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THE MENTOR  
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Kai Bird, Susan Goldmark
August 3, 2026
The New Yorker
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_ How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything. _

“Ignore the rules, do what you want to do, don’t leave a paper
trail,” the reporter David Cay Johnston said, listing the lessons
Cohn taught Trump. “And if somebody gets onto you, rat out other
people to save yourself.”, Mary Ellen Mark

 

When President Donald Trump’s 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.
“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” he yelled. But Roy Cohn—an 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—was long gone.

Trump and Cohn had met forty-four years earlier, in 1973. The New York
_Post_ gossip columnist Cindy Adams later reported that her old friend
Cohn had introduced her to his new protégé 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,
“One day this kid is going to own New York.” Cohn, who was a
closeted gay man, was invariably attracted to what could be called
über-Gentiles—tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed. “Roy loved to
surround himself with attractive straight men,” Robert S. Cohen, a
divorce lawyer who’d worked for him in the sixties, observed.
Trump—blond, six feet three—fit the bill.

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’s Eve, in 1960, Le Club occupied a
small white stucco house; a brass plaque reading “Members Only”
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’s
favorite couturier, was the chairman of Le Club’s board.

“It 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,”
Trump wrote in his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal.” In a few
years, Trump would boast about being “a director” of Le Club, but
in 1973 he was living in a rent-controlled studio at 196 East
Seventy-fifth Street. The “dark, dingy little apartment,” 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 “a city guy instead of a kid
from the boroughs.” 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.

In “The Art of the Deal,” Trump recalls their meeting, a
description that is likely embellished. He claims that, after he got
introduced to Cohn, Trump told him, “I don’t 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.” He continues, “I’m just not built that way. I’d rather
fight than fold, because as soon as you fold once, you get the
reputation of being a folder.”

In an interview with us last year, Trump relayed a different version
of the meeting, claiming that it had been Cohn who’d initiated the
conversation. “I was doing very well, I guess people were reading a
lot about me,” he said. “I remember it very vividly—he was with
a whole group of guys, and he came over, he wanted to introduce
himself.” Trump went on, “He said, ‘Maybe we’ll do some
business—if you ever have a case. I’d love to work with you.’ I
remember that he didn’t have cards. He wasn’t a card person. But I
called him up.”

It’s more plausible that Trump, then a virtual unknown, introduced
himself to Cohn and nervously explained that he needed some legal
advice. In “The Art of the Deal,” he describes their conversation:
“The government has just filed suit against our company . . .
saying that we discriminated against blacks,” Trump told Cohn, and
asked,“What do you think I should do?”

“Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them
prove that you discriminated,” Cohn snapped. Trump thought that this
was splendid advice.

It wasn’t long before Cohn began introducing Trump around town. “I
got to know everybody,” Trump said. In November, 1973, Cohn invited
his new protégé 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’s friend
William F. Buckley, Jr., paid tribute to him in a speech: “Roy Cohn
is a man who has triumphed over his tormentors, and he deserves the
credit we are here to give him so enthusiastically.” 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’s discrimination
charges.

Trump’s 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’s unclear what role he played in the riot.) Almost thirty
years later, a tenant living in one of Fred’s 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 “Old Man
Trump.” The tenant was Woody Guthrie.

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hateHe stirred
up in that bloodpot of human hearts . . .Beach Haven is Trump’s
TowerWhere no Black folks come to roam

By 1973, when Trump met Cohn, the evidence that Fred’s 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 “C” to indicate that the applicants were
“colored.” One Trump employee described the policy to an F.B.I.
agent: “Fred 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.” These activities
would have been a clear violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

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 “welfare
recipients.” 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_, later said
that he had been stunned that any reporters had shown up: “You
couldn’t get through your second day of law school without knowing
it was a totally bogus lawsuit.”

The stunt, a show of bravado, dominated local headlines, but, a month
later, a federal judge dismissed the Trumps’ suit as frivolous,
scolding Cohn that he was “wasting time and paper.” Trump and Cohn
refused to back down, and they refused to engage with the accusations
of racism. A friend of Cohn’s told us that, in private, Cohn
routinely referred to Black people as “the Schvartze,” a slur
he’d picked up from his mother, Dora, and that on at least one
occasion he was heard using the N-word. Trump always said that he was
color-blind and that his only criterion for tenants was the income of
the male head of household: “We don’t generally include the
wife’s income. We like to see it for the male in the family.”

