They’re in the comment section.

American football is already in serious decline, and I’m not sure a multimillionaire coach snorting coke with twenty dollar bills while telling his girlfriend he’d like to be “licking this off your pussy” (aka ‘Pulling a Puliafito’) is going to be good for business. I mean, maybe it will be. I don’t know.

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That’s but a trifle here.

No, it’s not The Onion. Crazed Carmen Puliafito’s replacement as the head of the University of Southern California medical school – Puliafito’s protégé, by the way – turns out to have quite the naughty backstory himself, and since the story happened at USC and they appointed the guy dean anyway, UD thinks it’s time for the medical school at the University of Southern California to seek counseling. This is totally nuts, and UD‘s going to stop covering USC med school on this blog if things descend yet further into farce.

So. Meet the guy they chose to replace drug-crazed Carmen.

A young international student working for [Rohit] Varma on one of [his] research projects — an NIH-funded study of eye disease in Latinos — accompanied him to [a] conference.

The woman later told USC investigators that when they arrived at the conference hotel, Varma told the woman he had booked a single room and expected her to share a bed with him, according to two sources familiar with USC’s investigation. She told the investigators that when she questioned the arrangement, Varma claimed the grant money would only cover one room, the sources said.

She said that when she protested further, he took her cellphone away and threatened to have her visa revoked, according to the sources. The woman told investigators that she had no money to pay for her own room and ended up sleeping on a cot in Varma’s room, the sources said.

She reported the incident to USC, and the university’s Office of Equity and Diversity launched an investigation of Varma for sexual harassment and retaliation. Investigators found evidence to support her claims…

Just the sort of person you want when you’re desperate to clean house after orgy-meister Carmen.

At the University of Southern California, it’s about illusion, and maintaining illusion. As in the top secret executive committee, composed of selected top secret trustees, that will review the illusion that was Carmen Puliafito:

“There will be a fair number of board members who are not engaged in serious decision-making,” [an experienced observer noted]. “The problem with empowering the executive committee in that manner is that a great number of trustees … are more or less in the dark. They become decorative backdrop rather than actually filling the fiduciary role. That is not a healthy situation in governance.”

To make the situation all the more absurd, the university’s president, who seems primarily responsible for maintaining Puliafito way past his unmasking as a world-historical degenerate, is himself a voting member of this committee. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!

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Another observer writes:

“A healthy board [which this one, she strongly implies, is not] is going to ask itself: ‘Have we participated in the creation of a culture where the most egregious ethical lapses are ignored because the money is coming in?’”

Very delicate of her to state the matter in the interrogative.

Perhaps most concerning about this board is their inability to come up with more than one member (out of many) willing to respond to the Los Angeles Times’ request for a comment like a real asshole son of a bitch:

I have no interest in talking to the L.A. Times. … Just draw a line through my name.

Ronald N. Tutor! May your name be inscribed in the book of life as a blessing, for lo! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived. Amen.

Athletics and the med school: At many universities, these are the big ticket items, featuring massive salaries and high-profile staff, plus smarmy rhetoric about teamwork and making the world a better place through selfless scientific discovery and character-driven winning traditions.

So what if these same two locations may be shot through with conflict of interest, other forms of personal and financial corruption, and even criminality?

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And… I dunno… On the eve of the anniversary of Woodstock — (Has UD already told you she’ll be in Woodstock for her birthday later this month, at the Bear Cafe, and as her carful of family and friends approaches that hippie town she will slide this into the CD player and make everyone sing along?) — on this sacred anniversary, UD will simply echo Janis and say Get it while you can... Honey, get it while you can.

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Your basic Five Million Dollar Man don’t have no truck with hippies. When Hugh Freeze coached women’s high school basketball, he was so incensed at a player wearing a Grateful Dead shirt that he had to stay in the room while she took it off. That’s how dedicated he was to Just Say No.

One woman [says that] Freeze forced her to change shirts in his office, claiming her Grateful Dead shirt violated the school dress code because it “represented drugs.” At the time, [she] was in eighth grade; according to her, Freeze did not leave the room while she changed.

