Roy Cohn: A Deep Dive Into a Piece of Shit
By David Swanson
Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I write about what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers.
Fifty years ago this month, Roy Cohn filed a motion to dismiss a federal case against his newest client, a young Brooklyn-based developer named Donald Trump whose company had been charged with discriminating against minority tenants. An infamous New York lawyer, fixer, and power broker, Cohn accused the Justice Department of waging a “gestapo-like” campaign against the Trump Corporation. The Judge was having none of it, but to Trump’s relief, the case was settled out of court several months later.
It was the beginning of a hideous friendship, one that’s depicted in movie theaters this weekend with the release of “The Apprentice” starring Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Cohn.
Playing the diminutive Cohn, Strong has big shoes to fill. In the last few decades Roy Cohn become something like Shakespeare’s Richard III: a broken, brilliant, black-hearted antihero, and one of acting’s the most coveted roles. This is mostly due to Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America”, in which a dying Cohn plays a major part. Al Pacino, F. Murray Abraham, Nathan Lane, and Glenn Close are just a few of the actors who have taken on the role, and Cohn’s earlier career as Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting pit bull has also been depicted onscreen in a number of movies. Pacino has played Michael Corleone and the literal devil, but his most chilling role is arguably Cohn.
“I got to know him over the years,” Village Voice writer Wayne Barrett said of Cohn in August 2016. “It was like having lunch with Satan.”
For this Sunday’s newsletter, I’ve gone back into the historical record to see how the media covered Cohn from the moment he first made headlines as the precocious prosecutor who sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair in 1953 right up until his AIDS-related death in 1986. Below you’ll find material from his early magazine cover stories in Time, Life, and Esquire, through later accounts of his career in Manhattan in Vanity Fair, New York, Harpers, plus excerpts written by both Cohn and Trump themselves. Think of it as a supplement to the exhaustive batch of Trump articles we’ve been collecting over the last couple years, as well as a companion piece to “The Apprentice”.
The Self-Inflated Target
Time, March 22, 1954
Cohn, a chunky (5 ft. 8 in., 160 Ibs.), hazel-eyed dynamo type with deceptively sleepy eyelids, carefully slicked hair, is a man of extraordinary talents. Gifted with a sharp, retentive mind and a photographic memory, he also has the innate political cunning of the kingmaker. As Joe's committee counsel, he moves around the room at a dogtrot, speaks like a machine gun. He is relentless with witnesses, scornful of weaknesses, nerveless before criticism, and contemptuous of all Senators on the subcommittee save McCarthy. With good reason, Joe calls Roy Cohn "the most brilliant young fellow I have ever met."
"A Great Treat." "Roy has deserved a spanking since he was a child," says an old friend of the Cohn family, "but I doubt if he ever got one in his whole life." Roy's father, Albert Cohn, is a judge in the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court, a onetime protege of the late Boss Ed Flynn, and a power in the Democratic Party. In his teens, Roy would amaze his friends by putting in a spur-of-the-moment telephone call to the mayor's office and talking briefly to "Bill" (O'Dwyer). Once, when Roy was invited to go along on an excursion supervised by the father of one of his chums, the father got a telephone call from Roy's mother. "You're in for a great treat," she said. "Roy's going with you. He's such a smart boy and knows so much about so many things. I'm sure you'll get a lot of pleasure out of him and probably learn a lot from him, too."
The Dispensable Man
Time, August 2, 1954
Wisconsin’s Senator Joe McCarthy once called Roy Cohn indispensable in the Senate’s effort to ferret out Communists—“as indispensable,” the Senator said, “as I am.” Last week, however, the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee. Joe McCarthy, chairman, dispensed with the services of the indispensable Mr. Cohn.
Time for Memoirs. Cohn’s career as chief counsel ended at a subcommittee luncheon in the old Supreme Court chamber. Even before the steak and French fried potatoes were served, McCarthy announced Cohn’s resignation. Later, he scowled at reporters over the dishes and rumbled that Cohn’s departure was “a great victory for the Communists.”
