Deborah Friedell: In the Public Closet

Deborah Friedell

Roy Cohn has been dead for forty years, but Donald Trump still yearns for him, his first lawyer and his fiercest. Who else could take an attack meant for Trump and return it a thousand – a million! – times harder? He still sometimes calls out for him: ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?’ No one was better at making him feel indefeasible. The gossip columnist Cindy Adams remembers the first time she saw Trump, a ‘smart kid fresh out of Wharton’, during his Studio 54 days: ‘I said to him, “So who are you?” Standing behind him, Roy answered: “One day this kid is going to own New York.”’ According to Adams, Cohn

perennially told Donald he could be president. Then came that moment it actually happened. Donald’s elected. First time. We – just we two alone – nobody near us. In his Trump Tower office. We’re standing close together, speechless, staring at multiple wall-size TVs. His family behind a barrier of desks. Staffers behind man-made gates. Workers behind them. Nobody around us. Nobody speaking. Or breathing. And all he said to me was: ‘You remember what Roy said?’

Kai Bird had come to think of himself as a ‘biographer of the American establishment’. He’d made his career writing about John J. McCloy, the ‘chairman’ of postwar US foreign policy; the Bundy brothers, architects of the Vietnam War; J. Robert Oppenheimer; Jimmy Carter. Cohn often figured in his work, but only in passing – an ‘annoying and obstructive minor player’, not someone Bird thought worth a book. Then: an ‘epiphany’. The old East Coast order had disappeared, replaced by a thoroughly Cohnian ruling class. Bird – working with his wife, Susan Goldmark – now regards Cohn as ‘the ghoul of our nightmares’, haunting the White House from his Queens mausoleum. His ‘personal immorality planted the seeds of America’s descent into the political folly of the 21st century.’

Cohn liked to insist he’d never had a childhood. He’d had to help his less brilliant father, a judge on the New York Supreme Court, with his cases; ‘before I was ten I had a dramatic impact on his thinking.’ He played bridge with his mother’s friends and supplied a local tabloid with gossip. He was born in 1927, and though he came of age during the Depression, the Cohns lived in splendour on Park Avenue. His maternal grandfather, Joseph S. Marcus, an immigrant from Russia, had been a tailor who looked after the savings of other poor New York Jews, keeping their money safe in his shop. This became what he grandly called the Bank of United States, and he grew rich on thousands of small deposits. His daughter Dora, Roy’s mother, would be remembered by various relatives as ‘the ugliest girl in the Bronx’, ‘mean, vicious, ugly and foul-mouthed’, ‘the nastiest person … she would make people wait on her, dominate them, and use her power ruthlessly.’ The family story was that no one had wanted to marry her until, when she was 32, her increasingly well-connected father found a taker in Albert Cohn, a hard-up 41-year-old lawyer, by offering him a judgeship in exchange. Bird suggests that this was probably achieved with a campaign contribution – somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000 – to the Democratic Party machine.

In his autobiography, which he co-wrote with the New York Times reporter Sidney Zion, Roy remembers watching his father at work – helping another judge, for instance, make sure that his son would ‘be all right’ after killing a girl with his car. The world ran on favours; justice was for those who knew how to pay for it. Once a month he visited his ‘favourite uncle, and one of my favourite people of all time’, his mother’s brother Bernie, in Sing Sing. Roy claimed that Bernie had been ‘railroaded’ when the Bank of United States collapsed. He didn’t deny that Bernie had technically committed fraud; but once you started looking for it, couldn’t fraud be found anywhere? Thousands of banks went under during the Depression, and almost no other bankers were held criminally responsible. Roy grew up believing that Bernie had gone to prison only because he was Jewish, or Jewish in the wrong way, unlike the more respectable German-Jewish Lehmans or Loebs. (The family weren’t observant, but neither were they assimilated.) Bernie’s niece, the writer Anne Roiphe, remembered seeing cartoons of him in newspapers, invariably ‘with a big nose and a dollar sign on his belly’. Roy always regretted that he’d been too young to defend him in court. He also wondered if Jewish communists might have had a hand in his uncle’s ruin. His mother believed they spread rumours that banks were about to collapse, provoking runs.

