A world-famous private investigator — whose high-profile cases included helping former President Bill Clinton and top Hollywood stars — has been placed on life support after suffering a head injury during an unprovoked attack outside his home on Thursday night.
Jack Palladino, 70, had just stepped outside his San Francisco home on Thursday when a car pulled up and a man jumped out to grab his camera from him, police told The San Francisco Chronicle.
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As the suspect grabbed the camera, Palladino fell and hit his head on the pavement, causing a traumatic head injury. Chapman said Palladino was not expected to survive after undergoing surgery to stop the massive bleeding.
The Chronicle reported Saturday an arrest had been made, but no suspects were yet named.
Palladino was wrapping up one final case before joining his wife and work partner, Sandra Sutherland, in retirement.
Since the 1980s, the two conducted investigations out of their Victorian home in the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, on behalf of the famous and powerful as well as the underdogs.
That included Bill Clinton, whose 1992 presidential campaign hired Palladino to quell rumors of his numerous extramarital affairs.
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And Courtney Love, who hired Palladino to talk to journalists investigating whether she played a role in the mysterious 1994 death of her husband, 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 molestation.
In the 1990s, he ran a counter-investigation to the tobacco industry’s campaign to smear whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand. Palladino’s work protected Wigand’s credibility as an expert witness in a lawsuit that resulted in a $200 billion settlement, the first successful courtroom win against Big Tobacco. He would play himself in the film “The Insider” on the Wigand story.
Palladino’s career began even before he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley’s law school when the family of Patty Hearst hired him to assist in investigating her 1974 kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Party.
He went on to work on behalf of clients involved in radical politics and the counterculture, including the Black Panther leader Huey Newton, the Hells Angels, and Larry Layton, who survived the 1978 mass suicide at Jonestown, where more than 900 members of the People’s Temple killed themselves.
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Palladino spent seven years interviewing surviving members of the religious cult and their families.
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The Associated Press contributed to this article