Episode 73 -- Roy Cohn with Matt Sitman (Part 2)

Homosexuals are men who in 15 years of trying cannot pass a piss-ant anti-discrimination bill through city council.

Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows, who have zero clout.

And that is what makes Cohn Dying of AIDS so

striking, right?

I don't even know what the right word to use is.

The thing he spent his whole life telling himself and other people he was not.

He found himself in the same lot with all the weaklings he was looking down upon.

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

And I'm Moira Doddigan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So today we are coming at you with part two of our Opus, our epic investigation of Polestar of Human Evil and Donald Trump mentor Roy Cohn.

So Adrian, when we left off, we had gone through Roy's biography and we had left off with the end of his time working for Senator Joseph McCarthy.

That's right.

So we left off essentially with the last relatable thing that Roy Cohn was able to sneak into a long career of evil, which was that he had a boyfriend that he wanted to gallivant around Europe with.

And when the army tried to, you know, cockblock him basically, he was like, well, I'm going to do the next obvious thing and accuse you of communism.

It did not go well.

And it really ended with a kind of Kirby enthusiasm moment where just like everything just blows up in his face.

Well, the relatable moments will now sort of vanish from Roy Cohn's biography to be replaced by mountains and mountains of cocaine.

I mean, who among us has not called Senate hearings because we wanted to have a nice fling with somebody pretty in our mid-20s?

You know, that's definitely how that always ended for me.

As a relatable queen, what can I say?

So, like, today we're going to follow Roy out of DC and back to New York, where he really makes his career, sort of both coasting off of his reputation as the murderer of the Rosenbergs and the attack dog of Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare and Lavender scares, and becomes this sort of fixer to the stars who is the legal strong arm of a ton of corruption among some of the most powerful people of the 20th century.

Including Donald J.

Trump.

So we're joined again for the second part by the amazing, indomitable Matt Sittman of Know Your Enemy.

We're a big fan of Matt's and Matt is a longtime, well, I don't think fan is the right word, but has long harbored a real interest in Cohn and his networks.

So I really think we were able to get into a lot of very interesting stuff.

Before we get to it, I wanted to briefly mention our Patreon.

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We are doing a lot of extra content.

There's another Project 1933 coming down the pike.

But for now, please enjoy our delve into the 1970s and 1980s through the incredible, the I Can't Believe He's Real, Roy Cohn.

And I thought we'd start it off with a clip from 60 Minutes about Roy Cohn and Studio 54.

It is always business when he visits Studio 54, that over-publicized disco parlor in New York.

Here gather the hip and the old and the odd.

Any night, it is the mob scene from a Fellini movie.

Cohn may look and feel uncomfortable in this goofy setting, but he goes.

Lately he goes because the owners of the place are his clients and they've pleaded guilty to income tax evasion.

Federal authorities say they've skimmed millions in cash from the place.

They'll be sentenced next month.

Cohn also goes because he likes to be seen with this week's jet set.

Once in a while, he'll escort a model, but New York's matchmakers have given up on it.

He's just not the marrying kind.

Though at one time he says he and Barbara Walters almost got married.

Barbara won't comment except to praise Roy for his loyalty.

This is the moment when Cohn's excesses really bring down his mentor.

And I think this might be a decent moment to reflect on Cohn's relationships with these older, closeted, conservative gay men.

These do not seem to have been like sexual relationships, but it is this recurring pattern in his early life where he is introduced to an older gay man on the political right, and they become very close and they become very useful to each other.

And Cohn will like defend these guys and retain his loyalty to them like long after they're dead, right?

Like Matt, you keep referring back to this.

televised debate with Gore Vidal in which, you know, Cohn is defending Joseph McCarthy.

That's like the early 80s or late 70s when they have that conversation.

Late 70s.

It's a while later, right?

And something that does separate Cohn from his later protege Donald Trump is that he seems quite loyal.

He does seem actually to have been,

in some ways, a good friend to those who were on his side.

But he also has this responsibility for the downfall of McCarthy that he never really seems to take responsibility for or be particularly tortured by, you know?

McCarthy gets taken down.

Cohn resigns.

He He tells the media that nobody wanted him to resign.

It's like a very trumpy clip.

He's like, oh, they all begged me to stay, but it's time for me to go.

And he decamps to New York and begins what will be his career as a, you know,

hinge of corruption as a political fixer.

In a shocking twist, Cohn went to a place that's basically Disneyland for registered Democrats that are actually real Republicans, you know, New York City.

Yes.

And I want to add one detail to that.

So after Cohn resigns, leaves D.C., comes back to New York City.

I want to read here from Citizen Cohn again because some of this is just, man, it's delicious.