Dora treated her husband like a paid retainer, but was devoted to her son. At a time when children were rarely included at dinner parties, she threw them for his benefit, to put him in the way of useful people. A Democratic congressman helped him to avoid the draft, and he was one of the few men to make it through Columbia without interruption during the war. Maths and gym were compulsory, but not for Cohn: ‘What’s compulsory if you have friends?’ he asks in his memoir. He graduated at nineteen, and by twenty he had a law degree too. He was often indolent, but – as he would all his life – could fall back on his extraordinary memory, especially for documents. He may have tried to bribe Lionel Trilling with cartons of cigarettes, in short supply during the war, to give him better grades. It sounds like something he would do.

In 1948, Cohn’s father got him a job as an assistant US attorney. Albert wanted to retire from the bench, but Dora pressed him to stay put, to help their son where he could. Roy was assigned to the Smith Act trial, in which twelve communists were charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government. His job mostly involved preparing witnesses for court, many of them FBI informants. In the process he came to believe – or always said he did – that a Soviet espionage network had burrowed inside the American government, with ‘Kremlin cells strategically placed in the most sensitive federal departments’. A ‘violent overthrow of the “bourgeois state”’ couldn’t be ruled out.

The Red Scare offered glamour, power, a way up. At 23, Cohn made sure he was one of the lawyers assigned to the ‘trial of the century’: the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiring to give atomic secrets to the Russians. Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, a machinist at Los Alamos, had been arrested first, and told investigators that Julius had recruited him to steal information on the Manhattan Project. Intercepted Soviet cables appeared to confirm that Julius – codenamed ‘Liberal’ – had been involved in industrial espionage for years, much of it through his work as an engineer with the US Army Signal Corps. Ethel, by contrast, was often ill, and seemed to have been largely occupied with raising their two young sons. Cohn persuaded the clerk responsible for the court’s calendar to assign the case to Judge Irving Kaufman, a family friend. Even before the trial began, Cohn was secretly meeting with Kaufman to discuss the case – Cohn used a hidden staircase to reach Kaufman’s chambers, or they talked on payphones.

Cohn led Kaufman to believe that the evidence against the Rosenbergs went far beyond what could safely be presented at trial, but the government couldn’t risk exposing Soviet assets. There was some truth to this, at least in Julius’s case. But Soviet intelligence didn’t implicate Ethel, and the information her brother had stolen was meagre, possibly useless. None of this prevented Kaufman from declaring both Rosenbergs guilty of ‘worse than murder’: by giving the Russians the secrets of the bomb, he said, they had made themselves responsible for the future casualties of a nuclear war. J. Edgar Hoover let it be known through a back channel (very possibly Cohn) that he recommended the death penalty for Julius but not for Ethel, whom he thought less culpable. In his memoir, Cohn remembered persuading Kaufman to kill them both: ‘The way I see it,’ he told Kaufman, ‘is that she’s worse than Julius. She’s the older one, she’s the one with the brains.’ Bird sidesteps the psychoanalytic reading other writers have found irresistible: that Cohn looked at Ethel and saw his own mother.

Thinking back on the case years later, Cohn expressed no remorse. The Rosenbergs were traitors, he insisted, and most Americans had agreed that they were better off dead. He acknowledged that it had been improper to speak to a judge ex parte, but ‘it was normal’ in those days. Far from having misgivings, he said that he ‘would have pulled the lever’ himself. It irked him that the Rosenbergs had reinforced the ‘idea of associating Jews with a sympathy towards communism’. At the same time, he saw the advantage in being the Jew who took down other Jews. His family thought he might end up president. The case brought Cohn to the attention of the junior senator from Wisconsin, who was looking for a chief counsel for his investigative committee. Joe McCarthy was sensitive about his reputation as an antisemite – though not so sensitive as to let it interfere with his antisemitism – and thought hiring a Jewish lawyer would be a good look. It was 1952, two years after McCarthy had dazzled the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, with his claim that more than two hundred ‘card-carrying’ communists had infiltrated the State Department. A Senate committee was convened to investigate his charges; McCarthy responded by producing more charges.

