Aside from being a modern morality tale, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark,¹ might be seen as a veritable inversion of Bird’s earlier work American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which he wrote with Martin J. Sherwin. That book, which served as a major source for Christopher Nolan’s 2023 blockbuster biopic, Oppenheimer, presented a nuanced portrait of the idealistic, mystically inclined, yet duplicitous and power-seeking nuclear physicist. The subject of this chilling new biography was an entirely different creature, even though like Oppenheimer he was born to a wealthy New York Jewish family (albeit a much less cultivated one), attended the progressive Ethical Culture Fieldston School (although the “ethics” part evidently eluded him), and ranked among the most polarizing American personalities of the early postwar period.

In Bird and Goldmark’s account (these collaborators are also married), the nihilistic, amoral, duplicitous, power-seeking Roy Marcus Cohn makes Niccolò Machiavelli seem like a rank amateur. Yet far from coming across as distant history, American Scoundrel fairly vibrates with contemporary relevance thanks to its subject’s crucial part in the creation of Donald Trump. The authors demonstrate how Cohn’s playbook has been coopted chapter and verse by the present occupant of the Oval Office, who, they suggest, has mastered his principal mentor’s flagrant lying, transactional wheeling and dealing, ad hominem invective, reflexive calumny, frivolous lawsuits, and endless delaying tactics—even his stiffing creditors and parroting mendacious phrases like “to be absolutely frank”—to a degree that might astonish that incorrigible schemer. But Bird and Goldmark’s book also made me think back on one of the strangest episodes of my life, which improbably involved Cohn and began five years before his untimely death.

I caught my first glimpse of Cohn in 1972, when I drove a New York City taxi for nine months between graduate school and my first publishing job. One summer Friday afternoon my cab was stuck in bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic on Sixth Avenue near Radio City Music Hall. Alongside me materialized a huge Cadillac convertible, top down, with several shirtless young men in the front and back seats laughing and carrying on. At the wheel was a considerably older, fully clothed gent, whom on second glance I recognized as Roy Cohn. Perhaps it was the cowboy hat that one of the bare-chested boys was wearing, or their unusually muscular physiques, but it dawned on me that the rumors about Cohn being gay were true, as the book’s extended descriptions of his hectic sex life now verify in explicit detail.

What surprised me more was how blissfully unconcerned he seemed about being identified in such company, driving a showboat vehicle that itself begged for attention in such a conspicuously public place swarming with office workers and tourists. Although it had been three years since the Stonewall Inn uprising ignited the gay liberation movement, it was still long before high-profile figures with political connections began to openly declare their same-sex orientation. Cohn represented numerous mobsters from the organized crime families that owned most New York City gay bars, and according to the memoirs of his friend Liz Smith, the gossip columnist, published in 2000, he was a clandestine investor in several of them.

Cohn persistently denied in public that he was gay, but he acted as he pleased among the elite, as when he introduced his last lover, Peter Fraser, a handsome New Zealander thirty years his junior, to the Reagans in Washington. He knew that his ability to retaliate protected him from being outed, at least until the news leaked that he was undergoing an experimental treatment for AIDS at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, shortly before he died there in 1986 at the age of fifty-nine.

If you moved in certain New York circles back then, sooner or later you’d likely run into Cohn, an inveterate partygoer, in the same way that Andy Warhol popped up at any number of incongruous occasions as his artistic reputation languished toward the end of his life. I often spotted Cohn at big black-tie events, where he was always huddled with someone in a corner deep in conversation. But I never set foot in Studio 54, the period’s most decadent New York nightclub and a favorite of his, so I didn’t get to observe him at that coked-up hothouse of Seventies hedonism. Getting people past its red velvet rope—he was the owners’ attorney—was yet another of the myriad favors he dispensed in expectation of eventual payback.

