American Monster — Roy Cohn

Third in a series about US criminals who accelerated global authoritarianism

“New York, I love you, but you’re bringing me down.”—LCD Soundsystem

New York media, minus a handful of investigative reporters, has been delivering us creeps — celebrating their lust for power and greed, their lavish lifestyles, and transactionally exchanging reputation washing or overlooking more sinister qualities for access.

Disgraced and disbarred attorney Roy Cohn was — like his proteges Donald Trump and Roger Stone — a creep.

This is part three of my American Monster series for paid members. Part one and two can be found here. To read the series and listen to the podcasts, please join Bette Dangerous today.

‘No Sense of Decency’

If you were in his presence, you knew you were in the presence of evil.—Where’s My Roy Cohn

Lavender scare tactician Roy Cohn — a gay man himself — grew up visiting his uncle Bernard Marcus in Sing Sing…

Marcus had been president of the Bank of the United States, which failed during the Great Depression. He was convicted of fraud and sent to prison. That item is often left out in the myth-making around Cohn, much as Jared Kushner has been pampered by corporate media, with rarely any mention of his disgraced and disbarred father’s time in prison for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering.

Cohn represented Trump’s father Fred, when he was sued for racial discrimination. According to the Department of Justice lawsuit, the Trump’s avoided renting to black people at their 39-properties, even using an internal code. The Trump’s countersued the government in a tossed-out lawsuit, and settled the case.

‘Situational Immorality’

According to author Sam Roberts in a Marie Brenner report for Vanity Fair, Trump inherited ‘situational immorality’ from Cohn.

“Roy was a master of situational immorality . . . . He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.”—Sam Roberts

Dead for nearly four decades, we are still living in the disturbing shadow of Roy Cohn.

‘Rules of War’

Cohn mastered the ‘offensive strategy’, as Roger Stone noted in Where’s My Roy Cohn, a documentary film on Cohn’s life and career.

“Those are the rules of war,” said Stone. “You don’t fight on the other guy’s ground. You define what the debate would be.”

In practice this meant, getting away from truth of his or other’s corruption and vilifying your accuser, attacking the media, government, and law enforcement. This method led to the culture wars, the manipulation away from truth and facts with phony issues. It’s made our world sick, and it’s pure fascism, as Hannah Arendt taught us when she said: “One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”

‘Mother Issues’

Another story from Cohn’s youth chafes.

A cousin described a holiday Passover dinner where Cohn’s mother Dora left a dead maid in the kitchen rather than interfere with the family gathering. In preparing this report, it appears Dora could give Ma Jarrett — the smothering gangster mom from the James Cagney film White Heat — a run for her money.

Born in the Bronx in 1927, Cohn was the only son from an arranged marriage. The arrangement being his father married Dora for the promise of a judgeship. Cohn was fresh from graduating Columbia University when he could be found sitting beside Senator Joe McCarthy in the early ‘50s conjuring up Red Scares, Lavender Scares, and ultimately, destroying untold lives. That is, until McCarthyism flamed out when the chief counsel for the US Army Joseph Nye Welch spoke these words: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”

In a column for The Wrap, Cohn’s cousin David L. Marcus sums it up like this:

“He started as a prosecutor of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the early 1950s; he then became chief counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy, who led witch hunts against people suspected of being Communists; in 1973, Cohn met Donald Trump and began grooming him to become a national figure; President Reagan welcomed him to the White House in the 1980s after he became one of the first people on the East Coast to line up big donors for Reagan’s campaign.

Cohn advised everyone from Catholic archbishops to Mafia clients like Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and Gambino family boss Paul Castellano. Cohn helped an upstart Australian publisher named Rupert Murdoch connect with American power brokers. It’s impossible to imagine anyone today with so much influence for so long in the law, the media, the Mob, the Church, plus Democratic and Republican politics.”

That’s a lot to unpack — Cohn represented the mob, the Trumps, the church, power broked for Murdoch — enabling right-wing infiltration into the government as Murdoch developed Fox News in the Oval Office — and all the while crimed in plain site.

