LOS ANGELES — It would be hard to find a worse couple of years than 2016 and 2017 for two major Los Angeles institutions: the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Times.
That's when a young drug addict overdosed on crystal meth and GHB in a Pasadena hotel room while partying with Dr. Carmen Puliafito, dean of USC's Keck School of Medicine. It also was when two high-level editors then at The Times were accused of trying to stop the paper's own reporting team from covering the USC scandal.
The Times eventually published a lengthy piece on USC's major ethical lapses. But to do so, a clandestine team of reporters had to hide their early efforts to cover the university from the paper's top management, according to "Bad City: Peril and Power in the City of Angels," out this month.
