BAD COMPANY: Drugs, Hollywood, and the Cotton Club Murder

by Steve Wick ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 1990

Cocaine-ridden tree story of the original financing behind The Cotton Club film, by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for New York Newsday. Roy Radin, a 300-pound impresario, had just had his traveling vaudeville show collapse when a visiting photographer mauled a Playboy girl at Roy's Long Island ""castle,"" giving Roy a barrel of bad publicity. Roy had always wanted to get into the movies and so transferred his operation from New York to L.A., where--by way of Miami coke empress Laney Jacobs--he fell in with Robert Evans, the former head of Paramount Pictures who was now down on his luck and casting about for financing for a trio of pictures to be headed by The Cotton Club. Radin offered to come up with $35 million for Evans. However, Radin and Evans were coke junkies with incredibly expensive habits, and the coke gave them egos that were Napoleonic. Meanwhile, five-times-married Laney Jacobs, who had built her coke empire by climbing the backs of one ever-bigger Latin supplier after another and by trafficking coke from Miami to Los Angeles, decided to move to L.A. and get into the movie business herself. She had $5 million to invest in Evans' Cotton Club, but Roy decided to cut her out as a partner. Roy, however, loved her pure coke, and when one of Laney's underlings ripped her off for a million bucks' worth of coke from her superfancy L.A. digs, Laney thought Roy had done it. She imported some muscle to take Roy out into the desert and blow him away. Then she married again, way way upward, to Larry Greenberger, whose coke millions were almost uncountable, and had him blown away, too, so that she could inherit and at last really get into the movies. The Greenberger murder was ineptly done, and Laney is now about to stand trial. So gripping it leaves you wired.

Pub Date: July 2, 1990

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1990

Categories: NONFICTION