THE CALL HAD COME AT seven minutes after midnight. Laney Greenberger said she had been awakened by a single gunshot, had rushed to her husband and discovered the worst.
When the police arrived, they found Larry Greenberger on the frong porch of his house in the small Florida town of Okeechobee. He was slumped in his favorite chair with a .44-caliber Magnum in his hand and a bullet hole in his head. His bathrobe was soaked in blood, but his eyes were still wide open, as if horrified by what he had seen in his last moment of life.
Larry Greenberger was the local boy with a golden future. He was bright and popular and was voted “Mr. OHS” in Okeechobee High School’s Class of 1966. When he died during the night of Sept. 13-14, 1988, he was 40 years old and seemed to have everything going for him — plenty of money, a wife, an adopted stepson, a big house in his hometown. No one could understand why a man as fortunate as Larry Greenberger would want to kill himself. Suddenly this quiet cow town at the northern edge of Lake Okeechobee didn’t seem quite so innocent after all.
THE DAY AFTER GREENBERGER’S DEATH, HIS BODY WAS laid out on the stainless-steel table in the office of Dr. Frederick Hobin, the Okeechobee County medical examiner.
In his autopsy, Hobin found that Greenber-ger, the onetime Mr. OHS, had drunk alcohol, smoked marijuana and snorted cocaine in the hours before his death. But even more significant was the medical examiner’s analysis of how Greenberger died.
The bullet entered just below the left eye, passing at a downward angle out the back of Greenberger’s head, through his wicker rocking chair and into the wall of the house. Hobin noticed that the powder burn, or “tattooing,” around the bullet wound was too wide for a point-blank shooting. There were no grains of gunpowder on the surface of Greenberger’s eye, indicating that the gun had been fired from a distance greater than the length of his own arm.
He had been shot from the left side, even though the pistol was found in his right hand. But the powerful recoil of a .44 Magnum would probably have kicked the four-pound gun out of a dead man’s hand.
“It turns out,” the medical examiner announced several days after the shooting, “that we have a homicide rigged to look like a suicide.”
Three other people were in the house the night Larry Greenberger was killed, five years ago this week – his wife, Laney; her 6-year-old son, Dax, whom Larry had adopted; and a 21-year-old Pennsylvanian named Terry Squillante, whom Laney had met at a real-estate licensing school in Orlando.
Laney Greenberger was vibrant and good-looking, with a sweet Southern accent, but a woman like her didn’t often settle in a place like Okeechobee. She drove around in a Mercedes convertible and opened a peculiar business for a cow town: a referral service for a plastic surgery clinic in Mexico. She had lived in Hollywood – California, not Florida – and had connections in the movie business.
Just after the police and paramedics finished their grisly work, Laney and Squillante left for Miami. She came back to Okeechobee for her husband’s funeral, but in the next three weeks Laney kept moving around; she stayed in several houses and hotels in Miami, flew to Denver, then to Orlando.
As Lt. Don Fisher, a detective with the Okeechobee County Sheriff’s Office, tried to track down the elusive Laney, word about her filtered in from Los Angeles. She had won quick popularity in Tinseltown because she supplied two commodities people wanted – sex and cocaine. One of her lovers had been Robert Evans, the producer of Chinatown, Marathon Man and The Godfather and the former husband of movie star Ali MacGraw. Every six weeks Laney imported 10 kilos of cocaine from her friends in Miami, making her one of the leading coke dealers in Hollywood.
When Laney Greenberger finally surfaced in Orlando on Oct. 2, 1988, Don Fisher drove up from Okeechobee. In his deep, low-key drawl, he questioned Laney and politely announced, “I have a warrant for your arrest, Mrs. Greenberger.”Then he clamped handcuffs on her wrists.
But she wasn’t charged with selling drugs or shooting her husband. She was arrested for one of the most notorious slayings in Hollywood history: the Cotton Club murder of 1983.
CATTLE STILL GRAZE LAZILY IN PASTURES LINING THE roads to Okeechobee. The town lies 60 miles northwest of West Palm Beach and two miles from the northern tip of Lake Okeechobee. It has a population of 4,900 and is the only incorporated town in Okeechobee County. For decades it has depended on fishing and cattle ranching for its economy and its identity.
