Bad City, Paul Pringle
Bad City, Paul Pringle
2 Rating(s)
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
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Bad City
Peril and Power in the City of Angels

Author: Paul Pringle

Narrator: Robert Petkoff

Unabridged: 9 hr 48 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/19/2022


Synopsis

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 the largest private employer in the city of 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Celadon Books.

"Robert Petkoff is especially effective at narrating this account..."- AudioFile Magazine (Earphones Award Winner)

About Paul Pringle

Paul Pringle is a Los Angeles Times reporter who specializes in investigating corruption. In 2019, he and two colleagues won the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for their work uncovering the widespread sexual abuse by Dr. George Tyndall at the University of Southern California, an inquiry that grew out of their reporting the year before on Dr. Carmen Puliafito, dean of USC’s medical school. Pringle was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 and a member of reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes in 2004 and 2011. Pringle won the George Polk Award in 2008, the same year the Society of Professional Journalists of Greater Los Angeles honored him as a distinguished journalist. Along with several colleagues, he shared in Harvard University’s 2011 Worth Bingham Prize for Investigative Reporting. Pringle and a Times colleague won the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s Freedom of Information Award in 2014 and the University of Florida’s Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Award in 2015. Pringle lives in Glendale, California.

About Robert Petkoff

Robert Petkoff has won multiple AudioFile Earphones awards for his acclaimed narrations. He was named Best Voice of Fiction & Classics for his reading of The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore by Benjamin Hale. His other narration credits include Oath of Office by Michael Palmer, Gangster Squad by Paul Lieberman, and books by David Foster Wallace.Petkoff has appeared on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in theaters across America and Europe.  He has worked in television and film. His theater credits include Lord Evelyn Oakleigh in the Broadway production of Anything Goes, Perchik as part of the Tony-nomianted cast of Fiddler on the Roof, and Hubert Humphrey in the Tony award-winning play All the Way. He has also had numerous roles in television on shows such as Law and Order and Married with Children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Blaine on January 27, 2023

Ah yes, Los Angeles, city of Angels and a book that takes us back to the days of LA Noir. Police forces in Pasadena and LA that look the other way. Cozy tie-ins with USC, investigations that go nowhere and are always inconclusive. Yes, this book written in 2022 shows us all of this, and it is led by......more

Goodreads review by Mallory on June 29, 2022

I liked that this story was from the perspective of a journalist in so much more detail than we usually get of the work journalists do in their investigations. While the things described in this investigation were criminal it was definitely focused on corruption and how the rich and powerful not onl......more

Goodreads review by Valerity (Val) on August 07, 2022

I wasn’t sure if this was my type of read or not, but it turned out to be a page turner. A reporter starts checking into a tip and it tuns into a wild investigation. He uncovers some pretty shocking information that keeps growing. The problem is all of the places involved seem to be intertwined and......more

Goodreads review by Collette on August 18, 2022

Upon reading Bad City by Paul Pringle, my first thought was that it might have better been named, Bad University, as most of the reporting is on the University of Southern California and the corrupt men who worked there. Although another thread woven throughout is the trouble Pringle, an investigati......more

Goodreads review by Nancy on July 12, 2022

Here in Michigan, we are all too familiar with universities involved with scandal, especially the Michigan State University physician Larry Nassar who abused athletes. When charges were first made against him in 2014, MSU cleared Nassar of wrongdoing; it took four more years before he was charged, c......more


Awards

  • Amazon.com Best Books of the Year