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SEE MAFIA CONCRETE

MANAFORT?

see murdoch (stone)

uber1

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-1534

grift bk

Longest-Grifters-Swindlers-Hijacked-Conservatism

eur junket

https://gregolear.substack.com/p/deconstructing-the-epstein-myth-what

...SK

Well, was looking at all of the criminals around Donald, and I had a head start with a piece of information that I had gotten in 2005—before there was even an imagination that this man would run for president. I think to the layman’s understanding, if you knew who Trump was, which people did, that he was political in any way, just maybe he had been and we learned that he had been.

In 2005, Trump had this new reality show with Mark Burnett. And so I had a circle of people that I knew. I’m a writer, screenwriter. So I knew folks in that circle with that man.

Okay. Meaning Burnett.

Yes, Burnett. And I had learned that Donald was in a tremendous amount of debt to some Russians. And it was threatening this new thing—this idea of him as this self-made, you know, billionaire, whatever, whatever the thing was, a successful businessman, because it was all about to crumble. And there’s been a tremendous amount of reporting since I learned that. Verifying all of that. So I had that information at the time, back in the day.

And so when he came down that escalator, I knew, I was like, “Oh no, that’s the guy that’s in debt to a bunch of Russian gangsters!” And so I started trying to figure out who those Russians may be. And then in doing that, I came across Jeffrey Epstein.

Okay, interesting. So Trump to the Russians to Epstein.

## Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump

Greg Olear

March 31, 2020

Yeah, well, organized crime—specifically Russian organized crime. And then trying to understand Donald and Fred, Fred’s empire, his father’s empire, which was built with the Genovese crime family. And then the building of Trump Tower in Manhattan that moved in—they had different territory as Fred would call it, as Donald has said on the record—that Manhattan wasn’t. According to his father, “That’s not our territory,” because it wasn’t, it was Gambino territory. For Donald Trump specifically to be able to build in Manhattan, develop in Manhattan, Fred arranged for, and Roy Cohn arranged for, the two crime families, the Gambinos and the Genovese to form what became known as a concrete cartel—all the five families were in there. And this was the bid-rigging over concrete contacts to develop in Manhattan. And it was called “the Donald Trump deal.” And so that was in the middle of it, for those U.S. crime families and the racket they were running, which is this very racket that Giuliani used to prosecute the five families. So…

Four of the five families.

Four of the five families. Castellanos was a holdout and then was killed, shot dead in the street. So that’s the history.

There’s way more than that. During that time, before the Russian mafia had really taken over New York—which it did; it rolled in in the late 80s, some of it even back to the 70s, but very specifically in the 80s and the 90s and just sort of rolled up a lot of the territories as their own. And they did it by laundering money through Donald’s casinos. There was a lot of ways that they did all of that. There was a very prominent Russian gangster named Ivankov, who had actually an office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, but he was ultimately caught, tipped off and caught by Andy McCabe’s team.

Like when you start learning about these characters, of what they were doing back in the day, both on the law enforcement side pursuing Russian organized crime and from the Russian organized crime side—the bosses and the key figures there were all in business in some fashion with Donald Trump.

Then in the mid early 2000s to like 2005, 2006, right around when I was hearing this stuff about him, what was happening was the Russians were wanting to keep using Trump to go internationally. So the properties: Trump Panama developing and Trump Toronto developing and Trump Georgia developing and all of these foreign developments, which we were watching. If you watch “The Apprentice,” it unfolds on “The Apprentice” as well. This sort of expansion of the Trump thing where he was just licensing his name to be put on these things, because he was really over-leveraged.

Like the one in Georgia, the country Georgia—the Trump Tower there, all they did was just stick a shovel in the ground, and a whole bunch of money was laundered. There’s Trump Baku, which, you know, there was quite a bit of reporting how that was probably a front for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Again, Iran and their corruption very closely tied in with Russian organized crime as well.

Right. Adam Davidson in the New Yorker.

So that’s the background. That’s why the Trump/Russia thing is not a hoax. Donald is the hoax. You know, he did. And there’s so much reporting and Trump, the company, Allen Weisselberg, all those people, they affirm this, they said, “Yeah, yeah, we took that money.” The problem with it is some of it was illegal, but a lot of it’s not illegal, right?

He couldn’t get a casino license in Australia, infamously. They would not give him a casino license because of his ties to organized crime, both U.S. organized crime and Russian organized crime.

So a major Five Eyes power decided that Trump couldn’t have a casino license because of his ties to organized crime—and specifically Russian organized crime. Let’s just underline that because it seems important. Australia is, as they say, a real country, you know—that is one of our strongest allies.

Right. Right.

So how you get to Jeffrey is, there was a time in the 80s where Donald was really having issues, and he was sort of over-leveraging himself. He was building in Atlantic City. He was doing these things and couldn’t get them funded. He always had a problem getting the money because legitimate banks would stop lending to him, which was the crisis he was facing in the early 2000s, mid-2000s. There was Deutsche Bank, but even Deutsche Bank was turning him down, so he had to go for this Russian money. You could get Russian money, you could get Chinese money, and the Chinese money hadn’t quite showed up yet. But the gangsters will invest in you. So the banks were difficult.

Now part of the stuff that made it hard to get finding from U.S. banks is because of what happened with him in the 80s with Bear Stearns. So there’s a guy that ran Bear Stearns.

(This is all the reporting done by Wayne Barrett. And I recommend everybody go read Wayne Barrett’s work on Donald and Fred Trump and that sort of “Trump Inc.” He did extraordinary work on that. He also did great work on Giuliani and showing what sort of a criminal and a fraud Giuliani was. And it still is, I guess.)

So Ace Greenberg ran Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns is the company that infamously went down in 2008 with all the credit-default swaps, all that kind of stuff that just crashed—you know, the Big Shorttype of thing.

But before that, they were a real player—Bear and Lehman and these other entities. Goldman Sachs. And so Donald had a very close relationship with Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg is the man whose daughter was Jeffrey Epstein’s student when Jeffrey Epstein was at the Dalton School. And Epstein did whatever he did at the Dalton School to leverage his just being a math teacher and tutor at this private school into working directly for Ace Greenberg.

So he went into the financial industry at Bear Stearns. And he didn’t come in as a low-level person and work his way up. He came in at a very senior level, and it caused a great sort of upset at Bear Stearns. Who is this guy? Where is he coming from? And why is Ace giving him this plum spot?

And he was handling private wealth management. And his big client that he had, that Ace gave him, was Edgar Bronfman, who’s Sam Bronfman’s son. Sam Bronfman, he established Seagrams, and he was Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano’s business partner during the bootlegging days. And Edgar Bronfman has a lot of ties to Russia as well, quite frankly. And it’s his daughters that were part of that NXIVM thing. That’s how people recognize that name, Bronfman.

He’s Canadian though, right? Sam Bronfman?

Yes, he was Canadian. So that was part of the bootlegging thing. Yeah.

But that was Jeffrey’s client, and he got into difficulties and troubles there at Bear Stearns with that particular client managing, you know, and he basically had to be fired. And Ace really resisted firing Jeffrey. And what I uncovered and discovered was that he didn’t fire him. He just moved him into Offshores. Jeffrey went into establishing offshore accounts and offshore money, sort of tax havens for Bear Stearns clients.

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no lnx

Corrupt, fixable and usable': Why Trump’s 'decades-old playbook' is finally losing its appeal

Maya Boddie

January 31, 2023

While former President Donald Trump pursues a third presidential run amid a flurry of criminal investigations, it’s clear that the effectiveness of his typical tactics of “defiance and counterattacks” is starting to dwindle, Maggie Haberman at the New York Times reports.

Haberman named nearly six current investigations facing Trump — from his pending classified documents case, rape accusations, potential indictment in Georgia following allegations that he attempted to overturn the 2020 election and more.

New York Attorney General Letitia James recently filed a $250 million lawsuit against Trump for “widespread financial fraud.”

READ MORE: Trump hits Bob Woodward with $50 million lawsuit for releasing audio of interviews

Sources close to Trump, Haberman reports, say the former president’s main worry is the potential of facing criminal charges, which “he has worked to avoid since the late 1970s,” under the guidance of his former attorney, the late Roy M. Cohn.

In an attempt to distract officials from pending litigation, Trump has kept Cohn's legacy alive by attempting to ambush the legal system while finessing his way around potential consequences.

“Always distraction, and apparent scorched earth and counterattacks at the start, and after much passage of time, settlement as quietly as possible,” First Amendment attorney and New York Democratic activist Victor A. Kovner said. “And the counterattacks as scurrilous as possible. Mostly from the Roy Cohn playbook.”

Trump has continuously engaged in harmful tactics such as calling Black prosecutors like Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis “radical, vicious and racist,” or accusing the Department of Justice of partisanship.

[READ MORE: How a Kansas mayor pulled off a 'coup' using Trump-like tactics: report

As lawsuits come for Trump, he has proceeded to file a few lawsuits himself — most recently against Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.

But former attorney and FBI official, Chuck Rosenberg, told Haberman that this approach is losing its power.

“You can wear down a private party if they do not have the same resources as you, or you can settle a civil case and make it go away, but criminal cases are not about money,” Rosenberg said. “Criminal cases are about liberty and justice, and it is really rather difficult — if not impossible — to wear down federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. and make them go away.”}:

Rosenberg continued, “I think he thinks that everything can be bought or fought. And that is just not true.”}:

[READ MORE: 'Acting in bad faith': Trump lawyer in 'judge’s sights' over courtroom stunts and 'frivolous' claims

In the past, and still, according to former Trump Organization employee Alan Marcus, “Trump views the judicial system as he sees everything else: corrupt, ‘fixable’ and usable as a bullying tactic.”

Marcus mentioned that when he worked under Trump in the 1990's, he noticed that Trump would quickly dismiss cases against him as a “waste of time and money” but proceed to search for a “friendlier” judge to take on the case.

Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks of South Florida, who fined Trump $1 million this month for his 2016 “frivolous lawsuit” against Hillary Clinton, likely would not be considered a “friendly” judges in Trump’s eyes.

“Mr. Trump is a prolific and sophisticated litigant who is repeatedly using the courts to seek revenge on political adversaries,” Middlebrooks said. “He is the mastermind of strategic abuse of the judicial process, and he cannot be seen as a litigant blindly following the advice of a lawyer.”

Trump dropped his lawsuit against Letitia James as a result of the $1 million fine, proving Haberman's point that Trump's “decades-old playbook” is becoming worn and torn.

