{"id":1219,"date":"2026-08-05T10:37:36","date_gmt":"2026-08-05T10:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1219"},"modified":"2026-08-05T10:37:36","modified_gmt":"2026-08-05T10:37:36","slug":"the-mentor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=1219","title":{"rendered":"The Mentor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When President Donald Trump\u2019s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from a federal investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, in 2017, the President was angry. \u201cWhere\u2019s my Roy Cohn?\u201d he yelled. But Roy Cohn\u2014an American scoundrel and the lawyer who helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, aided Senator Joseph McCarthy in implementing the Red Scare, and showed Trump the ropes in the real-estate business\u2014was long gone.<\/p>\n

Read more Michigan Primary-Election Map: Live Results<\/a><\/p>\n

Trump and Cohn had met forty-four years earlier, in 1973. The New York Post<\/em> gossip columnist Cindy Adams later reported that her old friend Cohn had introduced her to his new prot\u00e9g\u00e9 at a dinner party soon after. Trump was not yet thirty, and an ambitious outer-borough real-estate developer. In her column, Adams wrote that Cohn told her, \u201cOne day this kid is going to own New York.\u201d Cohn, who was a closeted gay man, was invariably attracted to what could be called \u00fcber-Gentiles\u2014tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed. \u201cRoy loved to surround himself with attractive straight men,\u201d Robert S. Cohen, a divorce lawyer who\u2019d worked for him in the sixties, observed. Trump\u2014blond, six feet three\u2014fit the bill.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

The scene of their first encounter was Le Club, a private dining venue at 416 East Fifty-fifth Street, half a block from the East River. Cohn was a member. Opened on New Year\u2019s Eve, in 1960, Le Club occupied a small white stucco house; a brass plaque reading \u201cMembers Only\u201d was its only signage. The place had an international, jet-set atmosphere. Igor Cassini, a former society columnist for the Hearst papers and the brother of Oleg Cassini, Jacqueline Kennedy\u2019s favorite couturier, was the chairman of Le Club\u2019s board.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy-five-year-old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden,\u201d Trump wrote in his 1987 book, \u201cThe Art of the Deal.\u201d In a few years, Trump would boast about being \u201ca director\u201d of Le Club, but in 1973 he was living in a rent-controlled studio at 196 East Seventy-fifth Street. The \u201cdark, dingy little apartment,\u201d as Trump described it, had a view of a water tank. His father, Fred Trump, had named him president of the Trump Management Corporation in 1971. The company owned thousands of rental units in Queens and Brooklyn, but the younger Trump was eager to expand the family empire into Manhattan. He wanted, he wrote, to be \u201ca city guy instead of a kid from the boroughs.\u201d He had joined Le Club because he thought it could help him make inroads into Manhattan society. Trump was having dinner there one evening when he spotted Cohn at a nearby table.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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In \u201cThe Art of the Deal,\u201d Trump recalls their meeting, a description that is likely embellished. He claims that, after he got introduced to Cohn, Trump told him, \u201cI don\u2019t like lawyers. I think all they do is delay deals, instead of making deals, and every answer they give you is no, and they are always looking to settle instead of fight.\u201d He continues, \u201cI\u2019m just not built that way. I\u2019d rather fight than fold, because as soon as you fold once, you get the reputation of being a folder.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an interview with us last year, Trump relayed a different version of the meeting, claiming that it had been Cohn who\u2019d initiated the conversation. \u201cI was doing very well, I guess people were reading a lot about me,\u201d he said. \u201cI remember it very vividly\u2014he was with a whole group of guys, and he came over, he wanted to introduce himself.\u201d Trump went on, \u201cHe said, \u2018Maybe\u00a0we\u2019ll do some business\u2014if you ever have a case. I\u2019d love to work with you.\u2019 I remember that he didn\u2019t have cards. He wasn\u2019t a card person. But I called him up.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more plausible that Trump, then a virtual unknown, introduced himself to Cohn and nervously explained that he needed some legal advice. In \u201cThe Art of the Deal,\u201d he describes their conversation: \u201cThe government has just filed suit against our company\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. saying that we discriminated against blacks,\u201d Trump told Cohn, and asked,\u201cWhat do you think I should do?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove that you discriminated,\u201d Cohn snapped. Trump thought that this was splendid advice.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t long before Cohn began introducing Trump around town. \u201cI got to know everybody,\u201d Trump said. In November, 1973, Cohn invited his new prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to a black-tie dinner at the Biltmore Hotel to celebrate his twenty-fifth anniversary as a practicing attorney. (The event doubled as a fund-raiser for the Cardinal Spellman foundation and the American Jewish League Against Communism.) Cohn\u2019s friend William F. Buckley, Jr., paid tribute to him in a speech: \u201cRoy Cohn is a man who has triumphed over his tormentors, and he deserves the credit we are here to give him so enthusiastically.\u201d A congratulatory letter from President Richard Nixon was read to the guests, who included the State Supreme Court justice John M. Murtagh and the mayor-elect Abraham Beame. Trump was enthralled. He craved these connections, and he knew that, in Cohn, he had found the kind of tough lawyer he needed to fight the government\u2019s discrimination charges.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s father, Fred, appears to have had a long history of racism. On Memorial Day, 1927, when Fred was twenty-one, he was arrested for refusing to disperse during a violent confrontation between police and a band of white-hooded Klansmen in Queens; he was released shortly after. (It\u2019s unclear what role he played in the riot.) Almost thirty years later, a tenant living in one of Fred\u2019s first major developments, the Beach Haven apartment complex, in Brooklyn, was so disturbed by the racial discrimination he observed from the management that he wrote a song about it. The song was called \u201cOld Man Trump.\u201d The tenant was Woody Guthrie.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.
Beach Haven is Trump\u2019s Tower
Where no Black folks come to roam<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

