Roy Cohn
Roy Marcus Cohn (/koʊn/ KOHN; February 20, 1927 – August 2, 1986) was an American lawyer and prosecutor who came to prominence for his role as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel during the Army–McCarthy hearings in 1954, when he assisted McCarthy's investigations of suspected communists. In the late 1970s and during the 1980s, he became a prominent political fixer in New York City.[3][4] He also represented and mentored New York City real estate developer and former U.S. President Donald Trump during his early business career.[5]
Roy Cohn
August 2, 1986 (aged 59)
Lawyer
- Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial (1951)
- Chief Counsel for Joseph McCarthy (1953–1954)
- Representation of Donald Trump (1973–1985)
- Albert C. Cohn
- Dora Marcus
Joshua Lionel Cowen (great-uncle)[2]
Cohn was born in The Bronx in New York City and educated at Columbia University. He rose to prominence as a U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor at the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, where he successfully prosecuted the Rosenbergs leading to their execution in 1953. After his time as prosecuting chief counsel during the McCarthy trials, his reputation deteriorated during the late 1950s to late 1970s after McCarthy's downfall.
In 1986, Cohn was disbarred by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court for unethical conduct after attempting to defraud a dying client by forcing the client to sign a will amendment leaving him his fortune.[6] He died five weeks later from AIDS-related complications, having vehemently denied that he was HIV-positive.[7]
Early life and education[edit]
Born to an affluent Jewish family in the Bronx, New York City, Cohn was the only child of Dora née Marcus (1892–1967)[8] and Justice Albert C. Cohn (1885–1959); his father was an Assistant District Attorney of Bronx County, then appointed as a judge of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court.[9][1] His maternal great-uncle was Joshua Lionel Cowen, the founder and long-time owner of the Lionel Corporation, a manufacturer of toy trains.[2]
Cohn and his mother were close; they lived together until her death in 1967 and she was constantly attentive to his grades, appearance and relationships.[10] When Cohn's father insisted that his son be sent to a summer camp, his mother rented a house near the camp and her presence cast a pall over his experience. In personal interactions, Cohn showed tenderness which was absent from his public persona, but he was vain and deeply insecure.[10]
Cohn's maternal grandfather, Joseph S. Marcus, founded the Bank of United States in 1913. The bank failed in 1931 during the Great Depression, and its then-president, Bernie Marcus, Cohn's uncle, was convicted of fraud. Bernie Marcus was imprisoned at Sing Sing, and the young Cohn frequently visited him there.[11]
After attending Fieldston School and the Horace Mann School and completing studies at Columbia University in 1946, Cohn graduated from Columbia Law School at the age of 20.[12][13][14]
Early career[edit]
After his graduation from law school, Cohn worked as a clerk for the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for two years. In May 1948, at age 21, he was old enough to be admitted to the state bar. He became an assistant U.S. attorney later that month.[15][16] That same year, Cohn also became a board member of the American Jewish League Against Communism.[17]
As an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Cohn helped to secure convictions in a number of well-publicized trials of accused Soviet moles. One of the first began in December 1950 with the prosecution of William Remington, a former Commerce Department employee and member of the War Production Board who had been charged with espionage following the defection of former KGB handler Elizabeth Bentley.[18] Although an indictment for espionage could not be secured, Remington had denied his long-time membership in the Communist Party USA under oath on two separate occasions and was later convicted of perjury in two separate trials.[18]
While working in Irving H. Saypol's office for the Southern District of New York, Cohn assisted with the prosecutor's case against 11 senior members of the American Communist Party for advocating for the violent overthrow of the U.S. Federal Government, under the Smith Act.[19]
Legal career in New York[edit]
After resigning from McCarthy's staff, Cohn had a 30-year career as an attorney in New York City. His clients included Donald Trump;[37] New York Yankees baseball club owner George Steinbrenner;[5] Aristotle Onassis;[38] Mafia figures Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, John Gotti and Mario Gigante; Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager; the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York; Texas financier and philanthropist Shearn Moody Jr.;[39] and business owner Richard Dupont. Dupont, then 48, was convicted of aggravated harassment and attempted grand larceny for his attempts at coercing further representation by Cohn for a bogus claim to property ownership in a case against the actual owner of 644 Greenwich Street, Manhattan, where Dupont had operated Big Gym, and from where he had been evicted in January 1979.[40] Cohn's other clients included retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who has referenced Cohn as "the quintessential fixer".[41] Following federal investigations during Cohn's legal career in the 1970s and 1980s, Cohn was charged three times with professional misconduct, including perjury and witness tampering, and he was accused in New York of financial improprieties related to city contracts and private investments. He was acquitted on all charges.[1]