For Cohn, a large part of the thrill of having power was his belief that it allowed him to get away with anything. It takes no neon arrows to draw connections in that regard between him and Trump, his most notorious protégé. The two men first met in 1973, at a members-only East Side Manhattan hotspot called Le Club. Deemed the first American discothèque, this high-class hetero pickup joint was frequented by libertine luminaries like the Fiat chairman Gianni Agnelli, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and George Plimpton, cofounder and editor of The Paris Review. A half century later we are all living in the moral penumbra of that fateful liaison at Le Club between these two monstres profanes. As the authors of American Scoundrel write with scant exaggeration, their subject “planted the seeds of America’s descent into political folly in the twenty-first century.”

In 1981 a relative of mine was blindsided when her husband of many years announced that he was leaving her and their children for another woman. This successful New York accountant and business manager—his clients’ names now convey a faint period glamour, including the couturier Arnold Scaasi, who dressed several First Ladies, and Wilhelmina Cooper, whose Wilhemina Models agency allegedly supplied President Kennedy with women during his visits to Manhattan—had been plotting a divorce for some time. Methodically he’d asked his wife to sign documents that he assured her were routine paperwork she need not read, but which reassigned their joint assets to him alone. To make matters worse, he was being represented by another of his clients, the celebrity attorney Raoul Felder, whom Variety described as “America’s go-in-for-the-kill king of divorce” and the “shark of split.”

My relative was terrified of winding up penniless or even dead. Her husband, always prone to bullying, began to act ever more irrationally. He cut the brakes on her car at their suburban hilltop home, and after he moved out he tore off the oven door when she refused to bake cookies for him. He kept her on a bare minimum allowance, and all the divorce lawyers she approached required a substantial upfront retainer. As she detailed her desperate situation to me, my instinctive reaction was that one must fight fire with fire. And in those days there was nothing quite like the panic that ensued when an errant spouse received a lawyer’s letter from the firm of Saxe, Bacon & Bolan over the signature of Roy M. Cohn, Esq., widely known as New York’s most cutthroat power broker, a macher among machers, the fixer of all fixers.

During the heady 1980s I worked for Condé Nast and knew that Cohn remained the lifelong best friend of the magazine company’s chairman, S.I. Newhouse, Jr., whose split from his first wife, Jane Franke, Cohn had handled. My wife and I had been taken up socially by Si and his second wife, Victoria, and I learned that he went into his office at 4:00 AM to work uninterruptedly for several hours before his employees showed up. If you really needed to speak with Si—and the reason had better be good—you could call him then and he’d pick up the phone himself.

Thus I arrived at my Condé Nast office one day before dawn, got him on the line, explained my relative’s plight, and asked if he would intervene with Cohn to take her case. He said he’d do what he could, and within a day called back to say that Roy asked to meet with us at his office. “Take a teddy bear,” he added. “What?” I replied, thinking I’d misheard him. “Bring him a teddy bear,” he repeated, “He likes teddy bears.” OK, I thought to myself, do whatever the man says, and I duly headed to F.A.O. Schwarz to find a suitably impressive stuffed animal for our conference with Si’s boyhood pal.

When my relative and I arrived for our 11:00 AM appointment with Cohn at the Saxe, Bacon & Bolan offices on East 68th Street, Steiff plushie in hand, we were startled to find that behind the imposing limestone façade of this midblock Beaux-Arts mansion were interiors as shabby and barren as a Morningside Heights frat house. Cohn also lived there, above the store as it were, but the townhouse was owned by a shell company lest he lose some personal lawsuit. In 1964 Cohn and Thomas A. Bolan (a former federal prosecutor and a founder of New York State’s Conservative Party) bought out a respectable old Wall Street law firm, Saxe, Bacon & O’Shea. But Cohn was never a named partner. He much preferred to operate behind the scenes, as his heedless demeanor was about to reveal to us.

