In 1957 he opened a gallery outside the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel, selling Edward Marshall Boehm's porcelain figures of animals.

Morris Gift Shop at 140 Maiden Lane, the only example of a completed Frank Lloyd Wright building in San Francisco.

[3][4] In 1983, Palley was suspended as chairman of the New Jersey Lottery commission by Governor Thomas Kean after he was charged with falsifying documents in an attempt thwart an ethics investigation into his conflict of interest.

The ethics committee found that Palley sought money from a company bidding on a contract for the Lottery Commission.

[11] In his book Unlikely Passages, he made claims to many alleged[12] feats, including starting an airline company, starting a mushroom farm in caves, opening a sewing machine needle factory in Russia, smuggling a sought-after Torah out of Odessa, escaping Ethiopian gunboats on the Red Sea, and discussing ideas to run an island government with Tristan Jones.