Cohn dragged out the litigation for twenty months. He attacked the
credibility of the government’s key witness, a former Trump
employee, claiming that he had been coerced by a “Gestapo-like
interrogation.” He also filed an affidavit charging that F.B.I.
agents had been acting like “stormtroopers.” The judge reprimanded
Cohn for his statements, which he described as “utterly without
foundation.” Cohn quickly retracted his remark about stormtroopers.
“I have never brought a charge against the F.B.I. in my life. I have
personal reasons why I haven’t, and I never would,” he said,
alluding to his close friendship with the former F.B.I. director J.
Edgar Hoover. “My relationship [to the F.B.I.] is much too close.”
But these digressions were great theatre, with Cohn as the ringmaster.
The circus antics served to delay the proceedings further.

One day, in court, Cohn filed a contempt motion against a junior
member of the prosecution’s team, Donna F. Goldstein. He claimed
that Goldstein had been calling up prospective witnesses at 4 _A.M._
and threatening to have them jailed if they didn’t 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, “Your Honor, the
girl”—Goldstein—“made a mistake, and, if she promises not to
do this again, I will withdraw the motion.”

The trial attorney was struck by how deferential the judge was to
Cohn. On another occasion, this attorney watched as Trump’s
deposition was being taken. Cohn took the lawyer aside and told him,
“Leave Donald alone. He’s going to be big one day.”

Reflecting on the suit later, in “The Art of the Deal,” Trump
writes, “The idea of settling drove me crazy.” But that’s
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 “one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated.” A
headline in the Black-owned New York _Amsterdam News_ proclaimed,
“_Minorities win housing suit_,” and the accompanying story
alerted readers that “qualified Blacks and Puerto Ricans now have
the opportunity to rent apartments owned by Trump Management.”

Trump and Cohn nevertheless declared victory. Winning, Cohn was fond
of saying, was not enough—people needed to know about it. And in the
coming years Trump repeatedly claimed that he had won the case.

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 “rehash,” without “the
slightest merit.” (He had previously called the government’s case
“a spit in the ocean.”) 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.

By then, Trump had moved on to the bigger playing field of Manhattan
real estate. He had already learned a lot from Cohn. “I was very
young, and Roy was a very political guy,” Trump later told the
_Times’_ Maggie Haberman. “A different kind of guy.” Trump was
astonished to see Cohn’s 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.

“Roy was a master of situational immorality,” Sam Roberts, who
covered city politics for the _Daily News_ in the seventies, told Matt
Tyrnauer, the director of the documentary “Where’s My Roy Cohn?”
“He had rules about how to exercise power. . . . 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.”

Cohn taught Trump not to worry about what other people thought of him.
“He would just make light of the fact that people in the family just
didn’t care about him,” David Marcus, whose father was Cohn’s
cousin, told Tyrnauer. Trump, Marcus said, manifested a different kind
of narcissism, “a narcissism combined with insecurity. But in Roy it
was a total security in who he was, except for the fact that he
didn’t want people knowing in public he was gay.”

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’s fifty-second birthday party at the
night club. The comedian Joey Adams (Cindy Adams’s husband) served
as m.c.; one of his regular gag lines was “If you’re indicted,
you’re invited.” Marcus recalled being at Studio 54 with both
Trump and Cohn. “Roy’s eyes were glued to Trump. . . . He
watched everything Trump did.” Trump sometimes wandered downstairs
to check out the semiprivate V.I.P. rooms. “I saw things happening
there that to this day I have never seen again,” he told the writer
Timothy L. O’Brien. “I would watch supermodels getting screwed,
well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the
room.”

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.

“If the charge is that Donald is unsophisticated, they are in some
ways right,” Cohn said. “If you go with Donald to see an art
collection, he’s not that interested.”Photograph by Guy DeLort /
Getty

That same year, Cohn had played a key role in the election of the
city’s 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’s mayoral nomination. His leading opponent was the Bronx
congressman Mario Biaggi. Cohn leaked a story to the _Times_ that
Biaggi had pleaded the Fifth the year before when questioned by a
federal grand jury, and the controversy helped sink Biaggi’s
candidacy. Beame was sworn in as New York’s 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.