Roy did not return to his natal city, New York City, a whipped puppy.

A week and one day after his resignation, 2,000 people paid $7 a ticket for a banquet in Roy's honor at the Astor Hotel on Times Square,

which then was still one of the better hotels in the city.

And it mentions all these people there, and one of them was William F.

Buckley Jr.

Another bicurious individual, MM.

Another one of our closeted queens.

Yes, yes.

I've been saving the Buckley dish, but

when we get to Cohn's disbarment, just a few weeks before he died, I think 1986, one of his character witnesses was one William F.

Buckley Jr.

Also author of the first full-throated defense of McCarthy.

I know, right?

Two years after this whole thing.

McCarthy and his enemies.

But one of the really interesting things, and this gets to like Cohn's connection with Cardinal Spellman and like doing legal work for the Catholic Church in New York City.

And I noticed this, this quote about this party, how many Catholics were there.

It was basically Catholics and Jews.

You know, for Roy Cohn, there was...

a writer who actually covered it for Commonwealth the magazine where I used to be an editor which in Citizen Cohn von Hoffman says a liberal Catholic publication publication, which was nearly a contradiction in terms in 1954.

But the quote is, from what I saw, it is safe to call Roy's banquet principally an Irish Catholic gathering.

There were odd copies of the Irish Echo scattered on the tables.

It was an Irish tenor, Mr.

John Feeney, who sang the intermission melodies, a patriotic blending of Mr.

George M.

Cohen and Irving Berlin.

The people were the people you might see at the graduation exercises of an Irish Christian Brothers High School.

Anyways, that was his return to New York.

Yeah.

Thousands of people paying to go to this banquet in his honor where McCarthy spoke, Cohn spoke, but people like William Buckley Jr.

and others were there.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

So he gets kind of embraced by the New York conservative establishment with open arms.

And Matt, I did want to hear you talk a little bit about Francis Spellman, one of his early mentors, I believe the Archbishop of New York at the time.

Yes.

So, yeah, Cardinal Spellman, Francis Spellman.

He was the Archbishop of New York from the late 30s until 1967 when he died.

He was an Archbishop for, I think, seven years before he was created a Cardinal by Pope Pius XII in 1946.

But Cardinal Spellman is someone who,

how should I put this?

I mean, everything I know about him means he was definitely a gay man who had sex with other men and kind of used his position of power and authority to,

you know, find find his

partners, sexual partners, if you can even call them that.

You know, the abuse, the professional power, this is a very like standard model for sexually exploitive straight men, and it's not like exclusive to them.

Like, gay men can do it too.

Yeah.

Yes, but I think because of the closet, right?

Because at this point in time, sometimes I just think back to the possibility of, you know, if you were in New York City in this time, 60s, 70s, and say you were in a gay bar that was raided, your name would be in the paper the next morning, right?

Right.

Under the crime that was, I'm not sure what people would be charged with exactly, but it was, it was code for anyone who cared to know that you were gay, right?

That you had been arrested for that reason.

So I think the closet and kind of the threat of that sort of punishment made, gave people like Cardinal Spellman more power than they might have had otherwise.

And for, you know, fellow closet cases like Roy Cohn, this was a potential source of blackmail, right?

But Cardinal Spellman, I mean, yes, he was a very conservative Cardinal Archbishop of New York City, and he was just, I think, notoriously gay.

And the fact that he knows Cohn at all, I just kind of wonder what some of the details were.

How did they meet?

You know, who introduced them?

Where did they hang out?

Those kind of questions come to mind.

But Cohn's involvement both with the mafia as one of their lawyers and then a lawyer for the Archdiocese of New York, it's just one of those details about his life that I find very interesting.

Yeah.

So, you know, Spellman was a big leader of conservatism in New York City, right?

He was a big opponent of like Vatican II.

So, like,

you know, conservative for a Catholic.

And he was a big opponent of unionization efforts among the workforces at Catholic institutions in and around New York City.

So this is a little bit of family lore, actually.

I had a great-grandfather who tried to unionize janitors at Catholic schools where he was working as a janitor.

And it was Cardinal Spellman who, among other things, directed the union-busting effort, called my great-grandfather a communist, and then had him interrogated for signs of mental illness.

He said, You're too shell-shocked from being in World War I to know what you're doing.

So, this guy's a piece of shit, very much in the like sort of red-baiting, blackmail-oriented way that Roy Cohn was a piece of shit, right?

Yes.

And I'm also interested in like Cohn's descent into the mafia.

He was representing like various different crime families, right?

He wasn't just loyal to one.

You mean other than the Catholic Church?

The other mafia, yeah.

Yes.

