Roy Cohn

Roy Marcus Cohn (February 20, 1927 to August 2, 1986) was a New York lawyer who worked as an assistant United States attorney on the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, served as chief counsel to the Senate investigations subcommittee chaired by Joseph McCarthy from January 1953 to August 1954, and was disbarred in New York in June 1986, about six weeks before his death. Federal juries acquitted him in three prosecutions between 1964 and 1971.¹²

Early career and the Rosenberg prosecution

The FBI's New York office recorded, in a 1962 report on Cohn's application for an appointment to the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, that he was born in New York City on February 20, 1927. His father was Albert Cohn, a judge of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York. Cohn received an A.B. from Columbia University in 1945 and an LL.B. in 1947.¹ The Senate's historical introduction to its published McCarthy-era executive sessions states that Cohn was too young to take the bar examination when he graduated from law school, and that he became an assistant United States attorney on the day he was admitted to the bar, a year after graduation.² The New York court later recorded his admission to the bar in 1948.³

In 1951 Cohn took part in the prosecution of Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg. The same Senate introduction lists the Rosenberg case alongside the perjury prosecution of a former Commerce Department employee and the trial of the leaders of the Communist Party in the United States, and says Cohn "earned a reputation as a relentless questioner with a sharp mind and retentive memory."² On appeal the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit listed Myles J. Lane as counsel for the United States, with "Roy M. Cohn, James B. Kilsheimer 3d and Stanley D. Robinson" of counsel. The court decided the appeal on February 25, 1952.⁴

The Rosenberg Fund for Children states in its case timeline that files released after a 1975 Freedom of Information request by the Rosenbergs' sons showed the trial judge communicating secretly with the prosecutors, "including the infamous Roy Cohn," and that Cohn "helped prosecute Ethel Rosenberg by orchestrating what was later proven to be perjurious testimony by her brother, David Greenglass."⁵ In a ruling that ordered release of Greenglass's grand jury testimony, Judge Hellerstein noted that Greenglass had told a New York Times reporter in 2001 that he lied at trial about his sister to protect his wife, and that he claimed government attorneys had threatened to prosecute his wife unless he testified.⁶ The lawyer Stephen G. Schwarz, who worked as a summer associate at Cohn's firm in 1979, wrote in the Journal of the American College of Trial Lawyers that Cohn conducted the direct examination of Greenglass, that Greenglass later claimed he lied to protect himself and his wife, and that Greenglass "also claimed that he was encouraged by Cohn to do so." Schwarz also wrote that, according to Cohn's autobiography, the trial judge telephoned Cohn after the verdict to ask whether Ethel Rosenberg should receive the death penalty, and that Cohn answered: "The way I see it, she is worse than Julius."⁷ In a March 11, 1985 letter to William Webster, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Cohn credited the Bureau with "magnificent investigative help" in the Rosenberg case.⁸

Chief counsel to the McCarthy subcommittee

According to the Senate introduction, McCarthy considered Robert Morris, Robert F. Kennedy and John J. Sirica before offering the chief counsel post to Cohn. Cohn had been briefly special assistant to Attorney General James McGranery in 1952, and in that role prepared an indictment for perjury against Owen Lattimore. The introduction records that McCarthy invited Cohn to become subcommittee counsel in December 1952.² The subcommittee's staff list gives Cohn's service as chief counsel from January 15, 1953 to August 13, 1954.²

The subcommittee's staff included G. David Schine as chief consultant.² On April 2, 1953 Cohn telephoned the legislative counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency to say that he and Schine were leaving the next morning on a trip to examine the Voice of America and the overseas information services. Cohn asked for contact with CIA officers abroad, and the agency's memorandum records that the CIA would have cables sent to its overseas stations.⁹

On August 11, 1953 Cohn telephoned the CIA's Office of Legislative Counsel to say that the subcommittee had received additional testimony indicating that CIA classified material had been printed at the main Government Printing Office plant. The agency's journal entry for the call records the conversation.¹⁰ On October 22, 1953 Allen Dulles wrote to Joseph McCarthy that a check of the agency's reproduction facilities had found no classified CIA material printed there.¹¹