It is the kind of place in which everyone knows everyone else, and the Greenberger family was especially well liked. For years Jerry and Dahlis Greenberger, Larry’s parents, ran the Fair Store, a shop selling western clothing and equipment.
“I’ve known Larry all his life,” says Okeechobee County Sheriff O.L. Raulerson, who once worked for Jerry Greenberger.
Because of its small size and neighborliness, there has never been much crime in the county. In the early ’80s, when some people started buying up big tracts of land, it turned out that the vast open spaces of the rural county were being used as drop sites for airplanes smuggling in drugs from South America. But in the last six years or so, ever since Raulerson was elected sheriff, the drug trade has fallen off, and life in Okeechobee has become generally calm and unexciting again, the way most people prefer it.
It was that kind of town when Larry Greenberger was growing up there in the 1950s and ’60s. He was an honor student, a football player and was named the most handsome and most popular student in his high-school class. When he went off to Florida State University in the fall of 1966, great things were expected of him.
He may have been likable, but when Larry Greenberger came back home nearly 20 years later, people began to ask themselves how well they really knew him. After he graduated from FSU with a degree in marketing, he seemed to be putting his education to good use, making independent real-estate deals. He was making independent deals of another kind too, and as early as 1974 Tallahassee police had identified him as a high-volume cocaine trafficker.
Greenberger was briefly married in 1977, but he met a more profitable partner the same year. A young Colombian needed money to buy an airplane, so Greenberger helped him out. The Colombian was Carlos Lehder Rivas, the man who later became responsible for organizing efficient, businesslike distribution networks for the Medellin cocaine cartel.
Greenberger began distributing cocaine nationwide. In 1979 federal agents stopped him and a girlfriend at Palm Beach International Airport as they were stepping from their Learjet. The agents found $108,000 in a brown paper bag, a handgun and a small amount of cocaine, but Greenberger was never charged. He was arrested again in 1980 in Hawaii, but he got off on a technicality, thanks to the legal work of his attorney, Frank Rubino – the Miami lawyer who would later become famous for defending Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
Okeechobee’s own Larry Greenberger had risen in the world, all right. He became probably the largest American distributor for Carlos Lehder. On trips to Lehder’s offshore headquarters in the Bahamas, Greenberger met Robert Vesco, the fugitive financier who may or may not have been an associate of Lehder’s. With dozens of couriers and dealers working for him, Greenberger handled millions of dollars. Rumor had it that he owned a mansion in Beverly Hills and had as much as $100 million hidden in banks, investments and legitimate businesses.
Perhaps because of his two narrow escapes from the law, Greenberger decided in the early 1980s that he’d had enough of Lehder and the drug trade. With an exotic girlfriend who claimed to be the daughter of Burmese royalty, Greenberger moved to Pompano Beach and briefly ran a commercial real-estate company called Guardian Properties. Despite his travels all over the world, he was still a small-town boy at heart, and in 1984 he bought a two-story, four-bedroom house on 9 1/2 acres of land at the edge of his hometown. He lived in a trailer while workers remodeled the house.
To get away from his worries, Greenberger sometimes piloted his own boat on fishing trips out into the Atlantic. In continual legal trouble, he was in the office of his Miami attorney, Frank Rubino, one day when he met a vivacious Southern woman who went by the name of Laney Jacobs.
KAREN DeLAYNE JACOBS WAS BORN IN ALABAMA IN 1947 and liked to be called Laney. Her parents were divorced when she was young, and Laney spent her high-school years in Georgia, living with her grandparents. Even as a teenager she had a wild streak – which, in the early ’60s, meant that she smoked and drank.
By her early 20s, Laney Jacobs had moved to Miami, where she worked as a secretary for several prominent attorneys, including Neal Sonnett and Edward Shohat. She also began a long string of at least seven marriages – if you put all of her names together, she’d be Karen DeLayne Jacobs-Gonzales-Goodman-Suquet-Ferreira-Amer-Greenberger-Squillante.
