‘Cotton Club’ Case Led to Arrests in ’84 Slaying of Prostitute

Five years ago, June Mincher, a 245-pound prostitute with a lavender Rolls-Royce, was shot to death on a Van Nuys sidewalk by a swift and efficient killer, setting off an investigation that unearthed a bizarre cast of characters and seamy tales, but convicted no one.

This month some of the mystery appears to be unraveling in a court hearing into another killing a world away--the world of the “Cotton Club” slaying with its Hollywood celebrities and high-finance film and cocaine deals.

Testimony in the Cotton Club hearing, and related documents filed with the court, contain accusations that both slayings were carried out by some of the same hired killers, who boasted of their work to an informant wearing a tape recorder for investigators.

The question of who might have hired them to kill Mincher is still open, but at least one document filed with the court quotes an informant as saying that it was the grandmother of the man who had been acquitted of the killing. An attorney for the woman, a Beverly Hills investment executive, denied the accusation. Police say they are still investigating and will not comment.

Mincher, who billed herself in local sex-oriented publications as a “Sexy Black & Indian Goddess” with a 56-inch bust, was shot to death May 3, 1984. Two years later, Gregory Alan Cavalli, a 24-year-old body builder from a prominent Beverly Hills family, was charged with her murder. Authorities said he drove the getaway car after a hit man killed Mincher.

But at Cavalli’s trial, prosecutors could not produce or even name the hit man. And the chief witnesses against Cavalli included a former cocaine addict, a transsexual performer in pornographic films and a woman recovering from a nervous breakdown suffered after her son killed her mother.

Fast Vote for Acquittal

At the end of a three-week trial in 1986, Cavalli walked out of the Van Nuys Courthouse a free man. It took a jury less than an hour to find him not guilty.

But now, three years later, the Mincher murder case begins a new chapter.

Authorities have charged two men with killing Mincher, identifying them as bodyguards who formerly worked for a security firm that the Cavalli family had hired. Detectives now say Cavalli was not the getaway driver and was not even present the night of the killing.

The question of who ordered Mincher’s killing remains, but authorities say Cavalli is not a target of the investigation because he can’t be tried for the same crime twice.

“Never,” said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Ed Entwisle. “He has been tried and that is it.”

Investigators will not discuss whom they consider suspects. But in a summary of the investigation filed with Los Angeles Superior Court, in connection with the Cotton Club case, the key informant in the case is quoted as telling officers that one of the suspects told him that Mincher “had been bothering a wealthy Italian family and the grandmother contracted the ‘hit.’ ”

Attorney Mitchell W. Egers, who represents the Cavalli family, identified “grandmother” as a reference to Mary Bowles, a partner in the Beverly Hills real estate investment firm of Bowles & Associates. “There is no other grandmother . . . with a part in this case,” he said, denying that anyone in the family had anything to do with the Mincher killing.

“It’s absurd, it’s crazy, it’s absolutely impossible,” Egers said. “It is beyond my conception that anybody in the Cavalli family would have anything to do with anything illegal, let alone a murder. They are gentle, refined people with an excellent reputation.”

New Leads Uncovered

New leads in the Mincher case emerged almost by accident in the last two years during the lengthy Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department investigation of the slaying of would-be movie producer Roy Radin.

William Molony Mentzer, 39, of Canoga Park and Robert Ulmer Lowe, 42, of Rockville, Md., two of the alleged hit men arrested in Radin’s 1983 slaying, have also been charged with killing Mincher in 1984.

Mentzer has pleaded not guilty, and Lowe is fighting extradition from Maryland.

A preliminary hearing is under way in Los Angeles Superior Court into the slaying of Radin, which was dubbed the Cotton Club case because Radin was killed during a financial dispute over the making of the movie of that name.

Although the Mincher murder is involved in the hearing, it has been overshadowed by the headline-grabbing testimony in the Radin killing, which has involved cocaine deals, limousines and accusations involving movie producer Robert Evans.

But investigative records filed with the court and the statements of prosecutors and detectives about the Mincher case weave a portrait of an investigation that was started and stopped two different times before the present inquiry began.

According to stories told by friends and associates at the time of her death, June Mincher, 29, parlayed advertisements in underground newspapers offering sexual services into a lucrative life style. Friends told investigators that she had spent at least $20,000 on cosmetic surgery to alter her face and hips and enlarge her bust. She drove a lavender Rolls-Royce and carried as much as $12,000 in cash beneath her wig.

In the summer of 1983, according to testimony at Cavalli’s trial, Cavalli began calling Mincher after seeing her ad in an underground newspaper. The telephone relationship lasted several months, with the two talking for several hours on some days. Cavalli wanted to meet Mincher but she declined. Finally, he went to her West Hollywood apartment and broke down the door.

Cavalli discovered that Mincher weighed 60 or 70 pounds more than she appeared to in the picture in her advertisement, and he ended the relationship.

Angered by the rejection, Mincher then began to harass Cavalli; his father, Richard Cavalli, and other relatives, including Bowles, with repeated threatening phone calls. Mincher was suspected by authorities of firebombing Greg Cavalli’s car in late 1983 and setting fire to his father’s military-surplus store in Santa Monica in 1984.

The Cavalli family spent $200,000 on private security guards to protect them from Mincher, according to trial testimony, and Gregory Cavalli moved to Phoenix to get away from her.

On May 3, 1984, Mincher had just left an apartment in the 6800 block of Sepulveda Boulevard with a friend when she was shot seven times in the head. She died instantly. The friend was shot in the chest but survived. The gunman ran to a waiting car, which sped away.