Well, I'm so glad you brought up his political role because this was sort of an era when the Archbishop of New York had almost veto over political decisions.

Cardinal Spelman would have been consulted and his opinion mattered about these things quite a bit in a way I don't think it's the same now.

But also when J.

Edgar Hoover, like supposedly his secret files contained a lot about Cardinal Spellman.

So it's one of these delicious ironies where it's like, you know, J.

Edgar Hoover had a file about Cardinal Spellman, given all his, you know, gay trysts.

And Hoover himself was a closet case.

It's just some of these connections, it's almost too much for me to bear when I, you know, was researching all this.

It's like the levels of connection among gay men, closeted gay men, and then the way they tried to use that information about each other even sometimes was remarkable.

Yeah, there's always a little bit of like, well, how would you know, sir?

You know, like, what are you going to do with this black male?

Your Honor, I ran into him at a gay club.

It's like, what were you doing there?

That's my case.

Did you ever hear the story of the, there was a sociologist who wrote a book about men, you know, getting blowjobs or whatever at like truck stops off the highway.

It was a whole like sociological study of this.

And someone did eventually ask him that question, like, how did you know about all this or discover all this?

And it actually kind of like got him in some trouble, I think, ethically, like, you know, to be a, shall we say, participant observer of such phenomenon.

I would like to be on that like internal review board ethics committee for that dissertation.

I want to hear about.

It was sort of like tea room trade or something like that.

Nice.

But yeah, so the way that like he wields the closet as a weapon seems so, so fascinating.

They all do, kind of, right?

Like in some way, you know, the other person that doesn't have a leg to stand on to push back, right?

Because ultimately, when one goes down, the whole tower comes down.

So it's also like a little bit of a mutual protection racket, which seems to be

a sort of consistent theme of Roy Cohn's relations, right?

But it's not that he's exactly Teflon at this time, right?

He's got a lot of powerful friends.

He's got a lot of blackmail material.

He starts to sort of accumulate blackmail material in a more systematic way around this time.

But he's also indicted over and over and over again.

People are trying to get him and get him sentenced criminally for his professional malfeasance.

He's committing financial fraud left and right.

He is doing ethical violations in his law practice, you know, extorting statements from people, forging evidence.

Lots of just sort of like under the table tax fraud.

He begins his like really kind of Olympian efforts at tax fraud during this era.

Does anybody want to like fill us in on the criminal prosecutions of Roy Cohn?

Well, I would encourage our listeners to think of who else that reminds them of, but I will say nothing more than that.

All I know is he did it all the time, right?

He's mobbed up.

He has his hands in Studio 54.

And there's that wonderful line in one of the documentaries, I can't remember which one.

where people are like, how come all these people that should like you are at your birthday party?

And he says it's about about who's meant what to whom.

I was like, okay, you can just say graft.

Those feels like a lot of words to say graft.

Yes, you know, Cohn was famous for saying he apparently had kind of a trap memory and was kind of brilliant in the sense that he could spend not that much time with, say, certain, you know, legal files or materials, but kind of absorb it all and end up performing really well in the courtroom.

But a number of people who worked with him would say, you know, his Roy Cohn's line was, don't talk to me about the legal arguments.

Tell me who the judge is.

Right.

Right.

Which I think gives a insight, a window into how he approached these matters, right?

It was about kind of using the leverage you had and knowing who the judge was and calling in every favor or using every point of leverage you had to get your way.

And so it's no kind of shock.

that, you know, his methods would get him in legal trouble, which he mostly evaded over the decades until just a few weeks before his death.

He wasn't disbarred until the mid-80s, just like five or six weeks before he died from AIDS.

Yeah, but you know, he develops this like sort of Teflon reputation because these attempted prosecutions of him

in like the late 50s and early 60s fail, right?

He beats them.

He gets, I think, three acquittals and one mistrial on all these various fraud and professional ethics charges, right?

And he takes the failure of the justice system to hold him accountable and uses it to feed into his personal mythos of invulnerability.

Yes.

Yeah, it's very interesting.

This is something that I think about a lot and that I think Kushner really drills down on in these beautiful monologues that he gives Roy Cohn and Angels in America, which is that he's not like other people, right?

That's the mystique.

Like, and in some way, the threadbareness of the closet, the fact that he gets away with things that other people can't get away with, is part of his selling point, right?

Like, there is an aristocratic ethos here.

It's not just just that homosexuality sets you apart.

It's that he's even set apart among homosexuals in the sense that he can get away with stuff that they could never, right?

Or at least that's sort of part of his pitch, but that's also the pitch he makes in some way to Rubel at Studio 54, to the mob, et cetera, et cetera.

Be like, look, I'm getting away with this shit.