Laney was slender and good-looking and loved to party. She worked for a short time at a massage parlor and was often seen at dance clubs, cozying up to a fast crowd. Her tastes ran to cocaine and expensive champagne, and her friends were powerful players in Miami’s drug-smuggling hierarchy. Laney began selling drugs out of her own home, keeping detailed records of her transactions.
Meanwhile, on May 15, 1982, she gave birth to a son she named Dax, after a character in her favorite Harold Robbins novel, The Adventurers. Her husband of the moment, a Honduran immigrant named Jose Amer, wasn’t present at the birth because he had been arrested on drug-smuggling charges four days before. Laney already had a new lover anyway, a silk-shirted, gold-chained, Cuban-born building contractor named Milan Bellechasses, who had a harelip that made him lisp.
Bellechasses was, in fact, one of the biggest cocaine dealers in Miami, and the ever enterprising Laney offered to open a West Coast branch of his business. (Laney told some of her friends that Bellechasses – who is now in prison – was Dax’s father, but the actual father is believed to be Jose Amer.) In October 1982, Laney and her son moved to California, buying a house in Sherman Oaks, a tony Los Angeles suburb. She also rented an apartment in Hollywood – a place for her many sexual liaisons, one former associate has said.
In the early ’80s, selling cocaine in Hollywood was as easy as selling hot dogs at a ballpark. Laney’s supply came by car from Miami – 10 kilos every six weeks, netting her $150,000 with every load.
It wasn’t long before she had a high-class clientele. She was especially proud of knowing producer Robert Evans, who had engineered such hit movies as Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Godfather and was once the production head of Paramount Pictures.
Evans was looking for money to produce a film he thought would put him back on top in Hollywood. The movie was The Cotton Club, about the famous Harlem nightclub of the 1920s, and would be directed by his old Godfather pal, Francis Ford Coppola. But Evans hadn’t had a hit in years and was written off by Hollywood gossips as a cokehead; in 1980 he had been convicted of cocaine possession in New York.
WITH ROBERT EVANS AS HER MOST FAMOUS HOLLYWOOD connection and also her lover, the starry-eyed Laney had visions of gaining fame, glamour and legitimacy as a movie producer.
At the same time, someone else was dreaming of making a name in Hollywood. Roy Radin was an abrasive 33-year-old New Yorker who had been producing traveling vaudeville-like shows since he was 17. Radin was a man of vast appetites; he weighed 275 pounds and had a cocaine habit that cost between $1,500 and $3,500 a week. He became one of Laney’s best customers.
Maybe it was just the coke speaking, but Radin had big plans. He wanted to produce movies, starting with The Cotton Club, and the more he talked, the more he convinced himself that he was destined to become the next head of Paramount.
The Cotton Club was going to be a big-budget picture – as much as $50 million – but no one was willing to invest in Robert Evans anymore, since he hadn’t had a certified hit in nearly a decade. But when Laney introduced Evans to the fast-talking Radin in early 1983, things suddenly began to happen.
Radin found a Puerto Rican banker willing to put up $35 million as long as the film was shot in Puerto Rico. Radin and Evans were each going to own 45 percent of the new production company, with the banker getting the remaining 10 percent. The deal was almost set when Laney demanded that Radin give her half of his 45-percent share for introducing him to Evans. Radin refused, offering instead a flat $50,000 as a finder’s fee.
Laney was upset anyway because someone had stolen 10 kilos of her cocaine, plus $270,000 in cash. She blamed Radin. To find out what happened to her stash, she hired a couple of weightlifting bodyguards who had worked for Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. One of them, William Mentzer, became another of Laney’s many lovers.
For weeks, Radin held firm in cutting Laney out of the deal. She grew more and more belligerent, demanding a share of the movie and insisting that Radin knew about her missing drugs and money. (In the end, the thief turned out to be Laney’s own courier.)
Laney and Radin finally agreed to work out their differences over dinner at La Scala, a fancy restaurant in Beverly Hills. The date was May 13, 1983 – Friday the 13th. When Laney went to pick up Radin at his hotel, she was sleek as always, stepping out of her black Cadillac limousine in a long, tight-fitting gown made of silver or gold lame – accounts differ on the color.
