Out of Frame: The Cotton Club Murder

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I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer. And Chris, how are you doing today? Doing fine. My car broke down in Gorman one time. Fun. Like seven or eight years ago. That car didn't make it. But yeah, it is in the Grapevine. It's this tiny little town north of Los Angeles. I-5 cuts through the mountains there. It's very desolate. It's a very steep incline to get up there. And there are many inlets, canyons, remote places to theoretically, I suppose, dump a body. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Both of those. Yes. Yeah. All of the above. All right. So why are we talking about a body in a canyon many miles north of Santa Clarita? That's because on Monday, we will be covering Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club. And the story behind that movie is completely insane. But as you may have figured out, what is even crazier is that there is an actual murder directly involved in the making of or at least the financing of this film. So there's so much to talk about with this movie, but because of who was involved in the murder itself, it's weirdly like a little bit of a side quest when you look at the overall story of that movie. So instead of trying to kind of jam it all into one episode, what we're going to do is use today's out of frame bonus episode to investigate who was killed, who did it, and how these people got involved with Robert Evans, one of the biggest film producers of all time. Chris, we're going to cover most of this in much more detail on Monday's episode, but here is a little primer. Did that make you happy? I'll tell you who else it made happy. Rian Johnson, Benoit Blanc. He says primer. Benoit Blanc. In Wake Up Dead Man, A Knives Out Mystery. I was proven right by Wake Up Dead Man. Everybody can suck it. All right, please continue. Great. All right, here's a little primer on who Bob Evans was and where he was at this point in his career. Chris, you know this, but Evans had been plucked from obscurity on the side of a Beverly Hills pool by Hollywood legend Norma Shearer, who thought he looked enough like her dead husband to play him on screen. What? Well, Irving Thalberg was a very sickly man. And so it is, I mean, he was a handsome man, but he died young of, I believe, like a congenital heart defect and had a lot of health problems. You look like you've got a congenital heart defect. You look like you barely survived the 1920s and just died in 1934. But he was a wonderful producer anyway. Well, so Evans launched into a brief, not super successful acting career, but he pretty quickly realized he didn't want to be on camera. He wanted to be the guy behind it calling the shots. So fast forward a decade and then some, and Evans had become the head of production at Paramount, where he had greenlit and shepherded movies to the screen. Like what, Chris, can you name a couple that he produced while at Paramount? Rosemary's Baby? Was that while he was at Paramount? Yes, Rosemary's Baby. The Godfather. The Godfather. Did he do Chinatown at Paramount or no? Chinatown is after. So speaking of Chinatown, by the early 70s, he had decided that he wanted to go solo. And Chinatown was his first movie that he tackled that with, followed by Marathon Man. Right. That's right. Then he got busted for coke, churned out some big time floppers, and was on the hunt for his comeback film. And he thought that he found it with The Cotton Club. But Evans was persona non grata in Hollywood at this point. And he was trying to finance the film completely independently with no studio involvement. So this meant he needed money. And he needed it really badly and really fast. So he went through a bonkers murderer's row of shady financiers, which we will get into on Monday, and finally landed on two Vegas casino magnates, the Dumani brothers. But all of a sudden, for reasons we will discuss, they pulled their money out. Meanwhile, production was very much moving forward. Casting was ongoing and a $1 million set was being built. So Evans was frantically trying to find a new backer, and he was telling basically anyone who would listen that he really, really needed money. So this evidently included his limo driver, Gary Keys, just a great name for a limo driver. Fantastic name. And just moonlights as a pianist. He is or breaks people's fingers. I don't know. Those are the two things I thought of as his limo driver. He reportedly did claim that he taught Michael Jackson the robot. Okay. Okay. Which I really like. Now, Keyes was an employee of Ascot Limousine, which was partially owned by Robert Evans. And Keyes is like, Bobby, you're in luck. I know someone who might be able to help you because Gary Keyes didn't just drive Bob Evans around. He also regularly chauffeured a woman named Lainey Jacobs. And she had expressed to him that she wanted to break into the movie business and she had money. Mm hmm. So Keyes introduced Laney to Evans and he said, hey, she's a wealthy widow who's been referred to the limo company by a major GM stockholder. She's very legit. To hear Evans tell it, he wasn't actually desperate for money. He was. And he really only met Laney as a favor to Keyes. He did not. He said, quote, I'm very incident prone. Excuse me. I'm very incident prone. I had a great deal of things happen to me. Unfortunately, this was a disaster for me. For you, Bob, you're alive. Evans allegedly laid out a plan for a $35 million production company that would fund his next three films, including The Cotton Club. The two others would have been The Two Jakes and The Godfather Part Free. Part Free. Part Free. And Lainey quickly realized that while she did have a lot of money, she did not have $35 million sitting around. Also, the cost of those three movies would actually be $100 million. Not $35 million. Yes, at least, probably more than that. But she's like, you know what? I know someone who can help us fund this. According to Evans, he told her not to get into the movie business and offered her a stake in his limo business instead. Sir, no, you did not. But anyway, she declined because what Evans didn't know is that Laney Jacobs would do anything to break into Hollywood. So who was this mystery investor she'd found who could pony up that kind of cash? a man named Roy Radin. So let's meet Roy Radin. He was born in 1949, the son of jazz-age Broadway promoter Broadway Al Radin. Al owned Speakeasies, and he was an enormous