profile mover and shaker who raised billions for the institution. So when Los Angeles Times investigative reporter Paul Pringle received a tip that Puliafito had provided drugs to his mistress—and was with her in a hotel room when she overdosed—it was worth checking out. Massive cover-ups soon followed, instigated by everyone from the cops to Pringle’s own employer, and when the story finally broke, the list of Puliafito’s misdeeds turned out to be even longer. Pringle writes with the intensity of the great shoe-leather reporter he is, diving deep into hard facts and fascinating backstories without ever losing momentum. Bad City is a sweeping story of power, corruption, and hard-fought justice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Los Angeles Times reporter Pringle debuts with an in-depth and often riveting account of sexual misconduct, drug abuse, corruption, and cover-ups in Southern California. Expanding on a story he broke in 2017, Pringle recounts how a Pasadena hotel manager's dogged efforts to get someone to investigate what happened to a young woman who overdosed on crystal meth in the hotel room of Dr. Carmen Puliafito, the dean of the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, led to Puliafito's resignation and the uncovering of decades of sexual abuse committed by George Tyndall, a gynecologist in USC's student health clinic. Throughout, Pringle draws detailed and sympathetic portraits of the victims in both cases, including Sarah Warren, the woman who overdosed in Puliafito's hotel room after meeting him through the website Backpage.com and becoming his "round-the-clock sugar baby," and recounts in meticulous detail USC's efforts to cover up the crimes. Part of these efforts included pressuring the leadership of the Los Angeles Times to kill the Puliafito story, and Pringle doesn't hold back in criticizing how the newspaper's executives allowed themselves to be compromised by moneyed interests in Southern California. It's a crisp tale of institutional rot, dogged journalism, and heroic whistleblowing. Readers will be on the edge of their seats.
