A Death Trap: Bad Blood Comes to Boil

The prospect of a partnership between Roy Radin and producer Bob Evans enraged the woman who introduced them. Laney Jacobs wanted in on the deal to produce “The Cotton Club,” which she felt she had put together. She also accused Radin of having knowledge of a $1-million cocaine theft from her garage, where she stored the powder before distribution. Despite the bad blood between them, and warnings that she was dangerous, Radin agreed to meet with Laney, as author Steve Wick reports in this excerpt from “Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder.”

That Friday, May 13, 1983, as Bill Mentzer and his buddies were gathering, Roy Radin was confused and afraid. Every instinct he had honed for more than a decade and a half of business life, everything he had ever done that had brought him to this moment in time, now told him that he was in dangerous waters.

He had awakened late, past 10, having slept poorly after finally falling asleep just a few hours before dawn. Radin had been abusing himself all week, living on daily doses of cocaine, and he was now paying for it. (His associate) John Lawson began to repeat everything he had said the day before, reiterating all the reasons why Radin was a fool to keep his appointment to meet Laney for dinner. But again Radin would have none of it.

Instead, he proposed a protection plan.

“I’ll ask Demond to come to the hotel early,” Radin said (referring to his close friend Demond Wilson, former co-star of “Sanford and Son”). “He’ll bring his gun. Just before Jacobs is supposed to arrive, Demond will go outside and sit in his car. He’ll wait until he sees me come out with her, then he’ll follow us to La Scala. At the restaurant, we’ll happen to meet, and I’ll leave with him.”

Well into the afternoon, Radin talked over his plan with Lawson. The more he talked about it, the more certain he became that it was foolproof. Lawson, for his part, thought the whole thing was absurd. Wilson was no bodyguard. Like Radin, he was a cokehead.

By the middle of the day, Radin had gone through almost a gram of cocaine, and it looked as though he was going to lose his mind. Lawson told him he was out of control and begged him to stop. Radin shrugged and said he knew what he was doing.

Demond Wilson’s secretary, Amelia, arrived at 8 o’clock, just as “The New Odd Couple” (Wilson’s latest show) was beginning. While the others watched the program, Radin made phone calls.

Afterward, he went into his bedroom to finish dressing. Wearing a dark three-piece suit and dark-colored Pierre Cardin tie, he sat on the edge of the bed, his head bowed, like a grieving man. Wilson came in and stood by him. He could see Radin’s anxiety was eating him alive.

Outside, there was no light left in the sky. The air was warm and still. Wilson’s Mercedes was parked on Hollywood Boulevard a half-block west of the Regency. Amelia and Wilson got in the car and parked with a clear line of sight to where the driveway curved around and met the front of the hotel.

Sitting in the car, his gun in the door pocket, Wilson dipped a tiny spoon into a glass vial containing cocaine, held it tight to a nostril and sucked in the white powder. His head floated back to rest on the seat, and he sniffed a few more times to make sure he had gotten it all. He repeated the procedure with the other nostril.

Perhaps 40 minutes later, a black Cadillac turned into the hotel driveway and stopped at the front doors. A woman stepped out of the back seat. From where they sat, both Wilson and Amelia noticed her dress. It was long and tight-fitting, very shiny, the color of gold. They watched as the woman entered the hotel.

Inside Radin’s apartment, the phone rang. It was the front desk, announcing Laney’s arrival. Lawson nervously waited a minute before he opened the door.

“Hello, Jonathan,” Laney said.

“Greetings and salutations,” Lawson replied, an edge of sarcasm in his voice.

She was all smiles, her face toned from her recent face lift. Lawson poured champagne into tall glasses, and Radin emerged from his bedroom. Despite the anxiety of the afternoon, he appeared fresh and ready to go out for the evening.

He told her they had a table at La Scala.

“Very nice,” she said.

Radin got up and went into his bedroom, where he put out a line of cocaine on his dresser and sucked it up his nose. In the living room, Lawson announced to Laney that he intended to drive both of them to the restaurant. But Laney protested, saying she had hired a limousine.

When Radin came back into the room, she rather politely alluded to their fight about the “Cotton Club” project. She was not looking for another argument. Instead of repeating her demand that she be brought into the company, she now mentioned that all she expected to get was a finder’s fee.

This evidently pleased Radin, who assured her that if all went well, she would get just that. As for her demand that she be given a piece of the company, Radin told her she would have to work that out with Evans.

