This looks like Roy Cohn`s last hurrah. Unlike previous battles–God knows, there have been many over the last three decades, from the Rosenbergs to Joseph McCarthy to Bobby Kennedy to the Internal Revenue Service–in this last battle, Roy Cohn may finally and conclusively lose.
It would be a new experience.
Cohn, the celebrated pit bull of the legal profession, has flirted with the dark side of the law his entire career and has yet to lose. He has beaten three indictments, paid little to the IRS in the last 27 years and outrun an entire army of attorneys seeking millions of dollars in various judgments.
Now, however, his life-on-the-edge may be catching up with him. A New York state disciplinary committee has unanimously recommended that Cohn be disbarred as a lawyer for various misdeeds dating back to 1966. A court is expected to make a final decision in the near future, and few doubt what its ruling will be.
The only question, it seems, is whether Cohn will live long enough to lose.
Cohn is dying, his friends and attorneys say, a victim of liver cancer. They contend the disbarment proceedings are, in effect, hitting a man when he is down. On the contrary, say the cynics. Cohn is using death to cheat his enemies out of one last victory.
Whatever. If Roy Cohn is departing this earth, he is going out with the same panache with which he has always lived. He is not one to go quietly into the night.
Cohn first splashed onto the scene during the nationally televised Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. He was Sen. Joseph McCarthy`s sinister-looking chief counsel who harangued witnesses and battled the Army over special privileges for a McCarthy aide who had been drafted (the incident that led to McCarthy`s downfall). A photo of the youthful baggy-eyed Cohn whispering to McCarthy was flashed across the front pages of the day and a copy still hangs in Cohn`s office.
Cohn has always thrived on controversy–and the media attention it brings. His smug bantamweight features often graced glossy magazines, gossip columns and television shows. Even today, at age 58, he remains the scourge of liberals, who remember his red-baiting days with McCarthy and his ruthless courtroom style, and the darling of conservatives–for the same reasons.
”I`m very thick-skinned; I don`t care what people write about me because it all seems to be helpful,” Cohn said in an interview with The Tribune two years ago.
”My image as a lawyer survives on toughness and controversy, and the worse people get with me, particularly on television and radio and all that, the better it is for me. People, when they`re in a fight, they want a fighter. They don`t want a namby-pamby type of lawyer.”
(Cohn declined to be interviewed for this article because, according to his secretary, the New York Daily News, which is owned by Tribune Company, has not been fair in its coverage of him during his current legal difficulties.)
Cohn has fought the disbarment action in typical trench-warfare style, employing tactics of bluster, delay and pathos–all played out in the media, of course.
He called the lawyers on the disciplinary panel a ”bunch of yo-yos” who were ”just out to smear me.” Then he trotted out 37 character witnesses to testify on his behalf. They included columnist William Buckley, television correspondent Barbara Walters, real estate mogul Donald Trump, a congressman, several state and federal judges and a high-ranking Catholic priest in the hierarchy of the New York archdiocese.
Cohn`s friends argue that the disbarment proceeding is a vendetta by liberals eager to settle an old score.
”Against a normal person in these circumstances, (the charges) would have been dropped,” said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who knows Cohn professionally and has debated him on occasion. ”If you`re part of the
`old boy network,` they get swept under the rug. . . . I think it has more to do with old personal gripes than it has to do with liberal-conservative.” Cohn, in his usual acerbic style, has struck the same general theme. In one published interview, he called the members of the panel ”deadbeat guys who could never get a significant job by election of the public or appointment by any responsible authority.”
Even one-time enemies wonder whether New York`s legal order has gone too far. Joseph Rauh, a Cohn critic who defended clients before the McCarthy committee, said, ”If he isn`t going to practice any more–and he swears up and down to that before the disciplinary–I think that should be the end of the matter. Disbarment is to keep people from practicing. It`s not for punishing.”
Leading the anti-Cohn parade, of course, is the disciplinary committee, which has mounted an unusual public counterattack to Cohn`s public relations assault. Disciplinary proceedings are, by tradition, conducted in strict secrecy, but when Cohn went after the committee in the press, the state courts took the extraordinary action of releasing the entire 2,400-page record of the case.
Disciplinary officials also made themselves available to the press.
The committee recommended Cohn`s disbarment on three charges. It accused Cohn of not fully repaying a $100,000 loan from a client for 18 years and then lying under oath about the loan in a lawsuit; of taking $219,000 from a corporate escrow account his law firm was under court order to protect, and of lying on an application to the Washington, D.C., bar when he said he was not subject to any disciplinary actions or civil judgments.
A fourth count was dismissed because of inconclusive evidence. It was based on a Florida court ruling that said Cohn misrepresented a document he asked a dying patient to sign. The court ruled that Cohn told Lewis Rosenstiel, the wealthy founder of Schenley Industries, the document was related to his divorce when in fact it was a codicil to his will that named Cohn as an executor.
