David Corbett worked 15 years as a San Francisco based PI with the firm Palladino & Sutherland. He was interviewed in 2009.
“We worked for the fourteen-year-old boy and his family in the child molestation case, and we tried the best we could to help the police, but we kept finding out from the sergeant who was out liaison at LAPD that they would assemble a witness list from our reports, pass it up the chain of command, and it would inevitably come back with certain key witnesses cross off. The suspicion was that, with Johnny Cochran at the helm of Jackson’s defense, he was pulling strings with old contacts in the DA’s office or with cops he knew. We could never prove this, and it was just a suspicion. But it all became moot when Cochran, fearing his investigators has been taped trying to tamper with witnesses – they’d been instructed by Cochran to go out and find ex-employees, tell them,”Michael loves you,” and offer them their jobs back at salaries they could hardly refuse – Cochran had a high-power conclave with his client and promptly pitched almost $20 million at the kid and his family. An unwritten part of the agreement was that the boy would not testify before the grand jury. This is illegal, but who was going to prove it happened? Anyhoo, Michael slipped out of that one, as we all know.”
Full interview: http://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/david-corbett-speaks-pi-fictional-and-real-life/