Jack Palladino, the flamboyant private investigator whose clients ranged from presidents and corporate whistleblowers to scandal-plagued celebrities, Hollywood moguls, and sometimes suspected drug traffickers, died Monday. He was 76.
Palladino suffered a devastating brain injury on Thursday after a few would-be robbers attempted to grab his camera outside his home in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. He held the camera but fell and hit his head, and the photos he took before his attackers fled were used by police to track down two suspects. They were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and other crimes.
Photo by Eric Luse / San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
“He would have liked to have known that,” his wife, Sandra Sutherland, told The Associated Press Monday. She added that she had told her husband while he was unconscious in the hospital, “Guess what, Jack, they’ve got the bastards, and it was all your job.”
In a career spanning more than 40 years, Palladino worked for a who’s who of the famous and sometimes infamous, variously hailed as a hero or denounced as a villain, depending on who his client was at the time.
He was hired by Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign to make a cover up for women who came forward to claim they’d had sex with the future president.
He was also the family investigator of a 14-year-old boy who won a multimillion-dollar settlement from Michael Jackson after accusing the entertainer of abusing him. Jackson was never charged with a crime in that case.
Two of his most prominent clients were former tobacco company president and whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand and former automotive director John DeLorean.
In the Wigand case, Palladino discovered a deliberate campaign by Big Tobacco to get the former president of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp. after his allegations became public that tobacco products were fortified with chemicals to make them addictive. Palladino also went on to play himself in “The Insider,” the 1999 film about the case.
Before DeLorean, he discovered that the former General Motors president had been set up by the authorities, who had accused him of trading millions of dollars in cocaine in what they say was a failed attempt to run his failed DeLorean Motor Co. to support. DeLorean was acquitted.
“Jack was a pillar of the legal and professional community. He was a strong supporter of due process, First Amendment rights, especially freedom of speech and freedom of the press,” said Palladino’s attorney, Mel Honowitz, in an emotional statement confirming Palladino’s death. .
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Although he still took on the occasional case, Palladino had largely retired a year ago, his wife said, adding that the two looked forward to traveling and photography, which was a passion for them.
The couple married in 1977, the same year they founded Palladino & Sutherland Investigations.
While many in their business remain unobtrusive, they did everything but. They took on high-profile cases publicly, while the media sometimes compared them to Nick and Nora Charles, the fictional, witty, high-society husband-and-wife detective team in the Dashiell Hammett potboiler, “The Thin Man.”
Their clients included everyone from the Black Panthers and Hells Angels to celebrities like Courtney Love, Robin Williams and Kevin Costner. They once recovered a truck with stolen equipment for the Grateful Dead, and Palladino spent years investigating the Jonestown sect’s mass suicide in Guyana.
Some celebrity clients, such as Williams and Costner, have been targeted for fan or tabloid abuse. In Love’s case, she was linked to baseless allegations that she played a role in the suicide of her husband, Kurt Cobain.
“I’m someone to call you when the house is on fire, not when there’s smoke in the kitchen,” Palladino told the 1999 San Francisco Examiner. ‘You’re asking me to deal with that fire, to save you, to do what to be done with the fire – where is it from, where is it going, will it ever happen again? “
Over the years, some people, including the women who brought charges against Clinton, complained that Palladino sometimes threatened and harassed them, their families and friends.
While he would admit he wasn’t afraid to ask tough questions, Palladino denied ever crossing the line ethically or legally.
All he ever looked for was the truth, he said, adding that he could understand it better than most other private eyes.
“I’m not a self-effacing person,” he said to the examiner. “I am a passionate, arrogant person who holds himself and everyone around him to incredibly high standards.”
John Arthur Palladino was born in Boston on July 9, 1944, the son of a pipe fitter.
After graduating with a degree in English from Cornell University, he studied law at the University of California, Berkeley, where he passed the bar’s state exam in 1978. But by then he had already discovered that research was his true passion.
While still a student in 1971, he had himself locked up in New York’s Nassau County as part of an undercover operation that exposed rampant crime in the county’s prisons. In 1974, the family of the newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst hired him to help investigate members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the gang of young revolutionaries who had kidnapped her.
“I was planning to become a lawyer,” he once told People magazine about his law school years. “Little did I know at the time that studies would make everything else seem dull, indisputable and little involved.”
