MAN: Testing, one, two, three.
Roy Cohn, September 28.
I was writing a profile of Roy Cohn.
My recorder is going, and...
I'm taking notes as well, and I said...
AULETTA :
COHN :
REPORTER: Roy Cohn was called
the most brilliant and influential lawyer in America.
His specialty was power.
And from the very beginning, he was flamboyant,
he was ruthless and always controversial.
ZIRIN: And he was like a caged animal.
If you opened the door to the cage,
he would come out and get you.
MAN 1: Roy Cohn's contempt for people, his contempt for the law,
was so evident on his face
that if you were in his presence,
you knew you were in the presence of evil.
ZIRIN: And he saw himself as a political puppeteer.
He could pull strings and bring people together.
He could pull strings and make people do things.
MAN 2: Roy Cohn is the common thread from Senator Joe McCarthy...
all the way to his protégé, Donald Trump.
ZIRIN: When you look at Cohn's life, you're shining a light...
on demagoguery...
hypocrisy...
and the darkest parts of the American psyche.
CROWD : USA! USA! USA!
The Roy Cohn show, which is unbelievable.
Now here's Roy Cohn, who appeared recently
on the cover of Esquire.
The title of that article, as I recall, sir,
was "The Legal Executioner."Yeah.
It went on to say that you are really a tough man
and that at times you can...Tough, mean, vicious, so on.
What does that kind of publicity do
for your business in New York?
Oh, it's fantastic.
Uh, the worse the adjectives,
the better it is for business.
What are they looking for? What are they buying?
Scare value.
Going back, over a period of years, when I call somebody
or write a letter or something like that,
this is supposed to make them tremble and think,
unless they act promptly and reasonably,
that, uh, all sorts of terrible consequences are gonna flow.
STONE: Roy's reputation in the courtroom
was for such viciousness that merely retaining him
usually caused the other side in any dispute
to want to settle immediately.
I hired Roy Cohn because he is a tough son of a bitch.
If I can compare this with a Western,
it's like bringing in a hired gun.
MAN: That's right.
My name is Roy Cohn.
The way Roy Cohn practiced as an attorney, uh, was:
"I don't care what the law is. I wanna know who the judge is."
That's the way he worked,
because that's how he manipulated the system.
I would do anything to get my client to win.
Yes, I would. That's my job.
There isn't anything I would not do,
because I believe there's only one answer
in an adversary profession like law,
and that is winning.
And he did it in ways that were, you know, beyond Machiavellian.
He was an amazing manipulator
and often got his way as a result.
REPORTER: What are they confiscating?
COHN: Packets of white powder.But what was it?
Was it cocaine?
It was not in his briefcase.
They do not allege it was in his briefcase.
I've read the complaint, and I was in court, and you weren't.
COHEN: Roy was somebody that had no boundaries.
If you were on the right side of him, it was great.
If you were on the wrong side of him, it was terrible.
MAN: He loved power. He loved pulling the levers of power.
And he got a taste for that very early in his career.
MANGAN: Here's a man that everybody is going to enjoy meeting.
He's Roy M. Cohn, who is confidential assistant
to the United States Attorney General,
and, of course, they've been very busy
prosecuting the Communists and Communist Party.
Hi, Roy.How are you, Jack?
What can you tell us, Roy,
that we might not know from general newspaper coverage
of the workings of the party in this country?
What can we watch for as individual citizens?
The Communists, the one thing we have to understand
at the outset is that the Communist Party...
COHN & HOOVER: ...is not a political party.
HOOVER: It is a way of life.
An evil and malignant way of life.
It reveals a condition akin to disease,
that spreads like an epidemic,
and like an epidemic, a quarantine is necessary
to keep it from infecting this nation.
COHN: It's a criminal conspiracy.
Its object is the overthrow
of the government of the United States
by force and violence...
and institute the worst type dictatorship
this world has ever known.
ROBERTS: This was the height of the Cold War.
People were genuinely terrified of a nuclear attack
and of the so-called Communist menace.
NEWSMAN: President Truman's dramatic announcement
that Russia has created an atomic explosion
sends reporters racing for the United Nations.
Any statement about Truman's statement on the atomic bomb?
Please, excuse me.Does Russia have the bomb?
Won't you reply to me?What can we do?
ZIRIN: It was a period of hysteria.
You really start to see
the paranoid style of politics unfolding.
And Roy Cohn was right there.
NEWSMAN: One of the greatest peacetime spy dramas
in the nation's history reaches its climax
as Julius Rosenberg and Mrs. Ethel Rosenberg,
convicted of revealing atomic secrets to the Russians,
enter the federal building in New York to hear their doom.
He became one of the prosecutors
in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
The appointment of Jewish prosecutors and a Jewish judge
was to create the impression
that it was not an anti-Semitic prosecution.
He was only 23 years old, but Roy Cohn was ruthless.
Roy Cohn knew how to bully,
and he was willing to do
whatever he could to manipulate the result.
Cohn felt he could ride the wave of anti-Communism
to further his own career.
And, in fact, his role in that case
is subject to very serious ethical questions.
According to Cohn, Judge Kaufman would call him
from a phone booth outside Park Avenue Synagogue,
where he urged Kaufman to impose the death penalty.
It was a pathway to power for Kaufman, the judge,
and for Roy Cohn.
They seized the moment.
They pushed it as far as they could, and it went there.
NEWSMAN: Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced both Rosenbergs
to death in the electric chair.
It is the first time in peacetime
that such a death penalty has been handed down.
ZIRIN: The country was polarized over the verdict.
People took to the streets to protest,
seeking clemency, which was not granted.
ROBERTS: The government never had enough evidence
to convict Ethel, and yet they convicted her,
sentenced her to death
and killed her in the electric chair.
And it was a deal that Roy Cohn helped engineer.
She just kept her hands open like this.
Right.
COHN: I think, if these people are made to understand
that like any other criminals, when they violate our laws,
they will be punished, that that will have
a strong deterrent effect.
And I think that the death sentence imposed
by Judge Irving R. Kaufman in the atom spy trial
had a very strong deterrent effect.
I think it's been a very good year
on the anti-Communist front in this country.
ROBERTS: My father took me to the corner of our block
to see the funeral procession go by.
I'm not sure where he really stood on the Rosenberg case.
But he wanted me to see this.
This was a part of history.
And it had an indelible effect on me...
and on all of America.
DOHERTY: Cohn makes his career on the backs of the Rosenbergs,
showing that he's not just a smart, young punk,
but that he's a go-for-the-jugular
district attorney who can quite literally
strap people into the electric chair.
ANNOUNCER: Our guest on Meet the Press,
ladies and gentlemen, is Roy M. Cohn.
I'd like to put you on the receiving end
of some questions you usually ask witnesses.
COHN: All right.
When and where were you born?
I was born in New York City in 1927.
GARY: Roy came from an unconventional family.
His mother, Dora,
was a privileged member of Jewish society.
When Roy was born,
the family consisted of the Bank of United States,
which was a big name at the time,
Van Heusen Corporation, Lionel Trains,
and my own grandfather, who had started Q-tips.