“Coach Freeze pulled me in his office and told me that my shirt represented drugs. … I said, ‘I’ll go change in the bathroom,’ and when I said that he said, ‘No, you’re going to change in here so I get the (Grateful Dead) shirt and you can’t have it back.’

He didn’t do anything sexual. But I stood in the corner and faced the wall when I did it and I changed out of my shirt. No privacy.”

Five mill and free nubile body viewing… And all the while you’re being billed as a saint and a miracle man. Get it while you can! Over in the med school, Carmen Puliafito’s also getting his… As long as he can… And both Ole Miss and Southern Cal are dumbfounded at what the heads of their football program and med school are up to…

So when eminent Stanford med school professor John Borchers staggered onto his private plane and flew himself into the side of a mountain in 2008, Stanford could get away with saying nothing when reporters tried asking the school about the fact that the body of the busy teacher/clinician was loaded down with so many drugs it took like a page and a half to list them all. He’d been a known addict for ten years.

In addition to cocaine and Prozac, toxicology tests by the FAA turned up opiates, mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic drugs. One of the drugs, buprenorphine, was among those Borchers prescribed to patients suffering from heroin addiction, according to his own online business profile.

John Borchers didn’t know how to fly very well, and he was maybe finally close to losing his license to practice medicine, so this was arguably a carefully prepared (#1: swallow the medicine cabinet; #2: pilot your plane alone at night through mountains) suicide. Yet Stanford has never said a word about having maintained this dangerous wreck of a man in a responsible and visible position on its faculty, though given his long record of addiction and attempted detox Stanford must have known about him.

UD drags up this ancient history because if you put aside the difference that Carmen Puliafito is still alive (though from his total silence in response to all efforts to talk to him you wouldn’t know it), his is a similar story of pretty overt fuckedupness determinedly ignored by a university that already has quite the history of ignoring fucked up high-level people.

USC faculty members I’ve been in touch with are incensed that a doctor was allowed to take patients for more than a year after his drug-fueled behavior was reported to the university, and they’re not buying the administration’s claims of ignorance.

Puliafito engaged in behavior (partying with meth-head friends in his campus office) that seemed designed to dare the University of Southern California to do something about him. Even after the LA Times told USC’s president that Puliafito had spent an evening lying through his teeth to the police about his relationship to a young woman found overdosed beside him in a Pasadena hotel room littered with drug paraphernalia (if you enjoy this sort of thing, you can listen to the police interview), the president simply wouldn’t hear what he was being told. In effect, he still won’t.

What we have here is a cover-up. Systematic cover-ups, as Steve Lopez notes. And you know what? Cover-ups exist to cover up not just a specific triggering event (Puliafito/Pasadena/Police), but, one has to assume, related, and possibly worse, stuff. What is USC hiding?

One of them had the audacity to suggest that the president of the University of Southern California should resign, given how incredibly badly he dealt – continues to deal – with his beyond-disgraced million-dollar med school dean (Is the now ex-dean on leave? The school seems to say that he is. Is that leave with pay?).

“If this is true, if it turns out that it is a cultural problem with the university, with President Nikias, will you [She’s addressing Carmen Puliafito’s replacement as dean.] fight for President Nikias to be let go, so we can bring in another president who wouldn’t let this happen?” the student asked.

Because it sure looks as though the prez knew a lot was wrong with Puliafito, and that he therefore knew this worst of outcomes – a big national scandal – was possible… After all:

At the meeting on the Keck campus, students — some wearing hospital scrubs — said university administrators should have known more about Puliafito’s troubling behavior, including reports that he appeared drunk or otherwise intoxicated at campus events. One woman said that it “seems shocking that no one has been able to figure anything out in the last 10 years. … People are now going to be questioning our professionalism.”

