Cohn also showed Trump how to exploit power and instill fear through a simple formula: attack, counterattack and never apologize.
Since he announced his run for the White House a year ago, Trump has used such tactics more aggressively than any other candidate in recent memory, demeaning opponents, insulting minorities and women, and whipping up anger among his supporters.
.. Cohn gained notoriety in the 1950s as Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel and the brains behind his hunt for communist infiltrators. By the 1970s, Cohn maintained a powerful network in New York City, using his connections in the courts and City Hall to reward friends and punish those who crossed him.
.. Trump prized Cohn’s reputation for aggression. According to a New York Times profile a quarter-century ago, when frustrated by an adversary, Trump would pull out a photograph of Cohn and ask, “Would you rather deal with him?” Trump remained friends with him even after the lawyer was disbarred in New York for ethical lapses.
.. “He was a vicious, Red-baiting source of sweeping wrongdoing.”
.. “Both of them are attack dogs.”
.. He professed admiration for McCarthy to the end of his life. “I never worked for a better man or a greater cause,” he wrote in his autobiography.
.. Cohn often operated in the gray areas of the law. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he fought off four federal or state indictments for alleged extortion, bribery, conspiracy, perjury and banking violations. At the same time, he avoided paying state and federal income taxes and engaged in a variety of schemes to take advantage of wealthy clients, court records show.
.. Trump, not yet a household name, knew about Cohn’s reputation as a legal knife fighter.
.. At the time, Trump and his father, Fred, were facing Justice Department allegations that they had systematically discriminated against black people at their family-owned or -managed apartment complexes across New York City.
.. Donald Trump, his father and Cohn called a news conference at the New York Hilton hotel. They said they were suing the government for $100 million in damages relating to the Justice Department’s “irresponsible and baseless” allegations.
.. Cohn represented him in two libel cases against journalists. Although Trump said the legal work cost $100,000, he said it was worth the money because “I’ve broken one writer,”
.. Cohn urged Trump to create a prenuptial agreement.
.. Even though he lived a lavish life, Cohn claimed he had little taxable income or assets. Over the years, he routinely vacationed with clients on the Greek island of Mykonos or in the south of France on the yacht of a British investor. He said his extravagant expenses were work-related. That included A-list parties he threw at his home.
.. Sidney Zion, a journalist who helped Cohn write his autobiography, described him as “the Babe Ruth of the Gay World.” But when gay rights activists once asked him to represent a teacher fired for being homosexual, Cohn refused. He told the activists: “I believe homosexual teachers are a grave threat to our children, they have no business polluting the schools of America,” Cohn and Zion wrote in “The Autobiography of Roy Cohn.”
.. “What went on in Studio 54 will never, ever happen again,” Trump told writer Timothy O’Brien. “First of all, you didn’t have AIDS. You didn’t have the problems you do have now. I saw things happening there that to this day I have never seen again. I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room. There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy.
.. “Mr. Stone, I want you to meet Tony Salerno,” Cohn said.
There Stone was, standing before the future boss of the Genovese crime family.
“So Roy says we’re going with Reagan this time,” Salerno said.
.. At Trump’s request, Cohn lobbied Edwin Meese III, a senior White House aide, to secure an appointment for Trump’s sister Maryanne Barry, an experienced federal prosecutor in New Jersey, to the U.S. District Court.
.. Over the years, the list of his friends and guests included Norman Mailer, Bianca Jagger, Barbara Walters, William F. Buckley Jr., George Steinbrenner, former New York mayor Abraham D. Beame and many others, some of them Cohn clients.
.. Joey Adams once elicited laughter with the quip, “If you’re indicted, you’re invited.”
.. State officials later said Trump had “circumvented” state limits on individual and corporate contributions by spreading out payments through Trump subsidiaries, but they did not formally accuse Trump of wrongdoing.
.. Trump also had to work with unions and companies known to be controlled by New York’s ruling mafia families, which had infiltrated the construction industry
.. Cohn was fond of saying that winning was not sufficient. People had to know about it.
.. Cohn was indicted and acquitted three times of federal charges of bribery, perjury and conspiracy. He was also charged with violating banking laws in Illinois, but the charges were later dropped.
.. Cohn turned his troubles into news. He loved the attention the tabloids and magazines gave him, and he socialized with some of their owners, including Rupert Murdoch.
.. “All this has done me a lot of good,” Cohn said, according to writer Ken Auletta. “I’d be a liar if I denied it. It has given me a reputation for being tough, a reputation for being a winner.”
.. “I don’t kid myself about Roy. He was no Boy Scout,” Trump wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “He once told me that he’d spent more than two thirds of his adult life under indictment for one charge or another.
.. “I don’t kid myself about Roy. He was no Boy Scout,” Trump wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “He once told me that he’d spent more than two thirds of his adult life under indictment for one charge or another.
.. a client of Cohn’s was in the hospital after suffering a debilitating stroke. Cohn visited the man, who was barely conscious. Cohn later claimed his client, during that visit, made him a trustee to his will. The man could not move. A nurse witnessed Cohn guiding his hand to complete the man’s signature on a legal document.
.. a host of prominent people testified to Cohn’s good character. Among them was Trump
.. Cohn questioned the fairness and competence of those who accused him of misconduct