Three weeks after Beame’s inauguration, according to the _Village
Voice_ journalist Wayne Barrett, Trump was trying to persuade Ned
Eichler, a businessman who managed some of Penn Central railroad’s
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.

“What kind of proof?” Trump asked. Eichler replied that he’d
want to talk to the Mayor, to make sure he was on board.

“When do you want to see him?” Trump asked.

“Tomorrow at 2 _P.M._,” Eichler said.

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’s office. He’d brought along his father, who had contributed
to Beame’s 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, “Whatever Donald and Fred want, they have my
complete backing.”

Fred may have made a phone call to City Hall, but it’s far more
likely that Cohn orchestrated the meeting. He would be Trump’s 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.

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’s 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.

Mayor Beame was eager to sell the hotel to a suitable developer, but
there were few prospects. New York was on the brink of bankruptcy,
and the Republican-controlled federal government was not sympathetic.
After one of the Mayor’s visits to Washington, D.C., President
Gerald Ford made it clear that no federal money would be forthcoming
for a bailout. The _Daily News_ reported the President’s rebuff with
a front-page headline: “_FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD_.”

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_ that Trump
was “overrated” and “totally obnoxious.”

Trump could be disarmingly frank about his ambitions. Michael Bailkin,
who ran Beame’s 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, “You’re a very shallow
person.” Trump replied, “Of course. That’s one of my strengths.
I never pretend to be anything else.”

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.

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 “rent,” starting at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Completing the deal took two years, and it was Cohn who finalized the
details. He’d approached his good friend Deputy Mayor Stanley M.
(Bugsy) Friedman with a proposition. Friedman was already a silent
business partner of Cohn’s, 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.

Friedman played a pivotal role in Trump’s 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’s 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’s
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_, in its coverage of the Commodore story, called Trump’s
unprecedented abatement “the tax deal of the century.”

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.

The Commodore deal was always controversial. Some wondered how a young
and inexperienced developer had managed to get such good terms.
“Donald Trump runs with the same clique that continues to manipulate
things behind the scenes in this city,” the city councilman Henry J.
Stern told the _Times_, calling the deal “a sweetheart contract.”
Stern went on, “Roy Cohn is his lawyer. He throws around a lot of
money in political campaigns.” In response, Cohn told the paper,
“Donald wishes he didn’t have to give money to politicians, but he
knows it’s part of the game.”

Cohn also encouraged Trump’s flair for finding the spotlight. “He
is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever
so much like Robert Redford” read the opening lines of a fawning
_Times_ profile of Trump, written by Judy Klemesrud and published in
November, 1976. “He 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 ‘more than $200
million.’ ”

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.

Another thing Cohn taught Trump was that he should always avoid a
paper trail. Cohn, Trump said, “did not take notes.” And he
didn’t want other people taking notes about what he said, either.
Trump learned from Cohn to conduct business over the phone.

Wayne Barrett saw Cohn’s stamp all over Trump. “Both of them are
attack dogs,” he said. Trump responded to that characterization in a
2016 interview with the Washington _Post:_ “Well, I don’t see
myself as an attack dog. I see myself as somebody that’s made a lot
of money and done a great job and put a lot of people to work, but I
don’t see myself as an attack dog unless I’m attacked.”

Trump and Cohn talked on the phone constantly. “Donald calls me
fifteen to twenty times a day,” Cohn told Marie Brenner, the
journalist. “He is always asking, ‘What is the status of
this . . . and that?’ ”

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’d regularly leave his house “without two cents in my pocket.”
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. “Dear Roy,” the vender wrote. “I’m still waiting for
a payment of $10,000.” Cohn scribbled in reply, “Dear
Louie—Fuck you, Roy.” In 1976, Cohn’s 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.

“He would go to restaurants,” Pamela Newhouse Mensch, Cohn’s
friend, said, “and he just ran a tab. I never saw him actually pay.
He just didn’t care.” By the seventies, Cohn had a reputation, as
the _Voice_ put it, “as a celebrity cheapskate and flimflammer.”
One creditor told a reporter, “He lives like a millionaire, buys
like a millionaire, and pays like a pauper.”

