Jack Palladino, the extravagant private investigator whose clients ranged from presidents and whistleblowers to celebrities plagued by scandals, Hollywood moguls and sometimes suspected drug traffickers, died Monday. He was 76 years old.
Palladino suffered a devastating brain injury Thursday after a pair of potential thieves tried to take the camera out of his home in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. He clung to the camera, but fell and hit his head, and the photos he took before the 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 loved to know,” his wife, Sandra Sutherland, told The Associated Press on Monday. She added that she had told her husband while he was unconscious in the hospital, “Guess what, Jack, the bastards got, and it was all you.”
In a career of more than 40 years, Palladino worked for whoever was 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 Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign to cover up the women who showed up to claim they had sex with the future president.
He was also the investigator of the family of a 14-year-old boy who won a multimillion-dollar deal from Michael Jackson after accusing the animator of harassing him. Jackson was never charged with a crime in this case.
Two of his most prominent clients were former tobacco company director and whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand and former automobile director John DeLorean.
In the Wigand case, Palladino uncovered a deliberate Big Tobacco campaign to tarnish the former executive of Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corp. after his allegations were made public that tobacco products were covered in chemicals to make them more addictive. Palladino also starred in “The Insider,” the 1999 film about the case.
For DeLorean, he discovered that the former General Motors executive had been created by the authorities, who had accused him of trafficking millions of dollars in cocaine in what they said was a failed effort to prop up his failed DeLorean Motor Co. DeLorean was acquitted.
“Jack was a mainstay of the legal and professional community. He was a firm believer in due process, the rights of the First Amendment, in particular freedom of expression and freedom of the press,” Palladino’s lawyer said. Mel Honowitz, in an emotional statement confirming Palladino’s death.
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Although he still took some occasional cases, Palladino had largely retired a year later, said his wife, who added that the two hoped to travel and pursue photography, which was a passion for both of us.
The couple married in 1977, the same year they founded Palladino & Sutherland Investigations.
While many of their businesses maintain a low profile, they did everything for less. They publicly took on high-profile cases, while the media sometimes compared them to Nick and Nora Charles, the team of fictional and clever detectives in Dashiell Hammett’s high society boiler, “The Thin Man.”
Her clients included everyone from the Black Panthers and Hells Angels to celebrities like Courtney Love, Robin Williams and Kevin Costner. They once recovered 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, such as Williams and Costner, were targeted for fan or tabloid abuse. In Love’s case, she was linked to unfounded allegations 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 treat this fire, to save you, to make it whatever you have to do in the fire: where did it come from, where is it going, will it ever happen again? “
Over the years, some people, including women who filed charges against Clinton, complained that Palladino sometimes threatened and harassed them, their families and friends.
While acknowledging that he was not afraid to ask difficult questions, Palladino denied ever crossing the line either ethically or legally.
All that was always true, he said, he added that it was better to get it than most other private eyes.
“I’m not a self-indulgent person,” he told the examiner. “I’m an arrogant, motivated person who maintains incredibly high standards for himself and everyone around him.”
John Arthur Palladino was born in Boston on July 9, 1944, the son of a pipe fitter.
After graduating from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in English, he studied law at the University of California, Berkeley, passing the state law exam in 1978. But by then he had already proven that his true passion was investigations.
While a student in 1971, he was imprisoned in Nassau County, New York, as part of a covert operation exposing rampant crimes in county prisons. In 1974, the family of the newspaper’s heiress Patricia Hearst hired him to help investigate members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the gang of young revolutionaries who had kidnapped her.
“He planned to be a lawyer,” he once told People magazine of his law school years. “I didn’t know in those days that investigations made everything else seem boring, unquestionable and uninvolved.”
