A Break in the Case: Tip Ties Killing to ‘Cotton Club’ Deal
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, as author Steve Wick reports in this excerpt from the book “Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder.”
Bob Evans was to spend Memorial Day weekend at the Golden Nugget, and shortly after his arrival in Las Vegas he met the Doumani brothers (Edward and Fred, who owned the El Morocco club) in their office.
Later, speaking to Fred Doumani, Evans got right to the point. “I’ve got myself in some kind of trouble.”
Doumani asked him what was going on, and Evans told him about his recent troubles. He said he had met a New York producer named Roy Radin, who had promised to raise millions of dollars through the Puerto Rican government.
But Radin was now missing, and the deal was as good as dead.
Worse, Evans explained, the woman who had introduced him to Radin had probably killed him. Evans appeared to be frightened.
Evans went on to explain that the woman, Laney Jacobs, was a dope dealer with ties to suppliers in Miami, and that he had been sleeping and partying with her.
Inferring that Doumani had Mob ties, Evans asked if he could help him.
Doumani declined.
“Why do you believe Radin is dead?” Doumani asked. “He could just be missing.”
“Believe me, he’s dead,” Evans said. “The bitch had him killed, and I’m next.”
Midmorning on June 10, almost two weeks later, in the desert country north and east of Los Angeles, Glen Fischer went looking for a place to store his beehives. Instead, he found a corpse.
Several hours after the body had been discovered, (homicide detective) Carlos Avila opened an investigation into the murder of Roy Alexander Radin.
Four and a half years passed after Roy Radin’s murder, an exceptionally long time in terms of homicide investigations. The investigators were working on theories only, without a rich body of physical evidence or a confession.
Their first major break, the introduction to Bill Rider (a friend of Laney’s bodyguard) had been important because it helped direct and focus the investigation. Based on what Rider had said, it now appeared that the murder was centered on the deal-making to produce “The Cotton Club” rather than on the stolen cocaine.
Cocaine surely had played a role, though. Perhaps the movie had become more important to Laney Jacobs because of the theft of the cocaine.
Cocaine complicated relationships and distorted realities. It made a failure feel like a success. It inflated egos. In drug-smuggling organizations, even the smallest ones, blood was inevitably spilled. It seemed probable to the investigators that Laney had brought her cocaine ethics to Hollywood, and when she could not get what she wanted, she committed murder.
Shortly after 2 on the afternoon of Dec. 14, 1987, Sgt. Bill Stoner and Detective Charlie Guenther met Anna Montenegro. Anna (a friend of both Radin and Jacobs) had left Los Angeles in a hurry after Radin’s kidnaping. To her credit, she had tried to keep Radin away from Laney, but he had stubbornly ignored her advice.
At her lawyer’s office, Anna sat, hands folded on her lap. She was pretty and well-dressed, her black hair flowing over her shoulders. She spoke in a soft, Spanish-accented voice.
They asked if she had ever met Bob Evans.
“I went to his house once with Laney,” Anna said. “They were going to discuss the financing on ‘The Cotton Club.’ ”
“What about the theft from Laney’s house?” one of the detectives asked. “What did you know about that?”
“I heard Tally Rogers and Laney fighting about money,” she said. “Tally was saying she was screwing him on a payment.”
She went over the last two days of Radin’s life, and talked about going to Laney’s house and seeing Bill Mentzer and being told she could not come inside.
“I told Roy all of this,” Anna said. “He knew. He was afraid of Laney, but he must have thought she wouldn’t do something real bad. He felt he had to keep the meeting on Friday to straighten out the whole Cotton Club mess. That was his problem. He felt he had to make that meeting, no matter what I told him.”
(In the years since Radin’s murder, Laney Jacobs had moved to Florida where she married Larry Greenberger, who had amassed millions as a partner in Carlos Ledher’s cocaine smuggling operation. The two, who shared a love of cocaine, traveled and partied often, using their rural farmhouse in Okeechobee, Fla., as their base. Over time, though, their relationship degenerated into constant bickering over money.) At 9:30 in the morning, Tuesday, Sept. 13, Greenberger stopped at his parent’s home. He seemed particularly upset. He sat down with his mother in the kitchen.
“Mom, I don’t know what I’m doing with Laney,” he said. “Honest to God, she’s off her rocker. She’s spending my money like water.”
A pretty woman with short brown hair and an upbeat personality, Dahlis Greenberger tried to comfort her son. “You have to do the right thing,” she said. “We’ll always support you--you know that, Larry.”
At dusk, Greenberger headed back up Route 710, through little communities that always look so backwater and poor, and pulled into the driveway of his farmhouse. There was still light in the sky.
A few minutes after midnight, Laney picked up the phone in the kitchen and called Greenberger’s parents.
“Jerry,” she said excitedly, “Can you come quickly? Larry just shot himself.”
A few feet from where Laney stood was Greenberger’s body, slumped back in his favorite chair on the side porch. He was sitting upright, his head against one wall, his eyes open. There was a single bullet hole near his left eye. His bathrobe was saturated with blood. The big .44 magnum revolver was clutched in the fingers of Greenberger’s right hand.
Seven hours after the shooting, Greenberger’s body was brought to the office of Frederick P. Hobin, the district medical examiner.
The bloody robe was removed, and the cool body was laid out on a large stainless-steel table equipped with drains to catch any fluids.
Hobin examined the bullet wound beneath the left eye. What he noticed about it was that there was a pattern of gunpowder tattooing around the wound, with an outside diameter of nearly 20 centimeters. This was wide for a point-blank gunshot wound. Also curious was the fact that there was very little tattooing (the imprints made by gunpowder as it strikes the skin) in the eye itself. In fact, there were no gunpowder grains on the surface of the eye.
This discovery indicated to Hobin that the eyelids were elevated and the eye itself was open at the time of the gun blast. This meant Greenberger was staring at the gun when it went off. The absence of grains of gunpowder on the damp surface of the eye suggested one further finding--that the pistol was held a distance from the head that was significantly greater than the length of Greenberger’s arm.
The bullet entered just beneath the left eye and exited at the back of the head, roughly at the level of Greenberger’s mouth. To Hobin, this signified that the pistol was pointed down at Greenberger.
On the cover sheet of his report, under “Manner of Death,” Hobin typed “Homicide.” Beneath it, he wrote: “Based upon the objective findings, it is my opinion that the subject was shot by another person. I would conclude that this is a homicidal gunshot injury which another person had contrived to disguise as a suicidal injury.”
In Los Angeles, Stone and Avila learned of Greenberger’s murder through police contacts. They had wanted to continue their investigation into Radin’s murder, but this changed everything.
They feared that Laney might be tempted to flee Florida rather than face questions by police about the exact circumstances of her husband’s death.
On Sunday, Oct. 2, 1988, Laney was arrested, as were her associates--Bill Mentzer, Alex Marti and Bob Lowe. They have been charged in the murder of Roy Alexander Radin and are scheduled to go to trial July 23.
No one has yet been charged in the murder of Larry Greenberger.
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.