name on the vaudeville circuit. And according to Richard Gersh, Roy Radin's press agent, quote, Mr. Radin wanted to become a show business legend like his father, and for a time, he almost succeeded. Sorry, was Al based in New York or in L.A.? New York. I wonder if he knew Oni Madden. Probably. I mean, because Oni Madden was a big Broadway hustler, aside from his mafia, obviously, dealings, and the Cotton Club was where that intersected. Yeah, and I mean, Roy was born pretty far after Al Raiden's golden years because they were literally the peak of the Cotton Club is when Al Raiden was doing his business. Yeah, exactly. More on Oni Madden on Monday. So his parents divorced, and Raiden initially lived with his mother in Long Beach, And by nine years old, he was fleecing the retirees in the community at the poker table. At 16, he dropped out of high school and moved to Florida, where his dad was at this point. And he started singing in like folksy coffee houses and doing publicity also for the circus run by animal trainer Clyde Beatty. So he's really he's casting a wide net. But just one year later, when Beatty refused to give him a raise, Raiden formed a bit of a circus coup, and he put together his own small group of performers and took them on the road in Florida. He also convinced his dad's friend, vaudeville star George Jessel, to headline the act. But according to Raiden, he also had, quote, J. Fred Muggs, the chimpanzee from the Today Show. I'm going to say little person saxophone player, a drag queen magician, and Jessel. It wasn't one of my most notable shows, but Jessel taught me a lot. He went on the tour as a gamble. He knew I was only 17 and didn't have any money. The tour was small, but it was a success. And by 20 years old, Raiden had made his first million off of these small vaudeville-type tours. And so what he does is really interesting. He always has these dreams of being like his dad, being like Broadway Al. But instead of, like, finding his way into very legitimate upscale productions, he kind of tries to reinvent vaudeville in, like, the late 60s and early 70s with these little, cheap, small, weird tours. And he's really good at it. By 1975, he had reinvented himself again. And this time he had become one of the biggest show business promoters in the U.S. built off of these weird, wonky-ass little tours that were ever-expanding. 26, so young. He bought a 66-room castle in Southampton, Long Island. It sold for $70 million in 2021. And he was running two or three roadshows a year, plus dinner theaters and more. His company employed at least 20 people at this point, and the success was definitely starting to go to his head. According to those around him, he saw himself like an old jazz-age showbiz mogul, and so he started to act like one. Despite being married with two children, his lawyer Stephen Siegfried said that of his first visit to Ocean Castle, quote, He had a whole harem there. He had one girl on each knee and another standing behind him with her arms around his neck. He was eating sandwiches and drinking vodka stingers and kissing the girls and trying to tell me what happened. He was big, all fat. It was wild. These quotes. We don't need to fat shame him, but it does sound like he was a bit of a hedonistic personality type at this point. Also, these quotes are coming after he's dead. Yeah. It just feels really rude. I'm sure it's true, but, you know. Yeah. It's interesting, too, how I think a lot of folks who, not that they make their money illegitimately. No, it was all legitimate. Like you said, it could be looked down upon, right, by the folks who are doing the high art sort of stuff. But what's interesting is what he's doing is far more profitable than making movies. That's exactly right. You know, especially on a project-to-project basis. Yeah. This is the bummer is that he doesn't understand that he actually does have a major talent for a certain thing. It's just not breaking into upscale markets like Broadway and Hollywood. And unfortunately, that becomes his obsession. I think because, to your point, there is this sort of like looking down the nose at what he was doing. It's funny. He could have promoted movies in like the 19-teens and 20s. Like that's how things were done on a more local market basis. But now there's an entire system and institution in place that he can't crack. And I think it really bothers him that he can't just, he can't get in there. He can't buy his way in. He can't figure it out. His whole team is like, Roy, don't try and do this. Like, you don't need to do this. You know, this is not what you're going to be good at. In fact, his own press agent called Radin's shows embarrassing and said, quote, he had no idea of good or bad, no taste at all. So they're desperately trying to discourage him from breaking into Broadway or Hollywood, but it's still his dream. And in April of 1980, Radin unfortunately got his first taste of infamy. On a Long Island railroad car early in the morning, passengers saw something disturbing. A young woman, bruised, bleeding, and barely conscious, was dangling over the seat on the train as it headed back to New York City. She was a 23-year-old actress named Melanie Haller, and she said she had been raped beaten and then abandoned on the train And it all took place at Ocean Castle Originally, Raiden was accused of raping her, but it later turned out to be her date that night, a New Jersey businessman who would eventually plead guilty to the crime. But Raiden was absolutely involved. He was charged with menacing her, cocaine, LSD possession, and illegally possessing a handgun. He did plead guilty to the gun charge. His then-fiancee and soon-to-be second wife, Tony Follet, which is an incredible name, was charged with third-degree assault involved in this. So there's almost like an Epstein Island quality to the castle, you know, with what's condoned there. Yeah. Many of his friends agreed that after this assault, his life really took a sharp turn downhill. His associates seemed to get darker and seedier, the parties got wilder and even more depraved, and to top it all off, he seemed to be running out of cash. His spending was spiraling out of control, especially when it came to his desire to break into Broadway or Hollywood. One of his former business associates told the New York Times, quote, it was pathetic. He paid $2,500 for a table at the Friars' dinner for Elizabeth Taylor, and he'd never even met her. But on a trip to LA in the early 