The truth is, Dora was not a very attractive woman.
Dora, according to my mother,
was the ugliest girl in the Bronx.
GARY: Not only was she not attractive physically,
but she had a difficult personality.
Nobody would marry Dora.
So they cut a deal with a young lawyer named Al Cohn.
If he married Dora, they would make him a judge.
They had one child, and that child was Roy.
DAVE: Al and Dora Cohn had a very frosty relationship.
They both focused on Roy a lot, Dora even more than Al.
She was the ultimate doting mother.
ROIPHE: He was treated like a young prince.
ZIRIN: Like any mother, she wanted a son who was perfect,
and she had a son that was short and unattractive.
And she tried to correct his nose.
And she wanted a different son from the son that God gave her.
That imbued him a sense of shame about who he was,
and his father gave him the language
whereby he would express his shame in various ways,
through law and politics.
And Dora and Al together were a perfect storm.
AULETTA: His father was a very active Democrat in the Bronx
and would have a lot of powerful Democrats come to dinner.
And when Roy was 9, 10, 11 years old,
his father would insist that Roy sit
at the table with adults.
And Roy would partake in conversation.
STONE: When Cohn was 10, his father brought him
to meet President Roosevelt.
Roy dared to opine to the president,
who I'm sure loved hearing it even from a 10-year-old,
"I support what you're doing, packing the Supreme Court."
He made his first bribe when he was about 15 years old.
He got a teacher out of a traffic ticket
when he was in high school.
Roy Cohn knew how the system worked,
and he manipulated that system for the rest of his life.
AULETTA :
COHN :
DAVE: Roy was the definition of a self-hating Jew.
He wanted to show to the world that he wasn't Jewish.
Many things he did over the years
were aimed at proving that to people.
BROOKS: When were you admitted to the bar?
I was admitted to the bar in 1948.
When you were...Five years ago.
Five years ago. 21 years old.Yes, sir.
DAVE: He graduated from Columbia Law School at 20.
He was so young that he wasn't able to be admitted
to the bar for another year, until he was 21.
He was incredibly, incredibly smart,
and he was an expert at taking advantage
of every connection he had.
I was in the Department of Justice
for a period of five years, and I worked,
during that period of time, very intensively
with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
ZIRIN: He attracted great attention
with J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI.
Hoover understood the value
of planting certain information with the press.
Cohn served his master, passed on the information,
and Hoover returned the compliment
in recommending Cohn as chief counsel
to Joseph McCarthy's notorious committee.
Even if there were only one Communist
in the State Department, that would still be
one Communist too many.
NEWSMAN: McCarthy almost single-handedly made the era
one in which debate became charge and countercharge.
ZIRIN: Cohn soared to national prominence
as McCarthy's handmaiden,
whispering in his ear in a conspiratorial fashion,
advising him how to question witnesses
before the congressional subcommittee.
STONE: Roy's tactics and his approach via McCarthy
make him one of the most
controversial people in the country.
I don't think you understood.
The question was, "Do you know this man?"
Can you look at the picture and tell us?
I assume the answer's yes or no.
MAN: The assumption is a bit mistaken in this instance.
Tell us whether you know the man before you proceed.
Do you know this man?
Your statements about him
have made it difficult for me and unsafe for me.
And, of course, McCarthy, we think of him
in terms of investigating Communists.
But he and Cohn also investigated homosexuals.
In the '40s and the '50s, being gay was such a terrible secret.
And that was true for Roy.
It's just hard for people today to imagine
the damage keeping that secret did
to people and their lives.
And Roy certainly would have done everything
to hide it in any way.
In a kind of "he doth protest too much" manner,
we have Cohn investigating
these homosexuals very aggressively.
So he's all over the press. Roy Cohn starts getting
a political and a social profile.
Cohn befriended many socially connected young men.
Among them...
G. David Schine, a wealthy hotel heir.
Cohn was able to get Schine on McCarthy's committee.
It's clear to me that Roy had an interest
in this beautiful David Schine that might have been
not entirely about his mental capacity.
Roy and David Schine went on a buddy trip
together across Europe,
inspecting various facilities, their libraries,
attempting to ferret out
any signs of Communist infiltration.
We are here to gather information,
to double-check leads we have
and to see a vast number of individuals
as long as they can contribute pertinent information or facts.
I... We believe that the free world
is gonna win the Cold War and win this fight
by one thing: the truth.
Communists are dedicated
to the overthrow of the United States,
who are dedicated to wiping the United States
off the face of the Earth
and substituting the freedom we have in America
for the spiritual and mental enslavement
you have in the Soviet Union.
Roy Cohn has spent most of his life studying law.
And finally, in his mid-20s,
he has the kind of romantic crush or compulsion
that most people have
for the first time in high school.
But Roy Cohn happens to have it
when he's chief counsel for the McCarthy committee.
Joseph McCarthy himself said
that he never saw Roy Cohn irrational about anything
except G. David Schine.
Roy liked to do favors for friends,
even when it was inappropriate.
So when his friend David Schine was drafted into the Army,
Roy tried to get him special treatment.
And he pulled all the strings he could pull.
He was a string-puller.
This is the way things worked in the Bronx,
in Manhattan politics.
It's not the way things worked in the Army,
and the Army was not gonna have any part of it.
And that prompted the Army-McCarthy hearings.
NEWSMAN: Early in 1954, Senator McCarthy said
there were Communists in the United States Army
and that they were being protected.
The Army replied that his charges
were a form of pressure to get special favors,
including a direct commission for G. David Schine,
a very special Army private and former McCarthy assistant.
The Army-McCarthy hearings pit the United States Army
against Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn.
Cohn's willing to do anything in order to get
more quality time with G. David Schine.
That's what the Army-McCarthy hearings were about.
NEWSMAN: It was televised, and 20 million stunned Americans
looked on for 36 days
at the greatest political spectacle of our history.
A new variable had entered our political life: television.
Thank you very much, Mr. Welch, and thank you, Mr. Jenkins.
You're welcome.Mr. Cohn, uh...
I think you are conducting a little one-sided interview here,
and that's perfectly all right with me.
I'll tell you what I have to say on the...
On the witness stand, under oath.
All right, thank you. That was Roy Cohn
and his opinion of the interview.
DOHERTY: You can read the Army-McCarthy hearings
as the original reality TV moment,
because you have what is an open-ended drama
with a cast of repeating characters,
but you really don't know what's going to happen.
Committee will please come to order.
I understand the secretary of the Army is here
as first witness.
WELCH: Roy thinks that Dave ought to be a general
and operate from a penthouse on the Waldorf Astoria,
or words to that effect.
I asked him what would happen if Schine got overseas duty.
You were breaking the news gently, Mr. Adams?
ADAMS: Yes, sir. That is right.
I think I observe on Colonel Bradley's face
a faint little look of pleasure.
Do you, sir?
I would say that Colonel-- I--
You and David Schine have been what we might call
warm personal friends, have you not?
He is one of my many good friends, sir.