READ MORE: Questions raised about former US attorney who knew the DOJ was protecting Trump

Trump hits Bob Woodward with $50 million lawsuit for releasing audio of interviews ›

Ex-prosecutor: Donald Trump keeps handing investigators 'incriminating evidence from heaven' ›

'He’s done. He’s over': Ann Coulter declares an end to Donald Trump's political reign ›

Legal career in New York[

After leaving McCarthy, Cohn had a 30-year career as an attorney in New York City. His clients included Donald Trump;^[31] New York Yankees baseball club owner George Steinbrenner;^[32] Aristotle Onassis;^[33] Mafia figures Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti; Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager; the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York; Texas financier and philanthropist Shearn Moody, Jr.;^[34] and business owner Richard Dupont. Dupont, then 48, was convicted of aggravated harassment and attempted grand larceny for his extreme attempts at coercing further representation by Cohn for a bogus claim to property ownership in a case against the actual owner of 644 Greenwich Street, Manhattan, where Dupont had operated Big Gym, and from where he had been evicted in January 1979.^[35]

Cohn was known for his active social life, charitable giving, and combative personality. In the early 1960s he became a board member of the Western Goals Foundation.^[36] Although he was registered as a Democrat, Cohn supported most of the Republican presidents of his time and Republicans in major offices across New York.^[8] He maintained close ties in conservative political circles, serving as aninformal advisor toRichard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.^[8] Cohn's other clients included retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who has referenced Cohn as "the quintessential fixer".^[37]

Representation of Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch

In 1971, businessman Donald Trump moved to Manhattan, where he became involved in large construction projects.^[38] In 1973, the Justice Department accused him of violating the Fair Housing Act in 39 of his properties.^[39][40] The government alleged that Trump's corporation quoted different rental terms and conditions and made false "no vacancy" statements to African Americans for apartments it managed in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.^[41]

Representing Trump, Cohn filed a countersuit against the government for $100 million, asserting that the charges were "irresponsible and baseless."^[39][42][40] The countersuit was unsuccessful.^[43] Trump settled the charges out of court in 1975, saying he was satisfied that the agreement did not "compel the Trump organization to accept persons on welfare as tenants unless as qualified as any other tenant."^[39] The corporation was required to send a bi-weekly list of vacancies to the New York Urban League, a civil rights group, and give the league priority for certain locations.^[44] In 1978, the Trump Organization was again in court for violating terms of the 1975 settlement; Cohn called the new charges "nothing more than a rehash of complaints by a couple of planted malcontents." Trump denied the charges.^[40][43][45]

Rupert Murdoch was a client, and Cohn repeatedly pressured President Ronald Reagan to further Murdoch's interests. He is credited with introducing Trump and Murdoch, in the mid-1970s, marking the beginning of what was to be a long, pivotal association between the two.^[46]

Lionel trains:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Cohn was the grandnephew of Joshua Lionel Cowen, founder of the Lionel model train company. By 1959, Cowen and his son Lawrence had become involved in a family dispute over control of the company. In October 1959, Cohn and a group of investors stepped in and gained control of the company, having bought 200,000 of the firm's 700,000 shares, which were purchased by his syndicate from the Cowens and on the open market over a three-month period prior to the takeover.^[47] Under Cohn's leadership, Lionel was plagued by declining sales, quality-control problems, and huge financial losses. In 1963, Cohn was forced to resign from the company after losing a proxy fight.^[48]

Later career and disbarment:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Cohn aided Roger Stone in Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign in 1979–1980, helping Stone arrange for John B. Anderson to get the nomination of the Liberal Party of New York, a move that would help split the opposition to Reagan in the state. Stone said Cohn gave him a suitcase that Stone avoided opening and, as instructed by Cohn, dropped it off at the office of a lawyer influential in Liberal Party circles. Reagan carried the state with 46 percent of the vote. Speaking after the statute of limitations for bribery had expired, Stone said, "I paid his law firm. Legal fees. I don't know what he did for the money, but whatever it was, the Liberal Party reached its right conclusion out of a matter of principle."^[49]

Federal investigations during the 1970s and 1980s charged Cohn three times with professional misconduct, including perjury and witness tampering.^[8] He was accused in New York of financial improprieties related to city contracts and private investments. He was acquitted of all charges.^[8] In 1986, a five-judge panel of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court disbarred Cohn for unethical and unprofessional conduct, including misappropriation of clients' funds, lying on a bar application, and pressuring a client to amend his will. In this case in 1975, Cohn entered the hospital room of the dying, comatose Lewis Rosenstiel, the multi-millionaire founder of Schenley Industries; forced a pen to his hand and lifted it to the will in an attempt to make himself and Cathy Frank—Rosenstiel's granddaughter—beneficiaries. The resulting marks were determined in court to be indecipherable and in no way a valid signature.^[6]

Sexuality:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

When Cohn brought on G. David Schine as chief consultant to the McCarthy staff, speculation arose that Schine and Cohn had a sexual relationship.^[50][51] Although some historians have concluded the Schine–Cohn friendship was platonic,^[51][52][53] others state, based on the testimony of friends, that Cohn was gay.^[54][55] During the Army–McCarthy hearings, Cohn denied having any "special interest" in Schine or being bound to him "closer than to the ordinary friend."^[51] Joseph Welch, the Army's attorney in the hearings, made an apparent reference to Cohn's homosexuality. After asking a witness, at McCarthy's request, if a photo entered as evidence "came from a pixie", he defined "pixie" as "a close relative of a fairy".^[51] Though "pixie" was a camera-model name at the time, the comparison to "fairy," a derogatory term for a homosexual man, had clear implications. The people at the hearing recognized the slur and found it amusing; Cohn later called the remark "malicious," "wicked," and "indecent."^[51]

Speculation about Cohn's sexuality intensified following his death from AIDS in 1986.^[8] In a 2008 article published in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin quotes Roger Stone: "Roy was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men. Gays were weak, effeminate. He always seemed to have these young blond boys around. It just wasn't discussed. He was interested in power and access."^[56] Stone worked with Cohn beginning with the Reagan campaign during the 1976 Republican Party presidential primaries.

Lavender scare[

See also: Lavender scare

Cohn and McCarthy targeted many government officials and cultural figures not only for suspected Communist sympathies, but also for alleged homosexuality.^[57] McCarthy and Cohn were responsible for the firing of scores of gay men from government employment; and strong-armed many opponents into silence using rumors of their homosexuality.^[57][58] Former U.S. Senator Alan K. Simpson has written: "The so-called 'Red Scare' has been the main focus of most historians of that period of time. A lesser-known element … and one that harmed far more people was the witch-hunt McCarthy and others conducted against homosexuals."^[59]

Death:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In 1984, Cohn was diagnosed with AIDS and attempted to keep his condition secret while receiving experimental drug treatment.^[60] He participated in clinical trials of AZT, a drug initially synthesized to treat cancer but later developed as the first anti-HIV agent for AIDS patients. He insisted to his dying day that his disease was liver cancer.^[61] He died on August 2, 1986, in Bethesda, Maryland, of complications from AIDS, at the age of 59.^[7] According to Roger Stone, Cohn's "absolute goal was to die completely broke and owing millions to the IRS. He succeeded in that."^[56] He was buried in Union Field Cemetery in Queens, New York.^[8][28][62]

Media portrayals...

truscott salon an 220

...Donald Trump is who he always was: a mobbed up grifter from New York who learned from his father that you can welch on debts, pay people off and game the system, and when you get caught, walk away. If you’re outrageous enough about it, people will be so stunned they are unwilling or unable to act. Trump’s old pal Roy Cohn was a past master at this. I covered him while I was on the staff of the Village Voice. He used to travel around the country giving speeches in smaller cities to Republican gatherings that were all impressed they could get Roy Cohn to come to Sheboygan or Zanesville and speak at their fundraisers. He would meet a local banker over rubber chicken and talk him into a signature loan for 50 or 100 grand, and he’d take the money and stiff them every time. He was sued over and over again by these little local banks, and he never paid a cent.

Trump also learned from Roy Cohn that you can steal stuff in plain sight and get away with it if you just say “Fuck you” loudly and often enough. I think that’s what Trump is doing to the whole country. He’s saying, “Fuck you. I never believed in your democracy, I never believed in your capitalism, I never believed in your establishment, and look what I did! I got elected president! Fuck you! I’m going to take everything I want! I’m going to fly Air Force One anywhere I want, and I’m going to play golf more often than Arnie Palmer, and I’m going to bellow racism and lies at my rallies, and I’m going to jack up the Secret Service for rooms at my resorts, and I’m not going to pay a fucking cent and what are you going to do about it? I’m going to call Vladimir Putin on the phone and I’m going to get him to help me steal another election, and fuck you.”...

Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn exposed in new documentary that contains ominous warning about the president’s downfall

Brad Reed / Raw StorySeptember 19, 2019

A new documentary called “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” exposes the history of Trump’s hero.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/heres-why-trumps-ideal-lawyer-roy-cohn-was-such-a-vile-figure-in-u-s-politics-and-why-his-name-lives-in-infamy/

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/donald-trump-roy-cohn-relationship

no lnx pix

Vanity Fair

From the Magazine

HOW DONALD TRUMP AND ROY COHN’S RUTHLESS SYMBIOSIS CHANGED AMERICA

In 1973, a brash young would-be developer from Queens met one of New York’s premier power brokers: Roy Cohn, whose name is still synonymous with the rise of McCarthyism and its dark political arts. With the ruthless attorney as a guide, Trump propelled himself into the city’s power circles and learned many of the tactics that would inexplicably lead him to the White House years later.

BY MARIE BRENNER

AUGUST 2017

roy cohn

ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE

Lawyer Roy Cohn and Donald Trump at the opening of Manhattan’s Trump Tower, 1983.

By Sonia Moskowitz.

‘Donald calls me 15 to 20 times a day,” Roy Cohn told me on the day we met. “He is always asking, ‘What is the status of this . . . and that?’ ”

It was 1980. I had been assigned to write a story on Donald Trump, the brash young developer who was then trying to make a name for himself in New York City, and I had come to see the man who, at the time, was in many ways Trump’s alter ego: the wily, menacing lawyer who had gained national renown, and enmity, for his ravenous anti-Communist grandstanding.

Trump was 34 and using the connections of his father, Brooklyn and Queens real-estate developer Fred Trump, as he navigated the rough-and-tumble world of political bosses. He had recently opened the Grand Hyatt Hotel, bringing life back to a dreary area near Grand Central Terminal during a period when the city had yet to fully recover from near bankruptcy. His wife, Ivana, led me through the construction site in a white wool Thierry Mugler jumpsuit. “When will it be finished? When?,” she shouted at workers as she clicked through in stiletto heels.

The tabloids couldn’t get enough of the Trumps’ theatrics. And as Donald Trump’s Hyatt rose, so too did the hidden hand of his attorney Roy Cohn, always there to help with the shady tax abatements, the zoning variances, the sweetheart deals, and the threats to those who might stand in the project’s way.

Cohn was best known as a ruthless prosecutor. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, he and Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy, the fabulist and virulent nationalist crusader, had hauled dozens of alleged “Communist sympathizers” before a Senate panel. Earlier, the House Un-American Activities Committee had skewered artists and entertainers on similar charges, resulting in a trail of fear, prison sentences, and ruined careers for hundreds, many of whom had found common cause in fighting Fascism. But in the decades since, Cohn had become the premier practitioner of hardball deal-making in New York, having mastered the arcane rules of the city’s Favor Bank (the local cabal of interconnected influence peddlers) and its magical ability to provide inside fixes for its machers and rogues.

“You knew when you were in Cohn’s presence you were in the presence of pure evil,” said lawyer Victor A. Kovner, who had known him for years. Cohn’s power derived largely from his ability to scare potential adversaries with hollow threats and spurious lawsuits. And the fee he demanded for his services? Ironclad loyalty.

Trump—who would remain loyal to Cohn for many years—would be one of the last and most enduring beneficiaries of Cohn’s power. But as Trump would confide in 1980, he already seemed to be trying to distance himself from Cohn’s inevitable taint: “All I can tell you is he’s been vicious to others in his protection of me,” Trump told me, as if to wave away a stench. “He’s a genius. He’s a lousy lawyer, but he’s a genius.”

