Police say two men have been arrested in connection with an attempted robbery involving famed San Francisco private investigator Jack Palladino.
SAN FRANCISCO – Two men have been arrested in connection with an attempted robbery involving famed San Francisco private investigator Jack Palladino on livelihood, police said on Sunday.
Palladino himself may have inadvertently assisted detectives in making the arrests after photos were recovered from a camera the suspects attempted to steal in vain, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Palladino, who worked on high profile cases ranging from the mass suicides in Jonestown to celebrities and political scandals, was injured in the violent attack on January 28.
Lawrence Thomas, 24, of Pittsburg, and Tyjone Flournoy, 23, of San Francisco were jailed on Sunday, police said. It was not immediately known whether they have lawyers.
Palladino, 76, remained unconscious but received news on Saturday night of the arrests of his wife and fellow private investigator Sandra Sutherland.
“I said, ‘Guess what, Jack, they got the bastards, and it was all your job,'” Sutherland told the Chronicle on Sunday.
Palladino had just stepped outside his home in San Francisco to try out his new camera when a car stopped and a man jumped out to take it away from him, police and Detective Nick Chapman’s stepson told the paper.
When the suspect grabbed the camera, Palladino fell and hit his head on the sidewalk. Palladino would not survive after surgery to stop the massive bleeding, the Chronicle said.
Palladino was on one last case before retiring from his wife. Since the 1980s, the two have been researching on behalf of the famous and powerful as well as the underdogs from their Victorian home in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of the city.
Their clients included Bill Clinton, whose 1992 presidential campaign hires Palladino to quell rumors of his extramarital affairs, and Courtney Love, who hires Palladino to talk to reporters to investigate if she played a role in the death of her husband, rock star Kurt Cobain in 1994.
In the 1990s, he counter-investigated the tobacco industry’s campaign to defraud whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand.
Palladino’s career began before graduating from the University of California, Berkeley’s law school, when Patty Hearst’s family hired him to help investigate her 1974 abduction by the Symbionese Liberation Party.