JENKINS: One of your many good friends.
And in all fairness, Mr. Cohn,
isn't it a fact that he is one of your best friends?
We all have our best friends.
There's no criticism of you on that account.
No, of course not, sir.
We have friends whom we love. I do.
There were a lot of snide, homophobic comments
that were leveled at both Cohn and Schine and at McCarthy.
WELCH: Did you think this came from a pixie?
Will counsel, for my benefit, define--
I think he might be an expert on that,
what a pixie is?Yeah. Yes. I should say...
I should say, Mr. Senator,
that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy.
With the word "fairy," the subtext
of the Army-McCarthy hearings is spoken out loud.
But it isn't true that you lose your head now
when Dave Schine's name is mentioned and...
That is... That is completely untrue, sir.
ZIRIN: McCarthy launched a counterattack
by bringing out the fact that one of Welch's associates
had been a member of an alleged Communist organization.
WELCH: Senator, may we not drop this?
Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator.
McCARTHY: Let's...You've done enough.
DOHERTY: Cohn knows that this is the moment
that Joseph Welch is seizing
to finally give the blast at McCarthy
that everybody has been waiting for.
And he starts squirming in his chair.
He sort of tries to gesture to McCarthy to stop it.
McCARTHY: Let's...You've done enough.
Have you no sense of decency, sir?
At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
That caught the conscience of the country
and ended with McCarthy being discredited.
Indeed, they were both discredited
as a result of Joseph Welch's:
"Have you no sense of decency?"
The chair declares these hearings adjourned sine die.
TRUMAN: McCarthyism.
I'm not referring to the senator from Wisconsin.
He's only important in that his name
has taken on a dictionary meaning in the world.
That meaning is the corruption of truth,
the abandonment of our historical devotion
to fair play.
It is the abandonment of due process of law.
It is the use of a big lie
and the unfounded accusation against any citizen
in the name of Americanism and security.
It is the rise to power of the demagogue
who lives on untruth.
It is the spread of fear and the destruction of faith
in every level of our society.
AULETTA: What a demagogue does is throw out information
that they know is salacious,
attention-grabbing and headline-grabbing.
And Roy proved that in the McCarthy period.
ROBERTS: Roy Cohn knew how to take a bad situation
and absolutely make the most of it.
No matter what happens, no matter how defeated you are,
no matter how deeply you wind up in the muck, claim victory.
I can't help but feel
that Roy Cohn has won a really great victory.
DOHERTY: His persona as this slick, maybe a little oily,
but really razor-sharp lawyer has been carved in stone.
And that's what he's going to be for the rest of his career.
NEWSMAN: No more shuttling between New York
and Washington for Roy Cohn. The young lawyer,
who befriended Private David Schine,
has handed in his resignation as chief counsel
to the Senate Permanent Investigation Subcommittee
headed by McCarthy. The reason?
He insisted that all members of the group
want him to stay on, and this was not so.
As for the future, Cohn says
that he will wage a personal fight
against Communism wherever he finds it.
JOHNSTON: New York in the 1950s
was a cutthroat place to make money.
Mafia families operated pretty much as they wanted.
Cops were on the take left and right.
It was unbelievably corrupt at every level,
right up to the very top in business.
For Roy Cohn, this was Candy Land.
I think he was trying to claw his way
to the very top echelon of American society,
one way or the other.
Part of New York society, at that time...
was preoccupied with getting the right table,
going to the right place, being invited to the right function.
The Stork Club, 21,
Danny's Hide-A-Way.
Roy always surrounded himself with womanizers
and the gorgeous women who came with them.
But Roy acted as though they weren't there.
They were really decorations.
He became an attorney in private practice.
His partner was Thomas Bolan,
who had close ties with the archdiocese of New York.
Cohn had close ties with Cardinal Spellman.
Of course, the position of the Church at that time,
as it is now, was staunchly anti-Communist.
They needed somebody to bring business into the firm,
and that was Roy Cohn.
BRENNER: He took his cutthroat D.C. tactics
and started applying them in corporate America,
at the expense of everyone in his path.
And he couldn't come back from Joe McCarthy,
so he just embraced it more.
ANNOUNCER: What you are about to see is top secret.
The first official test
of the powerful new Lionel Turbo Missile Firing Car.
DAVE: In the 1950s, Roy had his eye on a family business.
His great-uncle was a Lionel,
and he had founded Lionel Trains.
It was a thriving company.
ANNOUNCER: Remember, boy, you're the boss
of the greatest action cars ever created
when you own Lionel trains.
DAVE: Roy, over the course of several months,
acquired about 200,000 shares of stock,
and, boom, he took over the company.
It took not more than a few years
until he drove it into the ground.
He was so full of himself,
and he did not care about the family.
But he was known to people
as the person who was in charge of the big company.
For a period of years, the first years I was with him,
we were a powerful law firm.
Roy was very aggressive, very smart.
A very capable lawyer.
COHEN: He prepared at the last minute,
but he had a perfect memory.
VASSALLO: We'd get in the limousine going down to court,
and he'd say, "Now, tell me again, who's the client?"
And he'd get up there like he'd been immersed
in the case for years.
He was just that good at what he did.
VASSALLO: But the big picture was, uh, more complicated.
He just didn't play by the rule book,
and you learned that very quickly.
With time, Roy became more and more powerful,
and more and more ruthless.
He subjected everybody around him
to potential criminal liability.
For example, I was, I think, 25 years old.
I had about $35 in the bank.
And I was made the director of a bank in Chicago,
as were some of our associates for other banks.
I remember the first auditor's report,
basically saying, "What happened to the money?
Where's all the money?"
There was always something
of that criminal nature going on.
AULETTA :
COHN :AULETTA: Okay.
COHN:
AULETTA:
COHN:
When I was a kid, I would go with my grandmother,
because Roy would have her birthday party on his yacht,
which was docked in the Hamptons.
It was calledDefiance.
One year, there was this mysterious fire onDefiance...
which happened to be insured for a lot of money.
One of the crew members was killed in that fire.
AULETTA: There were serious questions
about whether Roy had a hand in burning the boat
in order to get the insurance.
DAVE: Was it arson? Was Roy connected?
AULETTA :
COHN :
AULETTA:
COHN:
Like a lot of things with Roy,
those questions haunted that case and that...
The mystery of what happened to the young man and that boat.
VASSALLO: It just got to a point
where they were crazier and crazier and crazier,
culminating in his first indictment.
COHN: It was a 10-count indictment, charging me with perjury,
obstruction of justice and with a conspiracy
to commit perjury and to obstruct justice.
It was about a 48-page-long indictment.
Everything bad that happened to Roy
during my years at his firm
was attributed to Robert Morgenthau,
who was then the U.S. attorney.
Cohn viewed all the three Morgenthau indictments
as a vendetta.
And it was a very public dispute.
COHN: If there's a defendant around
who hasn't been propositioned by Mr. Morgenthau's office
to furnish some kind of information on me
in return for a deal, I haven't met him.
AULETTA: He's the only person I've ever met
who actually enjoyed being indicted,
because it gave him a platform to attack.