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 “vendetta.”
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_ titled “You Can Beat the IRS.” “I am an
expert on the subject,” he wrote, and even offered tips on how to
hide income from the Feds. “Keep one step ahead of them. If there is
a problem, change bank accounts so they can’t grab your funds by
knowing from your records where you bank.” He tried to put the
I.R.S. off the scent by opening accounts with tiny deposits in rural
Connecticut.

Lawsuits from creditors left Cohn’s 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’s office manager, Jerry Howard.

“All I own are the clothes on my back and some personal
possessions,” Cohn said. “I 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’t need an estate. If anything happens to me, the law
firm has a one-million-dollar policy on my life.”

Steven Brill noticed that, during the 2016 Presidential campaign,
Trump sounded just like Cohn, using the same idioms and tough-guy
language—“If you wanna know the truth” or “_That_ I can tell
you.” Whenever Cohn was about to tell a big lie, Brill recalled,
he’d preface it with the phrase “to be absolutely frank.” Cohn
also taught Trump to talk off the cuff, according to Roger Stone, a
friend of Cohn’s who met Trump in 1979. “Trump’s greatest art
form would have to be his ability to improvise,” Stone said to
Tyrnauer. “This is a man who is working without a net. . . . And
he uses the tactics and the strategy of Roy Cohn to be in your face,
to attack, to drive the argument.” He continued, “Politics is
about who dominates the dialogue.”

Trump admired Cohn’s 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, “Would you rather deal with him?” Cohn
inspired fear. “The mere sending of a letter from Roy Cohn has saved
us a lot of money,” Trump told the writer Ken Auletta, who profiled
Cohn for _Esquire_ in 1978. “When people know that Roy is involved,
they’d rather not get involved in the lawsuits.” On the other
hand, Trump learned that, in an actual courtroom, Cohn had a tendency
to wing it. “He could go into a case without any notes,” Trump
wrote in “The Art of the Deal.” “When he was prepared, he was
brilliant and almost unbeatable. However, he wasn’t always
prepared.” Trump claimed that he would interrogate Cohn before every
court date. “If he wasn’t prepared, I’d push for a
postponement,” Trump said.

He didn’t mind that Cohn was controversial. In an interview last
year, Trump told us, “He was a wonderful lawyer. He did a very good
job.” The President went on, “Other people probably would say that
they weren’t happy with him. But that’s the way life goes,
right?”

In 1976, Trump started dating Ivana Zelníčková Winklmayr, a
twenty-seven-year-old model from Czechoslovakia. They had met at
Maxwell’s Plum, a stained-glass-encrusted Upper East Side singles
bar. In a 2016 interview with the New York _Post_, Ivana described
meeting “this tall blond guy with blue eyes. He said, ‘I’m
Donald Trump, and I see you’re looking for a table. I can help
you.’ I look at my friends and said, ‘The good news is, we’re
going to get a table real fast. The bad news is, this guy is going to
be sitting with us.’ ” The next morning, Trump sent a hundred
roses to Ivana’s hotel. A fast-tracked courtship followed, with
dinners at Le Club, “21,” 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’s. But, when he
called Cohn to tell him the news, his friend discouraged him.
“You’re better off not married,” Cohn insisted. “I don’t
know why you want to do this.”

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 “rainy day” 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: “Under no
circumstances will Ivana ever be possessed of or attempt to lay claim
to any of Donald’s holdings or interest in his family business
interests.”

The prenup was shockingly one-sided. “Donald has explained to Ivana
and Ivana warrants that she is aware that Donald’s 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,” one part of the document reads. “Ivana
acknowledges that she is familiar with the fact that Donald’s
standard of living is basically simple and will continue to be so
after the marriage herein contemplated.”

Ivana signed the prenup, a decision she regretted in 1990, when the
couple split. (The divorce was granted on the ground of “cruel and
inhuman treatment.”) Her lawyer for the prenup, Lawrence H. Levner,
was also Cohn’s lawyer, handpicked by him to represent his
client’s future wife. According to Christine Seymour, the
switchboard operator at Cohn’s firm, who listened in on
conversations, “Larry was a bozo. Roy wouldn’t have hired him to
referee a dog show. . . . Larry was just there because Roy could
control him.” Cohn had served his client well. He knew, he
acknowledged later, that, by definition, such agreements protect the
wealthier spouse: “You are stripping a spouse of a marital right.”

