San Francisco police have arrested a suspect in connection with a robbery and assault that left Jack Palladino, the famed private investigator who once worked for former President Bill Clinton, on life support this week, according to local reports.
Authorities were also on the hunt for at least one other assailant, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Saturday evening, citing a source familiar with the investigation. The 70-year-old gumshoe reportedly cracked his head on the pavement outside his Haight-Ashbury home when muggers yanked a new camera from around his neck Thursday.
Palladino’s stepson, Nick Chapman, said earlier that the well-known detective suffered a traumatic brain injury and was unlikely to survive his injuries.
This Aug. 12, 1982 photo shows Private Investigator Jack Palladino. Palladino, who worked on high-profile cases ranging from the Jonestown mass suicides to celebrity and political scandals, is on life support after suffering a head injury during an attempted robbery. Palladino’s stepson says the 70-year-old P.I. is not expected to survive the injury sustained Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021 outside his San Francisco home, where for decades Palladino and his wife Sandra Sutherland conducted investigations on behalf of the famous and powerful, as well as the underdogs. (Eric Luse/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
The prognosis did not appear to have improved Saturday, according to the Chronicle report.
“He went out the way he would have liked, in a dramatic confrontation with the forces of evil,” his wife, Sandra Sutherland, told the paper.
Palladino and Sutherland became a private-eye team after they met in the mid-1970s while investigating alleged prisoner abuses within a New York prison at the request of a Long Island district attorney.
Clinton hired Palladino in the early 1990s to discredit women who claimed he’d carried on extramarital affairs with them.
Palladino’s other celebrity clients have included Harvey Weinstein, Don Johnson, Kevin Costner, Robin Williams, Huey Newton and Snoop Dogg. He had previously been hired by the Hearst family to assist after their daughter Patty was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army and interviewed survivors of the Peoples Temple religious cult’s 1978 mass suicide. He also helped protect the credibility of a Big Tobacco whistleblower in the 1990s when the industry tried to smear him.
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Weinstein hired Palladino during his sexual misconduct investigation to keep track of his accusers and journalists investigating his abuses.
Fox News’ Brie Stimson contributed to this report.