New Blood in Hollywood : BAD COMPANY Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder <i> by Steve Wick (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $19.95; 271 pp., illustrated; 0-15-110445-X) </i>

There is hype surrounding publication of Newsday reporter Steve Wick’s engrossing and meticulously researched first book, “Bad Company: Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder.” The saddest commentary about the superfluous fanfare is that overstatement is totally unnecessary.

Wick currently is scheduled for the requisite monthlong, 15-city promotional tour, replete with talk shows, signings and press conferences, and the publisher’s press kit tells us that his book is going to reveal “new facts” in the Cotton Club murder case, which goes to trial July 23.

A careful reading of the fast-paced nonfiction account of drug dealing and deal making in Hollywood reveals ruthlessness, passion and suspense--all the elements that make for a terrific transcontinental airliner read--but few significant “new facts.”

The facts are that Roy Radin, would-be Hollywood film producer, was shot to death in May of 1983 in a remote canyon near the northeast Los Angeles County town of Gorman. Just before his death, the 300-pound Long Island variety-show producer and would-be Hollywood movie mogul struck a multimillion-dollar deal with former Paramount Pictures production chief Robert Evans to raise money for Evans’ 1984 feature film about Harlem gangsters and musicians, “The Cotton Club.”

Radin also had a ravaging cocaine habit, fed by Florida drug dealer Lanie Jacobs Greenberger . . . and that is where his real trouble began.

Wick chronicles how Los Angeles Sheriff’s detectives and Drug Enforcement Administration investigators spent the next seven years tracking down Radin’s alleged killers and bringing them to justice.

That one of the accused is Greenberger, a luxury-loving Florida drug dealer who looks more like a schoolmarm than a merciless, six-time-married murder suspect, is mildly interesting. That three other defendants, allegedly hired by Greenberger to execute Radin, are former bodyguards for porno publishing magnate Larry Flynt boosts the Interest Quotient a bit higher.

But the old (as opposed to “new”) fact that a Hollywood legend such as Evans has never been ruled out by prosecutors in the case as a possible Greenberger co-conspirator in the contract murder of Roy Radin pushes the IQ of “Bad Company” right through the roof.

A year ago, Evans took the Fifth Amendment when called to testify during Greenberger’s preliminary hearing on the murder charge, but the Los Angeles district attorney’s office never has indicted him.

Unfortunately, the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich trade-publicity department never fulfills the promise that it dangles before the reader like a carrot: that somehow “Bad Company” might implicate in a grisly contract murder the man responsible for bringing “Chinatown,” “Love Story” and “The Godfather” films to the screen.

Nor is “Bad Company” in the same category as “Indecent Exposure,” David McClintick’s classic 1982 study of the David Begelman affair. The publisher would have readers believe that “Bad Company” is written in the “Indecent Exposure” tradition, but Wick’s saga is not even in the same genre. Whereas the latter is a textbook case history about a studio head’s petty crime, the boardroom cover-up that followed and the arrogance of Machiavellian movie politics, “Bad Company” is not nearly so polite. It comes off instead as true crime reporting at its very best.

As a Newsday reporter, Wick has an advantage in that Hollywood is not his beat, and he feels compelled to pull no punches. His portraits of faded entertainers such as comedian Joey Bishop and TV sitcom actor Desmond Wilson are wickedly deadpan. The chapter in which Bishop acts as emcee for one of Radin’s Midwest vaudeville shows, introducing dog acts and an obese banjo player named “Two-Ton Tessie from Tennessee,” is worth the $19.95 retail price tag for “Bad Company” all by itself.

If the first half of the book is about Radin, the second half belongs to Greenberger, a ruthless woman who marries and tosses away husbands, friends and lovers like used hamburger wrappers. It is Greenberger who is scheduled to go on trial in Los Angeles this month for allegedly contracting three assassins to kidnap and kill Radin.

Wick covered the Radin story for Newsday over a six-year period, writing the first in-depth article about the case for that newspaper’s Sunday magazine five years ago, before any other reporter even knew there was a story to be told. Since the indictment of Greenberger and her three alleged hit men in 1988, newspapers, magazines, book publishers and at least five movie and TV production companies have jumped on the so-called “Cotton Club” murder case. But Wick’s long history covering the case, coupled with his review of several volumes of court transcripts and more than 200 interviews he conducted from California to Florida to Long Island, give him a natural advantage.

The corpulent Radin comes as close as any of the characters to being a sympathetic figure. The reader gets the sense that, for all of his gross faults, Radin was somehow likable and did not deserve to die. He made two fatal mistakes, by Wick’s measure: He befriended his cocaine dealer, and he offered to cut her in on his movie-making deal with Evans.

The only new, but critical, bit of information about Evans that Wick has uncovered is that Evans did meet with Florida drug lord Milan Bellechasses in his Miami home, ostensibly so that Bellechasses could give his approval to Evans and Greenberger, Bellechasses’ mistress and business partner, on their future film projects, including “The Cotton Club.” Though it is implied that Evans might have known that drug money was going to be used to produce his movies, the connection is never flatly stated, and the reader is left to guess.

It is clear that Evans, who has been press-shy since the Cotton Club murder indictments were first handed down, did not cooperate in Wick’s chronicle. His role in “Bad Company” is peripheral, if crucial.