Settle in. We're going digging for dirt."Where's my Roy Cohn?" Trump wondered after Attorney General Jeff Sessions made the decision to recuse himself from the Russia probe. Cohn, who died in 1986, was known as Trump's fixer and close friend.
Newsweek
In 1973, a brash young would-be developer from Queens met one of New York’s premier power brokers: Roy Cohn, whose name is still synonymous with the rise of McCarthyism and its dark political arts. With the ruthless attorney as a guide, Trump propelled himself into the city’s power circles and learned many of the tactics that would inexplicably lead him to the White House years later.
Vanity Fair
August 2017 Vanity Fair
Which would make a good description of Donald Trump.Donald calls me 15 to 20 times a day,” Roy Cohn told me on the day we met.
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It was 1980. [...] I had come to see the man who, at the time, was in many ways Trump’s alter ego: the wily, menacing lawyer who had gained national renown, and enmity, for his ravenous anti-Communist grandstanding.
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The tabloids couldn’t get enough of the Trumps’ theatrics. And as Donald Trump’s Hyatt rose, so too did the hidden hand of his attorney Roy Cohn, always there to help with the shady tax abatements, the zoning variances, the sweetheart deals, and the threats to those who might stand in the project’s way.
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During the Red Scare of the 1950s, he and Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, the fabulist and virulent nationalist crusader, had hauled dozens of alleged “Communist sympathizers” before a Senate panel. Earlier, the House Un-American Activities Committee had skewered artists and entertainers on similar charges, resulting in a trail of fear, prison sentences, and ruined careers for hundreds, many of whom had found common cause in fighting Fascism. But in the decades since, Cohn had become the premier practitioner of hardball deal-making in New York, having mastered the arcane rules of the city’s Favor Bank (the local cabal of interconnected influence peddlers) and its magical ability to provide inside fixes for its machers and rogues.
“You knew when you were in Cohn’s presence you were in the presence of pure evil,” said lawyer Victor A. Kovner, who had known him for years. Cohn’s power derived largely from his ability to scare potential adversaries with hollow threats and spurious lawsuits. And the fee he demanded for his services? Ironclad loyalty.
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All I can tell you is he’s been vicious to others in his protection of me,” Trump told me, as if to wave away a stench. “He’s a genius. He’s a lousy lawyer, but he’s a genius.”
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Cohn often greeted visitors in a robe. On occasion, I.R.S. agents were said to sit in the hallway and, knowing Cohn’s reputation as a deadbeat, were there to intercept any envelopes with money.
Cohn’s bedroom was crowded with a collection of stuffed frogs that sat on the floor, propped against a large TV. Everything about him suggested a curious combination of an arrested child and a sleaze.
Vanity Fair
Who are we kidding? Donald Trump never developed a moral compass.Cohn was compact, with a mirthless smile, the scars from his plastic surgeries visible around his ears. As he spoke, his tongue darted in and out; he twirled his Rolodex, as if to impress me with his network of contacts. The kind of law Cohn practiced, in fact, needed only a telephone.
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By the time I met with Cohn, he had already been indicted four times on charges ranging from extortion and blackmail to bribery, conspiracy, securities fraud, and obstruction of justice. But he had been acquitted in each instance and in the process had begun to behave as if he were somehow a super-patriot who was above the law. At a gay bar in Provincetown, as reported by Cohn biographer Nicholas von Hoffman, a friend described Cohn’s behavior at a local lounge: “Roy sang three choruses of ‘God Bless America,’ got a hard-on and went home to bed.”
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[As] Trump’s first major project, the Grand Hyatt, was set to open, he was already involved in multiple controversies. He was warring with the city about tax abatements and other concessions. He had hoodwinked his very own partner, Hyatt chief Jay Pritzker, by changing a term in a deal when Pritzker was unreachable—on a trip to Nepal. In 1980, while erecting what would become Trump Tower, he antagonized a range of arts patrons and city officials when his team demolished the Art Deco friezes decorating the 1929 building. Vilified in the headlines—and by the Establishment—Trump offered a response that was pure Roy Cohn: “Who cares?” he said. “Let’s say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would have just put them in their basement.”
For author Sam Roberts, the essence of Cohn’s influence on Trump was the triad: “Roy was a master of situational immorality . . . . He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.” As columnist Liz Smith once observed, “Donald lost his moral compass when he made an alliance with Roy Cohn.”