WATCH: The Long List of Lawsuits Against Donald Trump]vid

BLEAK HOUSE

On the day I arrived at Cohn’s office, in his imposing limestone town house on East 68th Street, his Rolls-Royce was parked outside. But all elegance stopped at the front door. It was a fetid place, a shambles of dusty bedrooms and office warrens where young male assistants made their way up and down the stairs. Cohn often greeted visitors in a robe. On occasion, I.R.S. agents were said to sit in the hallway and, knowing Cohn’s reputation as a deadbeat, were there to intercept any envelopes with money.

Cohn’s bedroom was crowded with a collection of stuffed frogs that sat on the floor, propped against a large TV. Everything about him suggested a curious combination of an arrested child and a sleaze. I sat on a small sofa covered with dozens of stuffed creatures that exploded with dust as I tried to move them aside. Cohn was compact, with a mirthless smile, the scars from his plastic surgeries visible around his ears. As he spoke, his tongue darted in and out; he twirled his Rolodex, as if to impress me with his network of contacts. The kind of law Cohn practiced, in fact, needed only a telephone. (The New Yorker would later report that his longtime switchboard operator taped his calls and kept notes of conversations.)

Who did not know Roy Cohn’s backstory, even in 1980? Cohn—whose great-uncle had founded Lionel, the toy-train company—grew up as an only child, doted on by an overbearing mother who followed him to summer camp and lived with him until she died. Every night he was seated at his family’s Park Avenue dinner table, which was an unofficial command post of the Favor Bank bosses who’d helped make his father, Al Cohn, aBronx county judge, and later a State Supreme Court judge. (During the Depression, Roy’s uncle Bernard Marcus had been sent to prison in a bank-fraud case, and Roy’s childhood was marked by visits to Sing Sing.) By high school, Cohn was fixing a parking ticket or two for one of his teachers.

After graduating from Columbia Law School at 20, he became an assistant U.S. attorney and an expert in “subversive activities,” allowing him to segue into his role in the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. (Cohn persuaded the star witness, Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, to change his testimony; in Cohn’s autobiography, written with Sidney Zion, Cohn claimed that he had encouraged the judge, already intent on sending Julius to the electric chair, to also order Ethel’s execution, despite the fact that she was a mother with two children.) Come 1953, this legal prodigy was named McCarthy’s boy-wonderchief counsel, and the news photos told the tale: the sharp-faced, heavy-lidded 26-year-old with cherubic cheeks, whispering intimately into the ear of the bloated McCarthy. Cohn’s special skill as the senator’s henchman was character assassination. Indeed, after testifying in front of him, an engineer with the Voice of America radio news service committed suicide. Cohn never showed a shred of remorse.

SEEING TRUMP AND COHN ENTER A ROOM TOGETHER HAD A HINT OF VAUDEVILLE. “DONALD IS MY BEST FRIEND,” COHN SAID BACK THEN.

Despite McCarthy’s very public demise when the hearings proved to be trumped-up witch hunts, Cohn would emerge largely unscathed, going on to become one of the last great power brokers of New York. His friends and clients came to include New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Cohn would become an occasional guest at the Reagan White House and a constant presence at Studio 54.

By the time I met with Cohn, he had already been indicted four times on charges ranging from extortion and blackmail to bribery, conspiracy, securities fraud, and obstruction of justice. But he had been acquitted in each instance and in the process had begun to behave as if he were somehow a super-patriot who was above the law. At a gay bar in Provincetown, as reported by Cohn biographer Nicholas von Hoffman, a friend described Cohn’s behavior at a local lounge: “Roy sang three choruses of ‘God Bless America,’ got a hard-on and went home to bed.”

Cohn, with his bravado, reckless opportunism, legal pyrotechnics, and serial fabrication, became a fitting mentor for the young real-estate scion. And as Trump’s first major project, the Grand Hyatt, was set to open, he was already involved in multiple controversies. He was warring with the city about tax abatements and other concessions. He had hoodwinked his very own partner, Hyatt chief Jay Pritzker, by changing a term in a deal when Pritzker was unreachable—on a trip to Nepal. In 1980, while erecting what would become Trump Tower, he antagonized a range of arts patrons and city officials when his team demolished the Art Deco friezes decorating the 1929 building.Vilified in the headlines—and by the Establishment—Trump offered a response that was pure Roy Cohn: “Who cares?” he said. “Let’s say that I had given that junk to the Met. They would have just put them in their basement.”

For author Sam Roberts, the essence of Cohn’s influence on Trump was the triad: “Roy was a master of situational immorality . . . . He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.” As columnist Liz Smith once observed, “Donald lost his moral compass when he made an alliance with Roy Cohn.”

donald trump parents

HAIR APPARENT

Donald’s parents, Mary and Fred Trump, at a New York City benefit, 1988.

By Marina Garnier.

WHEN DONALD MET ROY

Let’s go back further still, to 1973. Trump, 27, was living in a rent-controlled studio, wearing French cuffs, and taking his dates to the Peacock Alley, the bar in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria. At the time, the lockbox of Establishment New York was tightly closed to the Trumps of Queens, despite their mansion in Jamaica Estates.

Riding around Brooklyn in a Rolls-Royce, Trump’s mother, Mary, collected quarters from laundry rooms in various Trump buildings. Trump’s father, Fred, had already beaten back two scandals in which he was accused of overcharging and profiteering at some of his government-financed apartment complexes, and was now facing an even more explosive charge—systemic discrimination against black and other minority tenants. The Trumps, however, were connected to Favor Bank politicians in the Brooklyn Democratic machine, which, in tandem with the Mob bosses, still influenced who got many of the judgeships and patronage jobs. It was twilight in a Damon Runyon world, before the reformers moved in.

As Donald Trump would later tell the story, he ran into Cohn for the first time at Le Club, a members-only nightspot in Manhattan’s East 50s, where models and fashionistas and Eurotrash went to be seen. “The government has just filed suit against our company,” Trump explained, “saying that we discriminated against blacks . . . . What do you think I should do?”

“Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove you discriminated,” Cohn shot back. The Trumps would soon retain Cohn to represent them.

The evidence was damning. At 39 Trump-owned properties, according to the Department of Justice lawsuit, widespread practices were used to avoid renting to blacks, including implementing a secret code. When a prospective black renter would apply for an apartment, the paperwork would allegedly be marked with a C—indicating “colored” (a charge that, if true, would constitute a violation of the Fair Housing Act). Nevertheless, the Trumps countersued the government. “It just stunned me,” the lawyer and journalist Steven Brill recently recalled. “They actually got reporters to appear for a press conference where they announced that they were suing [the Justice Department] for defamation for $100 million. You couldn’t get through your second day of law school without knowing it was a totally bogus lawsuit. And, of course, it was thrown out.”

A race-discrimination case of this magnitude might have sunk many a developer, but Cohn persisted. Under his guidance, the Trumps settled by agreeing to stipulations to prevent future discrimination at their properties—but came away without admitting guilt. (With that, a Trump strategy was launched. Decades later, when questioned about the case in one of the presidential debates, Trump would declare, “It was a federal lawsuit—[we] were sued. We settled the suit . . . with no admission of guilt.”)

Cohn continued to go on the attack for the Trumps.“I was a young reporter just starting my first job, at the New York Post [in 1974],” book publisher David Rosenthal told me. “I was working on illegal campaign contributions and I started looking at the records that had come from a group of buildings in Brooklyn, which showed massive donations to [Democrat] Hugh Carey, then running for governor of New York. They had all come from buildings that I had traced to Fred Trump . . . . My story was published and my editors were thrilled.

“The next day, my phone rang and it was Roy Cohn. ‘You piece of shit! We are going to ruin you! You have a lot of fucking nerve!’ ” Shaken, Rosenthal, then 21, went to his editors. “Their jaws dropped. I thought I was finished. I was sure Cohn’s next call would be to Dolly Schiff, the owner of the paper. Of course, the call never came. The story was true. They had skirted the New York finance laws.”

For about a decade, the tax abatements and legal loopholes that Trump was able to finesse came about, in large part, because of Cohn. The time he spent on Trump matters was not reduced to “billable hours,” wrote the late investigative journalist Wayne Barrett in Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth. Instead, Cohn asked for payment only when his cash supply ran low.

Steve Brill again saw Cohn’s stamp when Trump struck back, defending the case against Trump University. It was, Brill asserted, “a scam against the very people who [eventually] voted for Trump—the middle and lower middle class . . . . The first thing Trump does is sue one of the plaintiffs. She wins and the judge awards her $800,000 in legal fees, and Trump appeals, and in that decision he’s compared to Bernie Madoff . . . . This strategy was pure Cohn: ‘Attack your accuser.’ ”

After Brill’s investigation was published, Brill said, he received a call from one of Trump’s lawyers. “I understand you may do a follow-up,” he told Brill, adding a bit of advice: “Just be careful.” “Thanks,” Brill replied. “And let me give you some advice: ‘You better get the check because this guy is never going to pay you.’ Being a deadbeat was also pure Cohn.” (A White House spokesperson says this claim is totally false.)

roy cohn

Cohn approaches his Bentley, 1977.

BOYS FROM THE BOROUGHS

How to explain the symbiosis that existed between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump? Cohn and Trump were twinned by what drove them. They were both sons of powerful fathers, young men who had started their careers clouded by family scandal. Both had been private-school students from the boroughs who’d grown up with their noses pressed against the glass of dazzling Manhattan. Both squired attractive women around town. (Cohn would describe his close friend Barbara Walters, the TV newswoman, as his fiancée. “Of course, it was absurd,” Liz Smith said, “but Barbara put up with it.”)

Sometime during the 2016 presidential campaign, Brill noticed that Donald Trump was using Cohn’s exact phrases. “I began to hear, ‘If you want to know the truth,’ and ‘that I can tell you . . .’ and ‘to be absolutely frank’—a sign that the Big Lie was coming,” Brill said.

Cohn—possessed of a keen intellect, unlike Trump—could keep a jury spellbound. When he was indicted for bribery, in 1969, his lawyer suffered a heart attack near the end of the trial. Cohn deftly stepped in and did a seven-hour closing argument—never once referring to a notepad. He was acquitted. “I don’t want to know what the law is,” he famously said, “I want to know who the judge is.”

When Cohn spoke, he would fix you with a hypnotic stare. His eyes were the palest blue, all the more startling because they appeared to protrude from the sides of his head. While Al Pacino’s version of Cohn (in Mike Nichols’s 2003 HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America) captured Cohn’s intensity, it failed to convey his child-like yearning to be liked. “He was raised as a miniature adult,” Tom Wolfe once observed.

Cohn liked to throw parties crowded with celebrities, judges, Mob bosses, and politicians—some of whom were either coming from or on their way to prison—causing Cohn’s close friend the comedian Joey Adams to remark,“If you’re indicted, you’re invited.” But it was Cohn’s circle of legal aides and after-hours pals that also held sway. “Roy loved to surround himself with attractive straight men,” said divorce attorney Robert S. Cohen, who, before taking on clients such as Michael Bloomberg—and both of Trump’s ex-wives (Ivana Trump and Marla Maples)—began his career working for Cohn. “[Roy had] a coterie. If he could have had a relationship with any of them, he would have.”