80s, Raiden did meet a woman at a dinner party who seemed to be the key to the future he desired because they both wanted the same things. To break into the film business and to do lots and lots of cocaine. This woman was in fact a cocaine dealer and a pretty big one. And she was who Raiden came to for coke every time he was in LA. But she didn't just provide access to coke. She seemed to provide access to Hollywood. And her name was... Lainey? Lainey Jacobs, indeed. There we go. All right. As I'm sure you've guessed, Lainey Jacobs was not, in fact, a rich widow with backing from a major General Motors stockholder. So let's meet the real Lainey Jacobs. Oh, did I say General Motors? I mean, I keep the coke in the back of my GM. That's kind of what I'm talking about. Karen Delane Jacobs was born in Alabama. She was dirt poor. In the late 60s and early 70s, she worked for a series of Miami law firms and legit jobs, but she also became a fixture on Miami's disco scene. One day, a club friend asked her if he could use her phone number as a contact for a pilot who was bringing in a load of drugs. And she's like, absolutely, A+. And then a few weeks later, he asked her to drive to the Miami airport and just pick up a suitcase. She said, that was it. I got $50,000 and that did it for me. Wow. Then, after a fun little trip to Nicaragua to party with the uber-corrupt and soon-to-be-deposed Samosa family, Lainey thought, why am I working a desk job when I can just be at cool parties like this for a living? She became known on the Miami cocaine scene as La Rubia or Blondie. And it turns out she was a pretty shrewd wheeler and dealer. And she was also, of course, a massive cocaine user. She had a habit of collecting husbands as well, Chris. Six of them by the early 80s, to be exact. But perhaps her most important relationship mixed business with pleasure when she became entwined with Milan Belichazas, who was a major Cuban drug lord and smuggler. By 1981, he was powerful enough to buy bulk coke and marijuana directly from Colombians, and later on, his own lawyers would liken him to Al Pacino's character in Scarface. So Lainey Jacobs had a son who was most likely Belichazas' son, and it turns out that she and Belichazas actually made a pretty good pair. Lainey sold to dealers, and she also collected dealers. For example, when one of her main clients wanted to sell his customer list for $300,000, she and Bella Chassis each paid $150K and split the business, with Laney managing Los Angeles and the West Coast and Bella Chassis holding down the fort in Miami. But she made it clear to him that she had a bigger ambition. She wanted to move to Hollywood full-time, and she wanted to become a Hollywood film mogul. A few months after giving birth to her son, she moved to LA to start a new life. Well, new-ish, she was, of course, still dealing cocaine. She and Bella Chess has hired a courier named Tally Rogers. Now, he was running the cocaine, I believe, back and forth from Miami to Los Angeles, as well as doing other sort of courier business. And now our timelines have merged. It's early 1983, and Robert Evans, Roy Radin, and Lainey Jacobs were connected by the same goal, to get in or get back in to Hollywood, no matter the cost. When Radin met Evans, he swore up, down, and sideways that he could raise every penny Evans wanted, and that part of the money would come from a banker in Puerto Rico named Jose Alegria. Raiden said Alegria had an in with the Puerto Rican government. And it should be noted that Alegria was a legit financial expert who had met Raiden at a party in 1979. The first official meeting between Evans, Jacobs, and Raiden ran nonstop from a Friday through a Tuesday. Do we think this was a sober affair? A hundred percent. Probably like intermittent fasting, juices, cleanses, and cocaine suppositories would be my guess. Is this meeting taking place in Los Angeles, in Miami, in Puerto Rico? Where are we situated? This is taking place in Los Angeles. Great. But Raiden's contact did, in fact, come through. Alegria said he could arrange about $35 million in Puerto Rican government bonds. And for her part, Lainey was like, I will put up $5 million. And then she kind of figured, hey, we're good to go. I did my job. You know, I'm putting up the money. I made the connection. I'm going to leave the nitty gritty of the deal making to the men. But she did expect to be paid a substantial cut of the final profits. Now, as to whether Raiden actually agreed to cut her in at the rate she expected, we will never know for sure. But his lover, Anna Montenegro, doesn't remember a specific contract between the two, despite Lainey saying she was with them when it was discussed. But Anna did say, quote, Roy would have promised her anything to meet with Robert Evans. And I do believe that. So on April 26th, 1983, Radin and Evans signed a two-page agreement to form a production company based in Puerto Rico. They were each taking 45% with the remaining 10% going to Alegria, who was also splitting it with another businessman. I don't totally understand how the Puerto Rican government is involved in this, but they are. Well, I believe the Puerto Rican government in the 80s was, from what my mom has told me, my mom grew up in Puerto Rico. She was there in the 80s. There were a lot of U.S. tax incentives to bring businesses. Specifically, there was like a lot of pharmaceutical companies that ended up there. And there was a big U.S. military presence too, on Vieques in particular. So it may be that there were significant tax rebates or tax incentives to set up your business there, much in the same way people set up their, you know, corporations in Delaware, for example, or they go and shoot their movies in places with good tax incentives. Right. I don't think that they would have had a physical headquarters in Puerto Rico, necessarily. My guess is that it legally would be set up within Puerto Rico. What I don't totally understand is where the $35 million is coming from. It does seem at least partially government subsidized, but I couldn't really crack into exactly what that meant. But as far as I can tell, it was all pretty legitimate. But Evans, unfortunately, was tiring of his rotund bedfellow. Raden was reportedly trying to strong-arm Evans, insisting he not speak to anyone unless Raden okayed it. And according to the New York Magazine, quote, the man who had once headed Paramount was not about to take instructions from a man who had run shows featuring J. Fred