Think about what else I can help you get away with, right?

Like in some way, the fact that he's always skating by is the pitch for the next mark in some way.

In Angels in America, Roy Cohn is like the devil in Paradise Lost.

You know, he's kind of this evil character who is nevertheless like kind of the most enticing and fascinating character and has this like magnetic pull.

And Kushner gives him a lot of the best lines, including this wonderful monologue.

Adrienne, do you want to read it for us?

Well, I thought maybe we could just cut in Al Pacino doing it because I don't think I can do it justice.

Al Pacino is quite good in that movie.

He's great in that.

I mean, Kiki signed up to deliver this monologue.

Oh, it's every other moment.

He's like, yeah, whatever, this is fine.

Clout.

Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call, who owes me favors.

This

is what a label refers to.

Now, to someone who does not understand this, homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men.

But really, this is wrong.

Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men.

Homosexuals are men who, in 15 years of trying, cannot pass a piss-ant anti-discrimination bill through city council.

Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows, who have zero clout.

I mean, that is what makes Cohn dying of AIDS so

striking, right?

I don't even know what the right word to use is.

The thing he spent his whole life telling himself and other people, he was not.

He found himself in the same lot with all the weaklings he was looking down upon.

That's right.

One of the things I read in preparation for this was a New Yorker profile of Roger Stone in May 2008.

Another Cohn protege, Roger Stone.

Yes, yes.

Not accidentally in Trump's orbit, a dirty trickster himself.

But this is what Stone said about Cohn.

He said, quote, Roy was not gay.

He He was a man who liked having sex with men.

Gays were weak, effeminate.

He always seemed to have these young blonde boys around.

It just wasn't discussed.

He was interested in power and access.

He told me his absolute goal was to die completely broke and owing millions to the IRS.

He succeeded in that.

But that line, Roy was not gay.

He was a man who liked having sex with men.

I thought that that is kind of a distillation

of some of what we've been circling around.

Yeah.

You know, it occurs to me that Cohn, following the death of his mother, his partying sort of accelerates.

He's not really described by people around him as somebody who's like succumbing to drug use, right?

He seems to have had like a personal discipline that kept the worst consequences of that kind of lifestyle at bay.

But he was drinking and using cocaine like very habitually as part of this sort of after dark life uh that he was living right uh-huh yes i mean i just one detail about that in one of the documentaries i think it was the liar bully callard

someone talks about like the dinner parties cone would have kind of in the studio 54 era right we're now into like the the 70s early 80s and at everyone's place setting at the table, like at the dinner to kick things off, when you have a big, you know, bash, there would be like a little container of cocaine.

Yeah.

That was in Provincetown.

Oh, in Provincetown, right?

Relaxing chill.

Yeah.

Straightest place on Earth.

Yes,

this is the best part.

Beside the little container of cocaine would be a pill that was a downer.

Oh, wow.

In case you got too, you know, zazzed out.

So I agree with your description, Moira.

Like, it doesn't seem like it was drugs that ultimately did him in or anything like that, but it did seem like he partook of the excesses of the era and that surely led him to some of his you know worst decisions but that the detail of the cocaine and the downer pill beside each other at your table setting in provincetown was remarkable that's somebody who does this so often that he has gotten used to treating his own brain as a chemistry set right that's right no that's a very good point yes anticipating the needs that you're gonna have when you're too coked out to function and preparing for that yeah Like that's not

a casual drug user's choice, right?

It was like when Pete Hegset made the comments about like beer versus liquor.

It's like,

you know, you talk about like you turning to beer at a certain point in your life.

Yeah, I don't know.

That betrays a certain involvement with the substances involved.

The other thing that I think we might need to mark explicitly, even though I think we're dancing around it, is that this is a profoundly lonely man.

This is a moment at which sort of the idea that, as Matt was saying, that men having sex with men might commit them to something communal starts really taking root, not just in like you know, small activist circles, but really is kind of a widely shared understanding, including among some conservatives.

But Cohn really still seems to operate according to this model where like he's sui generis, right?

Like it sets him apart.

It doesn't seem to me that any of these relationships really are mutual either.

He's extremely invested in kind of hierarchy and

dissimilarity, right, when it comes to these other men, right?

Well, I mean, the men he's sleeping with are not his professional equals, right?

Exactly.

Or his age bracket from what it looks like.

Right.

No, this is an insight from an ex-boyfriend of his, Wallace Adams, who has this kind of like, oh my God, what's the name of that like

80s Swedish model who dated Grace Jones?

Who's that guy's name?

Dolph Londgren.

Oh, Dolph Londgren, yeah, from the Rocky movies.

Action star.