Cohn’s cousin David L. Marcus concurred. Soon after graduating from Brown in the early 80s, Marcus recalled, he sought Cohn out. While they had encountered each other over the years at family gatherings, Marcus’s parents had despised Cohn since his McCarthy days, and a chill had set in. But Cohn, intrigued by the attention of his long-lost cousin, welcomed him. Marcus, a journalist who would later share a Pulitzer Prize, recently said that he was astonished by the atmosphere of creepy intimacy that, in those days, seemed to perfume Cohn’s attitude toward his acolytes, including one in particular. “There was a party in the mid-1980s, where Mailer was, and Andy Warhol, [when] in walked Trump,” recounted Marcus. “Roy dropped everyone else and fussed over him . . . Roy had that ability to focus on you. I felt that Roy was attracted to Trump, more than in a big-brotherly way.

“Donald fit the pattern of the hangers-on and the disciples around Roy. He was tall and blond and . . . frankly, über-Gentile. Something about Roy’s self-hating-Jewish persona drew him to fair-haired boys. And at these parties there was a bevy of blond guys, almost midwestern, and Donald was paying homage to Roy . . . I wondered then if Roy was attracted to him.”

“Thwarted loves obsessed Roy Cohn’s life,” added a lawyer who first met Cohn in the 60s, characterizing some of the men, both gay and straight, in Cohn’s orbit. “He would become sexually obsessed with cock-tease guys who would sense his need and not shun him. These were unrequited relationships. The way he would expiate the sexual energy was possessive mentoring. Introducing them to everyone in town and taking them places.”

Seeing Trump and Cohn enter a room together had a hint of vaudeville. Donald, standing six feet two inches, would typically enter first, with a burlesque macho-man’s gait, walking as if he led from his toes. A few feet behind would be Cohn, skinny, eyes darting, his features slightly caved in from plastic surgery. “Donald is my best friend,” Cohn said back then, shortly after he had thrown a 37th-birthday party for Trump. And over the years, several who knew Cohn would remark on Donald Trump’s resemblance to the most infamous of Roy Cohn’s blond, rich-boy obsessions: David Schine.

Cohn at his East 68th Street town house, with a photo of himself and Trump, 1984.]

PATRIOT GAMES

Consider the episode—and the compulsion—that ended Roy Cohn’s time in the capital and Joe McCarthy’s Senate career. In the mid-50s, Cohn was in the headlines for the malicious circus of the hearings. Scores of witnesses were being bullied by Cohn or McCarthy or both. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?,” Cohn demanded in his nasal honk, a spectacle replayed in the evenings on TV and radio.

It was amid this high drama that a young man had come into Cohn’s life. The heir to a hotel-and-movie franchise, the feckless David Schinehad reportedly pulled D’s in his first year at Harvard. But in 1952, he wrote a pamphlet on the evils of Communism and was soon introduced to Cohn. It was, for Cohn, a coup de foudre, and Schine came on the McCarthy committee as an unpaid “research assistant.” Dispatched on a tour of Europe to investigate possible subversion at army bases and American Embassies—which included ridding the consular libraries of “subversive literature” (among them works byDashiell Hammett and Mark Twain)—the pair were dogged by rumors that they were lovers. (Cohn told friends that they were not.) Whispers also began to swirl about McCarthy’s sexual orientation.

In lavender Washington, Cohn was known as both a closeted homosexual and homophobic, among those leading the charge against supposedly gay witnesses who he and others believed should lose their government jobs because they were “security risks.” When Schine was drafted as a private and not a commissioned officer, Cohn threatened he would “wreck the army.” McCarthy even mentioned to Robert T. Stevens, the secretary of the army, that “Roy thinks Dave ought to be a general and operate from a penthouse in the Waldorf Astoria.” President Dwight Eisenhower, meanwhile, angered by McCarthy’s attacks and fearful that the senator’s zealotry was severely damaging the president’s agenda and the G.O.P. itself, sent word to the army counsel to write a report on Cohn’s harassment tactics. According to historian David A. Nichols, the president secretly ordered the document to be released to key legislators and the press, and the revelations were explosive, resulting in the Army-McCarthy hearings.

Over 36 days, 20 million Americans watched. It was all there: Cohn and Schine’s jaunt to Europe, Cohn’s ultimatums, McCarthy’s smears. The high point came when the army’s sly Boston lawyer, Joseph Welch, shook his head in pained disbelief at McCarthy’s attempt to slander one of Welch’s own assistants, imploring the senator, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last . . . ?” Within weeks, Cohn was banished and McCarthy was soon censured.

Cohn played it as a win. After the debacle, he returned to New York and attended a party thrown in his honor at the Hotel Astor. It would be the first example of his ability to project victory from defeat and induce moral amnesia upon a mesmerized New York—a gambit not dissimilar to those later utilized by his confrère Donald Trump.

Another of Cohn’s tactics was to befriend the town’s top gossip columnists, such as Leonard Lyons and George Sokolsky, who would bring Cohn to the Stork Club. He was irresistible to tabloid writers, always ready with scandal-tinged tales. “Roy would be hired by a divorce client in the morning and be leaking their case in the afternoon,” New Yorker writer Ken Auletta recalled. Columnist Liz Smith said she learned to distrust most items he gave her. A similar reliance on the press would also become a vital component of the young Trump’s playbook.

“[Roy] would call me up and it was always short—‘George, Roy,’ ” said former New York Post political reporter George Arzt, who was later Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary. “He would drop a dime on someone, hoping I would print it.”

WATCH: The Evolution of Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign

My initiation to the louche world of Roy Cohn came in 1980—at a lunch with Trump in the room upstairs at the ‘21’ Club, the first time I had been there. “Anybody who is anybody here sits between the columns,” Trump told me. I was expecting our meal to be one-on-one, but a guest joined us that day. “This is Stanley Friedman,” Trump said. “He is Roy Cohn’s law partner.” The lunch agenda, not surprisingly, turned into a sales pitch, with Friedman offering a monologue on what Roy Cohn had already done for Trump. (Friedman, in pure Tammany Hall style, worked for the city while assisting Cohn, and would later go to prison for taking kickbacks in a parking-ticket scandal.)

“Roy could fix anyone in the city,” Friedman told me that day. “He’s a genius . . . . It is a good thing Roy isn’t here today. He would stab all the food off your plate.” A Cohn quirk was to rarely order food and, instead, commandeer the meals of his dining partners. I wrote then about the moment when hotel titan Bob Tisch came by the table. “I beat Bob Tisch on the convention site,” Trump said loudly. “But we’re good friends now, good friends. Isn’t that right, Bob?”

Trump, at the time, was developing a sullen moxie that rivaled Cohn’s. The lawyer Tom Baer, for instance, did not know what to expect when he got a call one day to meet with Trump. Baer had been recently appointed by Mayor Kochto represent the city in all aspects of what was to become its new convention center, and Baer was trying to line up possible partnerships. “Donald said, ‘I would be willing to contribute the land,’ ” Baer would remember. “ ‘I think it is only fair that it be named Trump Center’ ”—after his father.

“I called Ed Koch, and he said, ‘Fuck him! Fuck him.’ I said, ‘I don’t talk that way.’ He said, ‘I don’t care how you talk! Fuck him!’ So, I used my best lawyer-ese, and I called him back and said, ‘The mayor is so grateful for your offer. But he is not inclined to agree.’ ” Some time later Trump went to Deputy Mayor Peter Solomon and reportedly proposed a deal entitling him to a $4.4 million commission. (He eventually got $500,000.) Recalled Baer, “He spoke to the representatives of the governor [too]. He wasn’t going to be deterred because pisher Tom Baer told him he couldn’t do it . . . . Koch [just shook his head and] thought, This guy is ridiculous.”

roy cohn

Left, Cohn with Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1954; Right, Cohn with real-estate doyenne Alice Mason and TV newswoman Barbara Walters at Le Cirque, 1983, photographed by Harry Benson.]

“YOU NEED TO SEE DONALD”

‘Come and make your pitch to me,” Roy Cohn told Roger Stone when they met at a New York dinner party in 1979. Stone, though only 27, had achieved a degree of notoriety as one of Richard Nixon’s political dirty-tricksters. At the time, he was running Ronald Reagan’s presidential-campaign organization in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and he needed office space.

Stone appeared on East 68th Street to find Cohn, just awakened, in his robe, sitting with one of his clients, Mob boss “Fat Tony” Salerno, of the Genovese crime family. “In front of [Roy] was a slab of cream cheese and three burnt slices of bacon,” Stone remembered. “He ate the cream cheese with his pointing finger. He listened to my pitch and said, ‘You need to see Donald Trump. I will get you in, but then you are on your own.’ ”

“I went to see him,” Stone told me, “and Trump said, ‘How do you getReagan to 270 electoral votes?’ He was very interested [in the mechanics]—a political junkie. Then he said, ‘O.K., we are in. Go see my father.’ ” Out Stone went to Avenue Z, in Coney Island, and met Fred Trump in his office, which was crowded with cigar-store Indians. “True to his word, I got $200,000. The checks came in $1,000 denominations, the maximum donation you could give. All of these checks were written to ‘Reagan For President.’ It was not illegal—it was bundling. Check trading.” For Reagan’s state headquarters, the Trumps found Stone and the campaign a decrepit town house next to the ‘21’ Club. Stone was now, like Donald Trump, inside the Cohn tent.

And Stone soon seized the moment to cash in. After Reagan was elected, his administration softened the strict rules for corporations seeking government largesse. Soon Stone and Paul Manafort, Trump’s future campaign manager, were lobbyists, reaping the bonanzas that could flow with Favor Bank introductions. Their first client, Stone recalled, was none other than Donald Trump,who retained him, irrespective of any role Manafort might have had in the firm, for help with federal issues such as obtaining a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to dredge the channel to the Atlantic City marina to accommodate his yacht, the Trump Princess.

“We made no bones about it,” Stone recently said. “We wanted money. And it came pouring in.” Stone and Manafort charged hefty fees to introduce blue-chip corporations—such as Ronald Perelman’s MacAndrews & Forbes andRupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—to their former campaign colleagues, some of whom were now running the Reagan White House. It was all cozy and connected—and reminiscent of Roy Cohn.

By 2000, Stone had offered his talents to a new candidate: Trump himself. That year Stone traveled the country to help Trump explore the viability of running as a Reform Party candidate. But at a stop in Florida, things halted abruptly. “I’m tired,” Stone recalled Trump telling him. “Cancel the rest of this. I am going to my room to watch TV.” In Stone’s view, “His heart was never in it.” (A White House spokesperson disputes this account.)

“You have to let Donald be Donald,” Stone explained. “We have been friends for 40 years . . . . Look what happened with the ‘birther’ push. You don’t want to hear this, but when he started that campaign 7 out of 10 Republicans at the time believed that Obama was born in Kenya. And, let’s face it, many still question it. Donald still believes it.” (In fact, candidate Trump released an official statement two months before Election Day asserting, unequivocally, that “Barack Obama was born in the United States.”)