In 1954 the subcommittee's investigation of the Army became the Special Senate Investigation on Charges and Countercharges, which named Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens, John G. Adams, H. Struve Hensel, McCarthy, Cohn and Francis P. Carr. McCarthy stepped aside as chairman and Karl Mundt presided.¹² The published hearing record for May 26, 1954 (Part 41) indexes the testimony of Cohn as chief counsel of the subcommittee.¹³

On June 9, 1954 (Part 59), Army special counsel Joseph Welch told McCarthy that he had asked a young lawyer of his Boston firm to leave the case because of a past membership in the National Lawyers Guild, and that McCarthy had raised the matter in the hearing. The exchange that became the best known of the hearings was addressed to McCarthy and not to Cohn. Welch said: "Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Immediately before, Welch had turned to Cohn, who had nodded to him, and said: "I did you, I think, no personal injury, Mr. Cohn." Cohn answered: "No, sir." Welch added: "I meant to do you no personal injury, and if I did, I beg your pardon." McCarthy replied that Welch had been "baiting Mr. Cohn here for hours" and went on to quote a House Un-American Activities Committee description of the Guild as a legal bulwark of the Communist Party.¹⁴ The Senate censured McCarthy on December 2, 1954, and Cohn's term as chief counsel had ended on August 13, 1954, before the censure.²¹²

Federal prosecutions, 1964 to 1971

A federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York indicted Cohn and a co-defendant on September 3, 1963. The counts charged perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice in connection with grand jury proceedings on dealings in the securities of United Dye and Chemical Corporation. Three counts charged Cohn with perjury and four with obstructing justice; a conspiracy count against both defendants was dismissed by the trial judge, Judge Dawson, before the first jury began deliberating.¹⁵ The first trial ended in a mistrial on April 19, 1964, when the father of a juror died during deliberations, and the district court set a retrial for June 9, 1964.¹⁵ Before the retrial, the Second Circuit declined to order a continuance or a change of venue, noting that Cohn had received "considerable attention in the press" since the early 1950s.¹⁶

The retrial jury returned verdicts of not guilty on all nine counts on July 16, 1964.¹⁷ The same FBI file describes the underlying allegation as a bribe said to have been paid in 1959 to control an indictment in a Securities and Exchange Commission case.¹⁷

At the retrial Louis B. Nichols, formerly an assistant to J. Edgar Hoover and then executive vice president of Schenley Industries, testified on July 9, 1964. In a letter to Hoover the next day, preserved in the Bureau's file, Nichols wrote that when the United States Attorney asked on cross-examination whether he had contacted the Bureau at Cohn's request to halt its investigation at Schenley, he replied: "That's an unmitigated lie." Nichols wrote that Bureau agents had come to Schenley seeking cancelled checks for fees paid to Cohn; that Schenley had given its papers to the Internal Revenue Service, which was then investigating Cohn; and that when he heard agents were approaching other Cohn clients he telephoned Cartha DeLoach because he feared "another 'steel pricing case'" in which the Bureau would come under criticism. He also wrote that he had been told Judge Dawson asked the United States Attorney's office to instruct the Treasury Department to stop its inquiries about Cohn until the trial was over, and he enclosed the related memoranda for the Bureau's information.¹⁸

On January 17, 1969 a grand jury indicted Cohn and three others on charges of conspiracy, bribery and extortion. The charges were tied to Fifth Avenue Coach Lines, the New York bus company.¹⁹²⁰ In September 1969 Cohn petitioned the Second Circuit for a writ of mandamus directing the trial judge, Inzer B. Wyatt, to postpone the trial set for September 23, 1969. He argued that advance publicity, including a Life article titled "The Hotshot One-Man Roy Cohn Lobby," made an impartial jury impossible. The court denied the petition on September 17, 1969. The government's brief on the petition was signed by Paul L. Perito and Peter L. Truebner, assistant United States attorneys.¹⁹ An FBI memorandum of January 1975 describes Cohn as indicted in 1969 "and subsequently acquitted," and records that before that trial he had publicly charged Robert Morgenthau with a "personal vendetta" against him.²⁰ Schwarz wrote that Cohn's lawyer suffered an apparent heart attack at the close of the proof, that Cohn, who had not testified, delivered the closing argument himself over two days, speaking for seven hours without notes, and that he was acquitted.⁷