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 “The Power of Positive Thinking.” The pews
were filled with Fred Trump’s 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.

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.

Trump’s 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’s 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_ magazine showed Trump utilizing several P.R. tactics
learned from Cohn. He called the smashed friezes “worthless” and
crowed that the bad publicity had been a windfall: “The morning
after the story hit the front pages of the _Times_, I must have gotten
two dozen calls from people who wanted apartments in Trump Tower. It
was fantastic promotion.”

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.)

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’s 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. “They were
unbelievably good contractors in terms of doing the work,” Trump
later told the _Wall Street Journal_. “But a lot of them were
supposedly associated with the mob.”

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.

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’s housing commissioner, Anthony Gliedman, in a rage and warned
him, “I 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.”

In April, 1981, Cohn filed an appeal before the New York State Supreme
Court. More than a year later, the court ruled 7–0 that the Koch
administration should reconsider Trump’s 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.

“My lawyer, Roy Cohn, did a brilliant job,” Trump writes in “The
Art of the Deal,” “arguing before seven justices without so much
as a note.” In December, 1982, the Appellate Division of the State
Supreme Court ordered the city to give Trump the abatement. Cohn
gleefully told the _Times_, “A 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.” 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’s highest court ruled in Trump’s favor.

Koch was annoyed, and he later referred to Trump as “piggy, piggy,
piggy.” In return, Trump called him a moron. The Mayor, he said, was
“extremely nasty, mean-spirited, and very vicious, an extremely
disloyal human being.”

But Trump had got what he needed. He sent Cohn an effusive thank-you
note. “Needless to say, your representation of me with regards to
the Trump Tower case was brilliant,” he wrote. “Everyone scoffed
at our pursuit of this difficult victory saying that ‘it could never
be won.’ The skeptics . . . never saw Roy Cohn in
action. . . . Great job! Thanks, See you soon, Donald.” Cohn
framed the note and put it on his office wall.

Cohn treasured his relationship with Trump. “Dear Donald, Happy
Birthday,” he wrote in a letter one June, in the late seventies.
“As 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’ve ever known. Your encouragement and kindness
mean more to me than any amount of money—and I will always be
proud to be on your team.” The note was written on Cohn’s
personal stationery, imprinted with a scowling caricature of himself.

Cohn claimed that he never asked Trump, whom he liked to call the
“young genius, builder, and developer,” to pay him for the legal
work he did. But Trump apparently paid him anyway. “I’ve never
sent him a bill in my life,” Cohn told the journalist Peter Manso,
in 1980. “But there is no check that he has ever sent me that
isn’t higher than the amount for which I would have billed him.”
Cohn’s relative, David Marcus, believed that Cohn had a genuine
affection for Trump: “Roy, I think, really felt this sort of pride
of ownership in Trump,” Marcus told Tyrnauer. “He’d created
Trump. He had saved Trump from ruin after they met. And he felt this
odd attraction to him until the end.”

Cohn recognized that Trump was vulgar and uncouth, but the younger
man’s unembarrassed openness about his shallowness was disarming.
“If the charge is that Donald is unsophisticated, they are in some
ways right,” Cohn said. “If you go with Donald to see an art
collection, he’s not that interested. He’d rather look out the
windows at buildings.”

Trump regarded Cohn as a highly entertaining friend. “I got a kick
out of Roy Cohn,” Trump later told the Washington _Post_. 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 “To Roy, My
greatest friend. Donald.”

Trump liked to draw a contrast between Cohn and all the
“respectable” guys who made their careers “boasting about their
uncompromising integrity . . . [but] don’t think twice about
stabbing a friend in the back if the friend has become a problem.”
He occasionally dropped by Cohn’s town house, where Saxe, Bacon &
Bolan was based, so he witnessed firsthand some of the chaos in the
firm’s operations. “He was a man who did a lot of socializing with
judges. He liked a lot of judges,” Trump told us, speaking about
Cohn. “He 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.”