Stone’s modus operandi, even to this day, has seemed to be vintage Cohn. Fired by Trump for what one of his spokesmen called Stone’s desire “to use the campaign for his own personal publicity,” Stone went into overdrive, fighting back and scheduling interviews in which he praised candidate Trump. (Stone denied he was fired and says he resigned.) Stone recently expressed concern that Jared Kushner’s inexperience and façade of centrist policies might very well scuttle the already beleaguered Trump presidency. And he fretted about Trump’s daughter Ivanka as well, saying that he found it “disturbing” when Saudi Arabiaand the United Arab Emirates, in May, pledged $100 million to a World Bank women’s entrepreneurial fund—a project she had promoted.

Yet Stone would not concede that his decades-long relationship with Trump had become strained, even though Stone, along with some members of the administration, are facing allegations that they’ve had questionable contacts with a variety of Russian nationals. (All have denied any wrongdoing.) “There is nothing to any of this,” Stone claimed. “Donald knows he has my loyalty and friendship. I leave a message when I want to speak with him.”

All along there had been something deeper connecting Stone and Trump and Roy Cohn: the climate of suspicion and fear that had helped bring all three to power. Although Stone, like many around Cohn in the 70s and 80s, was too young to have observed how Cohn helped poison America in the McCarthy years, Stone had learned at the feet of Richard Nixon, the ultimate American paranoid. And the politics of paranoia that Cohn and Stone had cynically mastered would eventually make them kindred spirits. Just as the two of them had come to prominence by exploiting a grave national mood (Cohn in the 50s, Stone in the 70s), it was this same sense of American angst, resurgent in 2016, that would ultimately help elect Donald Trump.

“Pro-Americanism,” Stone said, “is a common thread for McCarthy, Goldwater, Nixon, [and] Reagan. The heir to that tradition is Donald Trump. When you combine that with the bare-knuckled tactics of Roy Cohn—or a Roger Stone—that is how you win elections. So Roy has an impact on Donald’s understanding of how to deal with the media—attack, attack, attack, never defend.”

THE LONG GOOD-BYE

Roger Stone was there in 1982 when Roy Cohn was at his peak. At the time, Cohn was trying to help Trump realize his dream of opening casinos in Atlantic City. Crucial to his success would be a sympathetic New Jersey governor. And Cohn and Stone were working hard to elect their candidate: Republican Tom Kean. Stone, as it turned out, was Kean’s campaign manager, and after Kean won in a close race, Stone would remain as an unofficial adviser.

Trump began to purchase boardwalk real estate. He built one casino and bought another. His prospects looked bright. But Cohn’s downfall was imminent. Word would soon begin to circulate that Cohn was battling AIDS. He denied it. He was also battling disbarment—under a cloud of fraud and ethical-misconduct charges. (Cohn, along with other misdeeds, had stiffed a client on a loan and altered the terms of a virtually comatose client’s will—in his hospital room—making himself its co-executor.)

Cohn tried to keep up a good face. But Trump, among other clients, began to shift his business elsewhere. “Donald found out about [Cohn’s condition] and just dropped him like a hot potato,” Cohn’s personal secretary, Susan Bell, was quoted as saying. (A White House spokesperson says this claim is totally false.)

Cohn sensed his growing isolation. And for whatever reason, he decided, according to journalist Wayne Barrett, to help the efforts of Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry, who was seeking an appointment to the federal bench. “Maryanne wanted the job,” Stone would recall. “She did not want Roy and Donald to do anything. She was attempting to get it on her own.”

Stone remembered that when it appeared someone else was in line for the job Cohn approached Reagan’s attorney general, Ed Meese, for help. In the end, Barry got the plum post. “Roy can do the impossible,” Trump reportedly said when he heard the news. The next day, Barrett noted, Barry called Cohn to thank him. (According to the Times, Trump, when asked in 2015, said his sister “got the appointment totally on her own merit.” For herself, Barry admitted to Trump-family biographer Gwenda Blair, “There’s no question Donald helped me get on the bench. I was good, but not that good.”)

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Cohn at home in Greenwich, Connecticut, 1986, photographed by Mary Ellen Mark.

By 1985, Cohn was seriously ill—“I have liver cancer,” he contended—and he started calling in his last markers. He phoned New York Times columnist William Safire, whom he’d known since Safire’s days as a publicist. And, sure enough, Safire ran a piece attacking the “buzzards of the bar” who had “dredged up” fraud charges to get even with Cohn, “[the] hard-hitting anti-legal-establishment right-winger at a time when he is physically unable to defend himself.” Roger Stone would recall Trump phoning him and asking, “ ‘Have you seen Bill Safire’s column?’ He called me to point it out to me. He said, ‘This is going to be terrific for Roy.’ “

Cohn also had asked a favor of Trump: Could he give him a hotel room for his lover, who was dying of AIDS? A room was found in the Barbizon Plaza Hotel. Months passed. Then Cohn got the bill. Then another. He refused to pay. At some point, according to The New York Times’s Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, Trump would present Cohn with a thank-you gift for a decade of favors: a pair of diamond cuff links. The diamonds turned out to be fakes.

Tensions between the two became progressively strained. And the dying Cohn, as Barrett would describe him in those waning days, would say, “Donald pisses ice water.”

That said, Trump did come out to testify on Cohn’s behalf at his 1986 disbarment hearing, one of 37 character witnesses, including Barbara Walters and William Safire. But none of it mattered.Cohn, after putting up a four-year fight, was kicked out of the New York Bar for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation.” Cohn’s nefarious practices had finally caught up with him.

Trump, by then a presence in Atlantic City, was setting his sights on a third casino. Roy Cohn, in contrast, would die almost penniless, given how much he owed the I.R.S. And his funeral made it clear what Cohn and his friends and family had felt, in the end, about Trump. The real-estate developer was not one of the speakers. He was not asked to be a pallbearer. Trump, in Barrett’s account, did show up, however, and stood in the back.

Thirty years later, on the day after Donald J. Trump was elected president, Roger Stone was one of the callers who got through to his old friend at Trump Tower. “Mr. President,” said Stone. “Oh please, call me Donald,” Stone remembered Trump saying.

A few moments later, Trump sounded wistful. “Wouldn’t Roy love to see this moment? Boy, do we miss him.”

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/frank-rich-roy-cohn-the-original-donald-trump.html

The day after Donald Trump was elected, “Frontline” filmmaker Michael Kirk informed series executive producer Raney Aronson that he foresaw producing at least 12 films about this presidency before the end of Trump's term.

“Trump’s Showdown,” debuting Tuesday at 9 p.m. on PBS member stations, represents the sixth in this anthology series. Six films parsing everything from Trump’s strategy for wresting power from the Republican establishment ("Divided States of America") and muscling his way into the Oval Office (“Trump’s Takeover”), to what his surrogate represents (“Bannon’s War”) to our susceptibility to Russian influence (“Putin’s Revenge”), and more.

Remember, Trump’s administration hasn’t even hit its official two-year marker — and it’s a safe bet, given the maelstrom of uncertainty and passion surrounding Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, that Kirk already is working on the seventh.

This installment, however, may provide the clearest context of understanding the likely moves to come with this presidency, legally and behaviorally, as we draw closer to what many fear may become a Constitutional crisis.

“Trump’s Showdown,” the culmination of 60 interviews with former heads of U.S. intelligence agencies, members and former members of Trump’s inner circle, reporters, authors and lawyers — don’t forget the lawyers — is a multiple-pronged study of the president’s concerted effort to discredit national intelligence agencies and the Fourth Estate.

But in large, Kirk trains his focus on the steps Trump has taken to defenestrate a number of key officials investigating his campaign’s connections to Russia and other evidence of corruption, opening with the moment former FBI director James Comey chose to inform Trump, then the president-elect, of the now famous “dossier” alleging that Russian intelligence had compromising material on him.

According to people who worked with Comey and accounts from Trump’s inner circle, this would be the first taste Washington D.C. officials would get of Trump’s aggressive and seemingly off-the-rails behavior: His reaction is to go on the attack.

This is standard “Frontline” structure, opening with a familiar story. But Kirk’s plot arc actually takes us back many more decades, to the 1950s and the Red Scare — and more specifically, to the McCarthy Era’s key architect Roy Cohn.

Trump’s early connection with Cohn, one of modern history’s more despicable creatures, is widely-known. Trump flaunted their relationship with pride in the early 1980s as he expanded his real estate holdings in New York City, using Cohn to force his way into the local political scene.

Vanity Fair reporter Marie Brenner, who profiled Trump and wrote a lengthy story detailing the nascency of the Trump-Cohn relationship, which began in 1973, appears in “Trump’s Showdown” to list Cohn’s lengthy crimes, the building blocks of “the most sinister period in American history.”

Cohn never felt guilty about the fact that he ruined the lives of tens of people by dragging them before the House Un-American Activities Committee, even driving some to commit suicide. “It was sheer political and career expediency,” Brenner explains.

In many quarters Cohn's and Sen. Joseph McCarthy's actions were called “a witch hunt.”

In 1973, when the Justice Department sued Trump Management for refusing to rent apartments to black tenants, Cohn advised Trump and his father Fred to fight the suit. Though the Trumps were forced to settle, in the press Donald Trump and Cohn crowed that they had beaten the Feds.

This pattern of reacting with attacking metastasizes over the years and, of course, in the world of Wall Street, this disregard of reality becomes a symbol of dogged determination. Defeat in the court can be restyled as victory in a media landscape seduced by a playboy.

This was Cohn’s formula, adopted wholeheartedly by Trump. And, the film explains, through more than 4,000 lawsuits, Trump successfully employed that strategy. Always be on the offensive. Never admit defeat.

“In the old days, the sport of kings and queens was horseracing,” New York attorney Adam Leitman Bailey observes in the film. “Now, it’s litigation. And Donald Trump definitely played the sport. And he played it very well.”

“Trump’s Showdown” avoids mention of Kavanaugh; obviously there’s enough potential material on that subject to merit its own installment. But anyone desiring a deeper understanding of why a Supreme Court nominee would adopt a loud, angry, aggressive demeanorwhile defending himself against sexual assault allegations only needs to watch this study.

Kavanaugh was obviously channeling Trump when he came out the gate attacking, attacking, attacking and never giving ground. Knowing this strategy was passed down by the vile Cohn, and employed by a potential Supreme Court Justice, should scare the hell out of everyone.

...

https://www.amazon.com/House-Trump-Putin-Untold-Russian/dp/152474350X

omg Favor bank

consigl gambio and genovesse families

trump, roger stone, mafia, mccarthy, abramoff, gambling

BONNIE FAULKNER: “Your latest article is entitled ‘The Dangerous Deception Called ‘The Trump Presidency’‘. [6] Donald Trump put forth some populist ideas in his presidential campaign, such as his goal to have good relations with Russia; his criticism of the vicious ISIS jihadis; support for rebuilding domestic infrastructure; among others. What do you consider to be the dangerous deception?” (c. 2:56)

DR. F. WILLIAM ENGDAHL: “The dangerous deception is, number one, Donald Trump. Who he is, as a person, is not at all what people or the world, really, is hoping. He is a complete, uh, showman, a work of, I dunno, stagecraft. He has no qualification and no business being anywhere near the White House, and certainly not as president of the world’s largest and most powerful superpower.