Actually. Cohn’s forced resignation was a victory for Michigan’s Republican Senator Charles Potter, who had demanded dismissals on both sides of the Army-McCarthy row. So far. Potter has failed to hit his Army target. Counselor John G. Adams. (“If we fired John G.,” a top Pentagon official said, “it would look like a deal with McCarthy, and the people are tired of McCarthy deals.”) But on the subcommittee Potter’s vote, plus those of the three Democrats, made up a 4-3 majority that could give Cohn his walking papers.
In a Neutral Corner; Roy Marcus Cohn
New York Times. April 22, 1960
During his career as the flamboyant boy scourge of American Communists, Roy Marcus Cohn drove the opinionated to heights and depths of verbal extravagance. “There is only one man the Communists hate more than Roy Cohn and that is J. Edgar Hoover,” said Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Cohn’s friend and mentor, in 1953. When Cohn resigned as chief counsel to a Senate investigating subcommittee, a columnist called him “the youngest has-been since Jackie Coogan.” A minister said, “The loss of Roy Cohn is like the loss of a dozen battleships.”
For almost five years young Cohn had occupied a place near stage center during a season of particular duress in American politics. The demise in 1954 of the McCarthy crusade sent him to an obscurity he had never sought, but he instantly adapted to it…
By the time he was 20, Cohn, an alumnus of the Fieldston School in Riverdale, the Bronx, had breezed through Columbia Law School. He was forced to cool his eager heels until he was old enough, at 21, to be admitted to the bar.
Beginning as a clerk-typist at $1,700 in the office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he moved quickly up the ladder to the post of confidential assistant…One observer described him as “a precocious, brilliant, arrogant young man.” Another said, “He learned early whom to soft-soap and whom to browbeat. You fawned on your betters, stepped on the people below.”
Roy Cohn: Is He a Liar Under Oath
By Keith Wheeler and William Lambert
Life, October 4, 1963
Attorney Roy Marcus Cohn, 36. who was once described by his bull-in-a-china-closet boss, Senator Joe McCarthy, as “the most brilliant young fellow I've ever met” today stands accused of perjury and conspiracy to obstruct justice. These are serious crimes.
But it is possibly even more galling to a man of Cohn's singularly self-confident temperament that the charge also implies he did something stupid.
Behind these accusations lies a story as tangled as a, basketful of cobras—and it carries much the same mesmerizing, reptilian fascination. It takes particular patience to unwind the labyrinthian coil because Cohn in person appears only near its end. Even then, there remains a final snarl: the puzzle of whatever possessed Cohn to get enmeshed in it…
If the charges against Cohn stand up, his remarkable career-from schoolboy prodigy to whiz-kid Commie stalker to business tycoon to championship-fight promoter-could come to a dismal close. On the other hand, his countercharges invite a detailed review of the indictment which inspired them and the background to that indictment.
Believe Me, This Is the Truth About the Army-McCarthy Hearings. Honest.
By Roy Cohn
Esquire, February 1968
My first appearance on the witness stand came at midmorning of April 27, the fourth hearing day. It was a disaster. I committed virtually every possible blunder. I was rambling, garrulous, repetitious. I was brash, smug and smart-alecky. I was pompous and petulant. Worst of all, I tried to match quips with the rapier-minded Joe Welch, who had behind him some forty years of courtroom experience in the art of impaling a legal opponent on his verbal foil. I was neatly skewered a number of times.
From the transcript, I have chosen some of my choicer utterances and listed the traits they unhappily projected during that brief initial session. It should be noted that, on the witness stand as in life, often it isn’t what you say so much as how you say it. Thus, while the words alone may not appear too damaging in cold print, a certain tone and attitude accompanied them that made me appear somewhat less than self-effacing.
ARROGANCE: “Roy Cohn is here speaking for Roy Cohn, to give the facts.” (I still grimace at the recollection of that grand pronunciamento.)
SELF-IMPORTANCE: Asked if I could produce the original photograph, I replied I could but indicated the committee had to understand that “I have an awful lot of papers and stuff to attend to and it is not in my possession.” I added confidently (and pompously), “I am sure it is under my control.”
CONDESCENSION: “I will be glad to answer any question that any member of the committee wants to ask.”