Although he beat multiple indictments for professional misconduct, perjury, witness tampering, and financial fraud, he was ultimately disgraced and disbarred after the New York legal establishment upheld a judicial disciplinary panel's charges of "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation."

Like Trump, he had a history of not paying his bills — as if the rules of mere mortals did not apply to him.

The panel also reported an investigation that Cohn had entered a Florida hospital room of a client, who was senile, drugged, and dying. The court found that Cohn held his client’s hand to sign a document naming Cohn a co-executor of his will after falsely telling him that the document dealt with his divorce. To be clear, he was disbarred for stealing from his own clients, defrauding his own clients.

Even his closest associates said Cohn lacked empathy. He was often called brilliant, but what that really meant is his ruthless, unethical, amoral stances — a willingness to lie without conscience — helped him rise to power and free mobsters like John Gotti from murder raps.

Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett told Democracy Now! in 2016: "Roy is incandescent evil… the Satanic feeling that he would give you… He was the weirdest guy. He was into the strangest stuff. He was a chicken hawk after little boys, and yet he was the most virulently anti-gay guy you could imagine. And so, that was Donald's mentor and constant sidekick, who represented all five of the organized crime families in the City of New York."

It’s important to note that in studying the conflicted life of Roy Cohn and his handling of the media, that Trump has been doing a Roy Cohn schtick his entire adult life.

Watching Cohn try to discredit the prosecutor in one of his indictment cases is no different than watching Trump try to discredit Jack Smith — like Cohn, he plays the victim, turning the spotlight away from criminality and toward a vendetta, all the while hugging a flag and calling it patriotism.

Watching him in video clips — his tongue poking in and out in a strange affect, much like Trump’s odd mouth and tongue motions — is unsettling. As one of Cohn’s former colleagues notes, power in the hands of someone that reckless and arrogant is a very dangerous thing.

That he came up during an era where men often remained closeted while leading a charge against homosexuality on the national stage reveals a profoundly dark and conflicted personality.

He might have been some aberration — some evil footnote in New York history — if it wasn’t for the installation of Trump by the Russian military and US traitors. Trump was created in his image. Trump is still practicing the dark arts of Roy Cohn each time he stands before a camera. Flag as prop, victimhood speech rehearsed, a liar never admitting defeat, a liar never admitting the truth.

A registered Democrat who aligned with the Republican right, Cohn influenced the outcome of multiple presidential elections. Nixon was aided into office by the anti-Communist fever running rampant after the Red Scare.

Ronald Reagan, it’s worth recalling, cooperated with the McCarthy era ‘witch hunt.’ According to Roger Stone in ‘Where’s My Roy Cohn’, Reagan won the election in 1980 because Roy Cohn “arranged for John Anderson, who had challenged Reagan for the Republican nomination, to be the liberal party nominee. There’s a three-way split in New York, and that three-way split allows Reagan to win the electoral votes with 45 percent of the vote.”

It was a set up and it worked.—Roger Stone, ‘Where’s My Roy Cohn’

A colleague of Cohn’s recalls being present in Cohn’s office when Nancy Reagan called and thanked him for getting her husband elected.

So for those paying attention, the exact same set ups are being deployed now in 2023 in the form of such bad actors as Robert Kennedy Jr., who is being championed by far-right operatives angling to get Trump re-installed.

That all of this history seems to elude much of the corporate media’s political reporting, when it is alarmingly relevant to this very dangerous moment in time — as authoritarian thirst takes root both domestically and globally — is criminal.

But I guess the access journalists didn’t want to miss Cohn’s party invites — where they could mingle with mobsters and mayors, cardinals and cutthroats.

“So Cohn is this bridge between the legitimate world and the illegitimate world.”—David Cay Johnson, ‘Where’s My Roy Cohn’

Cohn — like his proteges Trump and Stone — said that the only thing that mattered was winning. But in the end, he died a loser — disgraced, disbarred, dishonest — alone at the party, consumed by his own myth.

He even lied about what killed him — claiming he was suffering from liver cancer and not AIDS.

As he was being disbarred two months before his death at age 59 on August 2, 1986, Donald Trump was one of his character witnesses.

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(Roy Cohn, 1964, government archives)