Just before they were to leave for the restaurant, Laney asked Lawson if he would do her a favor: drive to her car, which was at the moment parked in the lot near her apartment in Beverly Hills. There were two grams of cocaine in the glove box, and she wanted him to bring them back to the Regency. That way, she and Radin would have the cocaine when they returned.

Lawson turned to Radin and shook his head. “I’m not going,” he told her, “I’m staying here until you’re done with the meeting.”

“Roy, make him go,” Laney insisted.

Before Radin could reply, Lawson pulled him away from Laney. “Look,” Lawson whispered, “there is no way I am leaving the suite until I hear from you after dinner. No way.”

Radin walked back to Laney. “Jonathan is staying,” he said.

She then turned and strode out the door, with Radin behind her.

Seated in his Mercedes, Wilson told Amelia, “There’s the big guy.”

As Radin and Laney emerged from the building, Bob Lowe (one of Laney’s associates) dressed as a chauffeur, jumped out and opened the back door of the car. Laney got in first, then Radin, and the door was shut behind him. The limousine pulled away and proceeded onto Hollywood Boulevard.

Wilson, who less than an hour earlier had held a coke spoon to each nostril, now tried to get his car away from the curb and behind the limousine. But he was partially blocked in, and it took several attempts to position himself so that he could pull out.

Standing just inside the lobby, Lawson looked for Wilson’s car as the limousine turned onto Hollywood Boulevard. What he saw was a different car pull up directly behind the limousine. Amelia, waiting for Wilson to get going, saw this same car as it passed her and fell in line behind the limousine. Two men were sitting in it.

The limousine immediately picked up speed as it left the hotel. It made a quick right-hand turn and headed toward Sunset Boulevard. Wilson finally caught up to within six or eight cars of the limousine as he saw it move onto Sunset Boulevard.

But the Friday-night traffic was heavy, and Wilson got bogged down. At the bend on Sunset, where the roadside is dominated by huge billboards, Wilson lost the limousine completely. Instead of looking further for it, he proceeded toward La Scala.

A few minutes later, Lowe pulled the limousine over to the side of the road. As he did, the car that had been following him stopped directly behind. Laney immediately jumped out, as did the two men in the following car. The men got into the back seat of the limousine--one on either side of Radin--and as the doors shut behind them, the limousine pulled away. Laney got in the other car, checked for traffic and drove toward Beverly Hills.

Five miles away, Carl Plzak and Roger Korban (two more of Laney’s associates), sat in the dark outside Laney’s Beverly Hills apartment. They had been waiting in the pickup for about an hour, and both men were getting anxious. The man they had been told to look out for had not shown up.

After 15 minutes had passed, Plzak picked up the walkie-talkie he had on the car seat and tried to reach Mentzer. There was no response, nothing but static, but he kept trying. Presently, a car drove up on the opposite side of the street from where the pickup was parked. It was 20 or 30 yards away, but Korban could make out the features of a blond woman wearing a bright, gold-colored dress.

“I’m going with her,” Plzak said, and he stepped out of the truck. He had the walkie-talkie in his hand. “If you want, you could follow us, or you can just go home.”

Korban said he would go home.

Plzak got in the car with Laney and shut the door. “Have you talked to Mentzer at all?” she asked.

“I haven’t been able to reach him,” he answered. If Mentzer’s walkie-talkie was turned on, he was out of range.

At some point, as they drove around, Plzak asked where Alex and Bill were.

“They grabbed the fat pig,” Laney said. “They were taking him to the desert.”

“What about the other guy we were waiting for?” Plzak asked.

“He wouldn’t go get the cocaine,” she said. “He was scared, for some reason.”

Sometime around 11 p.m., Laney drove to the Westwood Marquis and pulled into the parking lot. “Look,” she said. “My alibi is that I was with my lawyer all night. I’m going to make some calls from his house.”

She got out of the car and Plzak slid over to the driver’s side. “You haven’t seen me all night,” she added as she slammed the door shut.

At about midnight, Anna Montenegro (Roy and Laney’s mutual friend) called the Regency. “I got your message,” she told Lawson. “What’s wrong? Where’s Roy?”

“Anna, my God,” Lawson moaned. “Where the hell is Jacobs?”

“Where’s Roy?” Anna asked again, disregarding Lawson’s question.

“He went with Laney to dinner and he hasn’t come back and . . . “

“I told him not to go! Why did he do it?”

