He was best known for his work in the Peoples Temple tragedy, his defense of car maker John DeLorean, for the Bill Clinton presidential election committee, the tobacco industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, singer Courtney Love, and musician R. Kelly.
[3] Palladino attended Boston Latin School, graduating in 1962,[4] and went on to study English at Cornell University, obtaining a bachelor's degree from that institution.
The San Francisco Examiner noted in 1999 that he had "built a reputation for aggressive investigations, an in-your-face style and the ability to neutralize adverse witnesses and spin hostile media.
[6] While still in law school at University of California, Berkeley, Palladino was hired by the family of Patty Hearst to assist in the matter of her 1974 kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).
Palladino & Sutherland interviewed more than two hundred witnesses in a defense that convinced the jury to acquit DeLorean based on entrapment by government agents.
[8] The Clinton election committee reportedly paid Palladino more than $100,000 over several years to investigate two dozen women in a damage control inquiry.
He said the payouts came from campaign funds, but were listed as legal fees paid to a Denver law firm rather than payments to Palladino.
Palladino engaged in a counter-investigation that turned the spotlight onto this smear campaign and preserved Wigand's credibility as an expert witness in a lawsuit that subsequently resulted in a more than two hundred billion dollar settlement, in the first successful litigation against Big Tobacco.
[2] This effort is chronicled in Marie Brenner's May 1996 Vanity Fair article "The Man Who Knew Too Much"[11] and in the 1999 Michael Mann film The Insider.
[18][19] Other notable clients included Don Johnson, Kevin Costner, Robin Williams, Huey P. Newton, the Hells Angels and Snoop Dogg.