If you're interested in Cohn's childhood and background, and his early dealings with Trump, read this entire article. But, I'm going to switch to another one now.Riding around Brooklyn in a Rolls-Royce, Trump’s mother, Mary, collected quarters from laundry rooms in various Trump buildings. Trump’s father, Fred, had already beaten back two scandals in which he was accused of overcharging and profiteering at some of his government-financed apartment complexes, and was now facing an even more explosive charge—systemic discrimination against black and other minority tenants. The Trumps, however, were connected to Favor Bank politicians in the Brooklyn Democratic machine, which, in tandem with the Mob bosses, still influenced who got many of the judgeships and patronage jobs.
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For about a decade, the tax abatements and legal loopholes that Trump was able to finesse came about, in large part, because of Cohn. The time he spent on Trump matters was not reduced to “billable hours,” wrote the late investigative journalist Wayne Barrett in Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth. Instead, Cohn asked for payment only when his cash supply ran low.
Steve Brill again saw Cohn’s stamp when Trump struck back, defending the case against Trump University. It was, Brill asserted, “a scam against the very people who [eventually] voted for Trump—the middle and lower middle class . . . . The first thing Trump does is sue one of the plaintiffs. She wins and the judge awards her $800,000 in legal fees, and Trump appeals, and in that decision he’s compared to Bernie Madoff . . . . This strategy was pure Cohn: ‘Attack your accuser.’ ”
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Roy loved to surround himself with attractive straight men,” said divorce attorney Robert S. Cohen, who, before taking on clients such as Michael Bloomberg—and both of Trump’s ex-wives (Ivana Trump and Marla Maples)—began his career working for Cohn. “[Roy had] a coterie. If he could have had a relationship with any of them, he would have.”
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“Roy dropped everyone else and fussed over him . . . Roy had that ability to focus on you. I felt that Roy was attracted to Trump, more than in a big-brotherly way. “Donald fit the pattern of the hangers-on and the disciples around Roy. He was tall and blond and . . . frankly, über-Gentile. Something about Roy’s self-hating-Jewish persona drew him to fair-haired boys. And at these parties there was a bevy of blond guys, almost midwestern, and Donald was paying homage to Roy . . . I wondered then if Roy was attracted to him.”
“Thwarted loves obsessed Roy Cohn’s life,” added a lawyer who first met Cohn in the 60s, characterizing some of the men, both gay and straight, in Cohn’s orbit. “He would become sexually obsessed with cock-tease guys who would sense his need and not shun him. These were unrequited relationships. The way he would expiate the sexual energy was possessive mentoring. Introducing them to everyone in town and taking them places.”
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"Donald is my best friend,” Cohn said back then, shortly after he had thrown a 37th-birthday party for Trump. And over the years, several who knew Cohn would remark on Donald Trump’s resemblance to the most infamous of Roy Cohn’s blond, rich-boy obsessions: David Schine.
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Another of Cohn’s tactics was to befriend the town’s top gossip columnists, such as Leonard Lyons and George Sokolsky, who would bring Cohn to the Stork Club. He was irresistible to tabloid writers, always ready with scandal-tinged tales. “Roy would be hired by a divorce client in the morning and be leaking their case in the afternoon,” New Yorker writer Ken Auletta recalled. Columnist Liz Smith said she learned to distrust most items he gave her. A similar reliance on the press would also become a vital component of the young Trump’s playbook.
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In lavender Washington, Cohn was known as both a closeted homosexual and homophobic, among those leading the [House Unamerican Activities] charge against supposedly gay witnesses who he and others believed should lose their government jobs because they were “security risks.”
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President Dwight Eisenhower, meanwhile, angered by McCarthy’s attacks and fearful that the senator’s zealotry was severely damaging the president’s agenda and the G.O.P. itself, sent word to the army counsel to write a report on Cohn’s harassment tactics. According to historian David A. Nichols, the president secretly ordered the document to be released to key legislators and the press, and the revelations were explosive, resulting in the Army-McCarthy hearings.
Over 36 days, 20 million Americans watched. It was all there: Cohn and Schine’s jaunt to Europe, Cohn’s ultimatums, McCarthy’s smears. The high point came when the army’s sly Boston lawyer, Joseph Welch, shook his head in pained disbelief at McCarthy’s attempt to slander one of Welch’s own assistants, imploring the senator, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last . . . ?” Within weeks, Cohn was banished and McCarthy was soon censured.
Cohn played it as a win.
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1985, Cohn was seriously ill—“I have liver cancer,” he contended—and he started calling in his last markers.
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Word would soon begin to circulate that Cohn was battling AIDS. He denied it. He was also battling disbarment—under a cloud of fraud and ethical-misconduct charges. (Cohn, along with other misdeeds, had stiffed a client on a loan and altered the terms of a virtually comatose client’s will—in his hospital room—making himself its co-executor.)