Action star, Dolph Londgren, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's kind of the vibe.

And this Wallace Adams guy, who was willing to be a talking head in one of these documentaries, I think it's Get Me Roy Cohn,

has this insight that, like, you know, all of the guys Roy was with were younger than him.

All of them had this kind of Nordic look, and they were all, at least according to Adams, uneducated, lower class, poor.

These are

people who have access to spaces like Studio 54, like these social clubs, where Cohn was frequenting because of their looks, because of their attention from Cohn, and not because of their education, their background, their professional achievement, right?

This is not a guy who is having a quasi-secret affair with like another attorney.

This is a guy who is fucking a dancer, like at the end of a long night.

And after David Shrine, and I, you know, I'm almost tempted to speculate maybe because of David Shrein and what his relationship with that guy led him to, he never has what could be considered like a romantic entanglement.

Like Roy Cohn does not fall in love, you know?

He's fucking and it's, it's, it's very

boundaried.

Yes.

And, you know, to that point, I wanted to mention Cohn's whole operation.

Once he moved back to New York, he eventually gets this townhouse on the Upper East Side right like somewhere in the 60s he gets East 68th Street yeah

right so it's kind of this mix of like all these young men he was fucking slash semi-employing slash helping in some way you know mix with his law business you know in this townhouse in the upper east side it just seems like this

crazy combination.

Yeah, I wonder what the HR policies were like.

Yeah, no, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Like, if you knew Cohn at that time, like, that's where you'd meet him, right?

And you'd go into this townhouse and it would be, yeah, you'd might be talking about business, but there'd be some 23-year-old blonde guy taking notes about the conversation with a very, very short bathrobe.

Yeah, and the meeting is taking place literally in Cohn's bedroom while he's doing his daily 200 sit-ups, right?

Like,

there is a casualness to his professional life that is like entirely operated out of his home, seemingly, that seems to be about the power of the ability to flaunt the closet, right?

Like you were saying, Matt, about his like actions with David Schein in the 50s when they go gallivanting on this like European vacation where they like both burn books and like make out in the back of their car, right?

There's also something about like, yeah, like I am going to have

the mob representative come to my townhouse where he's going to be served drinks by my houseboy.

And that is the same sort of like flaunting of the concealment, right?

You can't say he's exactly closeted when he's drawing so much attention to his own sexual power, right?

Yes.

I mean, there's a few details from once Reagan became president.

Cohn definitely played a role in Reagan's presidential campaign.

I think that's how he met Roger Stone was Stone, you know, was working for the Reagan campaign and someone said, oh, you're responsible for New York State.

You got to talk to Roy Cohn.

And once he did, Cohn was just, you know, running his kind of saying, We'll do this, this, this, and this.

You need to talk to this person, this person, and this person.

Cohn was responsible for running a spoiler candidate that effectively delivered New York's electoral votes to Reagan in 1980.

Yeah.

Yes, exactly.

But so, you know, in part because he had helped the Reagan campaign, there are these stories and even photos of Cohn going to the White House,

meeting Ronnie and Nancy, you know, with his boyfriend in tow, so to speak, you know, some like, you know, 6'2 blonde guy with this 5'8 Roy Cohn, right?

I'm sure they stood out, but he did that.

He like brought the guy he was fucking to the White House.

And it's fascinating in part because, you know, the Reagan clearly knew lots of gay people.

They were from Hollywood.

Exactly.

And their, you know, kind of homophobia, especially in response to the AIDS crisis, was this sort of, you know, what the hell?

Moment where they almost pretended not to know the people they did and not to care about some of the people they did.

When Roy Cohn is dying of AIDS in the mid-80s, he uses his connections in the Reagan administration to get himself enrolled in the NIH's trial of AZT, right?

Yes, that's right.

I mean, they think bribing, you know, he probably

bribes his way through.

Yeah, but he knows the people he knows to bribe because he's got all these connections, right?

And on the one hand, the Reagan administration is leaving millions millions of gay men to slow, painful, neglected deaths.

And on the other hand, they're slipping this advantage and possibility of survival to a guy who's done them favors in the past.

Yeah.

And I think that the Hollywood connection there seems really key because I'm sure that is the kind of gay man

that at least Nancy sort of was familiar with, right?

Who sort of, you know, didn't have age-appropriate relationships.

No one sort of ever said anything, but they were always together, right probably you know both powerful and like you could sort of make fun of him like this was the kind of this is the house gay you can hold yourself and i think that that's exactly what what uh cone ends up being for them

it's also um didn't didn't cohn mostly lobby reagan on behalf of rupert murdoch yes no yeah like i wonder do we think that cohen had like a you know, like a baseball card set and like if you work for every evil person, like you somehow get like, I don't know, a free sub or something.