Los Angeles police began investigating Cavalli’s possible involvement in the slaying within three hours of the shooting, according to court records. Though two witnesses identified Cavalli as the driver of the getaway car, investigators could not identify the gunman. The investigation stalled and was shelved two months later.

As is routine with unsolved killings, the case was reopened by two new investigators the following year. According to police records, they immediately focused on the more than six bodyguards who had been provided to the Cavalli family by a Studio City firm, A. Michael Pascal & Associates. The detectives got the names but could not locate and interview all of the men because they had left Pascal.

“At that particular time, we were trying to get all the bodyguards identified,” Entwisle said recently. “We were never able to determine if these were the suspects in the killing although our investigation pointed that way.”

Went Ahead With Trial

Two of the bodyguards they could not find were Lowe and Mentzer. In December, 1985, police and prosecutors decided to go ahead with the arrest and trial of Cavalli without knowing who the hit man was.

During the trial in June, 1986, a transsexual pornographic film performer who was a close friend of Mincher’s testified about the relationship between Cavalli and Mincher. But the case relied most heavily on the two witnesses who had identified Cavalli as the getaway driver.

However, on the stand, one of those witnesses admitted that at the time of the shooting, he was a cocaine addict and could have made a mistake. The other witness, Cavalli’s attorneys brought out, had originally told police that he could not see the driver.

Jurors later said the witnesses lacked credibility and chose to believe the defense’s contention that Cavalli was in Phoenix, and had made phone calls from there, when the killing took place. Cavalli was acquitted, and the Mincher case was shelved once again.

Meanwhile, sheriff’s investigators working on the Radin killing of 1983 were investigating Mentzer and Lowe.

Radin, 33, of Long Island, disappeared May 13, 1983, after getting into a limousine in Hollywood to go to a dinner engagement to discuss the financial backing for “Cotton Club.” His decomposed body was found a month later on a wilderness shooting range south of Gorman.

Mentzer and Lowe were among the possible suspects identified in the slaying, but the sheriff’s investigation moved slowly until 1987 when deputies contacted William Rider, a former security chief for Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt. Rider knew Mentzer and Lowe from security jobs.

Slayings Described

Rider, according to court records and testimony in the Cotton Club case, told investigators that Mentzer and Lowe had told him about murders they had been involved in. One was the Radin killing. Another was the slaying of a woman in Van Nuys who the men apparently thought was a transvestite.

Rider told the investigators of a 1986 conversation he had with Lowe while they were on a security job in Texas. “Lowe began drinking heavily and told Mr. Rider about Mentzer murdering a black transvestite,” a sheriff’s investigative report says, and continued:

“Lowe said that he drove the getaway vehicle and that Mentzer shot the victim several times while standing on Sepulveda Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley. . . . Mentzer also shot the victim’s companion, but the companion survived.

“Lowe stated Mentzer began calling the murdered victim names and kicking her after the shooting, and Lowe, who was in the driver’s seat of their vehicle, had to call to Mentzer to get in the car so they could get away before the police arrived.”

Gun Matched to Slugs

The investigators connected the facts Rider gave to the Mincher slaying. Rider later told investigators that he had unknowingly lent Mentzer the gun used in the killing and turned over a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol, equipped with a silencer. According to the court records, investigators matched the gun to the slugs that killed Mincher.

Rider next went undercover for the sheriff’s investigators, agreeing to meet with Lowe, Mentzer and a third former bodyguard for the Pascal firm, Robert Leroy Deremer, 38, while the conversations were secretly tape-recorded.

In May, 1988, while sitting with Rider in a car in Frederick, Md., according to sheriff’s records, Deremer spoke about the Mincher killing and said he drove Mentzer by the murder scene shortly after the shooting so that Mentzer could see what police were doing. The next day, Rider met with Lowe at a bar in the same city and while the conversation was secretly recorded, Lowe told of his part in the killing, the records say.

Two months later, it was Mentzer’s turn. Rider met him in Los Angeles and steered the tape-recorded conversation toward the murder. According to the records, Mentzer said that in the weeks before the murder, he had placed a bomb under Mincher’s car but it failed to go off. He said he had also broken into Mincher’s apartment and pistol-whipped her. In another conversation, Mentzer said he used hollow-point bullets during the killing because he believed--erroneously--that they were impossible to match to a weapon.

The tapes of the conversations, along with testimony by Rider, are expected to be key evidence against Mentzer and Lowe, if they come to trial. uthorities said last week that Deremer has agreed to testify against his two fellow bodyguards and will not be charged in the case.

While authorities are confident that they finally know how Mincher was killed, the question of who ordered her death remains unclear.

3rd Look Into Case

Earlier this year, Los Angeles police began their third look at the case after the sheriff’s investigation broke it open.

“We’re following up on loose ends,” Entwisle said. “There are still people out there that were involved.”

Authorities declined to comment on who the suspects are. But one thing they are sure of is that Gregory Cavalli cannot be tried again.

“As far as Mr. Cavalli is concerned, the case is over,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Andrew W. Diamond, who headed the unsuccessful prosecution in 1986. “He can’t ever be prosecuted again for killing June Mincher.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. David P. Conn, who is handling the case against Mentzer and Lowe, would not comment. “I don’t want to speculate on Gregory Cavalli’s role,” Conn said. “He has been acquitted.”

Cavalli, who has moved back to Southern California since his trial, could not be reached for comment.

Pascal, whose security firm is now in Beverly Hills, confirmed last week that Mentzer and Lowe worked for his firm when it was hired by the Cavalli family. But he would not comment further. Pascal has not been charged with any crime.