By 1973, when Trump met Cohn, the evidence that Fred\u2019s company had discriminated against Black people seemed undeniable. According to the Justice Department filing, thirty-nine Trump-owned apartment buildings had systematically barred Black people from renting. The Feds had found four Trump superintendents or rental agents willing to confirm that applications were coded by race; the forms would be marked by a large capital \u201cC\u201d to indicate that the applicants were \u201ccolored.\u201d One Trump employee described the policy to an F.B.I. agent: \u201cFred Trump told me not to rent to Blacks. He also wanted me to get rid of the Blacks that were in the building by telling them cheap housing was available to them at only five hundred dollars down payment, which Trump would offer to pay himself.\u201d These activities would have been a clear violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.<\/p>\n

The Feds would have been satisfied had the Trumps merely signed a consent decree, agreeing to integrate their approximately fifteen thousand units; there would have been no fine and no admission of guilt. But Cohn encouraged Trump to reject the decree, and to assert that the Feds were pressuring the company to rent to \u201cwelfare recipients.\u201d Exasperated, the Justice Department filed a formal discrimination suit, whereupon Cohn countersued the government for defamation, seeking a hundred million dollars in damages. Cohn and Trump held a press conference at the New York Hilton to announce their suit. Steven Brill, the founder of The American Lawyer<\/em>, later said that he had been stunned that any reporters had shown up: \u201cYou couldn\u2019t get through your second day of law school without knowing it was a totally bogus lawsuit.\u201d<\/p>\n

The stunt, a show of bravado, dominated local headlines, but, a month later, a federal judge dismissed the Trumps\u2019 suit as frivolous, scolding Cohn that he was \u201cwasting time and paper.\u201d Trump and Cohn refused to back down, and they refused to engage with the accusations of racism. A friend of Cohn\u2019s told us that, in private, Cohn routinely referred to Black people as \u201cthe Schvartze,\u201d a slur he\u2019d picked up from his mother, Dora, and that on at least one occasion he was heard using the N-word. Trump always said that\u00a0he was color-blind and that his only criterion for tenants was the income of the male head of household: \u201cWe don\u2019t generally include the wife\u2019s income. We like to see it for the male in the family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohn dragged out the litigation for twenty months. He attacked the credibility of the government\u2019s key witness, a former Trump employee, claiming that he had been coerced by a \u201cGestapo-like interrogation.\u201d He also filed an affidavit charging that F.B.I. agents had been acting like \u201cstormtroopers.\u201d The judge reprimanded Cohn for his statements, which he described as \u201cutterly without foundation.\u201d Cohn quickly retracted his remark about stormtroopers. \u201cI have never brought a charge against the F.B.I. in my life. I have personal reasons why I haven\u2019t, and I never would,\u201d he said, alluding to his close friendship with the former F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover. \u201cMy relationship [to the F.B.I.] is much too close.\u201d But these digressions were great theatre, with Cohn as the ringmaster. The circus antics served to delay the proceedings further.<\/p>\n

One day, in court, Cohn filed a contempt motion against a junior member of the prosecution\u2019s team, Donna F. Goldstein. He claimed that Goldstein had been calling up prospective witnesses at 4 A.M.<\/em> and threatening to have them jailed if they didn\u2019t testify against Trump. Had this been true, Goldstein could have been disbarred. The accusation was serious enough that the judge halted the main case to hold a hearing to rule on the contempt motion. On the day of the hearing, according to a young trial attorney who was present, Cohn stood up in court and said, \u201cYour Honor, the girl\u201d\u2014Goldstein\u2014\u201cmade a mistake, and, if she promises not to do this again, I will withdraw the motion.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The trial attorney was struck by how deferential the judge was to Cohn. On another occasion, this attorney watched as Trump\u2019s deposition was being taken. Cohn took the lawyer aside and told him, \u201cLeave Donald alone. He\u2019s going to be big one day.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reflecting on the suit later, in \u201cThe Art of the Deal,\u201d Trump writes, \u201cThe idea of settling drove me crazy.\u201d But that\u2019s exactly what he did, finally signing, in June, 1975, virtually the same consent decree that he could have signed in 1973. He agreed to initiate a program that required him to advertise his rentals in Black-owned newspapers and to list vacancies with the New York Urban League, a civil-rights organization. He paid no fines and made no admission of guilt. The Justice Department, however, described the decree as \u201cone of the most far-reaching ever negotiated.\u201d A headline in the Black-owned New York Amsterdam News<\/em> proclaimed, \u201cMinorities win housing suit<\/em>,\u201d and the accompanying story alerted readers that \u201cqualified Blacks and Puerto Ricans now have the opportunity to rent apartments owned by Trump Management.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump and Cohn nevertheless declared victory. Winning, Cohn was fond of saying, was not enough\u2014people needed to know about it. And in the coming years Trump repeatedly claimed that he had won the case.<\/p>\n

