Did you know this, namely that Roy Cohn and Donald Trump go
way back, and that Cohn served Trump as what is called in certain kinds of
novels a fixer, a rabbi (no actual Judaism implied)?
One tidbit: "One of Mr. Trump’s executives recalled
that he kept an 8-by-10-inch photograph of Mr. Cohn in his office desk, pulling
it out to intimidate recalcitrant contractors."
Another: "For 13 years, the lawyer who had infamously
whispered in Mr. McCarthy’s ear whispered in Mr. Trump’s. In the process, Mr.
Cohn helped deliver some of Mr. Trump’s signature construction deals. . .
"
This is some hot reporting.
NY Times 6/21/16
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/21/us/politics/donald-trump-roy-cohn.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
The future Mrs. Donald J.
Trump was puzzled.
She had been summoned to a lunch meeting with her
husband-to-be and his lawyer to review a prenuptial agreement. It required
that, should the couple split, she return everything — cars, furs, rings — that
Mr. Trump might give her during their marriage.
Sensing her sorrow, Mr. Trump apologized, Ivana Trump later
testified in a divorce deposition, and said it was his lawyer’s idea.
“It is just one of those Roy Cohn numbers,” Mr. Trump told
her.
The year was 1977, and Mr. Cohn’s reputation was well
established. He had been Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting consigliere. He
had helped send
the Rosenbergs to the electric chair for spying and elect Richard M.
Nixon president.
Then New York’s most feared lawyer, Mr. Cohn had a client
list that ran the gamut from the disreputable to the quasi-reputable: Anthony (Fat
Tony) Salerno, Claus von
Bulow, George
Steinbrenner.
But there was one client who occupied a special place in Roy
Cohn’s famously cold heart: Donald J. Trump.
For Mr. Cohn, who died of AIDS
in 1986, weeks after being disbarred for flagrant ethical
violations, Mr. Trump was something of a final project. If Fred Trump got his
son’s career started, bringing him into the family business of middle-class
rentals in Brooklyn and Queens, Mr. Cohn ushered him across the river and into
Manhattan, introducing him to the social and political elite while ferociously
defending him against a growing list of enemies.
Decades later, Mr. Cohn’s influence on Mr. Trump is
unmistakable. Mr. Trump’s wrecking ball of a presidential bid — the gleeful
smearing of his opponents, the embracing of bluster as brand — has been a Roy
Cohn number on a grand scale. Mr. Trump’s response to
the Orlando massacre, with his ominous warnings of a terrorist
attack that could wipe out the country and his conspiratorial suggestions of a
Muslim fifth column in the United States, seemed to have been ripped straight
out of the Cohn playbook.
“I hear Roy in the things he says quite clearly,” said Peter
Fraser, who as Mr. Cohn’s lover for the last two years of his life spent a
great deal of time with Mr. Trump. “That bravado, and if you say it
aggressively and loudly enough, it’s the truth — that’s the way Roy used to
operate to a degree, and Donald was certainly his apprentice.”
For 13 years, the lawyer who had infamously whispered in Mr.
McCarthy’s ear whispered in Mr. Trump’s. In the process, Mr. Cohn helped
deliver some of Mr. Trump’s signature construction deals, sued the National
Football League for conspiring against his client and countersued the federal
government — for $100 million — for damaging the Trump name. One of Mr. Trump’s
executives recalled that he kept an 8-by-10-inch photograph of Mr. Cohn in his
office desk, pulling it out to intimidate recalcitrant contractors.
The two men spoke as often as five times a day, toasted each
other at birthday parties and spent evenings together at Studio 54.
And Mr. Cohn turned repeatedly to Mr. Trump — one of a small
clutch of people who knew he was gay — in his hours of need. When a former
companion was dying of AIDS, he asked Mr. Trump to find him a place to stay.
When he faced disbarment, he summoned Mr. Trump to testify to his character.
Mr. Trump says the two became so close that Mr. Cohn, who
had no immediate family, sometimes refused to bill him, insisting he could not
charge a friend.
“Roy was an era,” Mr. Trump said in an interview, reflecting
on his years with Mr. Cohn. “They either loved him or couldn’t stand him, which
was fine.”