Cohn thought he knew how to work the press. He had cultivated gossip columnists before, feeding them what Walter Winchell remembered as ‘juicy items about lawsuits, legalities and so forth’. But McCarthy operated on another level. In Red Scare (2025), Clay Risen shows that reporters knew McCarthy was probably lying to them, but they would publicise his every sensational claim anyway. He had a particular gift for supplying killer quotes just before deadline (not enough time to verify, but too thrilling to ignore). For Willard Edwards of the Chicago Tribune, ‘McCarthy was a dream story,’ a career maker: ‘I wasn’t off page one for four years.’ As chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, McCarthy also controlled its Subcommittee on Investigations, empowered to probe virtually any part of the federal government. But he seemed unsure how to go about it. ‘I was his brains,’ Cohn said. McCarthy called him the ‘most brilliant young man that I’ve ever had contact with’, as ‘indispensable as I am’.

Under Cohn’s direction, the committee shifted from investigating waste and corruption to rooting out alleged communist infiltration. With no legislative experience, Cohn ran hearings like a prosecutor: the ‘witnesses’ (hundreds of them) were suspects in all but name. Communist Party membership was at an all-time low, so proving that the menace was still at large required a little ingenuity. The discovery that a procurement clerk had once been a secretary for a newspaper called the People’s Voice was about as good as it got. (She knew which foods – hams, Hershey’s bars – were being sent to army bases, which could be spun as an unacceptable security risk.) In transcripts of the closed-door hearings, unsealed in 2003 after fifty years, Cohn is an unnervingly skilled cross-examiner. He gives the impression of knowing everything already, though apparently he rarely prepared. Outside McCarthy’s office, he developed a reputation for being highly organised; in reality, as McCarthy’s biographer Larry Tye argues, he turned the subcommittee into a ‘holy mess’:

Chaos seemed to follow chief counsel Cohn everywhere. His desk was stacked high with open folders of scribbled notes. Phones rang but were not answered, staff filtered in and out without direction, and the confusion was obvious at hearings he oversaw. Some files, like Eleanor Roosevelt’s, were just newspaper clippings, but that let Joe tell the press he had a file on her.

With suspected communist sympathisers scarce, McCarthy and Cohn turned their attention to ‘perverts’: gay men prohibited from working for the federal government. Those men, Cohn later told Sidney Zion, were ‘fags’, weak, unfit for public life and susceptible to Soviet blackmail. Although Cohn also slept with men, he didn’t count himself among them. As he told Ken Auletta, a homosexual was the opposite of what he was: ‘Every facet of my personality, of my aggressiveness, my toughness and everything along those lines is just totally, I suppose, incompatible with anything like that.’ To be homosexual was to be weak; Cohn wasn’t weak; therefore he wasn’t homosexual. The historian David Johnson estimates that about five thousand federal employees lost their jobs in the Lavender Scare; others resigned before they could be discovered, or killed themselves. Bird describes Cohn as living in a ‘weirdly public closet’: he seems almost to have convinced himself that it was no closet at all.