Three years later, the Feds declared the Trumps to be in contempt of the consent decree, alleging continuing discrimination. Cohn told reporters that the new charges were a \u201crehash,\u201d without \u201cthe slightest merit.\u201d (He had previously called the government\u2019s case \u201ca spit in the ocean.\u201d) But the matter fizzled, and the Trumps never admitted wrongdoing. The lesson Trump took from Cohn was that the facts could always be drowned out by strident counterclaims. Trump never incurred any financial consequences for his alleged discriminatory practices.<\/p>\n

By then, Trump had moved on to the bigger playing field of Manhattan real estate. He had already learned a lot from Cohn. \u201cI was very young, and Roy was a very political guy,\u201d Trump later told the Times\u2019<\/em> Maggie Haberman. \u201cA different kind of guy.\u201d Trump was astonished to see Cohn\u2019s name in the tabloids several times a week. Cohn taught him that the pyrotechnics of publicity were more important than the law. What counted was controlling the narrative.<\/p>\n

\u201cRoy was a master of situational immorality,\u201d Sam Roberts, who covered city politics for the Daily News<\/em> in the seventies, told Matt Tyrnauer, the director of the documentary \u201cWhere\u2019s My Roy Cohn?\u201d \u201cHe had rules about how to exercise power.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. You would always try to goad your enemies into being the worst they possibly could be and then turn that against them, so that Roy Cohn would actually look like the good guy, which he virtually never was.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Cohn taught Trump not to worry about what other people thought of him. \u201cHe would just make light of the fact that people in the family just didn\u2019t care about him,\u201d David Marcus, whose father was Cohn\u2019s cousin, told Tyrnauer. Trump, Marcus said, manifested a different kind of narcissism, \u201ca narcissism combined with insecurity. But in Roy it was a total security in who he was, except for the fact that he didn\u2019t want people knowing in public he was gay.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump viewed Cohn as a means to meeting influential people. One of the worlds that Cohn initiated him into was Studio 54, whose owners were clients. Trump attended Cohn\u2019s fifty-second birthday party at the night club. The comedian Joey Adams (Cindy Adams\u2019s husband) served as m.c.; one of his regular gag lines was \u201cIf you\u2019re indicted, you\u2019re invited.\u201d Marcus recalled being at Studio 54 with both Trump and Cohn. \u201cRoy\u2019s eyes were glued to Trump.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. He watched everything Trump did.\u201d Trump sometimes wandered downstairs to check out the semiprivate V.I.P. rooms. \u201cI saw things happening there that to this day I have never seen again,\u201d he told the writer Timothy L. O\u2019Brien. \u201cI would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until the early seventies, Trump had been basically an errand boy, collecting rents for his demanding, imperious father. It was not a glamorous job. But Trump was deeply ambitious, and he understood that, in the world of commercial real estate, he needed government tax abatements, zoning exceptions, and friendly city regulators in order to make profitable deals. Cohn was a fixer who could pave the way.<\/p>\n

That same year, Cohn had played a key role in the election of the city\u2019s new mayor, Abraham Beame, whom Cohn had known since he was a young man. By 1973, as the city comptroller, he was running for the Party\u2019s mayoral nomination. His leading opponent was the Bronx congressman Mario Biaggi. Cohn leaked a story to the Times<\/em> that Biaggi had pleaded the Fifth the year before when questioned by a federal grand jury, and the controversy helped sink Biaggi\u2019s candidacy. Beame was sworn in as New York\u2019s first Jewish mayor in early 1974, and Cohn became a trusted adviser. Although Cohn had earned a reputation as a right-wing attack dog for his work with McCarthy, he was now a powerful figure in the Democratic Party clubhouse.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Three weeks after Beame\u2019s inauguration, according to the Village Voice<\/em> journalist Wayne Barrett, Trump was trying to persuade Ned Eichler, a businessman who managed some of Penn Central railroad\u2019s properties in Manhattan, to partner with him on a real-estate deal in midtown. Eichler asked Trump for proof that he had the political connections to obtain the necessary zoning permits.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat kind of proof?\u201d Trump asked. Eichler replied that he\u2019d want to talk to the Mayor, to make sure he was on board.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen do you want to see him?\u201d Trump asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cTomorrow at 2 P.M.<\/em>,\u201d Eichler said.<\/p>\n

Trump told Eichler that his limousine would pick him up at one-thirty. The next afternoon, Trump met his new business partner in the Mayor\u2019s office. He\u2019d brought along his father, who had contributed to Beame\u2019s campaign. The Trumps quickly briefed the Mayor on the deal and why it would benefit the city, and then the five-foot-two Beame stood, reached his arms up to pat the shoulders of the two Trumps, and said, \u201cWhatever Donald and Fred want, they have my complete backing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fred may have made a phone call to City Hall, but it\u2019s far more likely that Cohn orchestrated the meeting. He would be Trump\u2019s legal counsel and fixer on all his Manhattan deals for the remainder of the seventies. In 1975, Trump and Cohn were focussing on a property owned by Penn Central, which was going bankrupt: the dilapidated Commodore Hotel, at East Forty-second Street, adjacent to Grand Central Terminal.<\/p>\n

When it was built, in 1919, the hotel was one of the most colossal structures of its kind in New York. The Commodore had been named after Cornelius (the Commodore) Vanderbilt, the railway tycoon who had built Grand Central, in 1871. But by the nineteen-seventies the establishment had become a symbol of the city\u2019s financial squalor. The decrepit hotel was barely operating. Half its rooms were empty. Homeless people squatted on the ground floor. A massage parlor occupied one of its storefronts. It was an embarrassing eyesore.<\/p>\n