“That being said, we have to look behind the people, who are elected president. Look at how it was with Obama when he came in on the banner of [hope]. And what did he do? The first thing he did was ramp up the Afghan War with a 30,000 troop surge—the Patraeus Strategy. And, ever since then, he’s been in Arab Spring, uh, wars across the Middle East: the destruction of Libya, trying to destroy Syria, uh. (c. 4:12)

“Every single financial appointment of Obama was dictated by Robert Rubin and the people at Goldman Sachs and Citi Group. So, we’ve had that experience with Obama. And, now, we have this thing called the Trump Presidency.

“Well, we, as human beings, love to hope. We love to have hopes. And I know so many, normally intelligent people , commentators, analysts, like myself, uh, who have a sense of world politics, who are just taken in by this shill called Donald Trump. The man’s—look at his background. And this I did back in March/April in a piece I wrote on my website called ‘The Mafia Don’. (c. 5:02)

“Donald Trump is a protégé of organised crime, full stop. His mentor was a mafia lawyer in New York named **Roy Cohn**. And Roy Cohn, who’s famous—infamous in the Joseph McCarthy hearings back during the ’50s and the Cold War. Roy Cohn was a lawyer for the mob. He was connected with the **Cardinal Spellman** of New York back in the ’50s and the ’60s—one of the leading architects of the Cold War.

“And Roy Cohn, as a human being, was a—if you want to use the term—a despicable specimen. And he would take Donald Trump to Studio 54. I remember when I was—in those days, back in the 1970s, working as a journalist in New York City; and Studio 54 was infamous for its cocaine parties or its, uh, glitteria, that would come there. And Donald Trump, in his autobiography, some years ago, describes going there with Roy Cohn and watching eight breathtakingly beautiful models fornicating in the middle of the floor of Studio 54. Now, what role Donald Trump did or didn’t play in that, he didn’t bother to say. (c. 6:25)

“But, okay, let’s say he underwent a remarkable transformation. Then, we have to look a little bit into: who are the people around Donald Trump? In my view, Donald Trump is pure showtime. He’s a choice of, what I call, the American patriarchs, the David Rockefellers, the George Soros, and so forth. And the idea that a maverick, a real upsetter, a man of the raw blue-collar working people, who is gonna reverse all these trade policies and do this, that, and the other thing to make America great again, even though the banks of Wall Street aren’t gonna like it and the military industrial—whatever. That the people like David Rockefeller would sit there and have their jaws open and say, my gawd, we can’t do anything to stop this Trump phenomenon! What a crock! What a nonsense! You know? Wake up. (c. 7:29)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

...

As the African American Civil Rights Movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened pre-existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South to the Republican Party that had traditionally supported the Democratic Party.^[4] It also helped push the Republican party much more right.^[4]...

Evolution (1970s and 1980s):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Lee Atwater

As civil rights grew more accepted throughout the nation, basing a general election strategy on appeals to "states' rights," which some would have believed opposed civil rights laws, would have resulted in a national backlash. The concept of "states' rights" was considered by some to be subsumed within a broader meaning than simply a reference to civil rights laws.[2]^[3] States rights became seen as encompassing a type of New Federalism that would return local control of race relations.^[53]

Republican strategist Lee Atwater discussed the Southern strategy in a 1981 interview later published in Southern Politics in the 1990s by Alexander P. Lamis.^[54][55][56]

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [Reagan] doesn't have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 . . . and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster...

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."

In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan made a much-noted appearance at the Neshoba County Fair.^[57] His speech there contained the phrase "I believe in states' rights"[note ^1]^ and was cited as evidence that the Republican Party was building upon the Southern strategy again.^[58] Reagan's campaigns used racially coded rhetoric, making attacks on the "welfare state" and leveraging resentment towards affirmative action.^[59][60] Dan Carter explains "Reagan showed that he could use coded language with the best of them, lambasting welfare queens, busing, and affirmative action as the need arose."^[61] During his 1976 and 1980 campaigns Reagan employed stereotypes of welfare recipients, often invoking the case of a "welfare queen" with a large house and a Cadillac using multiple names to collect over $150,000 in tax-free income.^[59][62] Aistrup described Reagan's campaign statements as "seemingly race neutral" but explained how whites interpret this in a racial manner, citing a DNC funded study conducted by CRG Communications.^[59]Though Reagan didn't overtly mention the race of the welfare recipient, the unstated impression in whites' minds were black people and Reagan's rhetoric resonated with Southern white perceptions of black people.^[59]

Aistrup argued one example of Reagan field-testing coded language in the South, was a reference to an unscrupulous man using food stamps as a "strapping young buck."^[59][63] Reagan, when informed of the offensive connotations of the term, defended his actions as a nonracial term that was common in his Illinois hometown. Ultimately, Reagan never used that particular phrasing again.^[64] According to Ian Haney Lopez the "young buck" term changed into "young fellow" which was less overtly racist. "'Some young fellow' was less overtly racist and so carried less risk of censure, and worked just as well to provoke a sense of white victimization."^[65]

During the 1988 U.S. presidential election, the Willie Horton attack ads run against Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis built upon the Southern strategy in a campaign that reinforced the notion that Republicans best represent conservative whites with traditional values.^[66] Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes worked on the campaign as George H. W. Bush's political strategists,^[67]and upon seeing a favorable New Jersey focus group response to the Horton strategy, Atwater recognized that an implicit racial appeal could work outside of the Southern states.^[68] The subsequent ads featured Horton's mugshot and played on fears of black criminals. Atwater said of the strategy, "By the time we're finished, they're going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis' running mate."^[69] Al Gore was the first to use the Willie Horton prison furlough against Dukakis and, like the Bush campaign, would not mention race. The Bush campaign claimed they were initially made aware of the Horton issue via the Gore campaign's use of the subject. Bush initially hesitated to use the Horton campaign strategy, but the campaign saw it as a wedge issue to harm Dukakis who was struggling against Democratic rival Jesse Jackson.^[70]

In addition to presidential campaigns, subsequent Republican campaigns for the House of Representatives and Senate in the South employed the Southern strategy. During his 1990 re-election campaign, Jesse Helms attacked his opponent's alleged support of "racial quotas," most notably through an ad in which a white person's hands are seen crumpling a letter indicating that he was denied a job because of the color of his skin.^[71][72]

New York Times opinion columnist Bob Herbert wrote in 2005 that "The truth is that there was very little that was subconscious about the G.O.P.'s relentless appeal to racist whites. Tired of losing elections, it saw an opportunity to renew itself by opening its arms wide to white voters who could never forgive the Democratic Party for its support of civil rights and voting rights for blacks."^[73] Aistrup described the transition of the Southern strategy saying that it has "evolved from a states’ rights, racially conservative message to one promoting in the Nixon years, vis-à-vis the courts, a racially conservative interpretation of civil rights laws—including opposition to busing. With the ascendancy of Reagan, the Southern Strategy became a national strategy that melded race, taxes, anticommunism, and religion."^[74]

Some analysts viewed the 1990s as the apogee of Southernization or the Southern strategy, given that the Democratic president Bill Clinton and vice-president Al Gore were from the South, as were Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle.^[75] During the end of Nixon's presidency, the Senators representing the former Confederate states in the 93rd Congress were primarily Democrats. During the beginning of Bill Clinton's, 20 years later in the 103rd Congress, this was still the case.^[76]

Shifts in strategy (1990s and 2000s)

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910

***

After graduating in 1968 from the University of Pennsylvania, a rich young man from the outer boroughs of New York City sought his fortune on the island of Manhattan. Within a few years Donald J. Trump had made friends with the city’s most notorious fixer, lawyer Roy Cohn, who had become famous as lead counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Among other things Cohn was now a mob consigliere, with clients including “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, the most powerful Mafia group in New York, and Paul Castellano, head of what was said to be the second largest family, the Gambinos.

This business connection proved useful when Trump began work on what would become Trump Tower, the 58-story high-rise where he still lives when he’s not at his Florida estate.

There was something a little peculiar about the construction of Trump Tower, and subsequent Trump projects in New York. Most skyscrapers are steel girder construction, and that was especially true in the 1980s, says John Cross of the American Iron & Steel Institute. Some use pre-cast concrete. Trump chose a costlier and in many ways riskier method: ready-mix concrete. Ready-mix has some advantages: it can speed up construction, and doesn’t require costly fireproofing. But it must be poured quickly or it will harden in the delivery truck drums, ruining them as well as creating costly problems with the building itself.That leaves developers vulnerable to the unions: the worksite gate is union controlled, so even a brief labor slowdown can turn into an expensive disaster.

Salerno, Castellano and other organized crime figures controlled the ready-mix business in New York, and everyone in construction at the time knew it. So did government investigators trying to break up the mob, urged on by major developers such as the LeFrak and Resnick families. Trump ended up not only using ready-mix concrete, but also paying what a federal indictment of Salerno later concluded were inflated prices for it – repeatedly – to S & A Concrete, a firm Salerno and Castellano owned through fronts, and possibly to other mob-controlled firms. As Barrett noted, by choosing to build with ready-mix concrete rather than other materials, Trump put himself “at the mercy of a legion of concrete racketeers.”

Salerno and Castellano and other mob families controlled both the concrete business and the unions involved in delivering and pouring it. The risks this created became clear from testimony later by Irving Fischer, the general contractor who built Trump Tower. Fischer said concrete union “goons” once stormed his offices, holding a knife to throat of his switchboard operator to drive home the seriousness of their demands, which included no-show jobs during construction of Trump Tower.

But with Cohn as his lawyer, Trump apparently had no reason to personally fear Salerno or Castellano—at least, not once he agreed to pay inflated concrete prices. What Trump appeared to receive in return was union peace. That meant the project would never face costly construction or delivery delays.

The indictment on which Salerno was convicted in 1988 and sent to prison, where he died, listed the nearly $8 million contract for concrete at Trump Plaza, an East Side high-rise apartment building, as one of the acts establishing that S &A was part of a racketeering enterprise. (While the concrete business was central to the case, the trial also proved extortion, narcotics, rigged union elections and murders by the Genovese and Gambino crime families in what Michael Chertoff, the chief prosecutor, called “the largest and most vicious criminal business in the history of the United States.'')

FBI agents subpoenaed Trump in 1980 to ask about his dealing with John Cody, a Teamsters official described by law enforcement as a very close associate of the Gambino crime family. The FBI believed that Cody previously had obtained free apartments from other developers. FBI agents suspected that Cody, who controlled the flow of concrete trucks, might get a free Trump Tower apartment. Trump denied it. But a female friend of Cody’s, a woman with no job who attributed her lavish lifestyle to the kindness of friends, bought three Trump Tower apartments right beneath the triplex where Donald lived with his wife Ivana. Cody stayed there on occasion and invested $500,000 in the units. Trump, Barrett reported, helped the woman get a $3 million mortgage without filling out a loan application or showing financials.

https://antifascistnews.net/tag/fred-trump/

DONALD TRUMP’S KKK CONNECTION RUNS DEEPER THAN YOU THINK ... As the media pundits expect Donald Trump to clean up on tonight’s Super Tuesday run, Trump’s recent response to the endorsement of David Duke is getting more headlines than his usual racist antics. Duke recently put forward a formal announcement, stating that if you care about your “race” then you are “required” to vote for Trump. Duke is one of the best known white nationalists in the world, formerly becoming state representative in Louisiana before running for Governor, and almost winning with 55% of the state’s white vote. Duke is one of the few open racists to see any electoral success into the 1990s, where he continued to support his past KKK and neo-Nazi affiliations, deny the Holocaust, argue for racial differences in intelligence, and run his organization, the National Association for the Advancement of White People.