In his memoir, Cohn complains that McCarthy didn’t know how to assemble an investigative staff, so Cohn had to do it for him. One of his recruits was David Schine: 26 years old, tall, blond, Adonic, an heir to a hotel fortune. Schine employed a valet and had been famous at Harvard for driving a Cadillac convertible fitted with a radio telephone. There didn’t seem to be any reason for Cohn to have hired him except that he was smitten, though it’s not certain that they were ever lovers. Bird describes them putting on ‘quite a show, a riveting two-man act that would capture the nation’s headlines’. In 1954, Time magazine claimed that ‘Roy and Dave’ were ‘inseparable’: ‘They would fly down to Washington from New York on Monday, take adjoining rooms at the Statler Hotel for the week, then fly back on Friday for a weekend of nightclubbing.’ In what Cohn would later admit had been a ‘colossal mistake’, he took Schine with him to Europe, ostensibly to investigate whether American libraries overseas stocked ‘pro-communist literature’, though it looked to all the world like a government-funded spree. Larry Tye calls Schine ‘an indulgence’ that McCarthy allowed Cohn, ‘whom he admired as the one staffer who was more calculating than he was – and meaner – in charting the course of Joe’s hearings and his crusade’.

When Schine received his draft notice in 1953 Cohn, naturally, assumed that he would be able to do something about it. What’s compulsory if you have friends? John Adams, the army’s general counsel, wrote that the ‘sustained violence of the telephone abuse which I took on this occasion is hard to describe. The obscenities and vituperative remarks which Cohn used to describe the secretary of the army, the army itself and our treatment of McCarthy, Schine and Cohn cannot be recorded.’ All to no avail. The Korean War needed bodies, and Private Schine was ordered to report to Fort Dix. Cohn demanded that Schine at least be commissioned as an officer, excused from basic training, posted to New York and granted extra leave. In his memoir, Adams remembered Cohn threatening to ‘wreck the army’ if Schine were posted overseas. ‘We’ll smear you all over every newspaper in this country. The army will be ruined.’ It all sounds too ridiculous to have worried anyone, but the army did worry. McCarthy and Cohn had started accusing generals of concealing espionage; an army dentist, Irving Peress, had invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked if he’d ever been a communist, yet had still been promoted from captain to major, and later honourably discharged. ‘Who promoted Peress?’ became one of the odder slogans of the Red Scare. McCarthy called for the generals responsible to be stripped of their commands – but why stop there? The Subcommittee on Investigations seemed to be closing in on President Eisenhower, who as wartime commander had allowed communists to be commissioned as officers during the Second World War.

The Army-McCarthy hearings were nominally an inquiry into Schine’s draft notice. Who had been strong-arming whom? Cohn’s answer was that the army had turned Schine into a ‘hostage’, treating him cruelly in order to pressure McCarthy and Cohn into abandoning their investigation of communist infiltration of the military. And then there was the ‘blackmail’. Cohn alleged that the army had threatened to publicise his exertions on Schine’s behalf, as though they had been improper, when he had only been ‘looking for ordinary treatment for Schine’ – ‘the same treatment anybody off the street would get’. At first Cohn had welcomed a public hearing: it would make him famous. Only much later, by the time he wrote his memoir, did he seem to grasp that ‘the real purpose of the whole shebang’ hadn’t been about Schine at all; it was a pretext ‘to wipe out McCarthy’.

By 1954, Americans had heard plenty about Joe McCarthy, but almost entirely on his own terms. The army hearings changed that. Broadcast live on multiple stations over eight weeks, they drew a larger audience than the World Series. The subcommittee had operated almost entirely behind closed doors; now, at last, there he was, the great scourge of communism, blustering, sweaty, sneery, sometimes appearing the worse for drink. Cohn sat beside him, anxious and alert, constantly whispering in his ear. Michael Straight of the New Republic called him ‘the boy Rasputin’ and the name stuck. In the footage, Cohn is slight and faintly saurian, with a habit of flicking his tongue. Risen shows that the army’s lawyers resolved to ‘drag out the hearings as long as possible’, calculating that prolonged exposure to McCarthy would turn Americans against him. The inquiry kept returning to the intimacy between Cohn and Schine, apparently with McCarthy’s blessing. No one called it homosexual, but the implication hung over the proceedings; when the army’s chief counsel, Joe Welch, worked the word ‘fairy’ into a sentence, the room cracked up. By the thirtieth day, when Welch finally asked McCarthy, ‘Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?’, the country had seen enough. The Senate voted to ‘censure’ McCarthy – a formal rebuke, but not an expulsion. It didn’t matter: ‘McCarthyism’, as Eisenhower put it, had become ‘McCarthywasm’. As the subcommittee’s minority counsel, Robert Kennedy had been in the room for all of it. He later wrote that he’d figured out McCarthy’s method, which was the same tactic ‘used by Hitler and again used by Stalin, that if you repeat something often enough people are going to believe it’. Cohn had worked it out too.

