Speaker 1: My first reaction was, Wow, what have I gotten myself
Speaker 1: into secret reporting team?
Speaker 2: In defiance of the.
Speaker 1: Top editors who wanted to kill a story because maybe
Speaker 1: they were afraid of USC.
Speaker 3: That's Adam Almarra, an investigative reporter for the La Times.
Speaker 3: My editor, Matt late had just asked Adam and three
Speaker 3: other colleagues of mine to join this secret reporting team.
Speaker 1: I came home and told my wife what we were doing,
Speaker 1: and she was kind of terrified. I think we were
Speaker 1: new parents. Why are we wanting to participate in some
Speaker 1: sort of secret rebellion that's going to rock the boat?
Speaker 2: Is this really what you want to be doing.
Speaker 3: Davon Maharaj, editor in chief at the Times, just killed
Speaker 3: my piece on Carmen Puliaffido, the dean of the medical
Speaker 3: School at USC. The fact that Puliafido was at a
Speaker 3: hotel doing meth and having sex with a young woman
Speaker 3: who overdosed, and that we had nine to one one
Speaker 3: recordings and first hand accounts. Apparently that wasn't enough, but
Speaker 3: Davon did say he was theoretically open to more reporting
Speaker 3: on it. Neither Matt nor I think he's serious about that,
Speaker 3: But we are so this secret reporting team with Adam
Speaker 3: and the three others definitely runs the risk of pissing
Speaker 3: off our top editors. Adam's only been out the paper
Speaker 3: for seven months, and this is an important moment for him.
Speaker 2: Look.
Speaker 1: I didn't get into journalism to be making a lot
Speaker 1: of money and for a stable career. If you want
Speaker 1: a stable career and you want to make a lot
Speaker 1: of money and all of that, I mean, journalism is
Speaker 1: really not for you. I knew that I had to
Speaker 1: participate in this effort to get this story published, Otherwise
Speaker 1: it would just betray my core values why I'm a
Speaker 1: journalists in the first place.
Speaker 3: My name is Paul Pringle. I'm an investigative reporter for
Speaker 3: the La Times. This is Fallen Angels, Episode four, The
Speaker 3: Secret Reporting Team.
Speaker 4: I wasn't really thinking about the risks.
Speaker 5: I was thinking about getting the story done and doing
Speaker 5: what it took to get it published.
Speaker 6: That's kind of how I felt about it.
Speaker 3: Matt Lade is my editor on the Pullia Feido story.
Speaker 3: It was Matt's idea to put together this team and
Speaker 3: keep it out of sight of Davon and his deputy
Speaker 3: Mark Duvason. Shelby Grad, another editor, quietly supports us. The
Speaker 3: first reporter we go to is Harriet Ryan. She's an
Speaker 3: expert at digging up documents.
Speaker 7: I worked at Court TV.
Speaker 4: I was there for nine years.
Speaker 7: I learned about court records, how to get them from
Speaker 7: any court, you know, go any small town or federal
Speaker 7: or whatever, and just like find the records, and court
Speaker 7: records are just filled with like little diamonds of information.
Speaker 3: Harriet guess that there's some risk to what we're doing,
Speaker 3: but she isn't phased.
Speaker 4: I know, ad like the element of a caper.
Speaker 7: It seemed righteous because I knew the management was just
Speaker 7: so awful.
Speaker 3: She had worked on a big investigation into Purdue Pharma,
Speaker 3: the baker's of oxy content, and she remembers how the
Speaker 3: editors took two full years to publish it.
Speaker 7: I'm not a bomb thrower revolutionary by nature, but by
Speaker 7: that point, when some of the things happened with Puliafido,
Speaker 7: like to the echoes of oxy and then just being
Speaker 7: treated so poorly, just came rolling back.
Speaker 3: Matt Hamilton had been part of the Times Pulitzer Prize
Speaker 3: winning coverage of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. He understands
Speaker 3: that this Pulia Fido story has to be handled carefully.
Speaker 5: It was clear to us that it was sensitive, that
Speaker 5: it was explosive. I do remember the instruction that this
Speaker 5: was to be discreet, to be confidential.
Speaker 4: Assignment.
Speaker 5: It was clear was coming from Shelby and Matt let
Speaker 5: I don't know what the hell they told the people
Speaker 5: above them, but it wasn't an assignment that was coming
Speaker 5: from Mark or Devon.