Muggs, the chimpanzee. But just a few days before this deal was all signed, Laney Jacobs was robbed. On April 19th, she found her garage safe completely emptied of 11 kilos of cocaine plus $270,000 in cash were gone. By the way, 11 kilos of cocaine could be worth anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000 at that time. So close to a million dollars, but maybe between half a million to a million dollars in the cash and the cocaine. Yes, is gone. Now only three people knew that combination. Obviously, Lainey herself, Milan Belichasas, and that drug courier I mentioned a few minutes ago, Tally Rogers. Spoiler alert, it was Tally Rogers. I was just saying, yeah. And also, the person that took it. Yes. He was pissed because he felt like Lainey had shortchanged him on a couple of runs that he had done, whereas Belichasas was paying him better. Now, Lainey seemed to know right away who'd done it, because as you pointed out, There's only one person there who has any motive to do it. But she suspected that maybe he didn't act alone. In fact, she wondered if Roy Radin, who was friends with Tally Rogers, had been involved. Because up to this point, Roy Radin had made no secret of the fact that he did not like Laney Jacobs. She was a means to an end to him. And as soon as he got that end, aka met Bob Evans, he was kind of a giant dick to her. And remember that deal that Radin and Evans just signed? Laney was not in it. In fact, Raiden had actually been working to cut her out of the deal completely. According to Anna Montenegro, again, Roy Raiden's mistress, she said, quote, I don't know what Roy saw in her that he didn't like, but he was very nasty to Laney. He got very greedy and wanted to con her out of the deal, so she thought he stole the cocaine. And that's how the whole thing came about. Also, everyone's on so much cocaine. I think that is the other big problem here. I know. It's like a lot of paranoia, I'm sure, being fueled throughout all of this. Well, you know they're not sleeping. Yeah. And what this really, I think, emphasizes within, especially worlds like film, where it is the intersection of art and commerce, is that if you don't have the money, nor do you own the work product, meaning the script or whatever it is. And all you have is your, quote, connections. You can see how quickly you become extraneous to a deal. And so the paranoia that all of these people feel is, aside from these Puerto Rican bonds, we're not necessary, right? Even though they believe they are necessary, they want to be necessary, but that's why they're all so paranoid and so easily cut out of this deal. Yeah. Well, the only one that's necessary is Bob Evans. Exactly, because he controls the material. Right. So Lainey's immediate concern, obviously, was to find Tally Rogers. He took all of her coke, which, again, that would have been worth anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000, and that's money that she then can't pay back to her Colombian suppliers. So that's like, they'll just kill you if you can't do that. So she hired a self-described private eye named Bill Menser. Menser was a bodyguard for Larry Flint after Flint had been shot, but he also used to own a limousine company. And we should briefly mention who Larry Flint is for anybody who doesn't know. Yes, sorry. Larry Flint created Hustler magazine. This is probably a whole other story that we could actually cover if you guys are interested, but he was shot and almost killed and ended up being, I believe, paralyzed. And once he was in the wheelchair, that's when he hired a full security team around him. Great movie, People vs. Larry Flint. Watch it if you haven't seen it. Menser had brought some of his buddies onto Flint's team, including a guy named Alex Marty. Marty was a wild card, known to be violent, and had a pretty lucrative coke business of his own on the site. So while these psychos were running around looking for Tally Rogers, Lainey found out that Roy Radin had cut her out of the deal. Now, Chris, how do you think she found this out? I don't know. Who's the one person that could do that? Oh, Bob Evans told her? Yes, correct. It's too bad you couldn't be a part of this, Lainey. Have a good one. I'll talk to you later. Well, she was also at this point almost certainly sleeping with him. So I'm sure in bed with a cigarette in hand, he's like, sorry about this, Lainey. Evans had revealed to her that Raiden wanted to give her a mere finder's fee and zero stake in the company, which she felt she was instrumental in forming. To be fair, she kind of was. And Evans was sick of Raiden, too. So lawyers representing Evans and Lainey Jacobs actually tried to bypass both Raiden and Alegria and work directly with the Puerto Rican government for the funds. So they're now trying to cut all of them out. And the lawyers offered Radin $3 million to exit stage left and leave the Cotton Club alone. Alegria was like, dude, take the money. Yeah, but Radin doesn't want money. He's had money. He categorically refused. And he was so desperate to break into Hollywood that he thought this was his only chance. Also, knowing what we know about this movie, if he'd walked away with $3 million, he would have, that's way more than you would have made off of the Cotton Club. He's the only person who would have been financially well off after that film released. So sometime between late April and early May, and again, this is all happening really fast, Lainey Jacobs, Roy Radin, and Bob Evans all met at Evans' townhouse in New York City. She asked him to be fair, and he again only offered her a $50,000 finder's fee. Evans, too, told Radin he needed to cut her in. It's not fair. But Radin put his foot down and he refused. On May 12, 1983, Raden flew to Los Angeles again to try and meet with Laney directly and see if they could put the whole thing to bed. And Laney's like, sure, come on out. I'll take you out to a nice dinner and we can talk it out. Laney did something else on May 12 1983 She put her house and Sherman Oaks on the market And Anna Montenegro Raden mistress begged him not to go anywhere near Laney saying quote she dangerous But Raden didn't listen. He checked into the Hollywood Regency Hotel. He made some calls, including one to his mother. She said, quote, his voice was strained and tense, and I knew right away something was wrong. I asked him, what's the matter, baby? He said that he wanted to tell me that he loved me. Then he asked me to give his love to Tony, his ex-wife, and