He moved back to his parents’ apartment in New York. He was 27, and no longer a future president – brought down, he said, by the ‘snide smears’ of ‘shallow men’. Privately, he worried about being indicted for perjury. He’d lied throughout the hearings, shamelessly, and too many people knew – but Eisenhower wanted to put the whole sorry show behind him (it made the Republicans look bad), and the grand jury summons never came. And to his surprise, infamy suited him. He told an interviewer – one of many – that being recognised by strangers alleviated the ‘depression and loneliness born of not being anybody’. He still had some friends on the anti-communist right; liberal Jews might despise him (they were ‘numerous’ in the media, he complained), but the American Jewish League against Communism called him ‘the American Dreyfus’. Two thousand people bought tickets to a dinner in his honour at the Astor Hotel.

Cohn was now working in private practice – what he’d learned in Washington ‘about guts’, he said, would carry him through the rest of his career. Clients ‘wanted a lawyer who wasn’t scared of anybody’, and for that there was no better role model than McCarthy: ‘It was incredible, the power the man had. It was power engendered by fear of him and by weakness on the part of his opponents.’ Cohn was soon being sought out for high-profile divorces (he’d eventually represent Bianca Jagger), and the anti-communist Archdiocese of New York gave him business (Bird says he advised on their property investments). He also fell back on his old classmates. He became Si Newhouse’s lawyer and Generoso Pope Sr put him in the way of the mob boss Frank Costello, which is probably how he started picking up clients with connections to organised crime. Even as he made a fortune representing them, Cohn continued to live at home. ‘I run my house for the comfort of my son,’ Dora said, and he wouldn’t move out until she died in 1967.

Bird shows that Cohn wasn’t particularly formidable in the courtroom – his files were always a mess, and it was said that he’d only start preparing for a case on the drive to the courthouse. The law books in his office were just for show: they had belonged to his father and were out of date. But he knew that most problems could be solved with phone calls, and no one was better at those. Roger Stone remembered him saying: ‘Don’t tell me the law. Tell me the judge.’ In 1963, Cohn was accused of bribing a US attorney to keep his clients out of prison – an allegation that was strangely good for business. Even liberals could find Cohn useful when they were desperate enough. Barbara Walters thought of him as a ‘living Satan’ because he’d killed the Rosenbergs, but when her father was on the brink of being arrested on a delinquent tax charge, she was happy enough to let Cohn take care of it. ‘Forget the ethics of the matter,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘We are talking about my father.’ It’s unclear, as usual, what Cohn did for Lou Walters, but the charges disappeared.

By his thirties, Cohn had become the counsellor of choice for New York mafia families (all of them), who were shunned by the white-shoe firms. (‘I don’t like the way this country punishes the working class,’ Cohn would say.) Bird suggests that crime bosses knew he was gay but let it pass. After Cohn fixed some problem with the New York State Liquor Authority, John Gotti supposedly said: ‘Who gives a fuck? That happy little homo just saved our asses.’ In 1974, Cohn negotiated what Bird characterises as an extremely ‘artful’ deal for Gotti: a short prison term for attempted manslaughter, rather than a conviction for a murder he’d obviously committed. Cohn also petitioned for Gotti to be provided with his own food and cigarettes during his incarceration, citing a stomach ailment. The judge – who’d once partied with Cohn at Studio 54 – agreed, so long as Gotti supplied enough for the other inmates too.