Mayor Beame was eager to sell the hotel to a suitable developer, but there were few prospects. New York was on\u00a0the brink of bankruptcy, and the Republican-controlled federal government was not sympathetic. After one of the Mayor\u2019s visits to Washington, D.C., President Gerald Ford made it clear that no federal money would be forthcoming for a bailout. The Daily News<\/em> reported the President\u2019s rebuff with a front-page headline: \u201cFORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump was the only developer who showed serious interest in taking on the Commodore. But many in the real-estate business were dubious; they regarded Trump as a blowhard. One banker told the Times<\/em> that Trump was \u201coverrated\u201d and \u201ctotally obnoxious.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump could be disarmingly frank about his ambitions. Michael Bailkin, who ran Beame\u2019s Office of Lower Manhattan Development, began meeting with Trump to discuss the possible deal. After several sessions in a Third Avenue bar, Bailkin blurted out, \u201cYou\u2019re a very shallow person.\u201d Trump replied, \u201cOf course. That\u2019s one of my strengths. I never pretend to be anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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During the negotiations, it became clear that Trump was having trouble persuading a bank to lend him the seventy million dollars he needed to renovate the hotel. The banks would make the loan only if the city awarded the developer a tax abatement.<\/p>\n

Bailkin came up with a novel solution: the Commodore would be given to a municipal agency, making it tax exempt, and Trump would lease it from the agency and develop it. Trump paid a rock-bottom ten million dollars to acquire the rights to lease the property, and he was given an extraordinary forty-year tax abatement, saving him approximately four million dollars a year in property taxes. He would pay a nominal annual \u201crent,\u201d starting at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.<\/p>\n

Completing the deal took two years, and it was Cohn who finalized the details. He\u2019d approached his good friend Deputy Mayor Stanley M. (Bugsy) Friedman with a proposition. Friedman was already a silent business partner of Cohn\u2019s, having arranged for him to lease a half-dozen city-owned parking lots that generated thousands of dollars a week. The parking operation was funnelled through shell companies Cohn operated from his home, and he reported far less revenue than he was earning. In effect, he was regularly stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from New York.<\/p>\n

Friedman played a pivotal role in Trump\u2019s Commodore deal, casting the deciding vote in its favor at a 1976 Board of Estimate meeting. He was thus in a position to get the tax abatement approved, days before the Beame administration gave way to Mayor Ed Koch\u2019s regime. In turn, Friedman secured for himself a major perk in return for securing the tax break: a lifetime appointment as chairman of the city\u2019s Water Board, a position that paid twenty-five thousand dollars a year and included the use of a chauffeured limousine. In addition, Cohn invited Friedman to become a partner at his law firm, Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, and gave Friedman his own spacious office. The Wall Street Journal<\/em>, in its coverage of the Commodore story, called Trump\u2019s unprecedented abatement \u201cthe tax deal of the century.\u201d<\/p>\n

In September, 1980, the hotel reopened as the Grand Hyatt. Trump had gutted the Commodore, replacing its brick exterior with bronze-tinted glass and steel. The new hotel had fourteen hundred rooms, a shiny ballroom, and convention facilities.<\/p>\n

The Commodore deal was always controversial. Some wondered how a young and inexperienced developer had managed to get such good terms. \u201cDonald Trump runs with the same clique that continues to manipulate things behind the scenes in this city,\u201d the city councilman Henry J. Stern told the Times<\/em>, calling the deal \u201ca sweetheart contract.\u201d Stern went on, \u201cRoy Cohn is his lawyer. He throws around a lot of money in political campaigns.\u201d In response, Cohn told the paper, \u201cDonald wishes he didn\u2019t have to give money to politicians, but he knows it\u2019s part of the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohn also encouraged Trump\u2019s flair for finding the spotlight. \u201cHe is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford\u201d read the opening lines of a fawning Times<\/em> profile of Trump, written by Judy Klemesrud and published in November, 1976. \u201cHe rides around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac with his initials, DJT, on the plates. He dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant clubs and, at only 30 years of age, estimates that he is worth \u2018more than $200 million.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Our Fauci Diaries, Ourselves<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump had made a close study of Cohn, from the vanity license plates to the chunky car phone he had installed in his limo. But it was all gloss. Trump was not worth two hundred million dollars. In 1977, he paid $42,386 in taxes on an income of $118,530. In 1978, his salary, less than a hundred thousand a year, was paid by his father.<\/p>\n

Another thing Cohn taught Trump was that he should always avoid a paper trail. Cohn, Trump said, \u201cdid not take notes.\u201d And he didn\u2019t want other people taking notes about what he said, either. Trump learned from Cohn to conduct business over the phone.<\/p>\n