Duke is only one on the long list of white nationalist endorsements. Recent, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance voiced a robocall in support of Trump in Iowa, which was funded by the nationalist American Freedom Party. The Radix Journal, The Right Stuff,Counter-Currents Publishing, Occidental Dissent, The Daily Stormer, and many more have jumped behind Trump, using his open nativist rhetoric as the mainstreaming of their own racism. Every one of these organizations have shared membership with various incarnations of the KKK, drawing them straight to Trump, yet Donald’s KKK connections move even beyond that.

After Duke’s endorsement, Trump was cornered on CNN and asked to denounce Duke and the Ku Klux Klan.

I don’t know anything about David Duke. I don’t know what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacist. I don’t know. I don’t know, did he endorse me, or what’s going on?

Trump later said that he had a “bad earpiece,” but in reality he was refusing to denounce a base that has thrown more resources than expected at him. While he may play ignorance, he actually knows exactly who David Duke is and where his politics come from.

In a 2000 report by ABC News, Donald Trump was interviewed about the Reform Party and its connections to the paleoconservative and racist right-wing.

As you know, the Reform Party has got some pretty big problems. Not the least of which is Pat Buchanan, David Duke, Fulani, and it’s a problem.

He then went on to bring up the same reference with the New York Times discussing the relationship between the Reform Party and the New York Independence Party.

Although I am totally comfortable with the people in the New York Independence Party, I leave the Reform Party to David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and Lenora Fulani. That is not company I wish to keep.

It is difficult for Donald to now claim that he knows nothing about David Duke, and therefore will not condemn him as the Anti-Defamation League has requested. He was endorsed by Duke quite a while ago actually, and when he originally found out he smiled and joked “I even got endorsed by that KKK guy.”

Trump’s connections to the KKK actually go much deeper into his family tree, which is a politic that we have seen played out in his new public persona. Fred Trump, Donald’s millionaire father, has been well known for his work with the New York KKK. He was arrested after a Klan riot in Queens in 1927. The arrest was a part of a 1,000-person racial brawl that came after a rally intended to restore the “Native-born Protestant Americans” to New York City. This was in line with the deep anti-Catholic views of the New York KKK of the period, which also said the police were mainly made up of Roman Catholics. The flier that they were handing out for the event read:

Liberty and Democracy have been trampled upon,” the flier stated, “when native-born Protestant Americans dare to organize to protect one flag, the American flag; one school, the public school; and one language, the English language.

The language of this flier seems awfully familiar given Trump’s recent rhetoric about Latino/a and Muslim Immigrants.

Fred Trump went on to “jumpstart” the campaign of arch-racist Barry Goldwater, where they also got backing from the John Birch Society. With influence from Roy Cohn, Goldwater went on to develop what was later called the “Southern Strategy,” which plays on Southern racism using “dog whistle” terms to signal to the base. Cohn went on to become Trump’s “mentor,”and helped him to countersue a group that was suing him for discrimination against African Americans in his business. Cohn eventually introduced him to Roger Stone, a man who has walked the line between the right-wing of the GOP and Libertarian Party and openly racialist, nativist, and white nationalist movements.

Since Donald’s recent misstep on CNN, he has been roundly denounced, even by the GOP establishment. Joe Scarborough has dropped him entirely with disgust, and Paul Ryan decided to speak up publicly in a press statement.

There has been a lot of talk in the last 24 hours about one of our presidential candidates and his seeming ambivalence about David Duke and the KKK, so let me make it perfectly clear. That is not the view of Republicans who have been elected to the United States Senate, and I condemn his views in the most forceful way….If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices. We appeal to their highest ideals. This is the party of Lincoln…his is fundamental. And if someone wants to be our nominee, they must understand this. I hope this is the last time I need to speak out on this race.

Neither of these men are the bastion of progressive values, so their disgust is a good sign of how far outside of any conventional discourse Donald Trump has become. With the recent violent stabbing of anti-fascist protesters in Anaheim by California by KKK members, few are willing to accept this tacit support for the KKK that Trump has given.

David Duke has gone to Twitter to continue to support Trump openly, decrying the “corporate media” for distorting his views and libeling Trump. Donald himself has recently given a speech that his presidency would further criminalize libel, a journalistic dishonesty that is already illegal. He may have trouble understanding that the reporting on him has actually been straight forward, yet he will not accept that he simply does not look good after ranting and raving on stage.

As votes are being cast today, we are about to learn a lot about what American whites are willing to accept to protect their last vestiges of privilege. Anti-racist author Tim Wise started his career with an organization fighting David Duke’s two political runs in Louisiana. After Duke got more than half of the white vote even though the media coverage clearly revealed his open racial politics, Wise said that he had to reckon with what was happening to whites. He labeled this turn “Dukism,” the ability for these whites to overlook his Nazism. Anti-fascist writer Alexander Reid Ross has given the current period Trumpism, and has a similar pattern to both David Duke and Pat Buchanan, two people that Trump had previously condemned. In periods of crisis and strife, working class whites are presented with a choice on how they will deal with the country’s future.

Hopefully, this is not the choice they will make.

DAVID DUKE DONALD TRUMP FRED TRUMP KKK PAUL RYAN ROY COHN

https://itsgoingdown.org/trumpism-pt-2-american-fascist/

On a fast-pace, FOX News talk show discussing the recent beating of a Black Lives Matter protestor at a Trump rally, the presidential hopeful phoned in with an ambivalent tone. First contemplating the host’s term “roughed up,” the Don returned to the notion with more effrontery: “maybe he should’a been roughed up.”

Activists around the world signaled despair at the thought that the local violence against a Black Lives Matter protestor would translate to open season against protestors across the US. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it did, in Minneapolis, where white supremacists fired on a peaceful gathering of Black Lives Matter demonstrators, sending five to the hospital. According to reports, before they fired the shots, the culprits yelled, “Race war and Trump 2016!” Trump’s parallel non-response came in the form of a tweet—a meme with false information about “black-on-white crime” traceable to a neo-Nazi handle.

Despite the fact that even mainstream media sites and even conservative commentators have begun to note the proximities between Trump’s ideology and fascism, some more academic commentators still seem to be on the fence. One article states that describing Trump as a fascist “obscures the fact that Trump’s demagogic hate-mongering is deeply rooted in mainstream U.S. politics.” Some have even gone as far back as the 19:{:{:{:{th:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;height:0px;position:relative;bottom:1ex"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:Century “Know Nothings” to identify Trump’s style.

We have seen Trump’s recent statements to the effect of issuing special IDs (perhaps badges?) to Muslims in the US and shutting down “certain” Mosques reflected in the opportunism of Republicans refusing Syrian refugees. Both seemed to land symbolically too close to the anniversary of the US’s rejection of the St. Louis carrying Jews fleeing from Nazi Germany, with the US Holocaust Museum pointedly condemning the treatment of Syrian refugees. We could further note that, according to his ex-wife, Trump used to read from a book of Hitler’s speeches,*:{:{:{My New Order:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:*, kept in a cabinet near his bedside. There are also reports that when he visits, Trump’s cousin “clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler.”

While it is very useful to observe racist tendencies in the US and Europe before fascism (and even alongside it), I would argue for an alternative viewpoint. Returning to the 19th Century is provocative, but we would do well to identify the important influence fascism has had on the US (and vice-versa) not just as a detail, but as a significant milestone. Trump’s chatter belongs just as much in the fictional Hotel Wessex at the opening of of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 warning of American fascism, It Can’t Happen Here, as it does in his own mega-hotels.

All in the Family

As is well-known, the Don’s father, Fred Trump,likely took part in the Klan’s militant street activity during the 1920s, which many would suggest represents a simple, US-American phenomenon.In fact, the Klan had heavy cross over with the American Legion, the leader of which announced in 1923, “Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States” (don’t worry, we won’t). Just over a decade later, the Klan would join a united paramilitary organization called the Storm Troops with the corporate-funded Silver Shirts, the German American Bund (the Nazi Party in the US at the time), the Black Legion, and other racist neo-fascist groups. While the Klan is distinctly US-originated, by the end of the 1930s, they were intertwined with the US’s homegrown Nazis, and by the 1970s were inextricably united with David Duke’s brand of neo-fascism.

It wasn’t just the Klan, though. In 1976, correspondence between J Edgar Hoover and his “:{:{:{pen-pal:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:” Nazis running Interpol during the late-1930s emerged, showing that Hoover’s autographed picture hung on the wall of Interpol’s offices in Nazi Berlin, and he remained on good terms with Nazi high officials until three days before Pearl Harbor. He became Interpol vice president in 1946, and refused to use his power to incarcerate Nazis war criminals on the run. Instead, through the State Department, the OSS, and FBI, the US brought Nazi scientists to the US, and helped coordinate the escape of numerous high ranking Nazis. To view neo-fascism as foreign to US groups like the Klan and neo-Confederate organizations is to ignore how it was absorbed in this country and to what utility.

The Klan has never been the sole or even principle point of intersection for US fascism; formal, official Americanism has always been the lynchpin. During the 1920s, the US’s great industrial and finance moguls, from Hearst, Ford, Du Pont, and GM to the house of JP Morgan, Jr., went fascist, and big business groups like the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a leading purveyor of Americanist propaganda, joined them. In 1923, after Mussolini’s March on Rome, the counsel of NAM delivered a speech to their convention called il Duce an “extreme leader, not only converted by the lightning stroke of intelligence and falling from his error like Saul of Tarsus from his horse, but leading through the streets of a reunited country a great body of citizens,” liberating Italy from “the blighting hand of radical socialism.”

Fascism and the Red Scare

Along with the NAM, the America First Committee, founded by publishing magnate Henry Regnery, warned that intervention in WWII would be traumatic to the US’s small and medium-sized manufacturers, insisting that the US maintain neutrality. One of NAM’s most well-regarded propagandists was a columnist named George Sokolsky, who famous anti-fascist journalist George Seldes aptly called an “[agent [of] fascist [interests]](https://books.google.com/books?id=N_LbUSH0N1sC&pg=PA182&lpg=PA182&dq=seldes+%E2%80%9Cagent+%5Bof%5D+fascist+%5Binterests%5D.%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=L110zfrL_N&sig=G34HIPefm51e93deKriM7QKSeao&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwibheSJ2q_JAhVH4WMKHcfDCo8Q6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=seldes%20“agent%20%5Bof%5D%20fascist%20%5Binterests%5D.”&f=false).” By the time the US entered the War, the NAM had abandoned its pro-fascist position, but it maintained the same spirit and ideology, shifting the focus to anti-communism.

While the American Legion’s Americanist Committee spurred the anti-communist movement toward McCarthy’s show trials, Sokolsky played the part of “clearance man” for an “American Fascisti” that now enforced the Black List in Hollywood. Senator McCarthy attempted to stay clear of associations with fascism. However, by 1948, McCarthy’s awkward enthusiasm for the liberation of German POWs had become impossible to hide, as he dove into the Malmedy war crimes case along with Regnery and Rudolf Aschenauer, a high ranking official of the Socialist Reich’s Party (the heir of the Nazi Party), which helped to derail denazification in Europe.

