Meeting Roy Cohn
John Bowie, LawFuel publisher
While we buckle our seat belts in the run-up to the US election, ‘The Apprentice’ movie provides a warmup act, as if one was needed.
Based on the relationship between Trump and his lawyer, Roy Cohn, a character whose resume includes the claim to infamy that he invented Donald Trump like a Frankenstein playing with a Petri dish.
The movie is a somewhat uneven affair – a sound first half, a confused second dropping references and names like a politician’s broken promises.
Cohn is played by Jeremy Strong, Kendal from the Shakespearean ‘Succession’ show and he does so with icy precision: the satanic steer, the cowled scowl, the inscrutability and vanity.
I have a clear recollection of Cohn after spending a late afternoon with him in 1982 at his Brownstone office, two years before he died.
He was infamous as the master of dark arts well before our meeting, a character so documented and storied that he became an American blackguard in the 1950s, let alone the ’80s.
There has been so much written about Cohn that there is almost nothing else to say – except a personal recollection of meeting the man.
He has been the subject of enough magazine and newspaper articles to fill a Cohn wing in any library. He’s the subject of books (“Citizen Cohn” and others), plays (Angels in America) and even in Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’.
He was credited, rightly or wrongly, with teaching Trump his holy trinity tenets of life:
- Attack, attack, attack.
- Admit nothing, deny everything.
- Claim victory, and never admit defeat.
The Cohn I met was no different from the Cohn others had met too, but was no swivel-eyed Bond villain, just that fuzzy cowl of hair and those fearsome eyes, with a pulsating personality and a searing intelligence that was doubtless corrupted by his ambition and drive for success.
Trump, after all, was largely the creation of his dysfunctional upbringing and controlling father as much as anything Roy Cohn could bring to the Trump creation party.
Cohn simply garnished the Orange dish with some basic rules, without the nuance or sophistication that a smarter person, like Cohn, could impart.
You only have to do a quick Google to see the references about Cohn . . ‘ , ‘devil’, ruthless, ‘loathsome’, ‘henchman’, ‘corrupt’, ‘evil’, a ‘fixer.’ Even the rather banal and baleful BBC can describe him as ‘mysterious’, as if there are things bout Cohn that we still don’t know.
But his life was as documented as many of his celebrity friends and clients.
The guy couldn’t even die (of AIDs) without being lambasted by LIFE – ‘The Snarling Death of Roy Cohn’.
I’m sure ‘Cohn’ has entered the Scrabble lexicon as ‘sinister’, or similar.
He was, as some have commented, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous characters.
He was central to New York Society when he ruled the legal roost.
Can anyone even pretend to start to defend Roy Cohn?
The Meeting
Let me try after a couple of hours with him one afternoon.
A young lawyer from New Zealand who Cohn had no reason to see but he nonetheless went out of his way to fix an appointment, spent a generous amount of time shooting the breeze about law, politics, travel . . gave me his latest book (‘How to Stand Up For Your Rights and Win’) and wrote in the cover:
‘To John Bowie. Welcome to the colonies. And to our peculiar brand of law practice. Roy Cohn”
The first appointment was cancelled when Cohn (“call me Roy”) asked for another day due to work. Could I come back?
And so it was back to the offices of Saxe Bacon and Bolan on East 68th Street.
His partner Tom Bolan had been a major figure in Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign and Roy knew Reagan, just as he knew Nixon and just about everyone else who mattered.
The office had a cathedral ceiling, bar, greenhouse for the secretary, outdoor patio, and a voluminous foyer where a large very unattractive man with a wise guy accent sat behind ‘reception’.
Roy represented ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, John Gotti, Carmine ‘Lilo’ Galante, Tommy and ‘Joey’ Gambino and the guy may have been running a side hustle with their lawyer.
There again, Roy Cohn also represented the Catholic Archdiocese of New York.
Presumably, the office parties were held separately.
And his client list was not so much a rolodex as a full New York social register.
Roy’s New York was the Tom Wolfe, Andy Warhol Big Apple. He repped them in domestic and business affairs, advising Aristotle Onassis, Jackie Collins, Truman Capote.
He advised Bianca in respect of Mick. Ari in respect of Jackie.
He had barons, princes, gangsters, archbishops, movie stars, and hustlers in the mix.
He partied at client and fellow closet Gay Steve Rubell’s Studio 54 and dined at ‘21’.
Cohn was a study in multi-faceted conflict, contradiction and intrigue.
Barbara Walters
He was briefly engaged to star interviewer Barbara Walters in the days when she ruled the networks and from the closet from which he never publicly emerged.
In many ways she was the rule-breaking barrier-piercing kinder-faced version of Cohn, prepared to push beyond the boundary. Publicity and fame were there for the taking.
They met when Walters was 25 and Cohn was 28. He reportedly proposed to her several times and they remained friends until Cohn’s end, where she remained a faithful confidant.