The Cohn Case: Curiouser and Curiouser
By Peter Maas
New York, June 23, 1969
One of the biggest cases on the local federal docket will come up for trial on September 23. It is the United States of America vs. Roy Cohn. It is one of two grand jury indictments that have been returned in recent months against Cohn.
In it Cohn is accused of bribery, conspiracy, extortion and blackmail arising out of condemnation proceedings over how much the city would compensate the Fifth Avenue Coach Lines when it took over the company's bus routes some years ago.
Fifth Avenue, on whose board Cohn once sat as a director and whose legal counsel was Cohn's law firm, was eventually awarded $33 million. One count against Cohn is that he, along with other defendants in the indictment, conspired with a city appraiser to lift confidential information about the condemnation proceedings out of city files. In another count, Cohn himself is also charged with once personally bribing the appraiser inside the US Courthouse on Foley Square.
Now the Cohn case has become the hottest subject of gossip, debate, innuendo, charge and counter-charge inside the Justice Department and the FBI. Nobody will talk on the record and very few will discuss anything off the record.
The Hotshot One-Man Roy Cohn Lobby
By William Lambert
Life, September 5, 1969
Roy Marcus Cohn has had a busy time in the 15 years since he and his wealthy young sidekick, G. David Schine, helped polarize the nation's views on domestic Communism with their far-flung and flamboyant investigations in Senator Joe McCarthy's behalf. When the show ended, Cohn, the son of a well-respected New York judge, moved back to New York, entered private law practice and quickly became head of his own firm and a corporate manipulator of the first order. He took over Lionel Corporation, lost it, gained control of Fifth Avenue Coach Company in New York and became involved with a succession of financial sponsors in a dizzying variety of other business ventures. In the process he left behind a trail of stunned, embittered and in some cases financially flattened ex-friends. In the past year substantial sections of his financial structure have begun to buckle faster than they can be re-riveted. Lawsuits have piled up, and more than $1 million in judgments have followed. In large part, these have left Cohn personally untouched, for virtually all his assets including his elegant Manhattan town house, his telephone—equipped limousine with its "RMC" license plates and his 99-foot yacht Defiance—are leased or held in separate corporations headed by his nominees. A great deal has been written about—and by—Roy Cohn as the consummate political and financial operator. Whatever his qualities in these fields, there is no doubt that he is a masterful lobbyist, a lobbyist who manipulates—with considerable success—press, politicians and the other power centers, a lobbyist with but a single client: Roy Cohn.
Why Doesn’t Roy Cohn Pay His Bills?
By Lois Morgan
Village Voice, July 5, 1976
Roy Cohn has trouble paying his bills—particularly the small ones. In the words of one man who’s been trying to collect for five years, “He lives like a millionaire, buys like a millionaire, and pays like a pauper.”
In January 1976, it was reported that the IRS was after Cohn for $370,000. As of the end of April, the New York State Industrial Commission was after Cohn and Scott E. Manley, law partners, for $7429 in unpaid unemployment insurance taxes. The firm (including the predecessor firms) owes at least $32,000 to miscellaneous travel agencies, personnel agencies, office supply companies, and firms providing all kinds of services. Most have been embroiled in collection proceedings and litigation for years. Some give up, like the man who said, “You have to make a whole career out of trying to collect judgments against Roy Cohn or his firm—I got tired.”
In April, Roy Cohn’s law firm owed $94.16 for office furniture, $558.56 for routine stationery (envelopes, engraved letterheads, business cards), $183 for telegraphic services, $7000 for the use of an oil company’s credit cards, $3512.92 for services rendered that reduced the law firm’s monthly phone bill and got them credit, $144.45 to a locksmith, $153 for mechanical work on a car, $436 for temporary office help, $3366 to a photo offset company; $3000 to several travel agencies for charged airplane tickets, $875 to private attorneys, $10,121.92 to an airline company for storage, pilot services, fuel and maintenance of a company plane.
