Bad Company

Drugs, Hollywood and the Cotton Club Murder

This story of the meeting and tangled business relationship of three unlikely partners, written by a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for Newsday. Implicated in the bizarre tale are Karen “Laney” Jacobs, a Florida drug dealer; Roy Radin, a Long Island, N.Y., entrepreneur who had made a dubious name as a packager of vaudeville shows featuring performers whose careers were distinctly on a downhill slide; and Robert Evans, producer of the movies The Godfather and Chinatown . Jacobs introduced Evans and Radin in the hope of co-producing a film with them, The Cotton Club . But as the negotiations proceeded, she saw herself frozen out of the project, and Radin was slain in L.A. in 1983. According to Wick, Jacobs not only arranged this death but also, later, that of her husband.
—Publisher’s Weekly 

In this book, New York Newsday reporter Wick examines the events surrounding the 1983 murder of movie producer Roy Radin. Both Radin and the woman accused of masterminding his death, a former Miami drug trafficker named Karen DeLayne Jacobs, were trying to break into the movie business and competed for the financing of Robert Evans’s The Cotton Club . The resulting clash between the two, as outlined by Wick, is a disturbing tale of amoral actions encompassing lust, greed, drugs, and murder–a microcosm of the American dream at its worst.
—Library Journal