to his sisters, just in case I get killed in a plane crash. Now, some of this stress was definitely due to the amount of cocaine that he was doing. By the middle of the day on May 13th, he had gone through a gram of cocaine. Mid-day. And at this point, everyone is like, dude, you need to slow down and you should cancel that meeting because you do not know what you've gotten yourself into and you're acting wild. But he insisted that he knew what he was doing. And he even arranged for a special bodyguard to follow his car to the dinner. And that person, Chris, was Demond Wilson, the son from Samford and Son. Yes. Wow. That's his bodyguard. Wow. And I literally just saw the announcement the other day that he passed away. Yeah. Raiden had been managing this guy's career. Here, get a new manager if your manager is asking you to follow his limo to dinner. That night, Roy Radin got into a limousine, all set up by his dinner date, Lainey Jacobs, who was waiting for him in the car, and headed to La Scala Restaurant in Beverly Hills. Demond watched Radin enter the limo with a woman in a silver dress. He followed them as the limo headed west on Sunset Boulevard, but suddenly the limo ran a red light and Wilson couldn't keep up. So he figured, okay, whatever, I'll just go to La Scala and I'll wait for Roy Radin there. But Roy Radin never arrived. The next day, Radin's secretary called Lainey Jacobs in a panic. She couldn't get a hold of her boss and wanted to know where he was. And Jacobs like, I don't know where he is. She said, look, we got into a fight in the limo last night. I got out and Radin drove off. And in fact, I had kept a date with another man. and then, you know, I left town today, by chance. Not a big deal. Meanwhile, Raiden's mother had hired an actual private eye named John O'Grady, known as Hollywood's number one private eye. And O'Grady had already figured out that Raiden was in town to work on a movie deal with a woman named Elaine Jacobs. This is, of course, Laney people, I think, often assumed her name was Elaine, even though it was not. O'Grady had spoken to Raiden's loyal assistant, Jonathan Lawson, and he did not like what he was hearing. Lawson told him about the theft from Jacob's safe, and he told him something weird. On the night of May 13th, the same night Radin had gone missing, Lawson said he saw Lainey Jacobs in Roy Radin's hotel suite. She told Lawson, hey, go leave the hotel, go out to my car, and grab me some cocaine and bring it back here so we can have something to party with after the dinner. Lawson, being not an idiot and also potentially sober, said, no, this is weird. and decided that he should stay in the hotel suite and wait for Raiden just in case any trouble arose. I think he suspected and definitely suspected later that maybe she was trying to get rid of him as well. So thanks to initial police interviews with Wilson and Lawson and more, Lainey Jacobs was a person of interest right away. But it would take a really long time to pin down what had actually happened. In her initial phone conversation with the police, she said she had no idea where Raiden was because he had gotten out of the limo after they got into an argument. Notice anything wrong with that statement, Chris? He'd gotten out of the limo. She told the police he had gotten out of the limo after they got in an argument. Oh, right. Whereas the opposite. She told the secretary that she had gotten out of the limo. And then she'd gone to dinner. Yeah, exactly. At this point, Bob Evans realized, as Job from Arrested Development did, that he'd made an enormous mistake getting into bed both literally and figuratively with Lainey Jacobs. So he went... Sorry, really, really quick, if I may. I just looked up a photo of Lainey Jacobs. I'm assuming you've seen a photo of her. Yeah, yeah. She's pretty hot. She is. She's really hot. She's super hot. At first, I was like, you idiot, Bob. Like, sleeping. I was like, yeah, no, she totally could have honeypotted me. Like, she's a smoke show. She's got, like, a little bit of a 70s Michelle Pfeiffer sort of vibe. A hundred percent. Totally. Those glasses? Yes. I'm like, this is... And also, like, come on. I could totally see how Roy Radin thinks, I'm a man, I'm a big guy, who's like, she's a little girl, you know, blah, blah, blah, and totally underestimates her in this situation. I can totally see it. Big time. He underestimated her the whole way through. I think, like, both of these guys did. Out of the three of them, she's the scariest one by far. She's maintaining a business relationship with a notorious Cuban drug dealer. Not just maintaining it. they are splitting the country in terms of... Like full-on partners and splitting it 50-50. You know, she's not going to take a $50,000 buyout from these guys. She's richer than both of these guys, realistically. She's just less crazy with her money. Bob Evans is the most broke of all three of them, is my guess. Absolutely. So Bob Evans, realizing what he had done, went skittering right on back to the Dumani brothers, his original Vegas investors, thinking that perhaps they might be connected to the mob and maybe they could help protect him. And the Dumonis are like, what's going on? Why are you so sure that Roy Radin is dead? And this is a good point. They're like, he could just be missing. Like, why are you freaking out right now? To which Evans allegedly said, believe me, he's dead. The bitch had him killed and I'm next. You know, you're in bad shape when the Las Vegas brother investors who are connected to the mob are saying, Dude, what have you gotten into? This is insane. They're like, what happened in the three weeks we left you alone? Because like, this has not been a long time. Yeah. So he would later deny that he said this, but I tend to believe the Dumani's on this one because of something that's going to come a little later. Evans became increasingly paranoid. At one point, he had his assistant drive him out to Palm Springs for a blind date with a woman named Denise Beaumont. Over the course of the evening, he told Denise the whole story and said that he was afraid to be alone. So she's like, okay, you can sleep on the bed. I'm just going to sleep on the couch. And she like didn't even take her jumpsuit off that she was wearing. And he was like, you should take off that jumpsuit. And she goes, no. And then at 3 a.m., she received a call from a friend and Evans flipped out, insisting that the call must be about him, that they were out