Cohn was nearly always under investigation for something – bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice, one or another species of financial mismanagement. Whenever indictments came down he’d hold a press conference – free advertising – at which he would accuse the Manhattan district attorney, Robert Morgenthau, of holding a ‘mortal grudge’ against him, the product, Cohn would explain, of an elaborate chain of grievances involving Morgenthau’s father, the Kennedy family and McCarthy’s committee. Bird provides a tidy summary of Cohn’s playbook:

Always respond in the public arena. Attack your critics personally, even if they be public officials. Delay the courts with repeated challenges and appeals. Accuse the accuser. Accuse your adversary of waging a vendetta. Loudly deny the facts and create your own counterfactual narrative. Above all, play the game aggressively – deny everything and never apologise.

To which one might add: never leave a paper trail (he taught that to Trump too). Morgenthau would complain to his biographer Andrew Meier that ‘Cohn was dirty, we knew that. But we did have this trouble – the problem was finding the evidence to make the case.’ In American Scoundrel, one crime or cruelty follows another with a relentlessness that borders on absurdity. Bird shows that Cohn was almost certainly responsible for the death by drowning of a crewman aboard his yacht Defiance, which he had arranged to have scuttled for the insurance money. He’s probably the one who tipped off the Genovese family that Salvatore ‘Sally Burns’ Granello was considering co-operating with the FBI, leading to Granello’s murder. He may have been involved in sex trafficking: a man from Northern Ireland told Bird and Goldmark that when he was a teenager at a children’s home in Belfast, Cohn arranged for him to travel to Venice for sex. Even as Cohn was dying of Aids, he kept paying boys and young men for sex, very probably without protection. He pretended that he had liver cancer.

Then there are all the lesser schemes and depredations. When a client was in a ‘vegetative state and dying’, Cohn had him sign a new codicil to his will naming Cohn as an executor and trustee. He preferred to be paid in the form of ‘loans’, not fees, so he could cheat the IRS. He routinely refused to pay his bills, especially from small businesses – let them take him to court, he figured. When a Japanese hotel tried to confront him about stealing from his room, he yelled: ‘You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve talking about a bathmat after you bombed Pearl Harbor.’ He once billed a client for a round-the-world flight on Pan Am ‘so he could focus on writing [a] brief undisturbed in first class’. He may have swindled McCarthy himself on a pump and dump uranium stock scheme. He compulsively picked his nose and, according to one friend, would ‘go into places like Le Cirque, pass the cake display and run an index finger through the icing’.

When Trump first met Cohn in 1973, he was 27 and living in a rent-controlled studio apartment on East 75th Street. Bird notes how strongly he used to resemble David Schine – another tall blond with a rich father. In The Art of the Deal, Trump remembers dining at Le Club, ‘the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive’, and seeing Cohn at another table: ‘I knew him by reputation and was aware of his image as a guy who wasn’t afraid to fight.’ Trump was upset: the Justice Department was suing his father’s real estate corporation for violating the Fair Housing Act. When Black people tried to rent Trump apartments, their applications were marked C for ‘coloured’, and they were told that nothing was available. Trump put the case to Cohn: why shouldn’t his company get to prioritise ‘tenants who we could be sure would pay the rent, who would be neat and clean and good neighbours’? All the government wanted was for the Trumps to integrate their apartment buildings; it would be an easy case to settle, and Fred Trump’s lawyers advised them to do so. But not Cohn. Why should they ‘have any obligation to rent to tenants who would be undesirable’? Cohn’s advice was to tell the government to go to hell. Trump had found his man.

