Jack Palladino, the private investigator who has worked on high-profile cases ranging from Jonestown’s mass suicides to celebrities and political scandals, is on life support after suffering a head injury during an assault attempt
SAN FRANCISCO – Jack Palladino, the private investigator who has worked on high-profile cases ranging from the mass suicides of Jonestown to celebrities and political scandals, has been placed on life support after suffering a head injury during an assault attempt.
Palladino, 70, had just left his home in San Francisco on Thursday 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 San Francisco Chronicle.
When the suspect grabbed the camera, Palladino fell and hit his head on the sidewalk, causing traumatic brain injury. Chapman said Palladino was not expected to survive after undergoing surgery to stop massive bleeding.
Police said no suspects were arrested.
Palladino was closing a last case before retiring with his wife and business partner, Sandra Sutherland. 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.
They included Bill Clinton, whose 1992 presidential campaign hired Palladino to crack down on rumors of his extramarital affairs, and Courtney Love, who hired Palladino to talk to journalists investigating whether she played a role in the death of her rock star in 1994 Kurt Cobain.
Other clients included John DeLorean, the auto magnate who was acquitted of cocaine trafficking charges and a 14-year-old boy who won a multimillion dollar civil settlement against Michael Jackson for alleged sexual abuse.
In the 1990s, he counter-investigated the tobacco industry’s campaign to defame whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand. Palladino’s work protected Wigand’s credibility as an expert in a lawsuit that resulted in a $ 200 billion settlement, the court’s first victory against Big Tobacco. He would play himself in the film “The Insider” about Wigand’s story.
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. He went on to work on behalf of clients involved in radical politics and counterculture, including Black Panther leader Huey Newton, the Hells Angels and Larry Layton, who survived the 1978 mass suicide of more than 900 members of the People’s Temple.
Palladino spent seven years interviewing surviving members of the religious cult and their families.