Cohn tried to keep up a good face. But Trump, among other clients, began to shift his business elsewhere. “Donald found out about [Cohn’s condition] and just dropped him like a hot potato,” Cohn’s personal secretary, Susan Bell, was quoted as saying. (A White House spokesperson says this claim is totally false.)
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Cohn also had asked a favor of Trump: Could he give him a hotel room for his lover, who was dying of AIDS? A room was found in the Barbizon Plaza Hotel. Months passed. Then Cohn got the bill. Then another. He refused to pay. At some point, according to The New York Times’s Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, Trump would present Cohn with a thank-you gift for a decade of favors: a pair of diamond cuff links. The diamonds turned out to be fakes.
This one was a Democracy Now! program in July 2016, and is part 2 of a conversation with a Trump biographer, Wayne Barrett.
[T]here’s no question that next to Fred Trump, Roy Cohn was the single greatest influence in Donald’s life. And Roy is incandescent evil. I mean, I would sit with him, and I—you know, it was enough to make you rush back to church, the Satanic feeling that he would give you. He would eat with his fingers. And we would be at 21. He would eat with his fingers. He would—he carried a little glass in his jacket that he would take out and drink in this little glass. He would pop a white pill when he didn’t think you were looking. And he—his house was filled with frogs. He was the weirdest guy. He was into the strangest stuff. He was a chicken hawk after little boys, and yet he was the most virulently anti-gay guy you could imagine. And so, that was Donald’s mentor and constant sidekick, who represented all five of the organized crime families in the City of New York.
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I think he was 23 years old when he was the chief counsel to Joe McCarthy doing all those hearings. He was extremely wired into the Reagan White House. He helped make Donald Trump’s sister Maryanne a federal judge in 1983. He was the ultimate fixer power player in New York for a whole period of time.
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Strangely enough, his cash cow was city-owned parking lots by the water, which were leased by the Bureau of Marine and Aviation, and he controlled the companies that had the parking lots that were city-owned. And it was just an enormous amount of money. He never paid any taxes. He pretended to have no income. He had an incredible cash empire. And the guy who actually leased those parking lots to him, Rick Mazzeo, wound up under federal investigation, and they found his body in the trunk of a car. And all he did was give parking lots to Roy Cohn.
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[H]e was the middle man between Donald and all these mob guys. You asked about the apartments at Trump Tower. John Cody gets an apartment at Trump Tower. John Cody is a Gambino crime family associate.
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[T]hey busted him for trying to kill a guy. He had already been in jail. He goes back to jail. Well, he had a—he denied it was a mistress, but he certainly told me that they were very close, Verina Hixon. I talk about her in the book. She got not only an apartment in Trump Tower, it’s the only apartment with a pool. It’s right underneath Donald’s apartment, right?
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This is not me talking, this is a finding in federal court, that Nicky Scarfo controlled the hotel workers’ union. And when they would strike all the casinos in Atlantic City, they wouldn’t strike Donald. You know, when he first goes down there into Atlantic City to acquire his first parcels, he buys them at a premium, overpays, from underbosses of the Nicky Scarfo crime family. He has a relationship with these guys throughout the early days of his time down there.
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You realize he’s not gotten a casino license since he got one for the Taj. He had the DGE, the Division of Gaming Enforcement, and the Casino Control Commission in New Jersey fixed. He had a—it was rigged for Donald. I don’t think there’s any question in my mind about that. And what wouldn’t be? It’s a company town. The only thing in it is casinos. He owned four of them. He was only legally allowed to own three of them, so when he bought the fourth one, that just became a hotel, and, you know, they closed down the casino in it and just ran it as a hotel. But, to me, there’s no other explanation that I can find as to why he does not have a casino in his hotel in Las Vegas, other than he couldn’t go through the licensing procedure. He was given in 2004 some kind of a clearance by the casino regulators there of suitability. But that’s just a preliminary step. If you’re actually going to get a license, you’ve got to go through an intensive background.
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[W]hen my book came out, I started getting visited by these state troopers from Missouri, because he had applied for a riverboat casino license in Missouri. And these guys were so thorough.
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And he withdrew before he was going to be denied in Missouri. And he’s never applied for a license in Nevada, where he has a giant hotel. It’s kind of ironic to me that a guy who wants to be president of the United States is afraid to go through a gaming commission licensing procedure.
Democracy Now!
Roy Cohn and Donald Trump
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