Radin had recently received threatening telephone calls, warning him to back out of The Cotton Club, so he asked his friend Demond Wilson – the onetime star of Sanford and Son – to follow him to the restaurant with his gun at the ready. Radin gave Wilson $150 for dinner.
When Laney and Radin came out of the hotel to go to the restaurant, Radin was wearing a three-piece suit from a big-and-tall men’s shop, a Pierre Cardin tie and Gucci loafers – even in Hollywood, he dressed like a New Yorker.
When Laney’s limousine moved away from the hotel, a black Cadillac carrying two men pulled in behind it. Demond Wilson followed in his Mercedes. At the time, he was as heavy a cocaine user as Radin himself, and after trailing the cars for a while he lost them on Sunset Boulevard. He then drove to La Scala and spent Radin’s money on dinner.
The limousine turned onto a side street, with the trailing Cadillac stopping behind it. Laney got out of the limo, while the two men in the Cadillac jumped into the back seat, flanking Radin. They were William Mentzer and Alex Marti, the former bodyguards of Larry Flynt, and both of them had guns. The limo driver, Robert Lowe, headed for the desert. When a police car came up with its lights flashing, Mentzer jammed the barrel of his pistol into Radin’s mouth. The police car went on by.
They drove Radin to a remote canyon 65 miles north of Los Angeles. Courtroom testimony varies on the number of times Mentzer and Marti shot him in the head – it was either 13 (in honor of Friday the 13th) or 27 (13 times 2, plus a coup de grace). Then Mentzer put a stick of dynamite in Radin’s mouth and lit it. The corpse, shrunken to 69 pounds, was found a month later by a beekeeper.
Meanwhile, Robert Evans eventually found financing from two brothers who ran a casino in Las Vegas. But The Cotton Club was a dismal flop, and Evans’ most recent picture, Sliver, also was a disappointment. He is still waiting to climb back up the Hollywood summit.
AFTER RADIN WAS KILLED, LANEY JACOBS SOLD HER house in Sherman Oaks and returned to Miami. In May 1984, at the Coconut Grove offices of her lawyer, Frank Rubino, she met another of Rubino’s clients, a tall, handsome man named Larry Greenberger.
They hit it off at once: They both spoke with a Southern accent, they both liked expensive cars and boats and, of course, they had both worked in the same high-pressure sales business. Four months later, on Sept. 3, 1984, they were married at a Las Vegas wedding mill called the Little Church of the West. Laney noted on the marriage license that it was her second marriage, though it was actually her sixth. The next year Greenberger adopted Laney’s 2 1/2-year-old son, Dax, and they settled in his remodeled house in Okeechobee.
Greenberger had invested in real estate and advertising businesses, but mostly he wanted to work on his house, go target shooting – he owned several handguns – and spend winters skiing in Colorado. He considered himself retired from the drug trade, though after he met Laney he began using cocaine again for the first time in several years.
People who had known him in high school noticed that he wasn’t the same friendly old Larry anymore. He drove around in a black Mercedes with tinted windows, and he always kept a loaded gun in the car. His new house had an electronic gate, floodlights and a tall fence topped with barbed wire. He could turn on all the lights from a panel of switches next to his bed.
With her husband’s money, Laney opened the Center for Plastic Surgery – surely the strangest legitimate business ever started in Okeechobee. She had had lifts, tucks and implants of various kinds and thought she could make money by referring vain Floridians to a clinic in Mexico. Laney began to come between her husband and some of his associates. In 1986 the Greenbergers accused their attorney, Frank Rubino, of cheating them on a boat-maintenance contract. They showed up at Rubino’s office with a couple of thugs – William Mentzer and his cousin, George Markel – who held guns to Rubino’s head and forced him to sign over his boat-management business. On the way out, Mentzer pulled Rubino’s gold Rolex from his wrist and took the keys to his $100,000 Ferrari. Rubino never reported the robbery for fear that he and his family would be killed. His Ferrari eventually turned up as a rental car in Los Angeles.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1988, LANEY JACOBS GREENBERGER was studying for her real-estate license in Orlando. She met a 21-year-old Pennsylvanian named Terry Squillante at the real-estate school and invited him back to Okeechobee. He became sort of a younger brother to Larry, an older brother to Dax – and something more to Laney.