Mr. Trump was asked if this reminded him of anyone. “Yeah,”
he answered. “It does, come to think of it.”
Business, Pleasure and Power
The gossip columnist Cindy Adams, who knew everyone, had no
idea who he was.
“This kid is going to own New York someday,” Mr. Cohn told
her, gesturing at a tall 20-something bachelor at a dinner party in the early
1970s. “This is Donald Trump.”
“Yeah, so?” Ms. Adams recalled replying.
Mr. Cohn, the son of a prominent New York judge, had taken
an uncommon interest in Mr. Trump.
The two had met not long before at a private disco called Le
Club, and instantly hit it off while discussing a nettlesome obstacle for Mr.
Trump. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department was suing him and
his father, accusing them
of refusing to rent to black tenants. Mr. Trump told Mr. Cohn that
their lawyers were urging them to settle.
“Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court,’” Mr.
Trump later recalled Mr. Cohn advising him.
Mr. Trump did just that, with Mr. Cohn as his lawyer. Not
only did Mr. Cohn countersue the government for $100 million, he filed a
blistering affidavit on Mr. Trump’s behalf, mocking the case. “The Civil Rights
Division did not file a lawsuit,” Mr. Cohn wrote. “It slapped together a piece
of paper for use as a press release.” The Trumps ultimately settled the case by
agreeing to make apartments available to minority renters, while admitting no
wrongdoing.
For Mr. Trump, the benefits of his new representation were
obvious. Mr. Cohn was one of the most famous and feared lawyers in America. He
would later appear on the cover of Esquire beneath an ironic halo, and earn a
posthumous parody on “The Simpsons.”
But Mr. Cohn saw something in Mr. Trump, too.
“He could sniff out a power-to-be, Roy could,” said Susan
Bell, Mr. Cohn’s longtime secretary.
After helping convict the Rosenbergs as a young federal
prosecutor and then working in Washington as a top aide to Mr. McCarthy, Mr.
Cohn had returned to New York, starting a boutique practice in his shabby but
elegant townhouse on East 68th Street.
The division of labor in the firm was clear.
“We called him the rainmaker,” said Michael Rosen, a partner
who handled many of the firm’s organized-crime cases. “We did all of the grunt
work, if grunt work means preparing the case and trying the case.”
Mr. Cohn lived on the third floor, often traipsing
downstairs in his bathrobe well after the workday had begun and taking clients
upstairs to a small sun porch. The elevator rarely worked. In the winter, the
lawyers stuffed towels around the windows to keep out the cold.
Parties and business meetings tended to blur, with
celebrities like Andy Warhol and Estée Lauder crowding in and spilling out.
“That townhouse was a workhorse,” recalled Mr. Trump, a familiar presence there
himself.
He and Mr. Cohn became social companions, lunching at “21”
or spending evenings at Yankee Stadium in the owner’s box of Mr. Steinbrenner, another Cohn
client.
After Mr. Fraser entered Mr. Cohn’s life, the two were
frequent dinner guests at Donald and Ivana’s Trump Tower apartment, with its
Michelangelo-style murals. They were also regulars at Mr. Trump’s owner’s box
at the Meadowlands, the home of his sports
team, the New Jersey Generals of the short-lived United States
Football League.
Mr. Cohn was the master of ceremonies at a Trump birthday
party at Studio 54; years later, Mr. Trump returned the favor with a birthday
toast of his own at a party in the atrium of Trump Tower, joking that Mr. Cohn
was more bark than bite.
“We just tell the opposition Roy Cohn is representing me,
and they get scared,” Mr. Trump said, according to a cousin of Mr. Cohn’s,
David L. Marcus, who attended. “He never actually does anything.”
Among the many things Mr. Trump learned from Mr. Cohn during
these years was the importance of keeping one’s name in the newspapers. Long
before Mr. Trump posed as his
own spokesman, passing self-serving tidbits to gossip columnists,
Mr. Cohn was known to call in stories about himself to reporters.