Don't Mess With Roy Cohn
By Ken Auletta
Esquire, December 1978
When the federal government was suing the Trump organization for discriminating against minorities in their housing projects, Don Trump searched for a lawyer. “They all said. ‘You have a good case, but it's a sticky thing,’” remembers Trump. Then he met Cohn for the first time at a party, explained his predicament, and was thrilled when Roy instantly declared, “Oh, you'll win hands down!” Sitting beside him at “21,” Republican socialite Sheila Mosier, whose divorce he is handling, exclaims, “To me, he's like a brother.”
Looking at Cohn closely, one is not surprised that “21” would shove him in a corner. Hooded, bloodshot eyes give him the appearance of a convict. A deep scar wiggles like a river down the center of a thick nose. Lines streak from either side of the nose to the mouth, which he lubricates with lizardlike strokes from his tongue. Short hair hugs his head, which is balding on top. The hairline is neatly shaved to form an arch above his ears, extending down and around the entire back of his head. Two thin, red lines curve around each of Roy's ears, the result, he admits, of cosmetic surgery to correct “bags” and “heavy lines.” He looks like a killer. Except for the body and the deportment. He’s only five feet eight inches tall, 144 pounds. The suit he is wearing this day is dark blue, slightly tucked at the waist, with a faint stripe. A modest paisley tie fades into a nondescript striped shirt. His mannerisms—the licking of the lips, the waving wrists—are effete.
The Birthday Boy: Roy Cohn is 52 at 54
By Wayne Barrett
Village Voice, March 5, 1979
The cake was a two-foot version of his face. The confectionary eyes were clear of the bloodshot coarseness that normally colors them, but the small, balding head still had the shape of a bullet. His jaw was locked in a smile—the frosting face of a birthday boy. To mark 52 years of infamy, Roy Cohn gave himself a party Friday night at Studio 54, and invited 200 friends and clients. There wasn’t a striking schoolbus driver among them, though the guys threatening handicapped kids with icepicks last week are collectively Cohn clients. Not a single black went to the dinner; nor did any of the guests arrive in station wagons or sedans. For three hours, while we stood in the rain watching and asking for names, the guests arrived in limo after limo.
Each guest had received a telegram and was ordered to bring it. The first 200 were on the “A” list, asked to arrive at 8:30 p.m. for drinks and food. A few hundred more got “B” list telegrams which entitled them to post-dinner partying at 11. The time on your telegram was a measure of your importance to the man who symbolizes evil to many in this city—the redbaiter turned Mafia broker, indicted three times, reprimanded in half a dozen courts around the country for unethical tactics like tricking a senile, dying 84-year-old client into changing his will to make Cohn executor. But his own most successful client in the end, he’s been convicted of nothing. Roy Cohn is now New York’s incandescent legal star—the choice of its crassest dealers (in all wares), the strategist for a new Tammany in Manhattan, already the shadow boss of the Bronx. In short, a one-man scandal show staged daily.
The Secret to Donald Trump's Success
By Graydon Carter
GQ, May 1, 1984
Roy Cohn has a problem. It is mid-November, a peak month for New York hotel bookings, and an out-of-town client of his law firm, Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, is stuck for a room for the night. Another lawyer might tell the fellow to hike his grip down to the “Y,” but Cohn is known around town as a fixer of sorts, a reputation that must constantly be nurtured by small favors. He decides to call another client, who happens to own two hotels in the city, the Grand Hyatt and the Barbizon Plaza. In the powerful New York triangle of politics, law, and real estate, the two men have what passes for a friendship. It is 8:30 in the morning, but the voice on the other end of the phone is full of brio. “Roy M. Hi. What's up? Who? Sorry, Roy, I think the Grand Hyatt is full. But how about the Barbizon? Hold on. Let me find out.” There follows a partially muffled shout to an assistant in the next office to line up the room, then he's back on the phone. “Okay, I think we can book him into the Barbizon. Only for you, Roy.”
Cohn Ko’D
Time, July 7, 1986
To his enemies he has been almost literally the devil’s advocate, the ruthless attorney who made his name as the whispering aide to Senator Joe McCarthy during the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. To his friends and clients, including politicians, mobsters and plutocrats of every description, he is the ultimate courtroom fighter.