Speaker 3: Matt's in his twenties, just a few years ago, he
Speaker 3: was an intern. One reason he agrees to join our
Speaker 3: team is to work with people like Harriet Ryan.
Speaker 4: I knew her work, I knew her byline, I had
Speaker 4: heard her on the radio.
Speaker 5: I was just intimidated by her because she's so good.
Speaker 4: I felt a high degree of pressure to deliver.
Speaker 3: Sarah Parvini is also in her twenties. She'd work with
Speaker 3: Matt on the San Bernardino stories, and like Matt, Sarah
Speaker 3: got her journalism degree at USC's Andinburgh School.
Speaker 8: I went to USC when I moved to la as
Speaker 8: a graduate student in the journalism program, and it only
Speaker 8: became more obvious that USC was really a player in
Speaker 8: the city. I personally had a great experience attending Edinburgh.
Speaker 8: I had excellent profess who taught me a lot when
Speaker 8: it came time to investigate USC and investigate what the
Speaker 8: institution itself knew. It's not hard to separate, at least
Speaker 8: in my mind, your experience as a student versus your
Speaker 8: experience as a journalist. And I think part of the
Speaker 8: reason why Paul had turned to me and had thought
Speaker 8: of Matt as well, was because we sort of understood
Speaker 8: a little bit about how USC worked, having gone there
Speaker 8: for grad school.
Speaker 3: Like Matt, she jumps at the chance to work with
Speaker 3: the veteran reporters, though we do make her nervous.
Speaker 8: It was just intimidating to be a young reporter working
Speaker 8: with the likes of Paul and Harriet, who are incredible
Speaker 8: investigative journalists and incredible writers. To sort of be thrown
Speaker 8: in with them and say, well, you know, go do this.
Speaker 8: It was intimidating in that aspect. The first meeting was
Speaker 8: just sort of a rundown of what Paul had already
Speaker 8: accomplished and what he had already found out.
Speaker 7: Immediately, people are like, well, have you tried this?
Speaker 4: Have you tried this?
Speaker 7: And I just remember being around this a comically large
Speaker 7: conference table was.
Speaker 4: Just like the five of us. We were just like
Speaker 4: off and running from that point.
Speaker 5: I remember Harriet basically saying, there's two routes we got here.
Speaker 5: We go through us like shake a bunch of trees,
Speaker 5: or behind the girl.
Speaker 3: The girl her name is Sarah, and that's all we've got.
Speaker 3: Devon Kahn, who worked at the hotel. Constance told me
Speaker 3: that she was blonde, and she was young, probably in
Speaker 3: her twenties. And the last time you had seen her
Speaker 3: she was being wheeled out of the hotel on a gurney.
Speaker 4: Everyone, on their own accord, did what we call a scrub.
Speaker 4: Where did you read the story?
Speaker 5: You read everything Paul's forwarding to us, and just do
Speaker 5: some like initial digging based on your own instincts. And
Speaker 5: I remember Sarah and I taking an approach by scrubbing
Speaker 5: their social media and other digital foot prints. Puliaffido's friend
Speaker 5: list on Facebook was public. We're kind of going through
Speaker 5: and seeing usual suspects of like medical professionals, kind of
Speaker 5: people in the Pasadena community. But then we find these
Speaker 5: really odd characters in his Facebook friends.
Speaker 4: It's like people with a bunch of tattoos just palpably
Speaker 4: different people.
Speaker 5: How is that person friends with Puliafido who lives in
Speaker 5: like a very tony area. Pasadena is a top official
Speaker 5: at USC and you just see like people that look
Speaker 5: like they're from the other side of the train tracks,
Speaker 5: so to speak. It struck us is like, what's the connection.
Speaker 5: It was like, this is like a girl who looks
Speaker 5: like she might be an escort. We were going through
Speaker 5: that specifically to find people named Sarah or a name
Speaker 5: that sounded like Sarah, or young women with blonde hair.
Speaker 4: Paul would forward them to Devin Kahn and be like,
Speaker 4: is this her? Is this her? Is this her?
Speaker 6: Paul starts sending me photographs and you know, I'm telling no,
Speaker 6: this isn't her.