It was also through Mr. Cohn that Mr. Trump met the political
operative who has played a leading, if behind-the-scenes, role in his campaign:
Roger Stone.
When Mr. Stone, the roguish former Nixon adviser and master
of the political dark arts, came to New York in 1979 to court support for
Ronald Reagan’s presidential bid, he arrived with a box of index cards filled
with the names of actors and producers. And Roy Cohn.
“I made an appointment and I pitched him on Reagan, and he
said you have to meet Donald and Fred Trump,” Mr. Stone recalled in an
interview.
Eventually, Mr. Cohn and Mr. Trump became so inseparable
that those who could not track down Mr. Cohn knew whom to call.
Once, Mr. Cohn chartered a plane with friends, without Mr.
Trump, trashing it during a midair party. He refused to pay. So the airline
found Mr. Trump, asking if he could help.
He called Mr. Cohn, more amused than concerned.
“I said, ‘Roy, what are you going to do about this? I mean,
you destroyed the plane,’” Mr. Trump recalled. “He said, ‘Eh, we’ll pay them
someday.’”
An Invaluable Relationship
By the time Mr. Trump started getting serious with a Czech
model named Ivana Winklmayr, Mr. Cohn had become something of an expert on
marriage.
“It’s difficult to imagine and admit that the flush of the
moment may become the flush of the toilet as the relationship goes down the
tubes,” he wrote about the importance of prenuptial agreements in his book “How
to Stand Up for Your Rights — and Win!”
According to “Trump: The Greatest Show On Earth,” a book by
the journalist Wayne Barrett, Mr. Cohn advised Mr. Trump against marrying Ms.
Winklmayr, but insisted that if he must, there had to be a prenuptial
agreement. He would handle it himself.
The agreement, completed only weeks before the wedding, did
not quantify Mr. Trump’s net worth — “impossible to accurately determine due to
the illiquid nature of his holdings” — and took a bearish view of Mr. Trump’s
earning potential and a modest view of his tastes.
“Donald’s standard of living is basically simple,” it said,
calling Mr. Trump’s preferred lifestyle “neither opulent nor extravagant.”
When the marriage dissolved a few years after Mr. Cohn’s
death, Mrs. Trump’s lawyers charged that she had not had proper representation
on the prenup. Her initial lawyer had worked for Mr. Cohn on at least one case,
and was a frequent passenger on Mr. Cohn’s yacht, the Defiance. The divorce
case eventually ended with a settlement.
The prenup was just one of many Trump deals, some more
conventional than others, in which Mr. Cohn was intimately involved.
He used his connections to help Mr. Trump secure zoning
variances and tax abatements critical to the construction of the Grand Hyatt
Hotel and the Trump Plaza.
After one Cohn coup, Mr. Trump rewarded him with a pair of
diamond-encrusted cuff links and buttons in a Bulgari box.
And if Mr. Cohn did not always feel comfortable charging a
friend for his services, Mr. Trump was hardly one to put up a fight.
“Roy said, ‘I’ll leave it to Donald to give me what he
thinks is fair,’” Mr. Fraser recalled of one lengthy Trump tax case in
particular. “But, of course, Donald didn’t give him anything.”
Some work would have been difficult to bill. For instance,
Mr. Cohn lobbied
his friends in the Reagan White House to nominate Mr. Trump’s sister, Maryanne
Trump Barry, to the federal bench. (Questioned last year about this, Mr. Trump
said that his sister “got the appointment totally on her own merit.”)
“He was a very good lawyer if he wanted to be,” Mr. Trump
said in the interview.
Asked about Mr. Cohn in 1980, Mr. Trump was more blunt in
his assessment: “He’s been vicious to others in his protection of me.”
Defiant to the End
It started with a cut that would not stop bleeding.
Mr. Cohn’s diagnosis came not long after his former
companion, Russell Eldridge, had gotten his. Mr. Eldridge had spent most of his
final days in a private suite overlooking Central Park in Mr. Trump’s Barbizon
Plaza Hotel.
Ms. Bell, Mr. Cohn’s secretary, recalled that Mr. Trump’s
secretary, Norma Foerderer, had billed Mr. Cohn for the room, and later called
to say that Mr. Cohn had not paid.