The third prosecution was a separate ten-count indictment charging willful violations of sections 13(a) and 14(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 in connection with the annual reports and proxy statements of Fifth Avenue Coach Lines. Six of the ten counts were dismissed on the government's motion before trial and a conspiracy count was dismissed during the trial. The Securities and Exchange Commission's News Digest of October 22, 1971 reported that on October 15, 1971 a federal jury in New York returned verdicts of acquittal on the three remaining counts.²¹ Schwarz described it as the last federal prosecution of Cohn, after three unsuccessful attempts.⁷

In a separate civil action the Securities and Exchange Commission obtained an injunction against Cohn and others arising from the same company. The district court found that Cohn had violated section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 in a transaction between Fifth Avenue Coach and an affiliated company, Gray Line Corporation, and enjoined him. The Second Circuit decided his appeal on December 8, 1970. The appellate opinion records that as of December 12, 1966 Cohn owned 7 percent of a company named Defiance, which owned about 32 percent of a registered investment company, and that shares bought from another holder were held through a nominee attorney at Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, where Cohn was "of counsel."²² In October 1973 the district court in the same receivership overruled Cohn's objection, as a shareholder, to an award of $489,924 in counsel fees to the receiver's lawyers.²³

The Hoover and FBI connection

The Bureau's file on Cohn runs from the 1962 background report through 1985. In the March 11, 1985 letter to Director Webster, Cohn wrote that since 1950 he had "a first-rate relationship with and respect for the Bureau," and described it as including "a close friendship with Mr. Hoover, speeches at Bureau gatherings, delivering the eulogy at Lou Nichols' funeral along with Deke DeLoach, representing Wally LaPrade when he was unfairly attacked, testifying for Mark Felt and Ed Miller at their trial in Washington, urging their immediate pardon and honoring them the day after our great President took that action." The occasion for the letter was a story he said a Bureau representative had planted in the New York Post.⁸ A 1971 FBI file note concerns a letter from an attorney who had written commentary on events mentioned in Cohn's book, A Fool for a Client, which the note says was not in the Bureau library.²⁴

In September 1969 a private correspondent wrote to Senator Abraham Ribicoff that newspapers had reported that Hoover transferred three agents from the New York office "rather summarily because they were involved in a case with Mr. Roy Cohen, who happens to be a particular favorite of Mr. Hoover's." Hoover's reply, quoted in the correspondent's later letter, stated that the transfers "resulted solely from their failure to comply with long-standing rules and regulations of this bureau and had nothing what-so-ever to do with the merits of the Roy M. Cohen case." After checking through acquaintances in law enforcement the correspondent withdrew the suggestion on March 3, 1970 and apologized to Hoover; the Bureau answered Ribicoff on March 16, 1970.²⁵

On January 6, 1971 Cohn wrote to Jerry Finkelstein, chairman of the New York City Democratic Committee, that he would not take part in a dinner for Comptroller Abraham Beame because Ramsey Clark was toastmaster, and that Clark was identified with "his unprincipled attack on J. Edgar Hoover whose service to this nation over a lifetime has earned him unique universal respect." Finkelstein's reply of January 19, 1971 referred to the stories he had written at Cohn's request for Hoover in the New York Law Journal and other papers. The copy of Cohn's January 25, 1971 follow-up in the Bureau's file is marked "bcc: Honorable J. Edgar Hoover."²⁶

Susan Rosenstiel, the fourth wife of Lewis S. Rosenstiel, told the author Anthony Summers, in the account he published in Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993), that at a party at the Plaza Hotel in 1958 she saw Hoover in women's clothing in Cohn's company, that Cohn introduced him to her as "Mary," and that she saw him in a similar state at a second party a year later. The account rests on her statements; Christopher Hitchens, reviewing the book in the London Review of Books, called it "the freelance testimony of Susan Rosenstiel."²⁷

Disbarment

The Departmental Disciplinary Committee for the First Judicial Department brought four charges against Cohn in the fall of 1982. On June 23, 1986 the Appellate Division, First Department sustained all four in a per curiam opinion joined by Justices Sandler, Fein, Lynch, Rosenberger and Ellerin, and disbarred him effective immediately. His counsel were Michael Mukasey and Harold R. Tyler Jr.³²⁸