Last week Roy Cohn, 59, found himself on the losing side of what may have been his most crucial legal battle. A five-judge panel of the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court ordered him disbarred. Ruling on four charges by a state disciplinary panel, the judges described his professional conduct as “incredible,” “startling” and “reprehensible.”
In one incident, the judges decided, Cohn spent nearly two decades evading repayment of a $100,000 loan from a woman whose divorce he had handled in 1966. Cohn claimed the money was simply an advance against future services, but the court cited 23 documents, some of them written by Cohn himself, indicating that it was a loan. Cohn’s firm returned the money in 1984, but only after the misconduct proceedings against him had started.
Faint light, dark print. Roy Cohn, AIDS and the question of privacy
By Dale Van Atta
Harpers, October 1986
Roy Cohn died August 2 at the Warren Grant Magnuson Clinical Center of the National In- stitutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland. The primary cause of death was listed as “cardio-pulmonary arrest”; the death certificate named “dementia” and “underlying HTL V-3 infections” as secondary causes. The mention of HTLV-3 implied what many suspected: Roy Cohn had AIDS. Cohn's NIH records—leaked to me last summer and published here, in part, for the first time—confirm he knew as early as last November that he had AIDS. But like other public figures who have contracted the disease, Cohn never admitted to having it. Not all of the problems and complications associated with AIDS are medical; journalists are having a difficult time writing about it, drawing a plausible distinction be- tween private and public information…
Rumors that Roy Cohn was a homosexual first appeared in the 1950s, when he was the communist-hunting chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Cohn, another young McCarthy investigator, Q. David Schine, and McCarthy were all bachelors, and very devoted to one another—Lillian Hellman called them “Bonnie, Bonnie, and Clyde.” Cohn always denied to reporters that he was "ever gay-inclined," and went out of his way to convey an impression of heterosexual orthodoxy. He would talk of having discussed marriage with Barbara Walters. And he was a lawyer for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which vociferously opposed New York City's gay-civil-rights legislation.
Roy Cohn's Last Days
By David Lloyd Marcus
Vanity Fair, August 1987
Even in his emaciated condition, his voice reduced to a whisper, he came across like the toughest bully on the block, temporarily sidelined with a cold. Slowly, painfully, he walked out to the heated pool and swam two laps. As he dabbed himself with a towel, he lectured me about the "immorality" of his enemies at the New York Bar, which was threatening to disbar him, and the I.R.S., which was pursuing him for income-tax evasion.
It occurred to me, as he spoke, that if anyone could defend himself against death and taxes, it was Roy.
Then I asked the favor: I wanted to shadow him for six months and write a story. He agreed, and told me to fly to New York in three weeks for his annual New Year's Eve party…
Roy and my father, Lloyd Marcus, were first cousins, but opposites in every way. They hadn't spoken for twenty years. I grew up with the notion that Roy Marcus Cohn was the embodiment of evil.
The Art of the Deal
By Donald Trump
Random House, 1987
Whatever else you could say about Roy, he was very tough. Sometimes I think that next to loyalty, toughness was the most important thing in the world to him. For example, all Roy's friends knew he was gay, and if you saw him socially, he was invariably with some very good-looking young man. But Roy never talked about it. He just didn't like the image. He felt that to the average person, being gay was almost synonymous with being a wimp.
That was the last thing he wanted to project, so he almost went overboard to avoid it. If the subject of gay rights came up, Roy was always the first one to speak out against them.
Tough as he was, Roy always had a lot of friends, and I'm not embarrassed to say I was one. He was a truly loyal guy—it was a matter of honor with him—and because he was also very smart, he was a great guy to have on your side. You could count on him to go to bat for you, even if he privately disagreed with your view, and even if defending you wasn't necessarily the best thing for him. He was never two-faced.
The Reaganite Ethos, With Roy Cohn As a Dark Metaphor
By Frank Rich
New York Times, March 5, 1992
In the ecumenically depressed America of this play, everyone is running away from whoever he or she is, whether through sex, drugs or betrayal, to dark destinations unknown. Yet for all his pessimism, Mr. Kushner sees many sides of every question. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his presentation of Cohn, who, in the demonic performance of Henry Goodman, is a dynamic American monster of Citizen Kane stature. True to fact, this Cohn, even at his most bullying and hypocritical, is neither stupid nor bereft of a sense of humor. In one typically arresting speech, he vehemently argues that he is not a homosexual but a heterosexual who has sex with men, for how could a man with his political influence be included among a constituency with “zero clout”? In Cohn's many fascinating self-contradictions, Mr. Kushner finds an ingenious vehicle for examining the twisted connections between power, sexuality, bigotry and corruption in an America that has lost its moral bearings.