So that’s a new but not surprising thing – he appeared drunk or otherwise intoxicated at campus events.. In earlier Puliafito posts, I’ve anticipated that we’ll be getting reports of his having exhibited signs of trouble at public USC events. You don’t reach this guy’s depth of squalor without revealing it in various ways. But, as the student’s comment suggests, the thing that needs explaining here is why the university kept the guy in his position for years. Achieving his degree of debauchery is not the work of a day. What sort of university president lets his medical school dean – his $1.1 million man – slide down the long slide and not do something about it? Especially given the simultaneous meltdown of his football coach, Steve Sarkisian?

Or was that in itself the problem? Was the president simply overwhelmed with a pretty amazing set of events – the alcohol/drug breakdowns at the same time of a dean and a coach? A 2015 Newsweek opinion piece is titled:

USC IGNORED THE WARNING SIGNS ABOUT STEVE SARKISIAN’S DRINKING

And the writer asks:

[W]here were the real adults — [USC Athletic Director Pat] Haden, university president C.L. Max Nikias and chief operating officer Steve Lopes —

when Sarkisian showed up drunk at one USC event after another?

For sure the university should ask itself whether a president who mishandled both of these crises – Sarkisian and Puliafito – is fit for the office.

Their football coach reportedly showed up to practices and games stinking drunk; at a major fund-raising event, he gave a speech so rambling and foul-mouthed that institutional attention finally had to be paid to Steve Sarkisian’s drinking problem. He doesn’t work at the University of Southern California anymore, but his memory lingers on in a massive lawsuit he filed against the school for wrongful termination.

While the school grapples with the lawsuit and the ongoing bad publicity, the head of USC’s medical school, whose shady past and ongoing meth-fueled insane behavior the university appears to have been treating with the same avoidance it treated Sarkisian, finally erupted into public view two days ago, with a big LA Times story.

So, these are the two sexiest positions at any university – the massively overpaid and overpraised football coach; the similarly celebrated med school dean. Even when they’re not drunks and meth heads, these people tend to present schools with problems having to do with justifying their outsized compensation, anticipating outsized legal bills when the schools try to fire them, and just generally attempting to handle people who know damn well they make far more than the school’s president and indeed may have more institutional clout.

So at USC you had this hopeless, intimidated president gazing with horror upon a coach and a dean who may have been highly effective fund raisers and all but were also imploding or threatening to implode from addictions and addiction-generated naughtiness. The understandable impulse is to control the situation, to quietly make it go away, to avoid at all costs an award-winning press exposé of staggering corruption and hypocrisy at the top of a major American university.

To make matters even worse than this, both “coach” and “med school dean” are clean-limbed, healthy-living type things, allowing the school to lecture the student body and indeed the country about teamwork and exercise and the whole mens sana in corpore sano thing. USC had two rampant substance abusers coming out with this shit, which means they found themselves solidly planted in farce territory.

There’s yet another wrinkle with the Carmen Puliafito thing. Unlike Sarkisian, who became visibly fucked up due to his drinking, ol’ Carmen had been, far as we can tell, functioning at a very high level as dean even while snorting up everything in sight in every luxury hotel room in Pasadena. The guy was only exposed because the police got called by a hotel where Puliafito’s girlfriend overdosed. Word of it got to USC’s president, and then to the press, which ran with it.

Franchement, UD has trouble believing the guy was in fact managing to run the med school smoothly while spending most of his time drugging. UD’s gonna predict that as this story develops we will discover Puliafito’s behavior had been deteriorating for some time, and that people on his staff were increasingly doing his $1.1 million a year job for him.

Oh, one more thing. Expect Puliafito to sue USC, just as Sarkisian did. For… I don’t know. For not curing him.

The Little Policeman from Pass-a-Dean-a

[Pasadena police did not write a report on the (USC medical school dean Carmen Puliafito) incident. After The Times made repeated requests for information, the department acknowledged that an officer at the scene should have prepared a report, and he was belatedly ordered to do so…

No arrests were made, and (a witness) told The Times that Pasadena police never interviewed her.]