The first charge concerned the answers on Cohn's application of July 28, 1982 for admission to the District of Columbia Bar. To question 8(b), which asked whether any charges or complaints concerning his conduct as an attorney were pending, Cohn answered "No," and added: "Except usual crackpot complaint letters following media appearances, etc. Know of none pending." The court found the answer untruthful, because three complaints of a disciplinary nature were then pending against him. The court also noted that in answer to question 8(a) he had volunteered a 1960 admonition by the Grievance Committee for releasing to the press a statement that a client was about to bring a lawsuit.²⁹

The second charge concerned a $100,000 loan from a client in 1966. Cohn and his partner, Thomas A. Bolan, had been paid in full for the client's divorce matter, and the client's loan was documented in Cohn's handwriting as a loan. The obligation was not satisfied until 1984, after the disciplinary proceedings began. In a January 1981 deposition Cohn was asked whether the transaction could be characterized as a loan, and answered: "I would say that's an incorrect characterization." The court sustained the charge.³⁰

The third charge concerned a codicil to the will of Lewis S. Rosenstiel, the founder of the Schenley distilling company. The codicil was signed in Rosenstiel's hospital room in Miami on December 6, 1975, about six weeks before he died there on January 21, 1976, and named Cohn as an additional executor and trustee. The hearing panel had recommended exoneration on this charge, and the court rejected that recommendation. On June 24, 1976 a Florida probate judge, Frank B. Dowling, revoked, annulled and set aside the codicil.³¹

The fourth charge concerned an escrow order in a securities action brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against a corporate client in December 1971. Cohn's firm was escrow agent for $25,000 in cash and two yachts. In January 1972 $94,000 was released from the escrow on the strength of an indemnity bond that was not an equivalent bond, and the money was never recovered. The court found Cohn's account of having no direct knowledge of these events "incredible."³²

The court concluded that "the evidence so compelling on each of these four charges as to leave us no recourse but to order disbarment," and wrote that "for an attorney practicing for nearly 40 years in this State, such misconduct is inexcusable."²⁸

Clients

In 1962 a federal jury convicted Carmine Galante in the Southern District of New York of conspiracy to violate federal narcotics laws, and he was sentenced to twenty years. Cohn appeared as his counsel in a habeas corpus proceeding in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in 1970, in an appeal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 1971, and in a 1977 Second Circuit appeal from the dismissal of a habeas petition challenging the revocation of Galante's parole. Galante had been mandatorily released in 1974, and the Parole Commission proceeded on a charge that he associated with a person who had a criminal record.³³³⁴³⁵ Schwarz wrote that during his summer at the firm in 1979 Galante came to the townhouse office to meet Cohn about legal problems, accompanied by bodyguards, and that the next day's New York Post carried the front-page photograph of Galante after his killing in Brooklyn.⁷

On January 18, 1983 Cohn attended an Oval Office meeting with Ronald Reagan, Rupert Murdoch, Charles Wick and Thomas Bolan. The Reagan Library's photograph record for the meeting names the same four men and gives the event as "Meeting with Rupert Murdoch."³⁶ On January 27, 1983 Cohn wrote on the letterhead of Saxe, Bacon & Bolan to Edwin Meese, James A. Baker III and Michael Deaver at the White House: "I had one interest when Tom and I first brought Rupert Murdoch and Governor Reagan together - and that was that at least one major publisher in this country ... would become and remain pro-Reagan." He listed Murdoch's papers, enclosed the New York Post editorial praising a presidential speech, complained that Murdoch's Washington bureau chief had been slighted, and protested that White House staff had not returned Murdoch's calls when he offered to turn the Boston Herald over to Reagan during a visit to Boston. A deputy assistant to the President, Michael McManus, answered on February 4, 1983 on behalf of the three, writing that he had called Murdoch and apologized, and of "our continued high regard for Mr. Murdoch personally."³⁷

On May 2, 1983 Reagan sent a message to Cohn, in care of the chairman of the B'nai B'rith Banking and Finance Lodge dinner committee at Bank Leumi Trust Company, congratulating him on the lodge's State of Israel Bonds tribute. The dinner program in the same White House file describes Cohn as the senior member of Saxe, Bacon & Bolan, an adjunct professor at New York Law School, and "president of the American Jewish League Against Communism." Its list of dinner sponsors includes Rupert Murdoch, as chairman of News America Publishing, and Donald J. Trump, as president of The Trump Organization.³⁸ A Los Angeles chapter letterhead of July 1956 in the FBI's file on the American Jewish League Against Communism lists George Sokolsky as chairman and Alfred Kohlberg as honorary chairman and treasurer.³⁹