Wayne Barrett saw Cohn\u2019s stamp all over Trump. \u201cBoth of them are attack dogs,\u201d he said. Trump responded to that characterization in a 2016 interview with the Washington Post:<\/em> \u201cWell, I don\u2019t see myself as an attack dog. I see myself as somebody that\u2019s made a lot of money and done a great job and put a lot of people to work, but I don\u2019t see myself as an attack dog unless I\u2019m attacked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump and Cohn talked on the phone constantly. \u201cDonald calls me fifteen to twenty times a day,\u201d Cohn told Marie Brenner, the journalist. \u201cHe is always asking, \u2018What is the status of this\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. and that?\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Another trait Trump picked up from Cohn was being cavalier about paying bills. Cohn never had a credit card, and he once said that he\u2019d regularly leave his house \u201cwithout two cents in my pocket.\u201d He ignored the small invoices that piled up on his desk. The trial attorney who worked with Cohn recalled seeing a letter from one of his venders. \u201cDear Roy,\u201d the vender wrote. \u201cI\u2019m still waiting for a payment of $10,000.\u201d\u00a0Cohn scribbled in reply, \u201cDear Louie\u2014Fuck you, Roy.\u201d In 1976, Cohn\u2019s law firm was in arrears on bills for office furniture, stationery, travel agents, and locksmith and telegraphic services. It owed $10,121.92 on expenses related to a company plane.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe would go to restaurants,\u201d Pamela Newhouse Mensch, Cohn\u2019s friend, said, \u201cand he just ran a tab. I never saw him actually pay. He just didn\u2019t care.\u201d By the seventies, Cohn had a reputation, as the Voice<\/em> put it, \u201cas a celebrity cheapskate and flimflammer.\u201d One creditor told a reporter, \u201cHe lives like a millionaire, buys like a millionaire, and pays like a pauper.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1976, the I.R.S. insisted that Cohn owed three hundred and seventy thousand dollars in back taxes. He had been under audit for seventeen years. In 1978, he accused the I.R.S. of engaging in a \u201cvendetta.\u201d By 1985, the I.R.S. claimed that Cohn owed more than three million dollars. Cohn flaunted his insolence about taxes, once writing an article in Parade<\/em> titled \u201cYou Can Beat the IRS.\u201d \u201cI am an expert on the subject,\u201d he wrote, and even offered tips on how to hide income from the Feds. \u201cKeep one step ahead of them. If there is a problem, change bank accounts so they can\u2019t grab your funds by knowing from your records where you bank.\u201d He tried to put the I.R.S. off the scent by opening accounts with tiny deposits in rural Connecticut.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Lawsuits from creditors left Cohn\u2019s assets untouched because his houses, Rolls-Royce, plane, and yacht were leased or held in the name of shell companies. For a time, in the late seventies, the deed to his town house on East Sixty-eighth Street was mysteriously put in the name of his firm\u2019s office manager, Jerry Howard.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll I own are the clothes on my back and some personal possessions,\u201d Cohn said. \u201cI have no assets. I want no assets, and I need no assets. My parents are dead. I am not married, I have no kids. I don\u2019t need an estate. If anything happens to me, the law firm has a one-million-dollar policy on my life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Steven Brill noticed that, during the 2016 Presidential campaign, Trump sounded just like Cohn, using the same idioms and tough-guy language\u2014\u201cIf you wanna know the truth\u201d or \u201cThat<\/em> I can tell you.\u201d Whenever Cohn was about to tell a big lie, Brill recalled, he\u2019d preface it with the phrase \u201cto be absolutely frank.\u201d Cohn also taught Trump to talk off the cuff, according to Roger Stone, a friend of Cohn\u2019s who met Trump in 1979. \u201cTrump\u2019s greatest art form would have to be his ability to improvise,\u201d Stone said to Tyrnauer. \u201cThis is a man who is working without a net.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. And he uses the tactics and the strategy of Roy Cohn to be in your face, to attack, to drive the argument.\u201d He continued, \u201cPolitics is about who dominates the dialogue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump admired Cohn\u2019s snarling deportment. Not long after they met, he put a signed photograph of Cohn in his office, and, whenever in-person negotiations with adversaries became tense, he would point to the photo and say, \u201cWould you rather deal with him?\u201d Cohn inspired fear. \u201cThe mere sending of a letter from Roy Cohn has saved us a lot of money,\u201d Trump told the writer Ken Auletta, who profiled Cohn for Esquire<\/em> in 1978. \u201cWhen people know that Roy is involved, they\u2019d rather not get involved in the lawsuits.\u201d On the other hand, Trump learned that, in an actual courtroom, Cohn had a tendency to wing it. \u201cHe could go into a case without any notes,\u201d Trump wrote in \u201cThe Art of the Deal.\u201d \u201cWhen he was prepared, he was brilliant and almost unbeatable. However, he wasn\u2019t always prepared.\u201d Trump claimed that he would interrogate Cohn before every court date. \u201cIf he wasn\u2019t prepared, I\u2019d push for a postponement,\u201d Trump said.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t mind that Cohn was controversial. In an interview last year, Trump told us, \u201cHe was a wonderful lawyer. He did a very good job.\u201d The President went on, \u201cOther people probably would say that they weren\u2019t happy with him. But that\u2019s the way life goes, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1976, Trump started dating Ivana Zeln\u00ed\u010dkov\u00e1 Winklmayr, a twenty-seven-year-old model from Czechoslovakia. They had met at Maxwell\u2019s Plum, a stained-glass-encrusted Upper East Side singles bar. In a 2016 interview with the New York Post<\/em>, Ivana described meeting \u201cthis tall blond guy with blue eyes. He said, \u2018I\u2019m Donald Trump, and I see you\u2019re looking for a table. I can help you.\u2019 I look at my friends and said, \u2018The good news is, we\u2019re going to get a table real fast. The bad news is, this guy is going to be sitting with us.\u2019\u00a0\u201d The next morning, Trump sent a hundred roses to Ivana\u2019s hotel. A fast-tracked courtship followed, with dinners at Le Club, \u201c21,\u201d and Tavern on the Green. After five months of dating, Trump broached marriage, on a ski trip in Aspen. (For years, he would brag, falsely, that Ivana had been an alternate for the Czech Olympic ski team.) Back in New York, Trump bought a three-carat diamond engagement ring from Tiffany\u2019s. But, when he called Cohn to tell him the news, his friend discouraged him. \u201cYou\u2019re better off not married,\u201d Cohn insisted. \u201cI don\u2019t know why you want to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump pushed ahead with his engagement, but he did allow Cohn to sell him on getting a prenuptial agreement. An early version of the contract, drafted by Cohn, included a clause providing Ivana with a cash bonus for each child she bore, and another required her to return any gifts from her husband if they divorced. When Ivana saw the draft, she was shocked, and threatened to walk. Trump struck the offending clauses and blamed Cohn for having crafted them. New language was inserted to explicitly provide that, in the event of a divorce, Ivana could retain her clothing and any personal gifts from Trump and others. She got a hundred-thousand-dollar \u201crainy day\u201d fund deposited in her personal savings account. But Cohn prevailed when it came to potential alimony; the final agreement stipulated that, if the couple divorced before nine years of marriage, Ivana would receive only thirty thousand dollars a year. The agreement read: \u201cUnder no circumstances will Ivana ever be possessed of or attempt to lay claim to any of Donald\u2019s holdings or interest in his family business interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