Speaker 3: I have the Times Library again, do sweeps of public
Speaker 3: record databases. None of the names from Facebook checks out.
Speaker 3: But suddenly, for the first time, there's a woman named
Speaker 3: Sarah linked the Pullifido in those databases, Sarah Warren, twenty
Speaker 3: two years old listed as a quote associate. I searched
Speaker 3: Sarah Warren on Facebook. There are a lot of them,
Speaker 3: but there's one who's young and blonde and lives in Pasadena.
Speaker 3: I text her photo to Devon Khan.
Speaker 6: After sending me I think maybe two or three photos,
Speaker 6: eventually he sends me a photo of Sarah, and I'm like,
Speaker 6: that's her.
Speaker 3: It's been a year since the overdose at the Hotel Constance,
Speaker 3: ten and a half months since I met Devon Khan,
Speaker 3: and four months since I filed the first draft of
Speaker 3: my story. Now, finally we found Sarah. But who is
Speaker 3: she and how did she end up in that room
Speaker 3: doing drugs with the high flying dean of the medical
Speaker 3: school at usc Each member of the reporting team is
Speaker 3: working a different angle. Harriet Ryan is digging into USC's
Speaker 3: relationship with Carmen Puliafido. Is USC protecting this guy and
Speaker 3: if so, why We've been trying.
Speaker 7: To figure out why is USC so invested in this guy?
Speaker 7: Just cut him loose if he has all these problems.
Speaker 7: One of the things we're looking at was hit the
Speaker 7: role that he played in this lawsuit between the University
Speaker 7: of California and San Diego and USC. US under Maxnichius
Speaker 7: and under Carmen Fulifito at the medical school had this
Speaker 7: focus on transformative faculty, so they were not going to
Speaker 7: like gradually work their way up the ladder of prestigious
Speaker 7: research institutions. They wanted to jump stairs, and a very
Speaker 7: efficient way to do that is to lure Alzheimer's and
Speaker 7: brain researchers to their universities with their hundreds and millions
Speaker 7: of dollars grant funding. Carmen Pulifito, you know, this would
Speaker 7: make Maxikias very happy if you'd get some of these guys.
Speaker 7: He brought two brain researchers from UCLA to USC. It
Speaker 7: was very secretive and overnight rating of this lab at UCLA,
Speaker 7: and UCLA was so upset that US quietly paid a
Speaker 7: two million dollar confidential settlement, which is a lot of money,
Speaker 7: but nothing compared to the research dollars that USC was getting.
Speaker 7: And then Pulifedo trained his sites on this very prestigious,
Speaker 7: enormous lab at UCSD San Diego, which was run by
Speaker 7: Paul Asen, and USC just took the entire lab. They
Speaker 7: arranged for everybody to just move over to working for
Speaker 7: USC without actually leaving San Diego. They would just become
Speaker 7: USC faculty USC researchers. They pulled this off so covertly
Speaker 7: and so totally that there was an allegation that they
Speaker 7: actually even took the paper clips from the lab at UCSD.
Speaker 7: They took everything, like the personnel, the file folders.
Speaker 4: UCSD is devastated.
Speaker 7: It's hundreds of millions of dollars, more than three hundred
Speaker 7: millions of dollars of federal funding. But UCSD decided to
Speaker 7: do something just that they filed a lawsuit against USC.
Speaker 7: You have two big academic schools fighting over this poaching
Speaker 7: of academic stars, and key witness in that case was
Speaker 7: going to be Carmen Pullifiedo.
Speaker 3: It wouldn't help USC case if it became publicly known
Speaker 3: that this key witness had been caught up in a
Speaker 3: drug overdose of a young woman in a hotel room.
Speaker 3: And three hundred and forty million dollars in grand funding
Speaker 3: is a big incentive to keep things quiet.
Speaker 7: So at the time that the school forces him out
Speaker 7: and it has to reckon with all of his problems,
Speaker 7: the highest levels of university knows that he's a key
Speaker 7: witness in this big case that you see has brought
Speaker 7: against USC, and the University California is seeking like one
Speaker 7: hundred and eighty million dollars in damage, so that they
Speaker 7: want serious compensation and key to adjudicating this is going
Speaker 7: to be the testimony of Carmen Pulia Fido. So when
Speaker 7: you think about when USC is like weighing like.