The little policeman from Pass-a-Dean-a
(Snort Carmen, Snort Carmen, Snort Carmen, Snort)
Is very unlikely to intervene-a
(Snort Carmen, Snort Carmen, Snort Carmen, Snort)
If you’re rich white overdosed and close to death
He’ll leave you alone with your crystal meth.

They don’t file reports in Pass-a-Dean-a.
(Snort Carmen, Snort Carmen, Snort Carmen, Snort)
They’re very good sports in Pass-A-Dean-a.
(Snort Carmen, Snort Carmen, Snort Carmen, Snort)
For a med school dean in a luxe hotel
The policy is: Don’t ask, don’t tell.

Sarah and Charles Warren said Puliafito wrote them prescriptions for asthma inhalers to soothe lungs raw from smoking marijuana and methamphetamine.

That’s Dr./Dean Carmen A. Puliafito, until recently the much-lauded head of the Keck School of Medicine, and a man whose compassion for his favorite fellow druggies extended to writing them prescriptions for some of the less attractive symptoms of chemical excess.

Carmen Puliafito’s career tells you all you need to know about why there’s a Black Lives Matter movement. Single-handedly Puliafito proves true everything anyone ever said about the breathtaking immunity white criminals may enjoy over long lucrative prestigious careers. I mean, Puliafito continues to represent the University of Southern California to the public.

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And why not? I mean, sure, he had to, er, resign his deanship with full honors when one of his mad meth-filled nights turned sour and got anonymously reported to USC’s president (the police knew about it too, but didn’t even write a report); but he remains on the faculty. And the same president who knew all about Puliafito’s criminal mischief a few weeks later enthusiastically hosted his elegant goodbye party:

“Today, we have one of the, not just the area’s, but the nation’s preeminent medical schools and medical enterprises — and, in many ways, thanks to the leadership of Carmen,” [the president] told the crowd.

Carmen himself, in his farewell remarks, really nailed it: “[T]he primary job of dean of a medical school is to bring leaders that will really set the tone of the organization.” And tone-setting starts at the top!

Who cares if Carmen’s penchant for hanging out with crooks for long nights of drug overdoses – sometimes in his offices on campus – was the reason for the goodbye party? Rich white people using illegal drugs in front of hotel cameras isn’t, it turns out, illegal in Pasadena.

White Lives Matter, in other words; and in fact Puliafito came to USC trailing all kinds of other shit no one bothered acting on:

His time at Miami was not trouble-free. Marc Brockman, an optometrist at the [university], filed a lawsuit against Puliafito in 2006 for assault and battery and accused the university of negligence in hiring him.

Brockman alleged in sworn testimony that Puliafito, in a profane “tantrum” over an inoperable piece of medical equipment, grabbed him by the collar of his lab coat and choked him.

Puliafito denied wrongdoing.

During the case, it emerged that the university had investigated separate complaints of sexual harassment against Puliafito, according to sworn testimony and court filings in the lawsuit. The records do not reveal the outcome of the investigation, and a university spokeswoman said in response to questions about the probe: “We don’t have anything to provide.”

Puliafito and the university reached a confidential settlement with Brockman in June 2007.

Two months later, USC hired Puliafito.

And what a hire!

In a court battle that is still playing out, the University of California filed [a $1.85 million] suit in July 2015 against USC over its poaching of a leading Alzheimer’s disease researcher.

Puliafito was the self-described “quarterback” of efforts to land UC San Diego professor Paul Aisen, a star in the state university system.

… The suit accused USC of civil conspiracy, aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty and other misconduct.

And he’s still a highly respected, high-profile faculty member at the University of Southern California!

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The latest thing is that someone got hold of a series of emails Puliafito wrote to the Los Angeles Times reporters who broke the story about him…

Fuck you.

I’m on you now.

You are fucking with me now.

Watch your back.

You are such a piece of shit.

Call me. Don’t be afraid you piece of shit.

Oh wait. Those are President Trump’s lawyer’s emails. I get mixed up.

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UD thanks John.