Jack Palladino, the flamboyant private investigator whose clients ranged from presidents and corporate whistleblowers to celebrities plagued by scandals, Hollywood tycoons and sometimes suspected drug dealers, died on Monday. He was 76 years old.
Palladino suffered a devastating brain injury on Thursday after two alleged thieves tried to grab his camera outside his home in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He held the camera but fell and hit his head, and the photos he took before his attackers escaped were used by the police to track down two suspects. They were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and other crimes.
Eric Luse / San Francisco Chronicle photo via Getty Images
“He would have loved to know that,” his wife, Sandra Sutherland, told the Associated Press on Monday. She added that she had told her husband while he was unconscious at the hospital: “Guess what, Jack, they took the bastards and it was all your fault.”
In a career spanning over 40 years, Palladino worked for a who’s who of the famous and sometimes infamous, alternately hailed as a hero or denounced as a villain, depending on who his client was at the time.
He was hired by the Bill Clinton presidential campaign in 1992 to stop women who came forward to claim they had sex with the future president.
He was also the investigator in the family of a 14-year-old boy who won a multimillion dollar deal from Michael Jackson after accusing the artist of molesting him. Jackson was never charged with a crime in this case.
Two of its most prominent customers were former tobacco company executive and whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand and former automotive executive John DeLorean.
In the Wigand case, Palladino discovered a deliberate campaign by Big Tobacco to defame the former Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp. executive. after his claims became public that tobacco products were enriched with chemicals to make them more addictive. Palladino also performed in “The Insider”, the 1999 film on the case.
For DeLorean, he found that the former General Motors executive had been framed by the authorities, who accused him of trafficking millions of dollars in cocaine in what they said was a failed effort to support his DeLorean Motor Co. DeLorean was acquitted.
“Jack was a pillar of the legal and professional community. He firmly believed in due process, First Amendment rights, especially freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” said Palladino’s lawyer, Mel Honowitz, in an emotional statement confirming the death of Palladino.
Matt Latella / AP
Although he still accepted occasional cases, Palladino had already retired a year ago, his wife said, adding that the two were eager to travel and look for photography, which was a passion for both of them.
The couple married in 1977, the same year they founded Palladino & Sutherland Investigations.
While many in their businesses remain discreet, they have done anything but. They publicly took on high-profile cases, while the media sometimes compared them to Nick and Nora Charles, the cunning fictional husband and wife team of high society detectives from Dashiell Hammett’s pot, “The Thin Man.”
His clients ranged from the Black Panthers and Hells Angels to celebrities like Courtney Love, Robin Williams and Kevin Costner. They once retrieved a truckload of stolen equipment for the Grateful Dead, and Palladino spent years investigating the mass suicide of the Jonestown cult in Guyana.
Some famous clients, like Williams and Costner, have been abused by fans or tabloids. In the case of Love, she was being linked to baseless claims that she played a role in the suicide of her husband, Kurt Cobain.
“I’m someone you call when the house is on fire, not when there’s smoke in the kitchen,” Palladino told the San Francisco Examiner in 1999. “You ask me to handle this fire, to save it, to do what to be done with fire – where did it come from, where does it go, will it happen again? “
Over the years, some people, including women who have made accusations against Clinton, have complained that Palladino sometimes threatened and persecuted them, as well as their families and friends.
Although he acknowledged that he was not afraid to ask difficult questions, Palladino denied crossing the line, either ethically or legally.
All he ever sought was the truth, he said, adding that he was better at getting it than most other private investigators.
“I am not a modest individual,” he told Examiner. “I am a determined and arrogant person who keeps himself and everyone around him to incredibly high standards.”
John Arthur Palladino was born in Boston on July 9, 1944, the son of a plumber.
After graduating in English at Cornell University, he studied law at the University of California, Berkeley, passing the state order exam in 1978. But by then, he had already discovered that his real passion was investigations.
While still a student in 1971, he imprisoned himself in New York’s Nassau County as part of a covert operation that exposed rampant crime in county prisons. In 1974, the family of heiress to the newspaper Hearst hired him to help investigate members of the Simbionese Liberation Army, the disorganized band of young revolutionaries who kidnapped her.
“I was planning to become a lawyer,” he once told People magazine about his law school years. “I didn’t know at the time that the investigations would make everything else look boring, without challenges and without involvement.”