Cohn kept the case spinning for almost two years, countersuing the Justice Department for defamation and demanding $100 million in damages. He taught Trump how to talk to reporters, just as he’d once learned from McCarthy: give them a killer line, and you might as well have written the story yourself. The two men railed against the government’s ‘Gestapo-like’ tactics, and said that the FBI had descended on the Trump offices like ‘stormtroopers’. Bird interviewed one of the prosecutors who worked on the case. He remembered that Cohn had accused another prosecutor of ‘calling up prospective witnesses at four in the morning and threatening to have them thrown in jail if they didn’t testify against Trump’. Had the court believed him, it could have ended her career. This was Cohn’s way of making sure the other side knew there would always be a cost to taking him on. In the end, the Trumps settled. They agreed not to discriminate against Black tenants (an agreement they would break) and to advertise vacancies in Black newspapers. Trump and Cohn held a press conference to announce their triumph: the government wouldn’t ‘compel the Trump Organisation to accept persons on welfare as tenants unless as qualified as any other tenant’, they said, though that hadn’t been the issue at all. In Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (2022), Maggie Haberman argues that the episode ‘set a behavioural template for nearly every fight’ Trump would face thereafter: deny, counterattack, declare victory. Trump found that he could bear losing, so long as he never had to admit he had lost.

In 1975, Trump saw an opportunity to redevelop the Commodore Hotel beside Grand Central Station, which had fallen into disrepair. His father told him it would be a mistake, ‘like trying to buy a ticket on the Titanic’. But with the support of the deputy mayor, Stanley Friedman, Trump secured a forty-year tax break worth millions of dollars – a concession the Wall Street Journal would call the ‘tax deal of the century’. Bird says that people ‘wondered how such a young, inexperienced developer had managed to get such good terms’. The answer was that Cohn had secured Friedman a lifetime appointment to the city’s water board (salary and perks galore, including a chauffeured limousine), and a job with Cohn’s law firm. By the time Friedman was convicted of racketeering in a different case, Trump no longer had need of him. The Commodore was gutted by a demolition crew run by the Mafia: Cohn showed Trump how to work with them, and he introduced him to the mobster ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, whose company would supply the concrete. The construction of Trump Tower in 1979 brought more of the same. When two hundred undocumented Polish workers threatened to strike over unpaid wages, Cohn brought in a replacement crew controlled by the Genovese family.

Wayne Barrett of the Village Voice – one of the few reporters to grasp what Trump was about from the beginning – said that he would look at him and ‘see Roy’. The two men always seemed to be together; when apart, they talked on the phone fifteen to twenty times a day. Cohn’s licence plate said ‘RMC’, so Trump got one that said ‘DJT’. People who knew both men – Steven Brill, Roger Stone – say that Trump started to sound like him too. ‘If you wanna know the truth,’ ‘I can tell you’ and the habit of prefacing a lie with ‘to be absolutely frank’ were all Cohnisms first. For a decade, Cohn advised Trump on all his Manhattan deals. He showed him how to court politicians and promote himself in the tabloids, to bury his adversaries in litigation, and to stiff (non-Mafia) contractors and tradesmen. He introduced him to Studio 54. He arranged a judgeship for Trump’s sister Maryanne, and persuaded Si Newhouse, by this time the owner of Random House, to publish The Art of the Deal. When Trump was preparing to marry his first wife, Ivana, Cohn tried to talk him out of it. ‘You’re better off not married,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why you want to do this.’ He handled the prenup, to Ivana’s lasting regret.

Sometimes, during an argument, Trump would point to the framed photograph of Cohn in his office and say: ‘Would you rather deal with him?’ Cohn kept one of him too, signed ‘To Roy, my greatest friend. Donald.’ As Cohn’s illness worsened, Trump began to pull away but still presented him with a pair of diamond cufflinks for his 59th birthday. In 1986, five months before Cohn’s death, Trump hosted him at Mar-a-Lago, throwing a ‘lavish’ dinner in his honour. Afterwards Trump complained about having to ‘spend a fortune to fumigate all the dishes and silverware’. The diamonds were said to be fake.

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