A federal grand jury in New York today
indicted Roy Cohn on charges of fraud and conspiracy.
Cohn could be sentenced to 38 years in jail
and fined $55,000 if convicted on all counts.
I can't imagine the kind of pressure
he was under while this was going on,
but he never showed it.
There was a confidence about him that was unshakable.
ROBERTS: He managed to get out of legal difficulties
in ways that almost no other lawyer could have.
He was a legal magician.
COHN: If Mr. Morgenthau were being honest,
he could have done this at the same time
he did the last indictment 60 days ago.
But if he did it that way, he wouldn't have been able
to get two smear news stories against me,
which is just what he likes to do.
And after this third indictment,
I don't think there are too many people left around
who don't realize
that this all is Mr. Morgenthau's vendetta.
ROBERTS: In his own trial involving the Fifth Avenue Coach Company,
his lawyer had a heart attack.
Roy got up and delivered his own defense.
Seven hours of his own defense without looking at a note.
ZIRIN: Cohn kept appealing to patriotism.
He said, "I love the United States of America,
and I can't believe
that most of the people in this great country
think that I could ever commit a criminal act."
He's just lying to save his skin.
It had a tremendous impact on the jury.
The foreman of the jury came back the next day
wearing an American flag in his lapel.
And he was acquitted.
I mean, he was really the Teflon fraud.
This is just the most relieved and happy moment of my life.
And the way I feel is
the way I feel every day in my life,
which is God bless America.
ZIRIN: Roy Cohn understood the political value
of wrapping yourself in the flag.
It's not surprising
that he would meet with reporters
and say, "God bless America."
He always made very good copy.
AULETTA: Cohn was, in part, powerful not just because
he was a good lawyer and a killer lawyer.
He was also powerful because he had press relationships.
And the press was beholden to him
because he was feeding them information.
This gave him a dimension beyond just being a lawyer.
Roy knew how to shape events that he was involved in
through his manipulation of the press.
JOHNSTON: Roy Cohn had learned his lessons
from the McCarthy era well.
He learned the press will accurately quote
whatever you say.
The headlines and the top of the story,
and a lot of people don't read beyond the first paragraphs,
would be your version of events.
Cohn had a coterie of reporters,
sort of the predecessors and precursors of Fox News,
to whom he would leak information.
STONE: He would sit back at the dining-room table,
and he would actually dictate copy
for both the New York Post and the Daily News.
"Period, paragraph, new paragraph,
comma, exclamation point."
I've never seen anybody do that.
From the very beginning, he tried to co-opt me.
He would give me horrible items about people,
and I wouldn't pay any attention.
But he did tell me a lot of incredible things.
He was consumed with a driving force
to make himself famous, to be with famous people,
to make himself powerful.
That was where the motives were.
GARY: In 1927, Roy's uncle,
Bernie Marcus, owned the Bank of United States.
The Depression comes,
and, of course, many banks had trouble.
GARY: When the stock market failed,
the Bank of United States was the first big bank to fail.
There was a run on the bank.
The only banks big enough to cover this run
were the Morgan banks or the Rockefeller banks.
But they said something to the effect:
"We don't care about the Jewish bank. Let them go."
ROIPHE: There's crowds in the streets, the bank is closed,
the doors are locked.
The immigrants lost all their money.
It was tragic in the Jewish community.
It was tragic for the country.
DAVE: My grandfather, Bernie Marcus, was hauled away to Sing Sing.
And that was the ultimate disgrace.
The social shame of that to the family was enormously deep.
Thrown out of every country club,
thrown out of the Harmonie Club.
There was a lot wrong with the trial
that ended up putting Bernie in prison.
And Roy had said that if he were
Bernie's attorney at the time, he would have gotten him off,
and probably could have.
DAVE: That failure of his Uncle Bernie
was a huge part of what motivated Roy.
He had to let people know
that although his uncle had lost it, he had made it.
COHEN: Roy had a huge standard of living.
Boats, planes, the best table
at the 21 Club or the Stork Club.
And the firm paid, because they were all business-related.
You know, Roy was never a partner in the firm.
That didn't mean anything to him.
He was Roy Cohn. I mean, he's the chief.
DAVE: This was the '60s and '70s,
when fame was becoming everything in New York.
And this was part of his need
to have these very wealthy friends.
His need to have a Rolls-Royce and let everybody know it.
COHEN: Actually, he had two Rolls-Royces.
One that was a convertible. He always wanted the sun.
And to look like he just came out of Miami Beach.
STONE: I think it was Aristotle Onassis who said:
"You can never be too rich or too tan."
Roy Cohn took this to heart.
COHEN: He had a speedboat, and often during the summer,
he would take a bunch of us up to 79th Street.
Now, the Hudson River was so polluted in the late '60s.
I mean, nobody would go 10 feet near the Hudson River.
And he went waterskiing.
And we went under the George Washington Bridge.
It was perfect Roy Cohn.
It was the way he lived, bigger than life.
VASSALLO: Roy took a house in Mexico every year.
And every time I would go there to meet with Roy,
there'd be a knock on my door at the office,
and his mother Dora would bring me
some jockey shorts and cans of tuna fish.
So Roy would have what he liked all the time.
AULETTA: His mother took care of him.
With her, it was, "Did you eat your breakfast?"
"Don't listen to him. He's wrong. You're right, Roy."
Bucking him up, always supporting him.
He became a little boy around his mother.
I gather he lived in fear of Dora knowing that he was gay.
Now, that's an odd thing,
because he was in his 30s and 40s,
but Dora chose not to see it.
After his mother died, things changed very rapidly.
A fellow who drove his car disappeared.
There was a new driver, much more handsome.
And there was a new captain of the yacht,
also much more handsome.
ADAMS: Roy was hung up
on a specific type.
I was his epitome of looks, like, you know, the very...
He liked blond-haired, you know, Nordic look, like David Schine.
Even the lawyers he would hire-- They were straight,
but they were that type of look.
Roy and the law firm of Saxe, Bacon and Bolan
moved into an Upper East Side townhouse.
ROSENTHAL: On East 68th Street,
which was an awfully fancy block.
I believe it was between Madison and Park.
The idea that it was an office
and a residence was a little unusual.
COHEN: You'd meet in the living room.
Or you'd meet in his bedroom, which was,
I think, on the fourth floor of the building.
He'd be in a bathrobe, and he--
That's the way business was conducted.
AULETTA: What I saw were two Cohns.
In a suit and tie, he was Roy Cohn, killer lawyer.
At his apartment...
I remember thinking, this is a different Roy Cohn.
He's letting himself be.
My recorder is going, and I said:
"Roy, let me ask you a question."
AULETTA :
AULETTA: Long pause.
He didn't answer for seconds. I mean, maybe five, six seconds.
COHN :
AULETTA: But he didn't say he was, he didn't say he wasn't.
But he squirmed,
which gave me great amount of pleasure.
Because in a way, I was doing to him,
in this personal interview, what he had done to people
in the McCarthy hearings, putting them on the spot.