Such is the high-voltage theatricality achieved by both play and production that the English audience at “Angels in America” is totally gripped even as it must consult a program glossary to identify phenomena like Ethel Rosenberg (who materializes to call an ambulance for the stricken Cohn), Ed Meese, Shirley Booth and the Yiddish expression “Feh!”
King Cohn
By Robert Sherril
The Nation, August 12, 2009
Cohn was notorious as a deadbeat. Except for what he owed homosexual prostitutes, he never paid his bills. Creditors could always sue him, of course, but “suing Roy could be a costly waste of time. The lawyers' fees might soon equal the size of the debt and the case would not go to trial, particularly in New York City where Roy had one or perhaps two judges, who must have been on his pad, because they would grant any postponement, any preliminary motion he asked for.” Occasionally a creditor would win a suit, but they virtually never collected because he had nothing they could attach (as the IRS discovered; he went to his grave owing it $7 million). He rented or leased everything. He had no bank account. He wasn't paid for his legal work but got phony “loans” or lived on a kind of millionaire's barter system. Very often he paid his own staff with bad checks. Indeed, Cohn could have been prosecuted for fraud because of the pattern of his non-payments.
His life was spent in a cocoon of filth and disrepair. “The expression used to describe Roy's abodes time and time again was ‘shit house,’” writes von Hoffman. His bedroom was decorated with frogs: frog drawings, frog paintings, frog decals, frog patterns on sheets, on nightshirts, on wallpaper, froggies everywhere; it was a room “bulging with stuffed animals, in this enormous turn-of-the-century townhouse, the plaster cracking, the paint all but gone from the walls, leaks squirting, and drafts finding their way through the ill-attended cracks.”
The Man Who Showed Donald Trump How to Exploit Power and Instill Fear
By Robert O'Harrow, Jr. and Shawn Boburg
The Washington Post, June 17, 2016
Donald Trump was a brash scion of a real estate empire, a young developer anxious to leave his mark on New York. Roy Cohn was a legendary New York fixer, a ruthless lawyer in the hunt for new clients.
They came together by chance one night at Le Club, a hangout for Manhattan's rich and famous. Trump introduced himself to Cohn, who was sitting at a nearby table, and sought advice: How should he and his father respond to Justice Department allegations that their company had systematically discriminated against black people seeking housing?
“My view is tell them to go to hell,” Cohn said, “and fight the thing in court.”
It was October 1973 and the start of one of the most influential relationships of Trump’s career. Cohn soon represented Trump in legal battles, counseled him about his marriage and introduced Trump to New York power brokers, money men and socialites.
Cohn also showed Trump how to exploit power and instill fear through a simple formula: attack, counterattack and never apologize.
Deal With the Devil
By Marie Brenner
Vanity Fair, June 28, 2017
How to explain the symbiosis that existed between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump? Cohn and Trump were twinned by what drove them. They were both sons of powerful fathers, young men who had started their careers clouded by family scandal. Both had been private-school students from the boroughs who’d grown up with their noses pressed against the glass of dazzling Manhattan. Both squired attractive women around town. (Cohn would describe his close friend Barbara Walters, the TV newswoman, as his fiancée. “Of course, it was absurd,” Liz Smith said, “but Barbara put up with it.”)
Sometime during the 2016 presidential campaign, Brill noticed that Donald Trump was using Cohn’s exact phrases. “I began to hear, ‘If you want to know the truth,’ and ‘that I can tell you…” and ‘to be absolutely frank’—a sign that the Big Lie was coming,” Brill said.