to get him. He then proceeded to open all of the windows and doors in her house in case he needed to make a quick escape. In case he needed to let the assassins into the home. What are you doing? Bob Evans would later say, quote, I don't think I made a very good impression. They actually went on more dates, though. I like that Denise didn't fail. I love how he's also both the master of exaggeration and understatement at the same time. Everything is a euphemism. Nothing's a big deal unless it's a huge deal. Yeah, it's just a way to live. I am dying for a Bob Evans biopic, and they have to cast Matthew Goode. Yeah, yeah, I know. And they've made versions of him. I know Matthew Goode played him in The Offer, and there have been characters in other films that are very much built around the persona of Bob Evans, but I agree, they haven't made him him. No, and his actual life is insane. So I would love to see that. But on June 10th, 1983, Evans' fears were, of course, legitimized when Roy Radin's body was found decomposing decomposing in that remote canyon northwest of Los Angeles. He had been shot 13 times, and a stick of dynamite had been lit and ignited inside his mouth. He was 33 years old. I've been looking at some photos of him, too, while you've been talking a little bit. And he's a big guy. He's tall, you know. He's handsome. He's unusual looking. And he styles himself very much in a jazzy, anachronistic sort of way. He seems very sort of, not magnanimous, that's the wrong word, but grandiose in his motions just from the photographs I've seen. But what's so interesting is, now if you were to make the movie of this, Lizzie, Christina Ricci, I'm going to show you this photo as Lainey Jacobs. I know which one you're looking at. Is it the courtroom photo? Yes, right? She looks just like her. We'll post some of these pictures on our Instagram so you can see what these people look like. Yes, you're totally right. So two things. For geography's sake, so Gorman, that's on I-5, but you are 90 minutes north of Beverly Hills. So that's a... He is in that car, presumably, for an hour and a half, probably knowing he's dead the whole time, you know, and if they, I'm assuming, didn't shoot him until he's out there. And then the other thing I was quite curious about is, man, when you mentioned it earlier, I wonder if the stick of dynamite at all inspired the use of dynamite as a method of attempted assassination at the beginning of the Cotton Club when the cop comes through and he drops the stick of dynamite under the Dutchman's table. I don't know. Maybe there's no connection, but I just... My guess is Bob Evans would want to avoid any connection to this whatsoever. Bob Evans Woods, but I could also see Francis Ford Coppola being like, it's great, Bob, we got to put it in, you know? True, true. Who knows? Yeah. So Detective Carlos Avila immediately opened a murder investigation on the man that they had found, initially ID'd as John Doe 94. But despite dynamite, dental records, as well as a missing persons report filed by his mother, confirmed pretty quickly that it was Roy Radin. Initial theories from friends seem to indicate that maybe Radin had angered some drug traffickers After all, he was running out of money and he sure did a lot of cocaine. I mean, that is what basically happened. It is, just not for the reasons that they think. Exactly. Yeah. So some friends even said his money wouldn't have lasted him the rest of the year if he had lived, given how he was living. But the thing is, as we've said, even though Roy snorted a lot of cocaine, he wasn't really known to deal it. So this didn't quite add up. It's not like he was running out on, you know, cocaine checks or anything, and he's not trying to, like, do business deals with the distributors as far as they knew. Bob Evans' name came up pretty quickly in the investigation, with some people insisting that Radin wanted out of the deal with Evans because of how much drug money was involved, and Evans' team saying it was the opposite, and that Evans hadn't even been in L.A. that weekend, which was true. As for Lainey Jacobs, she provided what appeared to be an airtight alibi. She said she had met her friend and lawyer Saul Besharat on the night of the murder at the Westwood Marquis Bar just after 10 p.m. To be clear, he was not her lawyer. He was a lawyer. They then went to Besharat's house where Lainey stayed until 5 a.m. And given what they knew about the timing of Raiden's murder, based on when he got into the limo and the fact that, as you pointed out, that canyon is at least an hour away, probably more, this alibi checked out. She could not have been at the Westwood Marquis Bar that night at 10 p.m. and committed this murder. So detectives requested phone logs for the night of the murder, and one week later, they got them. And one particular call caught their attention. Lainey Jacobs had called a New York City number at 1221 a.m., and a few minutes later, that number called her back. Any guesses who that number belonged to, Chris? Bella Chassie? No, it's called Cocaine Bob. It's Bob Evans. Oh, he was in New York. Okay, at the townhouse. Yep. Interesting. Now Bob Evans said, yeah, you know, she called me. She said that they got into a fight and she said that Raiden threw her out of the limo. So she switched again in terms of who got out of the limo. The detectives couldn't make heads or tails of exactly why Raiden had been in L.A. that weekend, but they were starting to connect his disappearance with the robbery at Lainey Jacobs' house. They wondered if maybe someone else had stolen the drugs and then blamed it on Raiden. And then Detective Avila discovered a tip that had previously slipped through the cracks. In May, right after Raiden had gone missing, an informant had tipped their police connection off to a murder that had taken place involving a rented limousine from a company called L'Express. Avila followed the lead, found the limousine, only to discover that it had been completely wiped clean of fingerprints and fibers. But the owner of the company did know who had rented it, a guy named Bill Menser. Sometimes Larry Flint bodyguard and current investigator for Lainey Jacobs. Hmm. Menser had been memorable because he had insisted on using his own driver for the night. Not a usual request. Another tip tied Menser to cocaine trafficking, which he appeared to be running for a Mrs. Delane. So detectives searched Menser's home and they found something particularly interesting. It