It's just like, it's astonishing to me.

Yeah.

One profile called him a malevolent forest gump.

Like he's just everywhere.

That's right.

Like Paul Pott shows up and I'm like, there's Roy Cohn.

Should have known.

Yeah.

It's funny.

The descriptions of Cohn's place on the Upper East Side, his townhouse, there was like a video that C-SPAN shot of going into the new Republic offices sometime in like the late 80s, early 90s.

And at the time, this British journalist, Henry Fairley, I I think, you know, was employed by them.

But, you know, this is the era of Marty Peretts, you know, hiring all these handsome young men, right, in succession to be editor of the New Republic.

And someone asked Henry, this kind of, you know, gin-besotted,

you know, like old school Fleet Street British journalist who happened to be in D.C., working for the New Republic, about this.

And he had the great line.

He said, Are you fucking kidding me?

It's like a Greek gymnasium in there.

And that line kept coming back to me when I was watching these documentaries about Roy Cohn and these kind of descriptions of the mix of personal and professional.

Are you kidding me?

It's a Greek gymnasium.

I'll never forget that line.

That's good.

Yeah, the shots of Roy Cohn's townhouse, like, it's always crowded and you don't really see a lot of female faces in there.

Yes, indeed.

So his deployment of the closet

is an expression of his power, right?

In a way that I don't think exactly exonerates him from all the compromises and vulnerabilities of being a gay man, as we're going to see when he gets sick.

But it also means that he is regarded as sort of immune from consequence, right?

The rules don't apply to Roy Cohn.

And I think that's something that is really magnetic and attractive about Cohn to a young gentleman from the Outer Boroughs named Donald Trump.

Does anybody want to take us through Mr.

Cohn's relationship with Donald Trump?

Yeah.

So Trump was then working for his father's business, Fred Trump.

And in a shocking twist that would never repeat ever again, that business was being investigated by the Justice Department, in this case, by the Civil Rights Division, for discriminating against black tenants.

Trump, then, or Donald, then just 23, approached Cohn.

basically, I think, retained him as their lawyer for this thing.

Specifically because Cohn has a reputation for being so aggressive as a lawyer.

Yeah.

And basically, Cohn sort of takes him under his tutelage and shows him how to bluster and bloviate his way through charges of things that you have manifestly done, a skill that we get to watch in operation every day now.

So that's great.

And so, yeah, Cohn does become Trump's attorney and countersues the DOJ, another favorite Trump tactic of today.

And these two men develop a friendship on the basis of shared interest in being absolute pieces of shit.

Yes.

I mean, you know, one of the really interesting things about researching this episode was I hadn't watched the film The Apprentice

before preparing for this.

And I thought it was fantastic.

I thought it was really good.

And so watching that, like right now, as Trump is, you know, his tariff madness, right?

These kind of crackpot schemes of his, the three rules that Roy Cohn taught him, right, for handling controversies in public were what?

Rule number one, always attack.

Rule number two, deny everything.

And rule number three, always claim victory.

Right.

That is Trump.

Yeah.

Right.

Like, like Roy Cohn taught him that, and Trump never forgot it.

Because my sense is that the lawsuits that the Trump corporation was facing from the Department of Justice, as you're saying back in the 70s over racial discrimination, like there were apparently records, right, documents of Trump corporation employees responsible for renting out these apartments, marking certain applications with like a B for black, right?

Like something like almost comically,

straightforwardly racist and prejudicial.

And my sense is a lot of lawyers told Trump, yeah, you know, this is going to be tough.

And Cohn was the one who said, no, you can get out of this.

And he taught him how to do it.

And that kind of stamped Donald Trump for the rest of his life.

And so, that line, where's my Roy Cohn?

When like Robert Mueller is going after Trump, of course, because Trump, you know, viewed Cohn as the man who was Teflon, who could get out of situations where you're obviously guilty, frankly.

Right.

And that's one of my main takeaways from all the reading and watching and listening I did to learn about Roy Cohn is just the extent to which he was a mentor to Trump in the most kind of decisive and important sense.

You can use the term.

Yeah, the notion that like there's nothing that is not justified in the service of your own winning and aggrandizement, right?

Like that's like really the takeaway.

And that the truth means nothing and that principles are for suckers.

You know, the

movie The Apprentice, which I agree with you, Matt, I really liked it.

I think, I think Jeremy Strong, our truest freak,

in an old Hollywood mode, does a really fantastic performance as Roy Cohn and like kind of nails the uncanniness of Cohn's affect in this way that I really like.

But that movie sort of depicts Trump as this like provincial outer borough innocent who is then corrupted by Cohn.