Lionel trains[edit]
Cohn was the grandnephew of Joshua Lionel Cowen, founder of the Lionel model train company. By 1959, Cowen and his son Lawrence had become involved in a family dispute over control of the company. In October 1959, Cohn and a group of investors stepped in and gained control of the company, having bought 200,000 of the firm's 700,000 shares, which were purchased by his syndicate from the Cowens and on the open market over a three-month period prior to the takeover.[57] Under Cohn's three-and-a-half-year leadership, Lionel was plagued by declining sales, quality-control problems and huge financial losses. In 1963, Cohn was forced to resign from the company after losing a proxy fight.[58]
Reputation[edit]
In 1978, Ken Auletta wrote in an Esquire profile of Cohn: "He fights his cases as if they were his own. It is war. If he feels his adversary has been unfair, it is war to the death. No white flags. No Mr. Nice Guy. Prospective clients who want to kill their husband, torture a business partner, break the government's legs, hire Roy Cohn. He is a legal executioner—the toughest, meanest, loyalest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America."[38]
Maureen Dowd wrote in an article for The New York Times which described Matt Tyrnauer's film Where's My Roy Cohn?: "Roy Cohn understood the political value of wrapping himself in the flag. He made good copy. He knew how to manipulate the press and dictate stories to the New York tabloids. He surrounded himself with gorgeous women. There was always something of a nefarious nature going on. He was like a caged animal who would go after you the minute the cage door was opened."[89]
Several people have asserted that Cohn had considerable influence on the Presidency of Donald Trump, e.g. Ivy Meeropol, director of Bully, Coward, Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn said "Cohn really paved the way for Trump and set him up with the right people, introduced him to Paul Manafort and Roger Stone—the people who helped him get to the White House."[90][91]
Vanity Fair's Marie Brenner wrote in an article about Cohn's mentorship of Trump: "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… When Cohn spoke, he would fix you with a hypnotic stare. His eyes were the palest blue, all the more startling because they appeared to protrude from the sides of his head. While Al Pacino's version of Cohn (in Mike Nichols's 2003 HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America) captured Cohn's intensity, it failed to convey his child-like yearning to be liked."[11]
Media portrayals[edit]
A dramatic figure in life, Cohn inspired several fictional portrayals after his death. Probably the best known is in Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1991), which portrays Cohn as a closeted, power-hungry hypocrite haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg as he denies dying of AIDS. In the initial Broadway production, the role was played by Ron Leibman; in the HBO miniseries (2003), Cohn is played by Al Pacino; and in the 2010 Off-Broadway revival by the Signature Theatre Company in Manhattan, the role was reprised by Frank Wood.[92] Nathan Lane played Cohn in the 2017 Royal National Theatre production and the 2018 Broadway production.[93][94] Cohn is also a character in Kushner's one-act play, G. David Schine in Hell (1996). That play may have been inspired in part by the National Lampoon comic strip "Roy Cohn in Hell" (Feb. 1987), which depicts Cohn joining Hoover and Senator McCarthy in the nether regions.
Cohn is portrayed by James Woods in the biographical film Citizen Cohn (1992), by Joe Pantoliano in Robert Kennedy and His Times (1985), by George Wyner in Tail Gunner Joe (1977), and by David Moreland in The X-Files episode "Travelers" (1998), in which an elderly former FBI agent speaks to Agent Fox Mulder about the early years of the McCarthy era and the beginning of the X-Files. In the early 1990s, Cohn was one of two subjects of Ron Vawter's one-man show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith; his part was written by Gary Indiana.[95] He was the subject of two 2019 documentaries: Bully, Coward, Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn, directed by Ivy Meeropol (a documentary filmmaker and granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg)[96] and Matt Tyrnauer's Where's My Roy Cohn?[97] Roland Blum, played by Michael Sheen, is a trickster lawyer inspired by Cohn, who appears in "The One Inspired by Roy Cohn", Season 3, Episode 2 of The Good Fight.[98] Cohn is portrayed by Will Brill in the Showtime miniseries Fellow Travelers (2023).[99][100] Jeremy Strong portrays Cohn in The Apprentice, a biographical film about Donald Trump's career as a businessman and his relationship with Cohn. He is also name checked in the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire".[101]