The prenup was shockingly one-sided. \u201cDonald has explained to Ivana and Ivana warrants that she is aware that Donald\u2019s standard of living and lifestyle are neither opulent nor extravagant in that neither he nor the companies in which he has an interest own yachts, planes or the usual appurtenances generally connected with large and substantial businesses,\u201d one part of the document reads. \u201cIvana acknowledges that she is familiar with the fact that Donald\u2019s standard of living is basically simple and will continue to be so after the marriage herein contemplated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ivana signed the prenup, a decision she regretted in 1990, when the couple split. (The divorce was granted on the ground of \u201ccruel and inhuman treatment.\u201d) Her lawyer for the prenup, Lawrence H. Levner, was also Cohn\u2019s lawyer, handpicked by him to represent his client\u2019s future wife. According to Christine Seymour, the switchboard operator at Cohn\u2019s firm, who listened in on conversations, \u201cLarry was a bozo. Roy wouldn\u2019t have hired him to referee a dog show.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Larry was just there because Roy could control him.\u201d Cohn had served his client well. He knew, he acknowledged later, that, by definition, such agreements protect the wealthier spouse: \u201cYou are stripping a spouse of a marital right.\u201d<\/p>\n

The couple married in April, 1977, in a Manhattan church ceremony presided over by Norman Vincent Peale, the radio personality and best-selling author of \u201cThe Power of Positive Thinking.\u201d The pews were filled with Fred Trump\u2019s business and political associates, including Mayor Beame and Cohn. Afterward, Cohn attended the reception at the 21 Club, where he served as toastmaster. The next morning, the newlyweds flew to Acapulco for a quick honeymoon before returning so that Trump could continue his negotiations over the Commodore.<\/p>\n

Even before the Grand Hyatt project was completed, Trump began to put together a deal to erect what would become his most emblematic building: Trump Tower. He had his eye on the old Bonwit Teller department store at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-sixth Street. After learning that the store was struggling financially, he acquired a lease on the space and then started negotiating to purchase the air rights above the neighboring building that housed Tiffany & Co.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump\u2019s aspirations were large. He had in mind a mixed-use skyscraper that would house luxury apartments above and offices and shops on the lower floors. In 1980, he brought Cohn into the project to help him obtain the building permits and zoning exceptions. That spring, crews began demolishing the Bonwit Teller building, a beloved landmark designed by Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore, the architects of Grand Central Terminal, and soon Trump found himself embroiled in a series of controversies. For one thing, after preservationists sounded an alarm about the demolition, Trump had promised to save a pair of Art Deco bas-relief friezes and a large nickel-plated grille, situated over the store\u2019s entrance, and to donate them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Despite this pledge, the sculptures were jackhammered into rubble. A story about the fracas in New York<\/em> magazine showed Trump utilizing several P.R. tactics learned from Cohn. He called the smashed friezes \u201cworthless\u201d and crowed that the bad publicity had been a windfall: \u201cThe morning after the story hit the front pages of the Times<\/em>, I must have gotten two dozen calls from people who wanted apartments in Trump Tower. It was fantastic promotion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump also got into trouble for hiring more than two hundred undocumented Polish laborers to handle the demolition. (They were employed by a firm called Kaszycki and Sons, which mainly did window washing.) Trump paid them substandard wages, and their working conditions were appalling. When the workers threatened to halt the project, Trump called in Cohn, who arranged to hire a different crew from House Wreckers Union Local 95, which was under the control of one of his mobster clients. (Several of the Polish workers sued, and, fifteen years later, Trump paid $1.4 million to settle the case.)<\/p>\n