Being called on the legal carpet for this array of misbehavior is quite a comedown for the boy wonder of the McCarthy era. The precocious Cohn had always seemed to be a bit smarter, a bit hungrier, a bit faster than everyone else around him. His mother liked to tell the story of the time when Roy, at age 12, approached a prosecutor after listening to a murder trial. Roy asked why the defense attorney had not pursued a certain line of questioning and the prosecutor admitted that if he had, the defendant might not have been convicted.
The only son of a respected New York judge, Cohn was graduated from Columbia Law School by age 19 and became an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan as soon as he passed the bar at 21.
These were the Communist witch-hunt days following World War II and Cohn fit in perfectly. Bright, aggressive and possessed of an uncanny memory, Cohn took on celebrated cases and found himself often quoted in the New York papers. He prosecuted author Dashiell Hammett and, in probably his biggest case, gained the conviction that sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair.
A 1954 profile in The Tribune said: ”He was obviously a young man going places in law or in politics.”
At age 25, his success in New York led to the job with McCarthy, where he was sometimes known as the ”Boy Rasputin” for his influence with the senator and hair-trigger temper. He also developed a quick dislike for another McCarthy staffer, Robert Kennedy, an enmity that would cost Cohn in later years.
The high-powered tactics Cohn honed during his McCarthy days–he could be brilliant, overbearing, manipulative and clever–would become his trademarks through the years as he defended the rich, the celebrated, the well-connected. ”I have no reason to doubt his technical excellence, but I dislike his browbeating tactics,” Rauh said. ”He`s very rough on people. I think we were put on this earth to help people. Roy Cohn believes it`s all right to hurt people if you help yourself.”
Donald Trump, for whom Cohn won a difficult tax decision for the plush Trump Tower, once said, ”If you need someone to get vicious toward an opponent, you get Roy. People will drop a suit just by getting a letter with Roy`s name on the bottom.”
His influence extended from high finance to show business to politics to the mob. They were all his clients and friends and loyalists, ready to defend him against any and all attacks. And there were attacks.
He was indicted in the 1960s three times, on charges of fraud, blackmail and perjury–the result of a vendetta, he says, by Kennedy and U.S. Atty. Robert Morgenthau. He was acquitted each time. In 1970, he was indicted in Chicago on charges that he had covertly tried to gain control of two banks. The charges were later dropped.
When he stopped paying federal taxes in 1959, the IRS intercepted a partner`s mail and spent 20 years auditing his documents. The IRS is still waiting for its money.
Cohn lived a charmed life. There seemed to be no scrape he could not escape.
Because of the IRS dispute, he liquidated his holdings 25 years ago and now owns virtually nothing. Everything he supposedly has–his Connecticut home, his Washington townhouse, his cottage on Cape Cod, his plane, his Rolls- Royce, his chauffeur–is owned or paid for through an elaborate ownership scheme that eventually leads back to his law firm, Saxe, Bacon and Bolan. Single and never married, he says he has no need to leave an estate.
Nearly all his expenses are deemed business-related and paid by the firm. He recently estimated them to be $500,000 a year.
With no tangible assets, neither the IRS nor his many creditors have anything to seize in their largely fruitless attempts to collect back debts. Manhattan Inc. magazine recently estimated that he owes at least $5.2 million, including $3.1 million to the IRS.
Stories of his attempts to dodge hearings, depositions and court judgments are legend.
”Roy Cohn is the type of man who doesn`t believe in paying his bills and he goes through pretzel bends to avoid doing so,” said lawyer Marshall Berger, one of the few lawyers to successfully sue and recover money from Cohn.
”He has created this marvelous facade with Saxe, Bacon and Bolan. The law firm`s really an extension of his personality,” he continued, adding,
”He will try to take advantage of you any way he can.”
Cohn`s political connections are an indispensable part of his image. Though a registered Democrat, he is close friends with President Reagan, who called Cohn when he was in a hospital in Washington. Once a year, Cohn holds a well-covered birthday party that attracts, among others, many of New York City`s powerful politicians and big-name judges.
Too ill to practice law regularly, he is in and out of hospitals seeking treatment. He spends a lot of time at a friend`s mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., collaborating on his autobiography. The small 145-pound body so feared on the legal circuit has become gaunt and pale. His cheeks are sunken and his quick gait has been replaced with a stiff limp.
As with everything that touches Cohn, there is even mystery over the nature of his illness. A sworn statement submitted to the disciplinary committee by a physician from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center said only that Cohn suffered from a ”serious and now life threatening disease.”
Barbara Walters, who recently had lunch with him, said he suffers from cancer and has two years to live. His physician said Cohn had between 6 and 12 months to live should an experimental drug be either ineffective or not available.
There have been persistent rumors in New York social and legal circles that Cohn is actually suffering from AIDS. Nicholas von Hoffman, a syndicated columnist, mentioned the rumor in a proposal for a Cohn biography.
Cohn, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, called von Hoffman`s proposal a ”libel and a slander.”
Judging from what his doctors, lawyers and friends say, Roy Cohn won`t be around long enough to file a suit. `Tis a pity. One last celebrated case, one last media show trial, one last courtroom drama . . . if Roy Cohn were writing this script, he wouldn`t have it any other way.