"Are you now, or have you ever been a Communist?"
I wanna ask you about this. To me, the nicest thing...
Let's be affirmative.
The nicest thing that I have ever heard about Joe McCarthy
was told me by Senator Flanders of Vermont,
that he was a full-time homosexual. Is this true?
No. I'm sure you think
that merited a badge of honor, but it is not true.
I'm getting to you in a minute, but what about Senator McCarthy?
I mean, that's your favorite topic, I know that.
By the way-- I know.Just aroused by the obvious.
ZIRIN: He was a very hypocritical guy.
He was engaged for a while to Barbara Walters.
We're getting married when we're both 60.
She and Roy had grown up together,
and she never deserted him.
But she was annoyed by Roy going around
saying he was gonna marry her.
She knew that was absurd.
This is a guy who ostensibly was a multimillionaire,
one of the most powerful people in New York.
There was a Disney sign that said "Roy" on it
on his bedroom door.
The door opened-- I only saw it once,
but the door opened, and there was a mirror.
I didn't know that people had mirrors
on the ceilings of their bedrooms.
So there was a mirror there, a huge bed,
and there were just people in and out all day long.
SAFER: Which is also a kind of recreation room
and office and gallery for his collection of frogs.
Roy had a lot of miniature animals and stuffed animals
and things that...
In his apartment that you wouldn't expect...
a killer lawyer to have.
SAFER: He admits to a certain vanity,
religious about doing his 200 sit-ups every day.
All this while dictating
to his male secretary, Vincent Millard.
COHN: Did you remember I had a date with Barbara Walters?
When is that?COHN: Today.
Every time I had a meal with him, he didn't order very much,
and sometimes he didn't order.
With his fingers, he would take food off my plate.
If you're Roy and you're always doing exercise
and you're always staying thin,
and you eat off somebody's plate, it doesn't count.
It's like everything in his life.
There was this image, and then there was reality,
which totally contradicted it.
STONE: He had a really bad facelift,
with these enormous gashes,
uh, and stitches on the side of his face.
You'd say, "Roy, did you have surgery?"
And he said, "No, not me. Why? I feel fine."
So I mean, he would even deny that he'd had this surgery
when he should have been home in bed with ice on it.
He was very vain in that sense.
DAVE: There was a strange contradiction about Roy.
He was totally ugly
and totally charismatic at the same time.
AULETTA :
COHN :
The people that he had sex with were not very well-educated,
did not come from good families.
That was a separate part of his life.
GARY: He had to have sex every day. Every day.
And preferably with someone who was new.
He took a lot of Valium.
He'd get so frustrated with those childproof bottles.
He'd always... "Can you open this thing?"
And it wasn't, like, one pill.
It was, like, just dump them in there and take them.
In the end of the evening, I went to take my coat,
and it was, like, stuffed full of hundred-dollar bills.
Every time I reached into a pocket,
there was several hundred-dollar bills.
GARY: When everyone left,
I would go in and lay down on the bed with him,
and, like, I'd look up at the mirror,
and he would look up at the mirror, and we would talk.
I asked him, "So are you the girl or the boy?"
And he said, "I'm the girl."
ADAMS: There were rumors that he was
picking up male prostitutes all around the city.
He was really a personality in disarray.
A personality in anarchy.
Which had no rules, it had no scruples,
it had no boundaries.
He was someone who lived on the edge.
And he enjoyed living on the edge,
because it was dangerous.
ROBERTS: The power politics of New York, the favor bank,
was very closely linked to organized crime.
And this was a milieu in which Roy Cohn fit in perfectly.
Tell me what direction.You got 50 people here...
ZIRIN: Cohn began to represent mobsters.
He represented all of the New York families
that controlled La Cosa Nostra.
NEWSMAN: Galante arrived at the federal courthouse
in a long black limousine and walked inside,
shielded from photographers by two of his daughters.
GALANTE: Stop it. Please!
Galante is now regarded by federal authorities
as one of the most important men in the Mafia.
WOMAN: Come on, Daddy, run!What are you doing here today?
REPORTER: Turn around and roll, Frank.
MAN: Come on, baby. Let's go!WOMAN: Stop pushing me!
REPORTER: Are you Mr. Galante's attorney?
Yeah.What is your name?
Roy Cohn.Federal investigator said
Mr. Galante is the boss of organized crime.
Would that be a correct characterization,
the godfather of the New York Mafia?
From my experience, practically everything they've said
is totally incorrect and inaccurate.
They're not treating your client fairly?
No, I just said it's just a total publicity stunt,
or all of you wouldn't be here, right?
What are you doing here today?
I'm a lawyer.
He was very clever
in protecting his clients, by far and large,
from long criminal sentences
that would put them out of business.
SUDLER: Roy was assigned by the Gambino Crime Family
to represent John Gotti.
When Gotti and a couple of his guys
walked into a bar
in front of a lot of witnesses
and shot this guy in the head and killed him,
Roy managed to get Gotti off.
Instead of 25 to life on a murder,
got him into some degree of manslaughter
and Gotti ended up serving only two years in prison.
Amazing that he did that.
An excellent result for Gotti
and a great injustice at the same time.
As a result of that case,
Roy had a perpetual client of the Mafia.
NEWSMAN: Tony Salerno, recently indicted,
has long been one of Roy Cohn's clients.
Tony, you've read the charges in this indictment.
Did you do any of those things to anyone?
All false.
ZIRIN: Cohn was more an advisor.
He was the guy who whispered in the ear of the don
and told him what to say, what to do.
He was full of advice.
COHN: What're you gonna do when you get to the country?
Well, I planted peppers last week.
Now I'm gonna plant tomatoes.
SAFER: His name is Carmine Galante,
the late Carmine Galante,
who the papers said was the godfather of the Mafia.
Think that had an influence on the judge,
when he held that the Parole Commission was wrong?
GALANTE: I think so.
A farmer ought to be able to seed.
I think so.
It's very well known that that's what I do.
SAFER: A few months after this meeting,
he was gunned down as he sipped a glass of wine.
NEWSMAN: Present for the service was Roy Cohn,
who had been Galante's lawyer
through many of the mobster's legal difficulties.
I pass no moral judgment on Mr. Galante
any more than I pass a moral judgment on anybody else,
because that's for the Almighty to do, not for me.
Do you have any idea why he was murdered?
Uh, as somebody once said a long time ago is:
"All I know is what I read in the papers."
BRENNER: The Mafia was the entire power underbelly of the city.
And Roy had all of the network at his disposal.
DAVE: Steinbrenner would be on line one,
and Carmine Galante would be on line two,
and some crazy Mafia boss
who had a cement company would be on line three,
and Roger Stone would be in the anteroom.
And Roy wanted that attention.
He was an only child
whose mother doted on him every second.
And he needed that attention years after she died.
VASSALLO: There's a story about Dora
that gives you a pretty good insight
into Roy's relationship with his mother
and into how Roy operated.
Every Jewish family has its own Passover story,
and our story is an unusual one.
