2 arrests in attack on famous San Francisco private investigator

Police say two men were arrested in connection with attempted robbery that left notorious San Francisco private investigator Jack Palladino on life support

SAN FRANCISCO – Two men have been arrested in connection with an attempted theft that left notorious San Francisco private investigator Jack Palladino on life support, police said on Sunday.

Palladino himself may have inadvertently helped detectives make arrests after photographs were retrieved from a camera suspects unsuccessfully attempted to steal, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Palladino, who has worked on high-profile cases ranging from mass suicides in Jonestown to celebrity and political scandals, suffered a head injury 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 clear whether they had lawyers.

Palladino, 76, remained unconscious but received news of the arrest of his wife and fellow private investigator Sandra Sutherland on Saturday evening.

“I said, ‘Guess what Jack, they got the bastards, and that was all you were doing,’” Sutherland told The Chronicle on Sunday.

Palladino had just come out of his San Francisco home to try out his new camera when a car pulled up and a man jumped in to grab it, police and Detective Nick Chapman’s stepson told the newspaper .

As the suspect grabbed the camera, Palladino fell and hit his head on the sidewalk. Palladino was not to survive after undergoing surgery to stop the massive bleeding, the Chronicle said.

Palladino was finishing one last case before joining his retired wife. Since the 1980s, the two have conducted inquiries at their Victorian home in the city’s Haight-Ashbury district, on behalf of the famous and powerful as well as the underdogs.

Their clients included Bill Clinton, whose 1992 presidential campaign hired Palladino to quell rumors about his extramarital affair, and Courtney Love, who hired Palladino to speak to reporters investigating whether she had played a role in the death. of her husband, rock star Kurt Cobain in 1994.

In the 1990s, he conducted a counter-investigation into the tobacco industry’s campaign to denigrate whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand.

Palladino’s career began even before he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley Law School, when Patty Hearst’s family hired him to help investigate his 1974 abduction by the Party. of symbolic liberation.