On Sept. 13, 1988, Greenberger took 6-year-old Dax to Palm Beach for the day, and on the way back he bought some wine and either cold cuts or pizza for dinner – reports differ on the main course. He often went target shooting with Laney and Squillante. All three fired a few rounds from Larry’s .44 Magnum. Later that night, after the others had gone to bed, Larry stayed on the porch to oil his gun; at some point he smoked marijuana and snorted cocaine. Right around midnight, a single shot was fired, and Greenberger was found slumped in his favorite rocking chair on the porch.
“There’s enough evidence to prove that this is murder,” says David Morgan, the chief assistant state attorney, who is handling the case. “The problem is, who did it?
“The possibilities are that someone inside the house killed Larry Greenberger – or someone came in from the outside. We have found no evidence that anyone came from outside. That leaves only the two adults who were inside the house.”
Neither Laney Greenberger nor Terry Squillante is talking.
“You’ve got a wife who has demonstrated she is capable of killing people,” says Morgan. “She’s the prime suspect from a common-sense point of view. But you can’t put someone in jail for that.”
Since Greenberger’s death, it has been learned that he had been indicted in California in 1979, but the case was dropped, partly because prosecutors didn’t think they could nail the chief target, Carlos Lehder. Lehder was finally convicted of drug trafficking in July 1988, and by then federal prosecutors had nearly completed a new case against Greenberger. He probably didn’t know it, but when he was killed he was just weeks away from being indicted on wide-ranging charges that could have sent him to prison for the rest of his life.
The police and prosecutors in Okeechobee are careful to say nothing about Greenberger’s history as one of the biggest drug dealers in the country – in fact, they won’t even acknowledge that it’s true.
“We feel there’s no evidence,” says Morgan, “to indicate that whatever his background was had anything to do with his death.”
“…other than meeting Laney,” adds Sheriff Raulerson.
LOS ANGELES POLICE WERE LOOKING FOR Laney at the time her husband was found dead in Okeechobee. A witness had come forward – Larry Flynt’s brother-in-law – and identified William Mentzer as one of the triggermen in the killing of Roy Radin five years before. Laney was fingered as the cash and the brains behind the murder.
In the course of a nine-month trial that began in 1990, Laney admitted to being a drug dealer but blamed the killing of Radin on two of her former lovers, Mentzer and Milan Bellechasses. All kinds of strange things occurred during the trial. A bailiff in a neighboring courtroom accidentally fired his gun one day, and people dove for cover, fearing that Laney was trying to shoot her way out of the courthouse. Actor Demond Wilson, a onetime cokehead, said he had found God; Roy Radin’s former assistant was led out of court when he showed up drunk on the day he was to testify; and Robert Evans repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, all the while claiming he knew nothing of Radin’s murder.
On July 22, 1991, the two gunmen, Mentzer and Alex Marti, were convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping. Laney Greenberger and the limo driver, Robert Lowe, were found guilty of second-degree murder and kidnapping. All four were sentenced to life in prison without parole. Mentzer had already been sentenced to life in an unrelated killing of a 245-pound prostitute.
In her own sentencing hearing, Laney claimed to be indigent, even though she had collected $900,000 of her husband’s estate. The value of Larry Greenberger’s ill-gotten wealth has never been determined, but his parents – who refuse to talk about the case – have filed suit to keep Laney from getting any more of the money. Janis Greenberger, Larry’s sister, now lives in the house on the edge of Okeechobee where her brother was killed. All photographs of Larry have vanished from public view – even his picture in the high-school yearbook at the public library has been cut out.
Laney Jacobs Greenberger is now 46 years old and will spend the rest of her life in prison in California, but she still has her old wiles. She has found a seventh husband in Terry Squillante, the only other person who knows for sure what happened on that Okeechobee front porch at midnight nearly five years ago. Squillante is 26, living in California and raising Laney’s son Dax, now 11 years old.
To this day, no one has ever been charged with the murder of Larry Greenberger.
— MATT SCHUDEL is a Sunshine staff writer.