Cohn lived a secret life, hooking up regularly with gay hustlers.
Trump was almost certainly aware of this. “Roy had a whole crazy
deal going,” he told the Washington _Post_. In an interview with us,
Trump said, “He enjoyed life. He’s a different kind of a guy, but
he enjoyed life.” Trump went on, “A lot of people didn’t know he
was gay until toward the end.” (When Cohn was dying of _AIDS_, Trump
fell out of daily touch with him. But just before Cohn’s death, in
1986, Trump invited him to a dinner party at Mar-a-Lago. Afterward,
Trump reportedly ordered his staff to “fumigate” the dishware and
cutlery.)

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’s needs. In 1983, Cohn
used his many connections in Ronald Reagan’s White House to engineer
the elevation of Maryanne Trump Barry, Trump’s sister, to a federal
judgeship. But the Cohn favor bank was nonideological. He didn’t
care about Maryanne’s qualifications. He knew nothing about her
politics or legal experience. He just knew that she was Trump’s
sister.

Trump’s father had reared him to have cutthroat ambition. But Cohn
taught him tactics. The _Times_ reporter David Cay Johnston told
Tyrnauer that Cohn had instructed Trump to “ignore the rules, do
what you want to do, don’t leave a paper trail, don’t keep a
calendar, never do things in writing, and, if somebody gets onto you,
rat out other people to save yourself. Delay, delay, delay, ’cause
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’re 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_. And that’ll be the news story. It’ll put the
government on the defensive.” Cohn’s rules became Trump’s rules.

In the spring of 1984, _GQ_ put the thirty-eight-year-old real-estate
developer on its cover and ran a story by Graydon Carter, with the
cover line “Success: How Sweet It Is.” The profile opened with
Cohn calling Trump one morning with a problem. He needed a hotel room
for a client that night: “What’s up? Who? Sorry, Roy, I think the
Grand Hyatt is full,” Trump says. “But how about the Barbizon?
Hold on. Let me find out.” A moment later: “Okay, I think we can
book him into the Barbizon. Only for you, Roy.”

Carter captures the young Trump’s greed and bravado. “About 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,” Carter wrote. The piece makes Trump seem vacuous.
“Did you ever pass Trump Tower at night and see the way it glows?”
Trump asks. “It almost glows in the dark. That’s because I used
real bronze. If you get imitations, it doesn’t look the same. It
looks like nothing.” In the profile, Carter notes that Trump has
hands that are “small and neatly groomed,” an observation that
would nettle Trump for decades, even into his Presidency.

Cohn was of New York, but he deeply resented New York’s
intellectuals, its universities, and its élite law firms. Trump has
always felt the same resentment. “I’ll never have the good will of
the establishment, the tastemakers of New York,” Trump said, in
1990. Another time, he remarked, “I love the poorly educated.” 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.

“He had a lot of respect for me,” Trump told us, of Cohn. “He
said, ‘You’re going to be President someday. If you want
to.’ ” He added, “He said that many times.” According to
_Vanity Fair,_ the day after Trump was elected to the Presidency in
November, 2016, Roger Stone reached him by telephone to congratulate
him. “Mr. President,” Stone said. “Oh, please, call me
Donald,” Trump replied. And then Trump remarked, in a pensive tone,
“Wouldn’t Roy love to see this moment? Boy, do we miss
him.” ♦

_This is drawn from “__American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey
from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump_
[[link removed]]_.”_

_KAI BIRD is an American author and columnist, best known for his
works on the __atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki_
[[link removed]]_,
__United States-Middle East political relations_
[[link removed]]_,
and his biographies of political figures. He won a __Pulitzer Prize_
[[link removed]]_ for __American
Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer_
[[link removed]]_. (Wikipedia)_

_SUSAN GOLDMARK, Kai Bird’s wife and chief researcher, has worked in
over seventy-five countries—in consulting, for nonprofits, and at
the World Bank. She was a World Bank Country Director in Nepal and
later in Latin America. She holds a BA from Carleton College and a
graduate degree in development economics from Princeton University.
Susan has been Kai’s muse for decades and led the research for
American Scoundrel._

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