We were ushered upstairs to a large, sparsely furnished, wood-paneled salon on the piano nobile, and a few minutes later Cohn shambled into the room. Barefoot and dressed—or, more accurately, undressed—in a loosely tied, silk paisley dressing gown, he clearly was wearing nothing underneath. After he seated himself in a well-worn wing chair, his manspreading and leg-crossing stopped just short of full disclosure. He was deeply tanned, the color of a well-used baseball mitt, which made his penetrating aquamarine eyes stand out even more. They were so heavy-lidded that he appeared to be wide awake and half asleep at the same time, a disconcerting effect that this master manipulator habitually exploited to his advantage.   

When my relative nervously presented him with the requisite stuffed animal he smiled wanly and said, “You know I collect teddy bears. Very nice.” He then set it aside, agreed to take her on as a client, and spoke with contempt of Raoul Felder. (I never learned how Felder or his client reacted to Cohn’s unanticipated involvement.) Aware that his supplicant had no cash because of her husband’s machinations, he said that payment could wait until the case was settled. Of course, Cohn added, he’d hand over day-to-day dealings to a younger member of the firm but would oversee everything himself. He then stood up, took the teddy, and left the room, robe flapping. Our audience was over in less than ten minutes. We were next introduced to a boyish-looking associate who was to be our primary contact, and we soon left the premises with a vague sense of having done something not quite kosher.

Thereupon followed days and weeks of silence from the law office, with countless unreturned phone messages that only increased our unease as nothing progressed. Although this entire saga transpired in less than a year, after six months’ inaction my relative had become so unnerved that she was ready to accept her husband’s draconian terms. To prevent that dire outcome, I offered to have the case assessed by an attorney recommended to me for her shrewd forensic analyses of other lawyers’ performance. After reviewing the paperwork, this expert concluded that Cohn’s firm was indeed slow-walking the matter, but she felt that my relative’s prospects were rather hopeless anyway. “Sometimes delaying is not such a bad thing,” she told me. “And as they say, you can always settle on the courthouse steps. But please get back to me when it’s over—I’m curious to know how this all plays out.”

Within a few weeks of that consultation, the plaintiff, who was not yet fifty, dropped dead of a heart attack. He had a history of cardiac disease and his wife had learned CPR to save him—but when he was stricken he was with his girlfriend. (To our family’s horror she crashed the funeral and threw herself on the coffin for good measure.) Because the divorce had not been finalized, the widow inherited everything, including his business, which she sold for its lucrative client list, an unexpected windfall. As one outspoken aunt commented a bit too loudly at the service, “This is the best thing that could have happened,” which others of us also thought but dared not say. My betrayed relative then wed a sweet-natured widower with whom she shared a happy second marriage that lasted nearly as long as her first.

Soon after fate rendered the divorce proceedings moot, she received an invoice from Saxe, Bacon & Bolan for $35,000 (more than $120,000 in current value). It contained no itemization, just the stunningly large sum. (According to American Scoundrel, “Unlike most lawyers, Roy did not keep track of billable hours.”) When she informed me that she had no intention of paying so much, I replied that this was one dispute I’d not get involved with, fearful that Cohn might complain to his friend Si about the deadbeat he’d sent him. With newfound assertiveness she told the firm’s junior associate that the fee was ridiculous, and the most she would offer was $7,500 (about $25,000 today), which she somehow calculated as a fair amount. Without skipping a beat he accepted, which made me wonder how Cohn’s office handled its finances. But as his friend Alan Dershowitz recalled in a PBS Frontline interview in 2018, “He would never set a fee in advance. After he did great favors for people, he would always say, ‘Pay me what you think it was worth.’”

Murray Kempton’s posthumous verdict on this dark prince of the city held that, “having been defeated in all his hopes for eminence, Cohn could only fall back on notoriety and return to being mercenary soldier for gangsters habitually disreputable or wives made transiently so by the ravenings of their thirst for revenge.” My relative, however, did not seek retribution but was fighting for survival, as distasteful as recourse to this guttersnipe of the law may have been. When the ashes to ashes and dust to dust finally settled, I contacted the consultant attorney as promised and reported the stunning denouement and providential resolution. “Well,” she replied, “I’ve always said that Roy Cohn runs a full-service operation.”