When construction started on Trump Tower, Cohn directed Trump to the mafioso Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno, an important player in what was known as the Concrete Club, a syndicate that controlled the pouring of cement in Manhattan. This was critical to Trump\u2019s project because his architects had persuaded him to build the skyscraper with a concrete skeleton nearly devoid of steel bars. Trump hired S&A Concrete, which was jointly owned by Salerno, the underboss of the Genovese crime family, and Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino clan, who would be gunned down at Sparks Steak House, in 1985. When unionized cement workers went on strike in the summer of 1982, the workers at Trump Tower continued to pour cement. \u201cThey were unbelievably good contractors in terms of doing the work,\u201d Trump later told the Wall Street Journal<\/em>. \u201cBut a lot of them were supposedly associated with the mob.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not only did Cohn keep the cement flowing at Trump Tower; he also orchestrated the early sales of its unbuilt luxury apartments. His client Robert J. Hopkins, a Lucchese crime family associate, bought two apartments on the fifty-ninth and sixtieth floors for $1.6 million. Such sales helped to create the buzz that enabled Trump to sell the other two hundred and sixty units.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Additionally, when, in 1981, Mayor Koch denied Trump a critical tax abatement for the project, Trump brought in Cohn to get the decision reversed. Trump had expected to qualify for a 421-A tax exemption because his tower was improving the neighborhood and increasing the assessed value of the site. But the law in question, from 1971, had been designed to encourage developers to build low- and middle-income housing. The expected abatement was worth millions of dollars and would have been held for ten years. Koch believed that tax breaks of that magnitude should not be used to subsidize luxury apartments. When Trump learned that the tax break had been nixed, he phoned the Mayor\u2019s housing commissioner, Anthony Gliedman, in a rage and warned him, \u201cI want you to know that I am a very rich and powerful person in this town and there is a reason I got that way. I will never forget what you did.\u201d<\/p>\n

In April, 1981, Cohn filed an appeal before the New York State Supreme Court. More than a year later, the court ruled 7\u20130 that the Koch administration should reconsider Trump\u2019s application. But Trump was turned down once more. Relentless, Cohn refiled the appeal and went through the whole process again. This time, they got a different result.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy lawyer, Roy Cohn, did a brilliant job,\u201d Trump writes in \u201cThe Art of the Deal,\u201d \u201carguing before seven justices without so much as a note.\u201d In December, 1982, the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court ordered the city to give Trump the abatement. Cohn gleefully told the Times<\/em>, \u201cA lot of people have been sitting back, afraid to build until this thing was settled. It is a shot in the arm for their proposed buildings.\u201d The appeals-court decision was written by Judge Sol M. Wachtler, a Rockefeller Republican. The Koch administration appealed the decision once more, but, in 1984, the state\u2019s highest court ruled in Trump\u2019s favor.<\/p>\n

Koch was annoyed, and he later referred to Trump as \u201cpiggy, piggy, piggy.\u201d In return, Trump called him a moron. The Mayor, he said, was \u201cextremely nasty, mean-spirited, and very vicious, an extremely disloyal human being.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Trump had got what he needed. He sent Cohn an effusive thank-you note. \u201cNeedless to say, your representation of me with regards to the Trump Tower case was brilliant,\u201d he wrote. \u201cEveryone scoffed at our pursuit of this difficult victory saying that \u2018it could never be won.\u2019 The skeptics\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. never saw Roy Cohn in action.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. Great job! Thanks, See you soon, Donald.\u201d Cohn framed the note and put it on his office wall.<\/p>\n

Cohn treasured his relationship with Trump. \u201cDear Donald, Happy Birthday,\u201d he wrote in a letter one June, in the late seventies. \u201cAs I look back over our close personal and professional relationship over so many years, the memories are among the high points of my life. With all the daily frustrations and unappreciative people we help, you have been a meaningful exception. You have never said no, never failed to be completely supportive, and [have been] the best morale builder I\u2019ve ever known. Your encouragement and kindness mean more to me than any amount of money\u2014and I will always be proud\u00a0to be on your team.\u201d The note was written on Cohn\u2019s personal stationery, imprinted with a scowling caricature of himself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Cohn claimed that he never asked Trump, whom he liked to call the \u201cyoung genius, builder, and developer,\u201d to pay him for the legal work he did. But Trump apparently paid him anyway. \u201cI\u2019ve never sent him a bill in my life,\u201d Cohn told the journalist Peter Manso, in 1980. \u201cBut there is no check that he has ever sent me that isn\u2019t higher than the amount for which I would have billed him.\u201d Cohn\u2019s relative, David Marcus, believed that Cohn had a genuine affection for Trump: \u201cRoy, I think, really felt this sort of pride of ownership in Trump,\u201d Marcus told Tyrnauer. \u201cHe\u2019d created Trump. He had saved Trump from ruin after they met. And he felt this odd attraction to him until the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohn recognized that Trump was vulgar and uncouth, but the younger man\u2019s unembarrassed openness about his shallowness was disarming. \u201cIf the charge is that Donald is unsophisticated, they are in some ways right,\u201d Cohn said. \u201cIf you go with Donald to see an art collection, he\u2019s not that interested. He\u2019d rather look out the windows at buildings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump regarded Cohn as a highly entertaining friend. \u201cI got a kick out of Roy Cohn,\u201d Trump later told the Washington Post<\/em>. Just as Trump kept a photo of Cohn in his office, Cohn treasured a shot of Trump that hung on his office wall. It was signed \u201cTo Roy, My greatest friend. Donald.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump liked to draw a contrast between Cohn and all the \u201crespectable\u201d guys who made their careers \u201cboasting about their uncompromising integrity\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. [but] don\u2019t think twice about stabbing a friend in the back if the friend has become a problem.\u201d He occasionally dropped by Cohn\u2019s town house, where Saxe, Bacon & Bolan was based, so he witnessed firsthand some of the chaos in the firm\u2019s operations. \u201cHe was a man who did a lot of socializing with judges. He liked a lot of judges,\u201d Trump told us, speaking about Cohn. \u201cHe was a very complex person. He was a very brilliant guy in so many different ways. He was also somebody that got himself into a lot of trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cohn lived a secret life, hooking up regularly with gay hustlers. Trump was almost certainly aware of this. \u201cRoy had a whole crazy deal going,\u201d he told the Washington Post<\/em>. In an interview with us, Trump said, \u201cHe enjoyed life. He\u2019s a different kind of a guy, but he enjoyed life.\u201d Trump went on, \u201cA lot of people didn\u2019t know he was gay until toward the end.\u201d (When Cohn was dying of AIDS<\/em>, Trump fell out of daily touch with him. But just before Cohn\u2019s death, in 1986, Trump invited him to a dinner party at Mar-a-Lago. Afterward, Trump reportedly ordered his staff to \u201cfumigate\u201d the dishware and cutlery.)<\/p>\n