was a photograph Chris of Menser with two men holding guns And the background of the photo looked an awful lot like the canyon where Roy Radin body had been found Guys quick selfie before we go We will find out later. It was not taken the night of, but it was a place that they frequented. But the cops had no idea who those two guys were. They did, however, find Lainey Jacobs when she finally resurfaced in September of 1984, except now she was Lainey Greenberger. Yes, Chris, congratulations. She had met and married her seventh husband. And who was the lucky guy? Just a chill man who also happened to be one of the main distributors of cocaine across the entire United States, Larry Greenberger. In 85, they moved to Okeechobee, Florida, which had secretly become a hotbed for drug smuggling, and they were living the life in a beautiful two-story home just outside town. Meanwhile, new detectives had taken over the case and they kept turning back to that picture from Bill Menser's apartment. In 1987, they finally were able to track down Menser's ex-wife, who ID'd one of the men as Bill Ryder, Larry Flint's head of security and brother-in-law. Ryder had hired at least three men on his security team, including Bill Menser, Alex Marty, and Robert Lowe. The detectives got a hold of Ryder and they sent him some photos to look at, presumably expecting to get like, I don't know, maybe another name or something that he could keep them on the right track. But instead Ryder was like, hello, yes, I know who killed Roy Radin and I will come to Los Angeles and tell you everything. But he said one condition, no notes, no photos, no tape recorder. Here is what Bill knew. He had learned about the murder around June of 1983 because Bill Menser wouldn't shut up about doing a hit and dumping the body up in a canyon that Ryder knew well because it's where they all went target shooting, hence the photo. Alex Marty started bragging about the murder too, even showing Ryder newspaper clippings to prove that the body had indeed been found there. Ryder confirmed that Robert Lowe was also involved, and Robert had another job outside of Larry Flint's security team, Lainey Jacobs' bodyguard, and sometimes Moonlit as a limo driver. The detectives knew they needed Ryder on tape as a full-time informant, but Ryder had backed off, fearing for his family. So 10 months pass at this point, while Laney was busy living a quiet life and running a referral business where she shipped people to Mexico for cheap plastic surgery. She's industrious. But finally, on April 8th of 1988, Bill Ryder called the detectives back. And he's like, fuck it, I'm in. So on May 11th, he wore a wire for a conversation with Robert Lowe. And it was immediately clear that this was not a drug deal gone wrong. This was a contract hit. Robert Lowe was involved in taking out Roy Radin, and he was paid $17,000 in cash and a Cadillac Seville. Radin had overstayed his welcome in a business deal, something about financing a movie, and that he had messed with the wrong person. And that person, of course, was Lainey Jacobs. Speaking of Lainey, though, things actually weren't going too great in Okeechobee, Florida. This might surprise you, but her marriage was not a happy one. And on the morning of September 13th, 1988, her husband Larry had visited his parents and told his mother, quote, Mom, I don't know what I'm doing with Lainey. Honest to God, she's off her rocker. She's spending my money like water. You'll never guess what happened next. Lainey ran downstairs that afternoon to find her husband sitting on the side porch in his favorite chair with a gunshot wound to the head. You're kidding. No one could have seen it coming. She immediately reported it as a suicide. But that didn't last long because the gunpowder tattooing around the wound was way too wide for a point-blank shot. Forensics also indicated that his eye was open at the time the gun went off, meaning he was staring at it. They also indicated that the pistol had been held at some distance from his head, way too far for his own arm to reach. Plus, if Lainey had run downstairs right away when she heard the shot, as she said, the killer wouldn't have time to flee the scene. So she's not covering it up super well with this one. To be fair, she would have gotten away with this, I feel, at the time of the Cotton Club. But I feel that investigative techniques have caught up at this point. Yeah, it's not. She can't keep ducking these crimes at this point. She just thinks she's untouchable at this point. Like, this is, this one's nuts. You know, so far that's proven true until this point in the story. Well, her own lawyer would eventually tell police that Lainey would have, quote, killed you if she didn't like the way you combed your hair. Lainey killed Larry to get his money. I mean, in a sense, Bob Evans is lucky that he didn't have money in this deal, right? Because everything, ultimately... Well, he played it right. You know, he didn't piss her off. He didn't piss her off. He had access to Hollywood, but ultimately there was nothing that she could take if he was dead. That's right. And also, I think he was a big enough name that there was probably some fear involved in that too. Whereas Roy Radin, not so much. On October 2nd or 3rd, sources differ, LA County made her day just a little worse when they arrested Bill Menser, Alex Marty, Robert Lowe, and Lainey Greenberger for the murder of Roy Radin. Now the trial dragged on for years, all while District Attorney David Cohn refused to completely rule out Robert Evans as a potential suspect. When Evans was called as the first witness in a preliminary hearing, he made things even weirder by pleading the Fifth on every single question, including things like, did you know Roy Radin? Which we 100% know he did. Now, Evans was in a large amount of debt at this point and having just generally a terrible time in his life. But his attorneys upheld that he would be willing to testify if he were granted complete immunity. This may have something to do with the fact that at least one of the tapes featuring Menser and Ryder seemed to indicate that Menser thought both Laney and Evans had ordered the hit on Roy Radin. I do not believe that Bob Evans knowingly ordered Radin to be murdered. Could I see him in a coke haze agreeing to they're just going to scare him or, you know, they'll strong arm him a little bit, just try and get him to go away? Yes, I could see him probably agreeing to that. It's also, I wonder