Speaker 4: What are we going to do about Puliafito?
Speaker 7: And one thing has to weigh is like we're going
Speaker 7: to need this guy to testify for us.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, Adam, Matt, and Sarah are looking for connect between
Speaker 3: Puliafido and Sarah Warren. She's still the only one who
Speaker 3: can really tell us what happened in that hotel room.
Speaker 5: We started scrubbing Sarah Warren and her family. There was
Speaker 5: some case involving Sarah in Texas that we found records for,
Speaker 5: and then I looked through the database and saw Sarah
Speaker 5: Warren had been arrested several times in La County.
Speaker 4: That revealed a number of other cases that we had
Speaker 4: to pull records for.
Speaker 5: Sarah Warren had several arrests in La County. She was
Speaker 5: in and out of rehabs.
Speaker 8: She had been signed up on like a sugar baby
Speaker 8: kind of website, and that it was associated with an
Speaker 8: email address that we had found in court documents. So
Speaker 8: what we knew of Sarah was what we had seen
Speaker 8: in the court filings in terms of rehab and then
Speaker 8: also the association with this sugar baby website.
Speaker 3: The website is called Humaniplex and it's for prostitution so
Speaker 3: Sarah Warren is or has been a sex worker.
Speaker 5: What was most interesting to me was her attorneys in
Speaker 5: these cases were very reputable private counsel.
Speaker 4: She wasn't using public defenders.
Speaker 5: Someone's paying for her lawyers, and someone's paying for these
Speaker 5: very tony rehabs. Like this is not like state insurance
Speaker 5: funded rehab centers. This is like high end rehab centers.
Speaker 3: Then we find something else. In one court filing, we
Speaker 3: discovered that Sarah had been arrested with someone named Kyle Voit.
Speaker 5: I was entering names from the Venmo list and the
Speaker 5: Facebook page into our internal database, being like, maybe there's
Speaker 5: a hit here, and I eventually struck gold with Kyle fot.
Speaker 4: There were several arrests and they were all.
Speaker 5: Drug related, possession, identity theft.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: It wasn't one arrest for like a dy.
Speaker 5: This was someone who got a criminal record, an extensive one,
Speaker 5: and he was friends with Pulliffido in some way or
Speaker 5: associated with him. He didn't have a lot of Venmo friends,
Speaker 5: but one of them was Kyle Voight.
Speaker 3: Kyle Voight, who had been arrested fifteen times in the
Speaker 3: past seven years, pleading guilty or no contest to possession
Speaker 3: for sale of meth, heroin, oxycodone, fentanyl, and ecstasy. So
Speaker 3: Matt digs into Kyle's court records.
Speaker 5: I knew the clerk at the Valley Courthouse and she
Speaker 5: let me come back, and I remember sitting there and
Speaker 5: kind of lift going through the pages, figuring out what's important.
Speaker 4: And I remember seeing.
Speaker 5: A court form that he filled out and he put
Speaker 5: an address in Pasadena on those rope lists, and then
Speaker 5: thinking that address looks really familiar and.
Speaker 4: It's Pullifido's address.
Speaker 5: Why would he list this five million dollar mansion in Pasadena.
Speaker 4: Kyle Voight was mull time drug dealer lists this address.
Speaker 5: How is Kyle Voyd, who appears to be arrested on
Speaker 5: a semi frequent basis in the orbit of USC's Medical
Speaker 5: School team.
Speaker 3: All the reporters on this team have covered crime stories.
Speaker 3: This kind of low level drug dealing is pretty routine
Speaker 3: and it's not much of a story. What makes this
Speaker 3: different is Pulliaffido, an important guy bringing in hundreds of
Speaker 3: millions of dollars to USC doing meth and delicate eye surgeries.
Speaker 3: Turns out Kyle Voyd is sitting in men's Central Jail.
Speaker 3: So Sarah Parvini and Adam Almark decide to pay him
Speaker 3: a visit.
Speaker 8: I had never gone to a jail or a prison
Speaker 8: before to speak with someone who was incarcerated there. That
Speaker 8: was definitely intimidating. Adam and I went down together.
Speaker 2: It's kind of like, what else does he have to do?
Speaker 2: He's sitting there in jail.