And I don't think that's quite true.

Fair, fair.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and I think that Donald Trump has always been himself.

Yes.

But Cohn gave him a series of like postures and strategies and tactics that it's really difficult not to see when you see them now.

And Trump is, I think, Cohn's truest heir in terms of just the indifference to anything other than victory.

Right.

Yeah.

And I think especially in Trump's like media strategies, right, the way he treats reporters.

I mean, what we know from Trump's history, right, of having a character named what, Robert Barron, right, there'd be his fake press person, PR person that would, you know, seed stories.

Like that is pure Cohn.

Yeah.

Like realizing that you could put your opponents on the defensive by like counter-suing, making some counterclaim, and then waging war in the media, right, to make them back down.

You know, the number of cases that Cohn was the kind of head lawyer for that were his clients were sued that ended up being settled because the people who had sued Cohn's client realized their lives were just going to be utter misery.

Ruined.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Until this was settled.

And so might as well like, you know, wrap things up now get the best settlement we can and walk away because again yeah their lives are going to be ruined that is pure Trump and it was something he learned from Cohn yeah I mean and and in some way the the one thing that Trump added to it right especially late in his life is Cohn's pitch must have been to his clients right like look at all this incredibly crazy shit I keep getting away with right I am manifestly not cut out to do this I am manifestly a super unethical person I am quite possibly a psychopath Yet, I keep getting more clients.

You too can get away with your worst psychopathy if you sign up with me.

And I think Trump then understood at some point that, like, yes, that's an electoral strategy.

I can extend the cult of impunity.

I don't get clients this way.

I can get voters this way.

And I think that's the really toxic legacy of Roy Cohn.

That, like, this is the thing that Cohn never stood for election, Cohn only ever manipulated elections, but like, that's the twist, right?

So this might bring us to the end of Cohn's life where things do get kind of bleak and weird.

This older lover, like one of these pretty boys who he had promised to help open a gym and then screwed out of the money for the gym.

You know, this guy goes kind of ape shit on him in a kind of like delightful way.

You know, this guy was calling the cops on parties at Cohn's country house.

The gayest falling out imaginable.

Oh, yeah.

I know.

I was like, you should have invested in my gym.

He distributed a zine around Christopher Street about Cohn's various evil and gay exploits.

He spray painted Roy Cohn is a faggot on the asphalt outside of Cohn's townhouse.

Look, it's not defamation if it's true.

But this like really seemed to have gotten under Cohn's skin.

A guy who has like cultivated the dislike of others really can't handle this kind of harassment, right?

Yeah, I think he even like called the police at one point and said someone had been murdered.

Oh, at Cohn's house?

Yes, yes.

And he swatted him.

Yeah, while Cohn is having some gay, you know, parte, yeah, the cops show up.

That is literally how Lawrence v.

Texas started, guys, by the way.

I know, I know.

That's amazing.

And then what's going on is that Cohn gets diagnosed with AIDS in 1984.

And it's gruesome.

It's painful.

You can see him in clips, interview clips.

You know, he keeps working, but he looks sick.

He doesn't look good.

He's really skinny and he's suffering, right?

It's not a good way to go.

He establishes this story, which is what he tells the press, that he is dying of liver cancer.

Yeah.

And basically nobody believes this.

Which is what the labels and clout monologue that we were playing earlier is all about, right?

He's like, at the end, he's like, I do not have AIDS, I have liver cancer, right?

Right.

Because he is, in a very Trumpian fashion, a guy who esteems himself to will truth in the service of his own interests and ego, right?

Yeah.

And you alluded to this before, Matt, but he does get disbarred.

I think his physical illness sort of mirrors a bit of a decline in his influence, right?

And they do finally manage to disbar him in part because his misconduct has accumulated so much.

And the New York State Bar Review Committee finally has some people on it who are no longer in Roy Cohn's pocket.

And I want to like quickly go through the charges that he was actually disbarred on.

Like it could have been a lot of things, but it was these things.

So a yacht club that was represented by Cohn went through bankruptcy and all the assets of the club wound up going to Roy Cohn instead of to the creditors.

A woman represented by Cohn is convinced to quote unquote lend him $100,000.

He just simply never pays her back.

He like steals from his client.

And then the death of Louis Rosenstein is, I think, maybe the one that really sticks out to me.

This guy was the chief executive of a liquor distributor.

And I think he has a stroke.

He's dying.

He's like on his deathbed.

Yeah, in the hospital bed.

He's like, sometimes thought of as being in a coma, sometimes described as just being like not mentally competent, right?

He is past the point where he is able to make decisions for himself and he's at death's door.