if he was concerned that he was going to get hit with another coke charge, that something else was going to get brought up, right? Because the last Coke charge he got hit with, he was effectively kind of named by his brother. I know it wasn't super intentional necessarily, at least the way he described it. But I wonder if he felt, even if I don't get tied up in this, there was enough Coke flowing and, you know what I mean, being dealt and going around. And this was also tied to a Coke theft. I don't know. There's a lot that he may be worried that he can get hit with. So what really happened that night? We're pretty sure it goes a little something like this. Lainey Greenberger ordered the hit on Roy Radin when she discovered that instead of the 50% profit she somehow thought she was getting, Radin wanted to give her 50k. We know that's true. Little did she know the movie would lose millions and she wouldn't have made a dime. She would have made more taking the 50k finder's fee. But to top it all off, she did suspect he may have had some involvement with the robbery just out of spite. So she's pissed. And Robert Lowe drove the limo with Lainey in it to pick up Radin. she got out, and then Menser and Marty got in with guns. They drove out to the canyon near Gorman, and they executed him. Now, to hear Lainey tell it, she just thought they were going to scare Raiden, mess him up a little bit, not kill him, and get more info on Tally Rogers. But Marty, Menser, and Lowe went nuts and killed him. Maybe even, ooh, were they hired by Bella Chassis in this version of events, and it was all tied to the drugs, not the movie. I don't buy it. I think she was pissed. She also adamantly said Bob Evans was not involved in the contract hit, but she did say she and Menser told him three days after the murder what they had done. And she said that he'd always known she was a drug dealer from day one and didn't give two shits about being involved with her. Regardless, Lainey Greenberger and Robert Lowe were convicted of second-degree murder and kidnapping, while Menser and Marty were convicted of first-degree murder in 1991, wrapping up one of the longest and most expensive murder trials in Hollywood history. and one that would hang over Bob Evans' head until the day he died. And all of this just to be a part of one of the biggest box office bombs in Francis Ford Coppola's career. So tune in on Monday to find out why a murder wasn't even Bob Evans' biggest problem on the film and why the Cotton Club was the death of his career. Well, thank you, Lizzie, for taking us down that bleak Gorman Canyon Road. You know, I think that aside from obviously the very salacious details, the couple of things that really stand out to me, with this episode are, on the one hand, Hollywood on an individual film-by-film basis remains a terrible place to invest your money. You need to be a volume player to even come close to guaranteeing any kind of return. And we know that it oscillates wildly from year to year for studios in terms of success and failure. And as a consequence of that, or at least in part because of that, Hollywood will always remain this porch light that attracts these dilettante moths that are not just drawn to the opportunity to rub shoulders with glamorous people and to be perceived as movers and shakers, but really are seeking some form of reinvention. On the, quote, legitimate side, I think you have somebody like David Ellison, for example, who we've talked a lot about recently, who obviously inherited quite a bit of money from his father, Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle. My understanding is that he wanted to be an actor at first. That didn't quite work out the way that he'd hoped. He ended up being part the money behind True Grit gets catapulted into protesorial prestige territory. And now Skydance Paramount, he's the owner of a major studio. And then on the other hand, you have people like Roy Radin and Lainey Jacobs, who I think see Hollywood as an opportunity to reinvent themselves beyond the shadow of the businesses that they came up in, namely cocaine dealing and carnival barking. Even though they both had enormously successful enterprises outside of this, Lainey Jacobs was hugely successful as a cocaine dealer. I mean, I know that's a legal business. I could see it for her thinking. I'm going to legitimize myself. Yes. Despite obviously having a very high tolerance for risk and perhaps some impulse control problems and propensity for murder, she may have realized that this was. Other than that, she's great. Well, I was just going to say she may have realized that this long term is not sustainable. And film is a business I can get into. She clearly is attracted to the thrill, the glamour, the wheeling and dealing. Roy Radin is the one, and it's tragic in a couple of senses in that, A, like, money so obviously corrupts. And I don't want to diminish if there was one example of a young woman who had been raped and beaten in his home. It stands to reason that that may have been the tip of the iceberg. and I'm sure that he was not like a good guy no I'm sure that he felt the need to protect or you know enable some of that activity whether or not he personally condone it because it was activity enjoyed by the powerful people around him which is so reminiscent of the Epstein stuff where you know it's like Bill Clinton you can say and Bill Gates you can say you only met this guy to talk about charity, he had very young looking women on his laps. You know, it's known at some of these meetings. I just believe they were also partly attracted to the, you know, more morally bankrupt aspects of the lifestyle that that man was leading. And there's an enabling factor to it. So anyway, it's a fascinating, tragic story. Like it's tragic for everybody involved. Poor judgment around the board. You know what mars your judgment? Cocaine. Lots and lots of cocaine. Cocaine and also the sense that your life depends on a certain position within Hollywood, which they all believed to a certain extent, not the least of which is Bob Evans. Yes. Let's leave it at that. And please come back on Monday where we will delve into everything about the Cotton Club. It is one of the biggest disasters we've ever covered. I'm very excited for you all to hear it. Thanks for being here. Bye. Go to patreon.com slash whatwentwrongpodcast to support whatwentwrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Laura Woods and edited by Karen Krupsa. Thank you.