Speaker 8: I was very glad to have Adam there with me
Speaker 8: because Adam had way more experience as an investigative reporter
Speaker 8: than I did. We basically had to, you know, request
Speaker 8: the time, and then Kyle would have to be okay
Speaker 8: with speaking to us. I remember just being shocked that
Speaker 8: Kyle would even speak with us.
Speaker 2: He's behind the plexiglass.
Speaker 1: It's a visitor's kind of room where it's just rows
Speaker 1: of plexiglass, and you have to pick up the phone,
Speaker 1: and he picks up the phone, and so you start
Speaker 1: talking to him through the phone behind the glass.
Speaker 3: We had to disclose who we were.
Speaker 4: We had to disclose it.
Speaker 8: It was for a story that we were working on.
Speaker 8: We were investigating usc we were investigating Fulia Fido. But
Speaker 8: he almost seemed shocked that almost like, hey, how did
Speaker 8: you find this out? How did you link us together?
Speaker 2: How do you know Sarah? How do you know Carton?
Speaker 1: He was a reluctant kind of source, so he would
Speaker 1: kind of just kind.
Speaker 2: Of sit there and listen and then maybe say something.
Speaker 1: We will be able to confirm that this is not
Speaker 1: a one off kind of relationship. This is Pulifido regularly
Speaker 1: associating with this circle of drug users, in this case
Speaker 1: a dealer.
Speaker 2: He called him Tony. He said that Tony's always there.
Speaker 3: Kyle tells Sarah and Adam that Sarah Warren is his girlfriend.
Speaker 3: They hang out in Pasadena on Huntington Beach with a
Speaker 3: bunch of other drug users, and Pulliafido is part of
Speaker 3: their scene. The reporters ask Kyle about some of the
Speaker 3: other names they've come across on Pulli Fido's social media,
Speaker 3: people who seem out of place in a world of
Speaker 3: money and prestige, and Kyle knows a lot of them.
Speaker 1: We would drop a name of one of you know,
Speaker 1: Puliafido's associates, and he would go, oh, yeah, you know
Speaker 1: I remember the son so, or oh yeah, wow, you
Speaker 1: know that person.
Speaker 3: But what's strange is that even though this Tony is
Speaker 3: someone they hang out with all the time and he's
Speaker 3: listed on Kyle's council form. Kyle seems to hate him.
Speaker 3: He says that Carmen Puliafido is a quote monster.
Speaker 1: He would make sort of ominous kind of remarks. He
Speaker 1: would say Carmen's evil, that the guy is, He's a
Speaker 1: really bad guy.
Speaker 8: He noted that the relationship between Sarah Warren and Harmon
Speaker 8: Puli Fido was a toxic one.
Speaker 3: Kyle won't confirm that he sells drugs to Puliafido, but
Speaker 3: he says he has plenty of dirt on the former dean.
Speaker 8: Kyle did, in that moment tell us that there were
Speaker 8: photos or videos or both that would link Juliafido to
Speaker 8: basically what we were investigating, to his relationship with Sarah Warren,
Speaker 8: his relationship with others including Kyle, in this sort of
Speaker 8: circle of partying and doing drugs.
Speaker 1: What Kyle Voyd gave us was enough of an indication
Speaker 1: to know that the medical school dean at USC was
Speaker 1: leading a secret double life with this circle of people,
Speaker 1: which all of a sudden makes the story much more
Speaker 1: interesting than one night in a hotel.
Speaker 3: Room, and it'll make it that much harder for Davon
Speaker 3: and Mark to kill the next draft of.
Speaker 1: This story, you can write a story that explains why
Speaker 1: having a powerful person who's also an eye surgeon in
Speaker 1: a position overseeing young students and doing all these drugs
Speaker 1: and associating with criminals is not an ideal situation.
Speaker 7: I think there was an initial idea that we would
Speaker 7: be able to turn this around pretty quickly.
Speaker 3: Reporter Harriet Ryan.
Speaker 7: And so on any given day, Sarah and Adam would
Speaker 7: be like out doing one thing, and then Paul be
Speaker 7: doing something else, and if not would be doing something,
Speaker 7: then we would like be writing, and just seemed like
Speaker 7: the days are really full of activity.
Speaker 3: But we still need to keep our reporting under wraps.