“I said, ‘Guess what, Norma, he’s not going to,’” Ms. Bell
said. “And she kind of knew it.”
Mr. Cohn remained in his townhouse. Until the end — and even
under interrogation by Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes” — he insisted that he had
liver cancer, not AIDS.
Mr. Cohn and Mr. Trump in an undated photo with Steve
Rubell, the co-founder of Studio 54, and Mr. Trump’s first wife, Ivana.
He received experimental AZT treatments in Washington and
continued working. But his clients could not help but notice that his health
was deteriorating.
Mr. Trump started gradually moving cases elsewhere, he said,
never telling Mr. Cohn why. “There’s no reason to hurt somebody’s feelings,” he
said.
“He was so weak,” Mr. Trump added. “He was so weakened that
he really couldn’t do it.”
Mr. Cohn never spoke about Mr. Trump’s decision, but was
plainly crushed, according to Ms. Bell. She remembers it happening not
gradually, but “overnight.”
Even as his health was failing, Mr. Cohn, whom government
prosecutors had unsuccessfully pursued for decades on charges including
conspiracy, bribery and fraud, faced a final indignity: He was facing
disbarment. Among other offenses, he was charged with coercing a dying
multimillionaire client — during a late-night visit to the man’s hospital room
— to amend his will to make Mr. Cohn an executor of his estate.
The hearings were closed to the public. But true to form,
Mr. Cohn, riding to the daily proceedings in a red Cadillac convertible,
insisted on a spectacle, describing his accusers as “a bunch of yo-yos just out
to smear me up.”
The prominent figures whom Mr. Cohn summoned to testify on
his behalf included Barbara Walters and William F. Buckley Jr.
And, of course, Mr. Trump. He described his friend in simple
terms.
“If I summed it up in one word,” Mr. Trump told the hearing
panel, “I think the primary word I’d use is his loyalty.”
Gaunt, frail and besieged, Mr. Cohn nevertheless managed to
attend a dinner with Mr. Fraser at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., shortly
after Mr. Trump purchased the property in late 1985. It was a last glimpse at
his final, fair-haired project.
“I made Trump successful,” he would occasionally boast,
according to Mr. Marcus, Mr. Cohn’s cousin, a former journalist who chronicled
Mr. Cohn’s last months for Vanity Fair.
In June 1986, Mr. Cohn was disbarred for “unethical,”
“unprofessional” and “particularly reprehensible” conduct.
To this day, Mr. Trump rues the outcome. “They only got him
because he was so sick,” Mr. Trump said in the interview. “They wouldn’t have
gotten him otherwise.”
During his final days, Mr. Cohn called Mr. Trump, ostensibly
for no particular reason. “It was just a call: ‘How are things going?’” Mr.
Trump recalled. “Roy was the kind of guy — I don’t think he ever thought he was
dying, frankly.”
About a week later, in August 1986, Mr. Trump received
another call.
Mr. Trump hung up the phone, repeating the news to an
associate in his office: Roy Cohn was
dead.
“I said, ‘Wow, that’s the end of a generation,’” Mr. Trump
remembered. “‘That’s the end of an era.’”
Mr. Fraser inherited all of Mr. Cohn’s possessions: the
townhouse, his weekend place in Greenwich, Conn., his Rolls-Royce, his private
plane and much more. But the Internal Revenue Service, collecting on Mr. Cohn’s
tax debts, confiscated nearly everything.
He did get to keep the cuff links Mr. Trump had given Mr.
Cohn. Years later, Mr. Fraser had them appraised; they were knockoffs, he said.
Mr. Fraser soon returned to his native New Zealand, where he
now works as a conservationist at the Auckland Zoo. He has not spoken with Mr.
Trump since Mr. Cohn’s death, but he has no doubt that if his former lover were
still alive, he would be an enthusiastic supporter of the Trump campaign.
“Having trained or mentored someone who became president,”
he said, “that would have been quite exciting for Roy.”
Reporting was contributed by Michael Barbaro, Steve Eder,
Maggie Haberman and Megan Twohey. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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