In 1985 Cohn wrote to Webster that a Bureau representative had planted a story in the New York Post, published March 5, 1985, reporting that agents were surveilling his office to develop grounds for a wiretap on his telephone. The Bureau's New York office confirmed in an April 1985 teletype that it had conducted surveillances to ascertain the feasibility of a monitoring device to intercept the conversations of Anthony Salerno, identified in the teletype as a Genovese boss, with a Teamsters contact.⁸⁴⁰ The Bureau's reply of May 13, 1985 said that it would not "plant" a story and that it had checked with its New York office.⁴¹ Salerno and Vincent Cafaro were arrested on March 21, 1986 on a 29-count racketeering indictment, and the government moved for their pretrial detention as danger to the community under the Bail Reform Act of 1984. On July 3, 1986, about four weeks before Cohn died, the Second Circuit vacated the detention orders in United States v. Salerno; the court's listing of counsel gives "Anthony M. Cardinale, Boston, Mass. (Roy Cohn, New York City, on brief), for defendant-appellant Salerno." The Supreme Court reversed on May 26, 1987.⁴²

Roger Stone told The Weekly Standard in 2007 that he started working with Cohn around the time he became northeast chairman of Reagan's 1980 campaign, and described a 1979 meeting at Cohn's townhouse at which Cohn introduced him to Salerno. By Stone's account Cohn said "Tony, everything's fixed. Everything can be handled," Salerno answered "Roy, the Supreme Court," and Cohn replied "Cost a few more dollars."⁴³ Stone told FRONTLINE that he and Donald Trump "became very good friends"; FRONTLINE reported that Cohn arranged his first meeting with Trump in 1979. In 1980 Stone, Paul Manafort and Charles Black opened a Washington lobbying firm, Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly; Stone said that Trump was among its first clients, and Newsweek reported that the most widely told version of how Trump met Manafort has Cohn introducing them.⁴⁴

In the federal government's 1973 housing discrimination suit against Fred Trump, Donald Trump and Trump Management, Cohn acted for the defendants. The docket records an affidavit of Roy M. Cohn filed in the case and letters from him to the court and to opposing counsel in 1974. The docket shows that the defendants filed a counterclaim on December 12, 1973, that the government moved to dismiss it on January 8, 1974, and that the motions were argued before Judge Edward R. Neaher on January 25, 1974. The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse summary states that Neaher dismissed the counterclaim, which sought $100 million in damages for defamation; The Nation reported that the judge dismissed it about two months after it was filed.⁴⁵⁴⁶

Tax disputes and the 1988 suit

In 1969 the Second Circuit affirmed a Tax Court decision that $27,247 Cohn received in 1958 was compensation for his services as co-executor of an estate rather than a gift.⁴⁷

In the spring of 1986 the United States filed suit to collect about $7 million in taxes, interest and penalties for tax years 1959 through 1983, on assessments made between 1972 and 1984. The government sought to foreclose tax liens under 26 U.S.C. sections 6321 and 6322 on a Manhattan townhouse that it alleged was held by a corporation as Cohn's nominee, and on fees earned by Cohn that his firm had retained or paid to third parties on his behalf. The court summarized the government's theory as resting in part on a book by Cohn, How to Stand Up for Your Rights and Win, and quoted him as writing: "I decided to have no assets." A memorandum opinion of March 23, 1988 addressed motions by the firm, the townhouse corporation and several of the firm's lawyers, and noted that Cohn had been disbarred in June 1986, had apparently served an answer that he never filed with the court, and had died on August 2, 1986, with no motion to substitute his estate having been filed or granted.⁴⁸ Schwarz wrote that in 1979 the firm owned the townhouse and the cars in which Cohn was driven, that Cohn drew a minimal salary, and that Cohn was reported to owe the Internal Revenue Service over $7,000,000.⁷

Death

Cohn died on August 2, 1986, about four months after the government filed its suit in the spring of 1986 and about six weeks after his disbarment. He was undergoing treatment at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, when he died. UPI reported that he died of complications brought on by AIDS, and an NIH spokeswoman named a heart attack as the immediate cause.⁴⁹