Speaker 1: We made sure that we couldn't be seen. We met
Speaker 1: a lot of the time in a little office that
Speaker 1: was like just kind of a spare room. It was
Speaker 1: kind of out of the way. We would meet in
Speaker 1: the cafeteria. We took steps to make sure that it
Speaker 1: was obvious that we were all working together on something major.
Speaker 3: Then Matt Lay, who championed the creation of the team,
Speaker 3: tells us he's leaving the La Times for a job
Speaker 3: at CNN.
Speaker 8: That news was just kind of like a lull. I'm
Speaker 8: just going to edit us now, who is going to
Speaker 8: sort of be the steward of this investigation at the
Speaker 8: editor level and ensure that it's what we wanted to.
Speaker 3: Be and who's going to have our back When Dave
Speaker 3: and Amark find out what we've been working on, I
Speaker 3: was devastated.
Speaker 4: I'm still devastated.
Speaker 7: There's part of me that still thinks of Matt Laatee
Speaker 7: as my editor.
Speaker 4: I know we haven't worked together in.
Speaker 7: A long time. He's a great person, a kind person,
Speaker 7: a great reporter on the Oxy story. Like when I
Speaker 7: was left alone, I was a last reporter working on it,
Speaker 7: Matt would come on door knocks with me. I just
Speaker 7: stand next to me to so I wouldn't have to
Speaker 7: go with myself. Like He's just like an a great person,
Speaker 7: and I just I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 3: Matt Levy makes us feel like the clock is running
Speaker 3: out on this team. We've got to nail this story down,
Speaker 3: make it bulletproof, because he won't be there to fight
Speaker 3: for it.
Speaker 8: Discovering the rehab came from the court files. I remember
Speaker 8: going through files and seeing names of different rehab facilities.
Speaker 3: Through court records. Sarah Parvini has been tracking Sarah Warren's
Speaker 3: various stints in rehab over the past thirteen months. There
Speaker 3: was Palm Strings and Malibu and San Juan Capestranto. The
Speaker 3: most recent is in Newport Beach. The place is called
Speaker 3: Ocean Recovery. Like the lawyers, it's not cheap. That makes
Speaker 3: us think there's got to be someone bank rolling it.
Speaker 3: Sarah Warren check into Ocean Recovery three months ago. Most
Speaker 3: rehabs run a thirty day program, but Sarah Porvini sees
Speaker 3: that Ocean Recovery also offers a ninety day package, so
Speaker 3: she might still be there. We decided to make the
Speaker 3: hour long drive down to Newport Beach and see for ourselves.
Speaker 8: It was a very dramatic, overcast kind of day. Paul
Speaker 8: and I had driven down from LA to this place.
Speaker 8: Looked like an apartment complex, but it was some sort
Speaker 8: of recovery kind of a place.
Speaker 3: Ocean Recovery is in a fourplex right by the marina.
Speaker 8: We parked in front of the building, walked up to it.
Speaker 7: At the threshold.
Speaker 8: There was someone who basically was like, what are you
Speaker 8: guys doing here? Of course, we can't pretend that we
Speaker 8: aren't journalists looking for information, so we disclosed that, and
Speaker 8: of course you know that person was like, well, I
Speaker 8: can't discuss anyone with you for medical privacy reasons. There
Speaker 8: were some people who were outside of the building who
Speaker 8: looked like they were staying there, and Paul asked if
Speaker 8: Sarah Warren was there or had been there. One of
Speaker 8: them said something like, well, she's not here right now.
Speaker 8: We had had the confirmation that Sarah, even if she
Speaker 8: wasn't there in that moment, had been staying there. To
Speaker 8: get that confirmation for us was huge because it meant
Speaker 8: the thread that we were pulling at was unraveling the
Speaker 8: way that.
Speaker 4: We wanted it to.
Speaker 3: This is as close as we've been able to get
Speaker 3: to Sarah Warren, and we've tried everything, sending her messages
Speaker 3: on social media, phone calls, door knocking addresses she's associated with.
Speaker 3: We have one more way in her family. Public records
Speaker 3: show that the Warrens lived than Huntington Beach, a town
Speaker 3: that calls itself Surf City, USA. It's about an hour
Speaker 3: southeast of downtown LA. Sarah's father, Paul, is an executive
Speaker 3: for logistics company. Her mother, Mary Anne, has a master's
Speaker 3: degree from Pepperdine. She's got a teenage brother Charles, Matt
Speaker 3: Hamilton and I take the drive down the coast.