I was the youngest child, and as such,
I had to ask the Four Questions.
DAVE: First question was,
"Why is this night different from others?"
And Dora finally blurted out...
"Why is this night different?
Because the maid's dead in the kitchen!"
Turns out the housekeeper passed away, was in the kitchen, dead.
And in order not to disrupt the Passover dinner,
Dora saw to it that the housekeeper
was kept in the kitchen under the serving table.
She was embarrassed about how it interrupted the Seder,
not the fact that a life had been lost.
DAVE: That's totally Roy's spirit.
His lack of ethics, his lack of empathy.
That came from Dora.
For Roy, life was transactional.
It was all about connections and accruing power.
AULETTA :
COHN :
ROSENTHAL: The biggest business in New York then,
and it probably still is now, was real estate.
That's where the real power was.
He represented a number of real-estate figures,
among them Donald Trump.
JOHNSTON: Donald Trump grows up in a household
where his father Fred is deeply mobbed up.
His business partner, Willie Tomasello,
is an associate of the Gambino and Genovese crime families.
So Donald comes to Manhattan to make a name for himself.
He naturally gravitates toward Roy Cohn,
the consigliere for the head of the Gambino family
and the head of the Genovese family.
Short answers or...?
INTERVIEWER: Whatever you'd like. It doesn't matter.
I'm not as long as Archbishop O'Connor, but...
No one is.
Mr. Cohn, how did you meet Donald Trump?
I met him at a New York club called Le Club.
We were seated next to each other. We were introduced.
He was 23 years old then. He said, "Listen."
He said, "I've spent two days
with these establishment law firms about a case we have."
It was a civil-rights case or something.
"And they were all telling us, give up,
do this, sign a decree and all of that."
He says, "I followed your career, and you seem...
You're a little bit crazy like I am,
and you stand up to the establishment.
Can I come see you?" And I said, "Sure."
DAVE: The Justice Department was going after
Fred Trump and Donald Trump
for not letting blacks in their housing.
Rather than making a deal,
rather than admitting guilt, Roy said to Trump:
"You need to go full-bore after the Justice Department."
AULETTA: Roy Cohn was very clear what to do: attack.
Don't settle. Don't apologize. Attack.
Roy would always be for an offensive strategy.
Those are the rules of war.
You don't fight on the other guy's ground.
You define what the debate is gonna be about.
I think Donald learned that from Roy.
I learned that from Roy.
JOHNSTON: Roy Cohn began this whole new mode
of what you see today, of get off the issue,
attack law enforcement,
attack the government, attack the press.
Create phony issues so that you can totally change the debate.
Here's a little McCarthyism going on right now.
COHN: He shouldn't disclaim--
Total inability to cope with any of these current topics.
He does it with great... With great...
Keep talking, Roy. Keep talking.
Great precision.Keep talking.
This is known as "filler." You know, what... You...
You throw mud, and then the filler goes on
until they've forgotten the point.
ZIRIN: They counterclaimed against the government
for $100 million.
Now, the counterclaim was soon dismissed,
but had the effect of keeping the opponent off balance.
We fought it, and we did extremely well.
For all practical purposes, we won the case together.
AULETTA: Trump settled, but that was a victory,
because he didn't admit he did anything wrong.
And it's very consistent with Roy's advice.
"Never admit you're wrong. Never apologize."
Settling is not an apology.
In fact, Trump, when he settles,
he oftentimes will cast the settlement
as a victory, not a defeat.
Ever since that day,
he knows I have the same kind of crazy fight in me
that he has in him, and he knows that...
He believes you can fight city hall.
I believe you can fight city hall.
And we both fought it together.
Cohn looked at Donald Trump as something of a protégé.
He saw him as a man
who was governed by the same sort of situational ethics.
They were cut from the same cloth, in many respects.
Roy Cohn begins teaching Donald:
"Here's how you keep law enforcement off your back.
Don't leave a paper trail. Don't keep a calendar.
Never do things in writing.
And if somebody gets onto you, rat out other people."
You're gonna have to start pushing these people a bit,
because it's getting ridiculous, as far as I'm concerned.
So start pushing, and start pushing as hard as possible.
Cohn taught Trump how to ingratiate yourself
with powerful people
and how to manipulate them for your own ends.
WOMAN: Roy, just hold on here.ALL: ♪ Happy birthday... ♪
WOMAN: You have to make a very special wish.
ADAMS: It was like this funny game he played
that he could bring someone like me,
you know, to these total antigay
Republican stronghold of a party, you know?
And no one would say a word.
AULETTA: Roy Cohn's friends justified him as a friend.
They knew about the McCarthy years,
the Army-McCarthy hearings,
some of the dastardly things that Roy may have done.
But that was overwhelmed
by their feeling that he was their friend,
and genuine friend, and they cared about him.
I've tried to give loyalty,
and I've tried to give friendship, and I find in life,
when you extend friendship and you extend loyalty,
you get it back.
DAVE: He was the one who threw the great parties,
who knew Norman Mailer, who hung out with Andy Warhol.
All these people who were larger-than-life,
they were orbiting Roy.
EPSTEIN: Everybody came, mayors,
governors, police chiefs, firemen,
anybody from the newspaper.
Who didn't go?
ZIRIN: Cardinal Spellman would come.
Real-estate magnates would come.
Trump would go.
And there he would see
the leading politicians of New York City
who would be very helpful to him in his business.
JOHNSTON: He navigates this world
between the people who hang out at Sardi's and the 21 Club,
and this other world that has these mobsters,
and it creates a sort of glamour.
So Cohn is this bridge
between the legitimate world and the illegitimate world.
ZIRIN: Cohn was a legend in his own mind.
If you approach things that way,
pretty soon, the appearance contributes to the reality.
HASKELL: Everyone knows the famous legal eagle,
my pal and yours, Roy Cohn.Good evening, Nikki.
How are you?I'm fine. How are you?
Well, this is a very exciting occasion.
Here is Trump Tower.
Marble waterfalls,
the greatest stores in the world.
When something like this can be created in New York
and take the city by storm, it's a real event.
Donald Trump wanted to construct a building,
which is now known as Trump Tower, at Fifth Avenue
between 56th and 57th Street.
JOHNSTON: He got ahold of the Bonwit Teller department store,
this prime piece of real estate.
Donald hires, to tear down the building,
a Syracuse window-washing firm with no experience whatsoever.
And it uses 200 illegal immigrants from Poland.
And then they don't get paid.
ZIRIN: Buildings of that sort at the time
were made largely with structural steel,
because to make them out of concrete was quite costly
and also involved dealing with the Mob,
which controlled
the poured-contract industry in New York.
Strangely, Trump chose to make it out of concrete.
Now, why out of concrete?
Because Cohn introduced him to his Mafioso clients,
and it was through them that he was able to make the deal.
Everything about this project was corrupt.
COHN: Donald Trump is probably
one of the most important names in America today.
What started off as a meteor,
uh, mounting from New York and going upward
is gonna touch the rest of this country and parts...
Good parts of the world.
Donald just wants to be the biggest winner of all.
