Police say two men were arrested in connection with an attempted theft that left the famous San Francisco private investigator Jack Palladino on life support.
SAN FRANCISCO – Two men were arrested in connection with an attempted theft that left San Francisco’s famous private investigator, Jack Palladino, on life support, police said on Sunday.
Palladino himself may have inadvertently helped detectives make arrests after the photos were retrieved from a camera that the suspects tried unsuccessfully to steal, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Palladino, who worked on major cases ranging from the mass suicides of Jonestown to celebrities and political scandals, suffered a head injury in the violent attack on 28 January.
Lawrence Thomas, 24, of Pittsburg, and Tyjone Flournoy, 23, of San Francisco were arrested on Sunday, police said. It was not immediately known whether they have lawyers.
Palladino, 76, remained unconscious, but received news of his wife’s arrests and also of private detective Sandra Sutherland on Saturday night.
“I said, ‘Guess what, Jack, they got the bastards and it was all your fault,'” Sutherland told the Chronicle on Sunday.
Palladino had just left his home in San Francisco to test his new camera when a car stopped and a man jumped out to pick it up, police and detective Nick Chapman’s stepson told the newspaper.
When the suspect grabbed the camera, Palladino fell and hit his head on the sidewalk. Palladino was not expected to survive after undergoing surgery to stop massive bleeding, the Chronicle said.
Palladino was closing one last case before retiring with his wife. Since the 1980s, the two have conducted investigations at their Victorian home in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, on behalf of the famous and powerful, as well as the oppressed.
Her clients included Bill Clinton, whose 1992 presidential campaign hired Palladino to quell rumors of her extramarital affairs, and Courtney Love, who hired Palladino to talk to journalists who were investigating whether she played a role in the death of her husband in 1994, the star of the rock Kurt Cobain.
In the 1990s, he counter-investigated the tobacco industry’s campaign to defame whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand.
Palladino’s career began even before he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley law school, when Patty Hearst’s family hired him to help investigate his 1974 abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Party.