And Cone sneaks in to the old guy's hospital bed and manipulates him either like by actually physically moving his hand or trying to get the guy to do it himself to sign over a change in Mr.

Rosenstein's will that would make Cone a beneficiary of the will.

One of the documentaries I watched for this had an image of the signature.

And to call it a scribble is generous.

This is somebody who's not capable of holding a pen.

I mean, it's soap opera shit, isn't it?

He fucking weekend winked at Bernie's this guy to get the money, right?

He's basically manipulating the hand of a corpse, and it is really dark.

And he dies a couple weeks after he is disbarred, and he is no longer a lawyer.

He is disbarred in June of 1986, towards the end of the June, and he dies in August.

And he is largely abandoned by his friends.

He is publicly disgraced.

He's abandoned by Donald Trump, who really backs away during this time.

Exactly.

And foreshadowing for the story we're all living through, you know, Cohn, if anything, was loyal when he was not guiding your hand to sign over all your effects to him.

That's not Trump's thing, right?

Trump will eventually find a way to backstab you.

And that's what he does with Cohn.

He backs away when it's inconvenient for him, telegraphing kind of what he will do to an escalating number of people and peoples over the next 40 years.

Yes.

I mean, I thought one of the most kind of striking scenes of The Apprentice, the film, was after this kind of last birthday party for Cohn, I think at Mar-a-Lago, actually,

the scene where, you know, germaphobe Trump is having all the seats at the table like steam cleaned is really striking.

Like, I think that was part of his reaction to Cohn dying of AIDS, was like Trump's germaphobia.

Yeah.

But, you know, as Cohn is going through this disbarment hearing, I mentioned earlier that like one of his character witnesses was William F.

Buckley Jr.

Yeah.

Another was Barbara Walters, who had been kind of his beard earlier in his life, right?

Like she, they had been friends, I guess, since childhood.

And that was the woman who he would plant in the papers that he was, you know, going on a date with or seeing.

Wow.

And she never really turned on him.

She didn't like that.

She didn't like that he kept telling the press they were engaged.

Of course, right, yeah.

But she did stay loyal to him until his death.

Yeah.

Yes.

And, you know, as Cohn is dying of AIDS, we kind of mentioned this earlier, but he participated in these clinical trials of AZT, which he probably had to bribe his way into those trials.

He kept telling everyone he was dying of liver cancer.

And at the start of Citizen Cohn, the Nicholas von Hoffen biography, it begins with Cohn dying, you know, kind of on his last legs in Provincetown.

And it was a reminder just how brutal these deaths could be, right?

Wasting away, no energy.

Frankly, it puts me in this position of like, as Cohn is dying, as you read about it, as you learn about it, like it's such a horrible death, but he was such a horrible man.

Yeah.

And it's, it's kind of this emotional whiplash or, you know, contradiction.

But yes, he, he died, what, in 1986?

August.

From AIDS.

Yeah.

August 1986 from AIDS.

I feel you, Matt.

You know, it's

my fascination with Cohn makes me feel almost implicated in his wrongdoing because he does have this charisma and this magnetism.

And I sort of wanted him, you go through this life and you want him to get his comeuppance.

And a lot of times when you you have that impulse in a narrative, it doesn't come true, right?

Yeah.

Like Cohn suffered at the end of his life in a way that has a note of justice to it.

A lot of those same talking heads in the documentaries that will describe him as evil or say something to the effect of like, I didn't really consider evil or think about evil until I met Roy Cohn.

This is something like a shocking number of people say.

A lot of those same people say, you know, like, at the end, I felt bad for him.

Yeah.

I think it is a testament to how we are, in fact, different from Roy Cohn, because I'll tell you, he sure as shit wouldn't have felt bad for any of us.

Yes.

And there's even, you know, I can't speak to this precisely, but a number of comments, whether in interviews or in these documentaries, you know, Cohn was dying of AIDS.

He refused to say it, right?

He was dying of liver cancer officially.

He would say, no, I don't have AIDS.

Who was he fucking then?

And did he tell them?

Yeah.

Like there are comments that like genuinely make it seem, and this isn't implausible, you know, more broadly, but that when he first started the AZT and he felt a little better, you know, he was asking doctors, who can I fuck?

And they said, you can't, you really shouldn't do that now.

And it seems to me that, you know, his lying implicated the people he slept with too, in ways that, you know, could have destroyed their lives.

Yeah.

A bastard to the end.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you, Matt Sitman, so much for joining us.

Thank you to our listeners for coming along with us on this dark, weird journey.

It was my pleasure, I guess.

And we'll see you next time.

See you next time on Inbid with the Right.

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Our episodes are produced and edited by Mark Yoshizumi and Katie Lau.

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