ROSENTHAL: Donald had the money,
and Roy had the balls and the shrewdness,
and also some of the connections
to move Trump beyond the world
of housing developments in Queens and Brooklyn.
And it was clearly mutually beneficial.
COHN: Let me tell you about this.
This is a picture of Donald and me,
in which he says, "Roy is my greatest friend."
And there's a letter from him.
He says, "Needless to say, your representation of me
with regard to the Trump Tower case was brilliant.
Everyone scoffed at our pursuit
of this difficult victory, saying it couldn't be done."
Now, here's a typical Donald Trump.
He's gotta come in with a crack at the end.
He says, "The skeptics, however, were at a disadvantage.
They never saw Roy Cohn in action,
especially when he really wants to win."
By the way, this picture hangs in my office
directly next to a picture I treasure
of the president and Mrs. Reagan.
Two of my favorites.
Roy was responsible, according to Roy,
for everything important that happened in the United States,
whether it's an election of a governor,
an election of a president.
SNYDER: If you had been attorney general
when Richard Nixon was in office during Watergate,
do you think you could have solved that problem?
I think Nixon could have solved the problem, Tom.
Or counseled him on how to solve it.
I think the problem could have been solved
very easily by getting rid of the tapes.
Roy Cohn's reach in American politics
is absolutely extraordinary.
He's got Richard Nixon as a connection
because Nixon's rise depended
on the whole anti-Communist fervor.
He has connections to Ronald Reagan, who cooperated
with the McCarthy-type investigations
in the early '50s.
Cohn became an important figure in Republican politics.
He was a registered Democrat,
yet he most closely identified with the political right.
STONE: In 1980, Reagan won the election
because Roy Cohn arranged for John Anderson,
who had challenged Reagan for the Republican nomination,
to be the liberal party nominee.
There's a three-way split in New York.
That three-way split allows Reagan
to win the electoral votes with 45 percent of the vote.
It was a setup, and it worked.
COHEN: I was present in his office when Nancy Reagan called him
and thanked him for getting her husband elected.
John Anderson wasn't the only political fix
Roy was responsible for.
He also torpedoed the vice-presidential campaigns
of Eagleton in '72...
and Ferraro in '84.
STONE: Roy was the one who made the link
between organized crime and her husband.
The New York Post and the Daily News,
as you might imagine, went to town.
Cohn saw himself as a political puppeteer.
He started an evolution.
This would certainly be the beginning
of the infiltration of the political-right media
into American government.
STONE: Rupert Murdoch and theNew York Post endorsement
is something that Roy Cohn works on every day for eight months,
mostly by giving Rupert Murdoch himself
a window into Reagan's campaign.
ZIRIN: It's not surprising that he could be
with Ronald Reagan and Rupert Murdoch,
who developed Fox News, in the Oval Office,
as though he engineered the entire relationship.
You can see what Cohn set into motion,
winding up with the type of political environment
we have today.
EPSTEIN: I can't think of anything else like him
in American history or anywhere.
People should have ignored him and put him in jail.
And here he is flying around in his own plane
to go have dinner at the White House.
Go figure that out.
COHN: I think the Reagan anticrime program
is gonna take the emphasis off
certain types of white-collar crimes, minor things...
That's good for you.Minor things and all that,
and put it on where the real root of the problem is,
violent crimes, so that the people of this country
are once again in control instead of the criminals.
Are you running for any office?No.
Have you been called by France
to restore the guillotine and conduct a campaign there?
No, but I'll tell you, I'd like to restore
capital punishment in the United States
so that when people are gonna kill a policeman
or people are gonna mug and kill an old person,
they're gonna think twice.
He did whatever he wanted.
And he felt he was good enough at everything
to get away with it, and he did for a very, very long time.
Roy Cohn has managed to stay out of jail all these years,
and I admire that. I'd like to have him for my lawyer.
STONE: Roy famously argued
that all of the expenses of his law firm were...
You know, were deductible.
The IRS did not see it this way.
Roy told me that the whole point of dealing with the IRS
was to die owing them as much as humanly possible.
The United States government filed a lawsuit against Roy Cohn
for failing to pay nearly $7 million in back taxes.
WALLACE: You are a tax avoider.
No, I'm not. I'm a tax avoider? We're all tax avoiders.
The president's a tax avoider.
You're more successful at it.
Don't blame me for your inadequacy.
Here was a guy who was so evidently crooked,
he was so evidently dishonest,
yet nobody was doing anything about it.
There were serious disciplinary complaints,
and they were sitting at the bottom
of the desk drawer for years.
AULETTA :
COHN :
Because I...AULETTA: But here...
Wait a minute.COHN: Let's stop there.
AULETTA: Okay, sure.
He was eventually disbarred for stealing from his own clients
and trying to defraud his own clients.
Ultimately, we disbarred him on the basis of four cases.
SEC brings a case against the Pied Piper yacht company.
Almost all the money from the company
has managed not to go to the creditors,
but they've gone to Roy Cohn and his partners.
Second, he stole from his client
by promising to pay her back
when he had no intention of paying her back,
and then lying about it.
And third, he tried to deceive a dying, incompetent man
into making him the executor of his will.
COHEN: One of Roy Cohn's major clients was Schenley,
a distributor of liquors and wines.
And Lew Rosenstiel, its chairman,
was a personal friend of Roy's.
Among the charges brought against Roy
were the fact that he had documents
executed in a hospital room
when Mr. Rosenstiel was not capable
of knowing what he was doing.
My dad had a stroke, and he was in a hospital in Miami.
These two people appeared at the hospital...
one of whom was wheeling the bed around
and fixing the covers.
It was then made clear to me that it was Roy Cohn,
and that Roy was having my father sign some papers
awarding himself as trustee of my father's estate.
NEWSMAN: The squibbly signature
at the bottom of the last will and testament
of multimillionaire Lewis Rosenstiel
purports to be that of the late Miami philanthropist,
designating attorney Roy Cohn,
Rosenstiel's granddaughter Kathy Finkelstein,
and her husband James as trustees
of a $50 million estate.
Other members of the Rosenstiel family
are contesting the will's authenticity.
His signature was illegible.
Scrolly sort of X,
and a little wandering down off the line.
There's no image on that line
that looks anything like any letter of the alphabet.
KABLER: I mean, it was ridiculous.
MAN : You were cited as dressing up as a male nurse
and getting a fraudulent codicil signed.
What's interested in it-- What's more interest--
What was amazing was the judge said--
Hey, mister, what's more interesting,
interesting to me, is how somebody like you,
who's aspiring to be one of the leaders of the future,
could have your facts so screwed up.
There was no-- Never any insinuation
that I could have dressed up as a male nurse
or anything like that.
And the charge you are referring to
was thrown out by the Bar Association in New York.
Why'd you appeal the case, Mr. Cohn?
Why do I have to appeal when I win?
Did you win? I thought you lost.
Yes, well, maybe you... You would've been disbarred
as a member of the Florida Bar.Oh, jeez.
LONDON: He was a liar.