Lawson asked her to drive to the Regency. When he hung up, he sat on the sofa in the living room and covered his face with his hands, muttering to himself. He felt like a caged animal, having been in the apartment for nearly 24 hours. He reviewed the evening, step by step, in his mind.

When Anna arrived, Lawson hugged her and nearly wept. She mentioned that she had been to Laney’s Sherman Oaks house earlier in the day and had seen four or five men there. “I thought maybe it was Milan (Laney’s cocaine supplier) sending these guys out to roust Laney about the rip-off,” she said.

“Anna,” Lawson pleaded, “I need help. Tell me everything, everything that might help Roy.”

Anna paced the small living room and again went over the terrain she had mapped out before--that Laney was a front for Milan Bellechasses, that he bought directly from the Colombians who controlled cocaine in Miami and that both of them were capable of violent behavior to protect their interests.

Lawson asked her about the movie deal and why it had meant so much to Laney to have Radin turn over a percentage of his share.

The movie deal was a set up, Anna explained. She claimed it was a means for Bellechasses to launder his drug profits in Puerto Rico. Laney wanted the glamour and prestige and legitimacy of the movie business, and Bellechasses wanted a mechanism for investing and cleaning up his narcotics profits.

“We thought we knew it all, and we didn’t,” Lawson muttered.

At 7 a.m. on Saturday morning, Dean Kahn went to work at the Hotel Bel-Air. One of the first things he noticed in the lot was that the black Cadillac limousine he had lent to Bill Mentzer had been returned.

He walked over to examine it, opening the driver’s side door. The trip odometer told him the car had been driven 78 miles since he had last seen it. Kahn was glad to see how clean the car was, particularly the inside, which appeared to have been carefully wiped out.

Very early that morning, Plzak was summoned to Mentzer’s apartment in the Valley. He found Mentzer and Bob Lowe waiting for him. The two men were excited and talkative.

“What happened at the hotel?” Plzak asked as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

“We knew we were being followed,” Mentzer said. “You know that guy who used to be in ‘Sanford and Son’? He was sitting out in front of the Regency.”

Lowe explained that he had lost him.

Mentzer said that when Laney jumped out of the limousine, he and Alex Marti (another bodyguard) pinned Radin in the back seat. Radin was scared, Mentzer said.

A few minutes later, a police car with the siren on roared up behind them, and the three men thought they had been caught. To keep Radin from shouting to the cop if they were pulled over, Mentzer shoved his pistol hard into Radin’s mouth, splitting his lips, which bled profusely. The police car sped right past.

They drove north on Interstate 5, to a section of remote canyon land where Mentzer and Marti had gone target shooting in the past. The car stopped near a box canyon, Radin was pulled out, marched a short distance off a gravel road, and shot 27 times in the head.

“Marti went crazy,” Mentzer said.

Mentzer, who had consumed part of a bottle of wine to dull his senses, then administered a final shot to the head as sort of a coup de grace. Mentzer said that, as it turned out, Radin knew nothing about the rip-off.

After hearing Mentzer talk about the murder, Lowe and Plzak left to take the limousine back to the Hotel Bel-Air. Lowe told Plzak he had personally cleaned out the car and wiped the blood from Radin’s cut lips off the back seat.

“That fat pig was screaming,” Lowe said. “They shot him. . . . I couldn’t watch it . . . and I walked back to the car.”

When Plzak and Lowe returned from dropping off the limousine, it was announced that they were all going to Miami with Laney. The plan was to continue the hunt for Rogers, who, it was believed, was somewhere in southern Florida.

On board the plane, Mentzer and Lowe talked about when they were in Vietnam. And because they were the sort of men who liked to discuss their work, they again spoke about taking the fat producer out to the desert and shooting him.

Dressed casually in a designer jogging outfit, Laney sat with them and listened. If she was hearing for the first time the awful truth that Radin had been executed after she had got out of the limousine, she did not react to the news.

(Editor’s note: After Radin’s killing, as author Wicks notes in “Bad Company,” Demond Wilson found God, testifying in a Los Angeles court hearing that he is now a fundamentalist preacher. ) Sunday: A worried visit to Vegas.

From the book “Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder ,” by Steve Wick. Copyright, 1990, by Steve Wick. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

COMING UP

* SUNDAY: After Roy Radin’s disappearance, film producer Bob Evans, believing he was Jacob’s next target, traveled to Las Vegas to seek help from two friends who he thought were connected to the Mob.