And he deployed his legal tradecraft to her benefit.
When her father was to be arrested for a tax issue, the claim somehow disappeared with Cohn’s facilitation. When she wanted to adopt a child, he arranged a private deal. When she had an affair with a Senator, which was about to go public, Cohn organised for its termination.
Epithets and Abuse
He collected epithets like others collect baseball cards. Reviled by many. Revered by many, too. A fixer. An anti-gay, Gay.
One author called him “a new strain of ‘son of a bitch’. Writers, journalists, opponents, political figures were all reaching for the most opprobrious smear to smirchh someone who was somehow smirch-resistant.
A brilliant legal mind who played the man as much as the law. A Jew who helped send the Rosenbergs to the gas chamber. A lawyer who faced a barrage of prosecution and disbarrment.
They lined up to indict or charge Cohn.
He survived indictment, IRS audits, Justice Department investigatioins, FBI enquiry, the SEC, Bar Association charges.
What he didn’t survive was AIDS, dying two years after our meeting at his office.
At the time he looked pretty well for a guy who had been indicted and acquitted four times in the sixties alone.
His entire professional life was spent defending attacks upon his ethics, finances and personal life.
As Frank Rich wrote in New York magazine “Trump triumphed despite having all of Cohn’s debits, wartime draft dodging included, but none of his assets — legal cunning, erudition, a sense of humor, brainpower, and loyalty”.
Those were assets Cohn could never pass on to Trump.
Electric Chair
As a prodigy prosecutor at 24 he sent spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair on espionage charges.
He then went on as assistant to Joseph McCarthy in the famed communist witchhunts in the mid-50s, which built Cohns reputation as a conservative firebrand winner.
Politics aside, he was there to win at any cost.
Our meeting was surprising on several levels. He had no reason to meet me other than a courteous letter from myself requesting one, seeking to interview a lawyer celebrated, infamous, iconic. It seemed like meeting America’s most infamous lawyer was a good thing to do, and he accepted.
We talked in his rather gloomy office and talked about his career, his interest in politics and the fact that the nearest he had got to New Zealand was a trip to Perth, Australia for a deposition.
We had both prosecuted, myself for five years although I had never sent anyone to the electric chair.
His office wall had the pictures of Roy here – whispering to McCarthy – there with Edgar Hoover. His late father, Judge Al Cohn was there near the small desk with the neat pile of papers and the alabaster frog underneath.
His offices were occupied at that late afternoon, early evening time with his tee-shirted ‘aids’ and assistants who came and went into its wood-paneled rooms.
He had no regrets about pushing for the execution of the Rosenbergs. His eager patriotism saw that act as one where the treasonous spies should be dealt the punishment they deserved.
And as for sending Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, an issue that troubled the Judge given that she was a woman with two children, Cohn believed she was the worst of the two, the brains behind the treachery, the older of the two and the one deeply involved in the betrayal at every level.
Why should she be spared?
Others claimed that the Rosenberg case was the beginning of Cohn’s unique ability to play the game at the edges, by allegedly colluding with the Judge to get ‘the Chair’ for the Rosenbergs.
If that is true, it says much about the abilities of a 24 year old lawyer to play a game with those stakes at that time.
When the McCarthy hearing legacy evaporated during the 1950s it lead to McCarthy drinking himself to death and Cohn leaving DC and a potential career in public service in the witchhunt detritus.
But, like any good showman, he had more acts to produce and went on to reinvention in New York, his hometown after all.
He had never been to New Zealand, but he expressed his admiration for New Zealand’s Prime Minister, the truculent and equally combative Rob Muldoon.
Mob Rules
He held a concept of loyalty and honour that may have been reflected in his mob clients’ views on life in the jungle.
We spoke about trial tactics and he indicated that he didn’t take prisoners but, if he did, they were tortured.
Nervous laughter there.
But his repertoire of clients and his abilities as a reconteur were engaging.
He could talk easily and the names dropped like flies – Ronald Reagan, Alger Hiss, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon – mainly political. We spoke little of the celebs he rubbed shoulders and possibly other body parts with. Let alone the mob.
They were legendary characters all of them and it’s a source of fascination and even aggravation among commentators that one man could relate and interact with a tapestry as broad as anything, anyone, anywhere could have accomplished.
I was heading for California and he wanted to know who to meet ‘out West’. He could set me up with a meeting with a colleague and he organised for me to meet the celebrated palimony lawyer Marvin Mitchelson, the man who had obtained the first award for a common law wife, being actor Lee Marvin’s partner.
It was kind of him, although I never got to meet Mitchelson who had crashed his Rolls Royce and was possibly in the final stages of ego dementia.
Instead I met John Branca, the entertainment lawyer for Michael Jackson and others.
But to connect Roy Cohn with kindness seems almost sacrilegious.
But there you have it. A memorable afternoon with a generous and charming Roy Cohn.
Who would have thought?