Cohn—possessed of a keen intellect, unlike Trump—could keep a jury spellbound. When he was indicted for bribery, in 1969, his lawyer suffered a heart attack near the end of the trial. Cohn deftly stepped in and did a seven-hour closing argument—never once referring to a notepad. He was acquitted. “I don’t want to know what the law is,” he famously said, “I want to know who the judge is.”
The Original Donald Trump
By Frank Rich
New York, April 30, 2018
The more I’ve looked back at the entanglements of Trump, Cohn, and their overlapping circles and modi operandi, the more I think the crux of their political culture could be best captured if Edward Sorel were to create a raucous mural depicting the Friday night in February 1979 when Cohn celebrated his 52nd birthday at Studio 54. That sprawling midtown Valhalla of the disco era, a nexus for boldface names, omnivorous drug consumption, anonymous sex, and managerial larceny, was owned by Cohn’s clients (and soon-to-be-imprisoned felons) Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager. The guest list? “If you’re indicted, you’re invited,” went the comedian Joey Adams’s oft-repeated joke about Cohn’s soirées. Among the (all-white) Democratic revelers joining Republican and Conservative party leaders at Cohn’s black-tie testimonial were the borough presidents of Queens (Donald Manes), Brooklyn (Howard Golden), and Manhattan (Andrew Stein), not to mention the former Democratic mayor Abe Beame and a bevy of judges, including the chief of the U.S. District Court. The investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who covered the scrum from the sidewalk for the Village Voice, noted that, among the usual Warhol celebrity crowd, politicians, and fixers, was a “surprise” attendee—“newcomer Chuck Schumer, a ‘reform’ assemblyman from Brooklyn who insisted he was just the date of a gossip columnist.” Also in attendance, less surprisingly, and camera-ready for the paparazzi, was the 32-year-old Trump, who by then had been in Cohn’s orbit for six years.
Without Compromise
By Wayne Barrett
Bold Type Books, 2020
In March 1974, Donald Trump testified as president of many of the Trump housing companies. He assumed a color-blind posture throughout much of the questioning, claiming he “had no idea of the racial composition” of his tenants or employees (he lapsed when he described “an all-black job in Washington,” and conceded that the company owned projects that were 100 percent white).
He was, he continued, “unfamiliar” with the Fair Housing Act of 1969, and said that the company had made no changes in its rental policies since the law's passage. He claimed that the only test of tenant eligibility was that the tenant's rent should not exceed 25 percent of his income. He testified twice that "we don't generally include the wife's income; we like to see it for the male in the family." Then he changed his testimony the next day, to try to include some assessment of the wife's income…
In October 1974, Cohn filed a motion to dismiss the case and charged—in an ironic reversal of his earlier McCarthy days—that federal agents were engaging in "gestapo-like tactics" against his client. Cohn's affidavit described the agents as "stormtroopers." In court he said the Trumps were being subjected to “undercover agents going in and out of their buildings, lying as to who they are and where they are from… trying to trap somebody into saying or doing something.”
The judge found Cohn's charges “utterly without foundation.”
Will Roy Cohn Save Donald Trump’s Hide One Last Time?
By Kai Bird
New York Times, May 28, 2024
Roy Cohn was indicted four times by Manhattan’s legendary prosecutor Robert Morgenthau. “I said to him, ‘Roy, just tell me one thing,’” Mr. Trump wrote in “The Art of the Deal.” “‘Did you really do all that stuff?’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘What the hell do you think?’ he said. I never really knew.” The most notorious of these cases involved charges of conspiracy, extortion, blackmail and bribing a former city appraiser inside the Foley Square courthouse…
On Dec. 8, 1969, the last day of the proceedings, Mr. Cohn’s lawyer, Joseph Brill, was about to make his summation when he complained of chest pains and was rushed to a hospital. The court adjourned, not knowing what would happen next.
The following afternoon, Mr. Cohn, dressed in a monogrammed shirt and a dark-blue suit with thin stripes, astonished the judge and prosecutors by announcing that he was prepared to make his own summation.
It was an ingenious strategy that in effect allowed him to testify on his own behalf—which he had avoided doing—without having to submit to a cross-examination…It took the jury a mere four hours to declare him not guilty. Mr. Cohn turned to the assembled reporters and said simply, “God bless America.