There are a year and a half worth of hearings
in which he challenges everything
and tells the same lies all over again.
He makes the matter worse
and makes an application
to the D.C. Bar where he lied under oath.
He tells lies about the Rosenstiel codicil.
He tells lies about the Schlesinger.
He just tells the same lies over and over and over again.
If you see a pattern there, you're not foolish.
And if you have no conscience about--
Or shame about whether you're telling an untruth
or you're using hyperbole, you get away with it.
ROBERTS: When he was about to be disbarred,
it was no surprise who shows up as character witnesses
for Roy Cohn,
but Barbara Walters...
William F. Buckley Jr...
Donald Trump.
The same people who he had cultivated
and who, in effect, had used him over decades.
LONDON: Thirty-seven witnesses testified.
You know what they all said under oath?
"Roy Cohn has an excellent reputation
in the community for integrity."
And they said that with a straight face
after taking an oath?
Man, that's power.
WALLACE: Here's what the Disciplinary Committee
of the Bar says about you.
Quote, "A total absence of moral character
and professional fitness.
A cruel public use of your illness.
Pleading for clemency for a dying lawyer
and showing up in court the next day."
They couldn't say it about me.
I never cited my illness as a reason for anything.
Anyone who knows me knows I don't plead,
and I'm not pleading in this case.
I don't like any of them.
I've called them a bunch of yoyos.
And there might be other lawyers
who have a guilty conscience or feel they have to crawl.
But I don't have a guilty conscience.
I'm not gonna crawl before this committee
or any committee like it.
He wouldn't plead to anything.
Roy Cohn went out and hired excellent lawyers.
But we had him. He wasn't getting out of this.
He was a pinned moth.
Roy gave a private dinner
for his closest friends and relatives every year.
And the one I was invited to
took place after he had been disbarred.
And when I got there,
this long table was set, and nobody came.
He had a lot of friends until he was disbarred,
and then he had no friends. They all ran away.
MAN : I wanna know why he's objecting
to the way people are treating him now.
Why don't he remember what he did, not only with McCarthy,
but with Fifth Avenue bus lines, Lionel Trains,
and is he proud of his record as an attorney?
I'll hang up.Okay.
Okay, the answer is yes.
I am proud of my record.
When you would try to get him to talk about Joe McCarthy
or the Army-McCarthy trials or that whole period,
J. Edgar Hoover, you couldn't get much out of him.
On the Rosenbergs, I asked him how he felt about it.
I told him I'd read the case, and he said, and I quote,
"If I could've pulled the switch,
I'd have done it myself."
That doesn't sound like remorse.
I think Roy was a hardliner to the end.
You feel pretty good.
I feel great. Why?
I mean, you were at death's door six months ago
three months ago?
They found I had liver cancer
and they found that...
Which spreads in strange directions. Tell me...
Are you in remission?I'm in total remission.
When I talk to friends and tell them
that I am doing a profile of Roy Cohn,
they say, "Ask him this, please."
And I'm sure you know what they tell me to ask you.
Do you have AIDS?Oh, no.
That's easy to answer.
DAVE: Peter Fraser, his companion, helped him everywhere.
Roy was forgetting things left and right,
which never had happened before.
And he looked at me with these pale blue eyes
and these hooded kind of eyes,
and quivering, and he said--
I said, "They say you have AIDS."
And he said, "Who is they,
and what do they know about me?"
Even at the end, he refused to admit that he was gay,
and he refused to admit that he had AIDS.
It was almost hard for me to believe
because of the man I had grown to know.
GARY: It was a mistake for Roy to deny that he had AIDS.
It was a mistake to deny that he was a homosexual.
If he had come out and said:
"Look, I'm homosexual. I have AIDS.
We need to do something,
not just for me, but for the community,"
he would have been a hero. Instead, he was a hypocrite.
And at the same time, he took advantage
of his connections to get special treatment.
The Reagan White House actually got him into
the National Institutes of Health
to do an experimental treatment that nobody could get into.
So here was President Reagan and all the people around him
basically denying there was an AIDS epidemic,
and yet Roy was flying down there
and going there a lot for this experimental treatment.
SMITH: And he acted like he was there on a mistake.
He didn't really have AIDS.
You know, he never gave up on his own myth.
Are you gonna win this one too?
You're darn right I am, Larry.Thanks for being with us, Roy.
I enjoyed it, and I hope not so much time goes
until I'm with you again.
Roy was incredibly loyal to friends.
And he was intensely loyal to Donald Trump.
Trump took his legal business
to somebody else when Roy had AIDS.
He stopped seeing Roy and calling Roy
and hanging out with Roy.
You know why people ask about AIDS and Roy Cohn?
Sure. Of course. Of course.They believe you're homosexual.
And that you simply have never acknowledged the fact.
And a good friend of mine,
and a good friend of yours, I should say...
Tell him, if he wants to admit anything,
he can, but it's a lie.
No, a good friend of mine who is a woman
says that she believes that Roy Cohn
wants to, in effect, come out of the closet.
"Come out of the closet" meaning,
make a very dramatic statement about...
Yeah, just acknowledge it.
There's certainly nothing horrible about it.
Mike, we've been here, we've been doing
a very intensive 20 minutes or more on me.
Um, I think you can see me.
I think you can see, and the audience can,
I ain't dying from nothing, to start with, number one.
Right. Right.Two, you asked me categorically.
And I tell you categorically, I do not have AIDS.
Where do these stories come from?
It's a cinch, Mike. Take this set of facts.
Bachelor, unmarried, middle-aged.
Well, young middle-aged, and, um...
Uh, then all the stories go back to the McCarthy/Schine days.
Schine was a bachelor too.
We were both bachelors.WALLACE: So was McCarthy.
COHN: Right, and so was McCarthy.
STONE: At that point, his phone calls are erratic.
They don't make much sense.
He tires very, very easily.
I called the hospital, I asked for his room,
and Tom Bolan answered the phone.
And I said, "Tom, I wanna see Roy."
And Tom said, "Don't come. It's too late.
He won't recognize you." He said he's...
And then I realized I had missed my chance to say goodbye.
WALLACE: If you had a chance to write your epitaph...
how would you like to be remembered?
Uh, I guess I would like to be remembered most...
Look, I... We know what my epitaph is gonna be
in all the papers.What's it gonna be?
It's gonna be "Roy Cohn dies, was McCarthy chief aide."
No matter what I do, good or bad,
for the rest of the years of my life,
that's what it's going to be.
My mother told me that she found a list
of Roy's career path.
It started out as prosecutor,
which he was right out of law school.
And then a series of political positions,
ending up with governor of New York.
He never reached the kind of public-policy power
that he had envisioned himself as having.
But it's undeniable that his impact on politics lives on.
ROIPHE: Roy was an evil...
produced by certain parts of the American culture.
There always is the possibility of another person
who cares not about our traditions
or our laws or our protections
who can come in and wreck it,
and wreck it for the weakest among us
and the most vulnerable.
ZIRIN: Power in the hands of someone who is that reckless
and that arrogant is a very dangerous thing.