Cohn always understood that, in dealing with Trump, a degree of obsequiousness was required. Trump could be demanding. As the years went by, Cohn functioned less as a mentor than as a fixer, having to dip into his favor bank to take care of Trump\u2019s needs. In 1983, Cohn used his many connections in Ronald Reagan\u2019s White House to engineer the elevation of Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump\u2019s sister, to a federal judgeship. But the Cohn favor bank was nonideological. He didn\u2019t care about Maryanne\u2019s qualifications. He knew nothing about her politics or legal experience. He just knew that she was Trump\u2019s sister.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Trump\u2019s father had reared him to have cutthroat ambition. But Cohn taught him tactics. The Times<\/em> reporter David Cay Johnston told Tyrnauer that Cohn had instructed Trump to \u201cignore the rules, do what you want to do, don\u2019t leave a paper trail, don\u2019t keep a calendar, never do things in writing, and, if somebody gets onto you, rat out other people to save yourself. Delay, delay, delay, \u2019cause grand juries have a limited time, and you can run out the clock. And call in the news media. Make up a fantastic story. We\u2019re just honest businessmen who are being attacked by these corrupt New York City police, or F.B.I. agents, or especially the corrupt and heartless I.R.S. agents<\/em>. And that\u2019ll be the news story. It\u2019ll put the government on the defensive.\u201d Cohn\u2019s rules became Trump\u2019s rules.<\/p>\n

In the spring of 1984, GQ<\/em> put the thirty-eight-year-old real-estate developer on its cover and ran a story by Graydon Carter, with the cover line \u201cSuccess: How Sweet It Is.\u201d The profile opened with Cohn calling Trump one morning with a problem. He needed a hotel room for a client that night: \u201cWhat\u2019s up? Who? Sorry, Roy, I think the Grand Hyatt is full,\u201d Trump says. \u201cBut how about the Barbizon? Hold on. Let me find out.\u201d A moment later: \u201cOkay, I think we can book him into the Barbizon. Only for you, Roy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Carter captures the young Trump\u2019s greed and bravado. \u201cAbout the only thing that gives away this striver from an outer borough are his cuff links: huge mollusks of gold and stone the size of half-dollars,\u201d Carter wrote. The piece makes Trump seem vacuous. \u201cDid you ever pass Trump Tower at night and see the way it glows?\u201d Trump asks. \u201cIt almost glows in the dark. That\u2019s because I used real bronze. If you get imitations, it doesn\u2019t look the same. It looks like nothing.\u201d In the profile, Carter notes that Trump has hands that are \u201csmall and neatly groomed,\u201d an observation that would nettle Trump for decades, even into his Presidency.<\/p>\n

Cohn was of New York, but he deeply resented New York\u2019s intellectuals, its universities, and its \u00e9lite law firms. Trump has always felt the same resentment. \u201cI\u2019ll never have the good will of the establishment, the tastemakers of New York,\u201d Trump said, in 1990. Another time, he remarked, \u201cI love the poorly educated.\u201d As Cohn did before him, Trump likes to frame his anti-establishment politics of resentment as empathy for the working class. For both men, that was a charade, yet Trump learned how to effectively deploy the sentiment at campaign rallies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cHe had a lot of respect for me,\u201d Trump told us, of Cohn. \u201cHe said, \u2018You\u2019re going to be President someday. If you want to.\u2019\u00a0\u201d He added, \u201cHe said that many times.\u201d According to Vanity Fair,<\/em> the day after Trump was elected to the Presidency in November, 2016, Roger Stone reached him by telephone to congratulate him. \u201cMr.\u00a0President,\u201d Stone said. \u201cOh, please, call me Donald,\u201d Trump replied. And then Trump remarked, in a pensive tone, \u201cWouldn\u2019t Roy love to see this moment? Boy, do we miss him.\u201d\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

This is drawn from \u201cAmerican Scoundrel: Roy Cohn\u2019s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more What My Life Would Be Like If All of Those Spam Texts Were Legit<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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