They Became the Joe Kennedys of Pot

David Corbett was steeped in the stars long before he became one.

Mar 01, 2024

What do Michael Jackson, John DeLorean, the famed Peoples Temple Trial and the murder of a U.S Congressman, and the “Cotton Club” movie murder all have in common?

Crime novelist David Corbett.

Corbett, before he was a novelist, wandered into the offices of Palladino & Sutherland, a private investigations firm, and became a PI. He thought the job would become the bedrock for his future writing career. But he got hooked and stayed on longer than intended, investigating some of the most famous criminal cases in the past half century, helping lawyers defend the likes of Jackson and DeLorean.

In particular, he became immersed in a series of federal prosecutions targeting a loose-knit group of Navy brats and Vietnam war vets who’d banded together to form the most successful marijuana smuggling operation on the West Coast. They were called the Coronado Company.

“The Coronado guys were wild but not evil. They thought President Carter was going to legalize the stuff and they’d become the Joe Kennedys of pot,” Corbett says. (Joe Kennedy, father of the late president, was infamous for being a bootlegger during Prohibition.)

But Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in 1980, who turned the DEA’s focus on marijuana, deemed a “gateway drug” at the time. Guys like the Coronado Company were soon taken down—the non-violent are the easiest to catch. They were promptly replaced by organized crime. Not so easy.

It was in 1988, five years into his PI career, when Corbett told his boss, Jack Palladino, “We’re not getting the kinds of clients we used to.”

“If those guys were still in the business, they’d be betrayed or dead,” Palladino said.

“The criminals were our clients,” Corbett says, especially the famous and nonviolent.

It began for Corbett in his years as an actor in California, which taught him scene structure for his later writing. Two of his fellow acting students were working part-time for Palladino & Sutherland. Upon learning of Corbett’s intention to pursue writing not acting, they urged him to become an investigator. “If you want to write, you should try to get a job here. You can’t beat it for material.”

And they were right.

Most of his work was for the defense, which he realized gave him a unique perspective on the criminal justice system as well as the criminal mind. Today, Corbett is known for digging deep into his characters and his crime fiction has a realism and edge other crime fiction authors envy.

Corbett eventually left the business to write novels full-time while his mentor, Jack Palladino, stayed on to run the business. His words to the young Corbett about the future for non-violent criminals proved somewhat prophetic.

Palladino had just hung up his gumshoes and was looking forward to retirement, hoping to indulge his lifelong love of photography. One evening, he heard a disturbance outside his Haight Ashbury residence. Grabbing his camera, he rushed outside where he discovered two young men breaking into cars. Jack started taking their pictures. Realizing they’d been discovered, they jumped in their car and drove right at him, trying to grab his camera as they sped past. Jack held on, but he was hurled to the pavement with such force he suffered extreme brain damage and descended into a coma from which he never recovered.

However, the pictures he’d taken proved crucial in identifying and apprehending the men who killed him.

Says Corbett, “Jack’s last case—he solved his own murder.”

They Became the Joe Kennedys of Pot

David Corbett was steeped in the stars long before he became one.

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