Speaker 5: So we show up to the Huntington Beach neighborhood of
Speaker 5: the Barren family, and I would say a quintessential Orange
Speaker 5: County neighborhood. It's a gated community, but it's in a
Speaker 5: pretty isolated area.
Speaker 4: It's close to the water. Kind of stuccoe townhouse is Italian? Ain't.
Speaker 3: Given the neighborhood. The Warren seem like a typical upper
Speaker 3: middle class Southern California family.
Speaker 5: We drove to the different entry points to this gated community,
Speaker 5: just trying to figure out, like.
Speaker 4: How are we going to do this?
Speaker 3: We make our way to the Warren's house and knock
Speaker 3: on the front door, no answer. Then a young man
Speaker 3: appears at the door of the garage. It's Sarah's brother, Charles.
Speaker 5: Paul gives the spiel like we're reporters from Los Angeles Times.
Speaker 5: We're trying to talk to Sarah. It's a story about
Speaker 5: doctor Carmen Platfedo, the dane of UC's medical school. Charles
Speaker 5: Warren rolled up the sleeves of his t shirt said
Speaker 5: almost nothing, but pointed to a tattoo that said no snitches.
Speaker 4: Just remember being shocked.
Speaker 5: Because this is well to do community, gated near the
Speaker 5: coast of Huntington Beach, very lily white, Orange County community.
Speaker 5: And here's this teenager acting tough and macho with a
Speaker 5: tattoo like ready to go, saying no snitches. I didn't
Speaker 5: know if he was joking or not, and if it
Speaker 5: was just kind of imitating bug culture or or if
Speaker 5: he was serious.
Speaker 4: And he was totally serious.
Speaker 3: We have a feeling why USC might want to protect
Speaker 3: Carmen Puleofido, the prestige, the money, the risk of scandal.
Speaker 3: But what about this seventeen year old kid from Orange County.
Speaker 3: What does the good doctor have on him? Davon Maharaj
Speaker 3: and Mark Duvison deny that they did anything wrong in
Speaker 3: their handling of the USC investigation, and they maintained that
Speaker 3: any negative betrayal of their actions is false. Next time,
Speaker 3: on Fallen.
Speaker 5: Angels, Puliafido had given him meth twenty five to fifty
Speaker 5: bars of sanax.
Speaker 3: The deeper we look, the darker it gets.
Speaker 8: Here's a young woman who is struggling not only with
Speaker 8: substance issues, but also this imbalance of power.
Speaker 5: She was discharged, but relapsed on the ride home with
Speaker 5: Puliafito because he gave her meth and alcohol.
Speaker 3: But the people who should be most concerned seem to
Speaker 3: have different priorities.
Speaker 8: We told them two reporters from the only times we'd
Speaker 8: like to speak with as as, but of course we
Speaker 8: were turned away.
Speaker 5: The money was arriving, so fast enough time for two
Speaker 5: dollar Times reporters.
Speaker 3: That's next time on Fallen Angels. Fallen Angels, The Story
Speaker 3: of California Corruption is a production of iHeart Podcasts in
Speaker 3: partnership with Best Case Studios. I'm Paul Pringle. This show
Speaker 3: is based on my book Bad City, Peril and Power
Speaker 3: in the City of Angels. Fallen Angels was written by
Speaker 3: Isabel Evans, Adam Pinkas, and Brent Katz. Isabel Evans is
Speaker 3: our producer. Brent Katz is co producer. Associate producers are
Speaker 3: Hannah Leebowitz Lockhart and On Pajo Locke. Executive producers are Me,
Speaker 3: Paul Pringle, Joe Picorello, and Adam Pinkus for Best Case Studios.
Speaker 3: Original music is by James Newberry. This episode was edited
Speaker 3: by Max Michael Miller. Additional editings, sound design and additional
Speaker 3: music by Dean White, Harriet Ryan, Matt Hamilton, Sarah Parvini
Speaker 3: and Adam Olmarik are consulting producers. Our iHeart team is
Speaker 3: Ali Perry and Carl Catle. Follow and rate Fallen Angels
Speaker 3: wherever you get your podcasts