McCarthy also developed a relationship with the well-known fascist agent Francis Parker Yockey on his trips to Germany, according to the latter’s friend John Anthony Gannon, and a letter obtained by the FBI, penned in 1952, reveals that McCarthy went so far as to ask Yockey to ghost write a speech for him. The manuscript, “America’s Two Ways of Waging War,” also intercepted by the FBI, concludes in the following fashion: “We shall liberate our land from the domination of traitors and then, by the help of the Almighty God, we shall restore the word America to its old meaning in the world before all nations. By the deluge of our votes, by the irresistible storm of our organized protest, we shall sweep America clear of its inner enemies and onward to its God-given Destiny.”

Yockey’s tailor-made mission to make America great again was likely going to be unfurled at a rally planned later that year for which McCarthy was a keynote, hosted by the fascist successor to the German American Bund and “floor managed” by infamous Nazi H. Keith Thompson. After negative press in The Daily Compass and The New York Post, McCarthy pulled out.

Americanism Comes to the Don

Perhaps partly as a form of PR, McCarthey enlisted a hot, young, Jewish columnist and lawyer named Roy Cohnas his chief prosecutor for the Red Scare. After illegally convincing judge Irving Kaufman to hand down sentences of execution to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg while acting as a prosecutor in the notorious anti-communist espionage case, Cohn found his way to McCarthy through Sokolsky, who he considered his father figure. One of the more well-funded circles that Cohn gained credibility by :{:{:{helping to establish:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: was the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), an anti-communist youth group notorious for singing :{:{:{fascist hymns:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:.

The master of national sleaze, Cohn’s rancor was particularly vitriolic toward Jews. According to Robert Sherrill writing in The Nation, “[Cohn] spent a great deal of his life tormenting Jews to show that, down deep, he could be just as anti-Semitic as the most bigoted WASP.” After Cohen went on what one historian calls a “book-burning” romp through Europe with his semi-secret boyfriend, McCarthy started to feel the heat. When Cohn’s boyfriend was drafted into the army, his tactics of pulling strings, bribing, and blackmailing backfired, and McCarthy found himself in a full-scale war with the Army, leading to the collapse of McCarthyism.

In the aftermath, McCarthy would drink himself into a death spiral, and some of the leadership of the NAM, including leader James O Welch, moved on to spearhead the John Birch Society, which amassed a sizable constituency of fascists, masking their anti-Semitism in cryptic anti-communist conspiracy theories. In the words of Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons’s impeccable book, :{:{:{Right Wing Populism in America:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-color:#ffff66;"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:, “it was at the NAM, during the height of the Red Menace hysteria, that Welch honed his Americanist philosophy.” In 1964, the Birchers threw most of their influence behind Barry Goldwater, whose campaign was:{:{:{jumpstarted:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: by a German émigré turned New York real estate entrepreneur named Fred Trump.

Although even Richard Nixon and Pat Buchanan felt that Goldwater went too far at times, his campaign established “the Southern strategy.” Like Cohn and Sokolsky, the Birchers and Goldwater shared what Cohn’s biographer von Hoffman calls, somewhat tepidly, an “apparent willingness to accommodate himself to European fascism.” As time went on, Cohn would sink into a role as one of the Birchers’ leading intelligence men along with members of La Rouche’s network in what would later become known as the Council for Inter-American Security (CIS), infamous for snooping on the Committee in Solidarity for the People of El Salvador (CISPES). By the onset of the 1970s, Cohn’s public life involved representation of mobsters,Studio 51, and a certain élite. In these circles, at a place forManhattan high rollers called Le Club, Cohn met Fred Trump’s son, Donald.

With Roy Cohn, Down and Dirty

The two must have gotten along swimmingly, because Cohn became Trump’s mentor, guiding him through lawsuits and counter-lawsuits as his business grew. It was Cohn who told the young Don to countersueafter being charged with discriminating against black people in 1973—a policy perhaps incurred from his father’s era. Although he lost the countersuit, Trump would revolutionize his dad’s old business into a lavish, luxurious, and extremely modern enterprise. The posterboy of the highflying modernism of the 1980s, Trump outfitted his hotels and casinos with sumptuous furnishings and the latest in technology. He became a Bloom County cartoon character for some, a symbol of the “new man” of the 1980s for others. Either way, he represented a morally bankrupt class that never stepped foot on a tightrope that didn’t have a golden safety net beneath it.

During his relationship with the ne plus ultra of yuppie playboys, Cohn also insisted on a reputably conservative public profile. By the early 80s, he even claimed to reject the John Birch Society, even as he joined the advisory board of the Western Goals Foundation, a private intelligence group organized by leading Birchers that openly worked with Nazis like Hitler’s unreconstructed spy chief, Reinhard Gehlen, who had been rescued from war crimes trials by the CIA’s first chief, Allen Dulles, in order to help coordinate clandestine anti-communist resistance. By the mid-1980s, Western Goals had become embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal due to the workings of the CIS, among others, which Cohn had been a part of since the 1950s. (As reported by :{:{:{Antifa:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: in 1996, the CIS’s hierarchy included Klan and Aryan Nations collaboratorLarry Pratt, who went on to co-chair Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run, as well as Buchanan, himself, who we’ll come to later in this article.)

A UK copy-cat organization called Western Goals Institute formed in the late-1980s, throwing its support behind Le Pen, who historian Martin A. Lee calls the “neofascist führer” of the French radical-right party, Front National. One of the top funders for Western Goals Foundation was the Bircher son-of-an-oil-magnate Nelson Bunker Hunt, who also helped bankroll the Council for National Policy, tied to the leadership of US Nazi Willis Carto’s old Nazi comrade, Roger Pearson (a former member of the editorial board for the Heritage Foundation, which politely allowed Trump to pull out of his September, since his birther ideas are beyond the pale).

While up to his eyeballs in fascism, Cohn attempted to keep his conservative slate clean byfighting legal rights to gay people, although he was gay, himself, and later died of AIDS. Underneath the alleged mob links, drugs, and corruption there remained strong bonds between Trump’s mentor to the fascist-fused Americanism of the War years, brought through McCarthyism by the leadership of NAM into the John Birch Society, and further into the Western Goals Foundation.

Meet Roger Stone

This year, Trump enlisted as his campaign manager another of Cohn’s protégés, Roger Stone, who :{:{:{Mark Ames:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: profiles on Before It’s News: “Roger Stone is a Libertarian prankster fighting the two-party stranglehold; and Donald Trump is a right-wing populist shaking up the system because by gum, he just doesn’t care and he doesn’t need to care,” Ames writes. “That’s one, very dumb, very gullible way of putting it.” Another way of describing Roger Stone, according to Ames, is “Dick Nixon dirty trickster, fascist fan of Roy Cohn, lobbyist for some of the worst dictators in the world.”

Stone met Trump through Cohn in NYC around the 1979 Reagan campaign, but was brought into the world of politics in the early 1970s, at the age of 19, by Donald Segretti, who initiated the teenage Stone into the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Notably using American Nazi Party members to shift voters from the American Independent Party to the Democratic Party, among other dirty tricks, CREEP’s fellow members included Pat Buchanan, who once described recollections of Holocaust survivors’ as “group fantasies of martyrdom,” and G. Gordon Liddy, a bizarre man obsessed with pain tolerance and willpower who grew up with an avowed admiration for Hitler and later became ghostwriter for J. Edgar Hoover. Liddy would remark, “at assemblies where the national anthem is played, I must suppress the urge to snap out my right arm.”

After Watergate, Stone linked up with notorious lobbyists Charlie Black and Terry Dolan—another publicly anti-gay but closeted gay man who died of AIDS—to found the National ConservativePolitical Action Committee (NCPAC) as a revision of the old Barry Goldwater campaign. Both Black and Dolan were former YAFers of the :{:{:{fascist songbook:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: era.

Other than helping Ron “Stormfront” Paul to his first election victory in Texas, theNCPAC formed Conservatives Against Liberal Legislation (CALL, later renamed Conservatives Alliance), connected to Carto’s neo-Nazi outfit Liberty Lobby. In turn, CALL created the National Coalition for America’s Survival, which included the reincarnation of the grandaddy of them all, the America First Committee, headed up by :{:{:{Art Jones, an infamous neo-Nazi:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:.

Stone also formed a heavyweight power-broker consulting firm with Black, Paul Manafort, and Lee Atwater (later BMSK), which started out on the Reagan campaign and Donald Trump’s casino business, and later became notorious for representing the apartheid-supported army of witch-burning opportunist Jonas Savimbiin Angola.

However, Stone came into his own by fixing votes. His methods were honed in New Jersey during the 1980s, where he employed a “National Ballot Security Task Force” to patrol majority-black and latino precincts while wearing what the local NAACP president described as “:{:{:{Gestapo armbands:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:.”

Holocaust Denial and Nativism

Throughout the 1990s, Trump was Stone’s most well-known client, and his casino industry hijinks, including manipulation and sabotage of Native tribes, are infamous. In 2000, Stone :{:{:{pitted the Don against Pat Buchanan:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: for the Reform Party ticket, but the Trumpster backed out after having pointed out, ironically, that fascists were supporting Buchanan’s campaign. Later that year, Stone would become infamous for orchestrating the “Brooks Brothers Riot,” which shut down the presidential election recount in Miami-Dade, prompting New York Rep Jerald Nadler to call out “a whiff of fascism in the air.”

After riding high with Bush, Stone’s went in for a change, and he turned to the libertarians, eventually :{:{:{sparking a relationship with libertarian candidate Gary Johnson:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: that would involve Roy Cohn, the mafia, and the white nationalist Tanton network. Continuing forward, Stone went on a neo-fascist media hub called Red Ice Radio hosted by Hitler fan, Henrik Palmgren, to chat about Cohn and the “legitimate threat of domestic communism” during the McCarthy era. Stone’s visit came at the tale end of an intense season ofguests such as “white man march” activist Kyle Hunt, Norse reconstructionist Stephen McNallen, and Holocaust denier Dennis Wise.

Some of Stone’s libertarian intrigues surrounded :{:{:{Scott Israel’s campaign:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: for the Sheriff’s office of Broward County. Last year, the Sheriff’s office told the South Florida Gay News it would cost nearly $400,000 to release the office’s internal homophobic emails. This year, the department faced a major scandal when four Ft. Lauderdale cops were caught regularly sending racist texts including sexualized murder fantasies and creating a promotional Klan video.

Since leaving the Trump campaign, Stone has pitched a possible run for Senator under his home ticket, the Libertarian Party of Florida. The only other party candidate is a surreal character who calls himself Augustus Sol Invictus—a goat sacrificing, eugenics spewing, fascist-symbol-using Thelemite.

Due to his connections to the extensive “immigration reform” network of John Tanton, there is speculation that, before leaving, Stone left the Don with the numbers of 11 million “illegals” to deport before departing. As the :{:{:{Southern Poverty Law Center:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: (SPLC) explains, Trump’s immigrant policy is “almost indistinguishable from the policy proposals made by John Tanton, a white nationalist who founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform and essentially created the modern nativist movement.” This is the same platform admired by the neo-fascist National Policy Institute’s Richard Bertrand Spencer, Tanton’s close friend, who sees it as a major step toward “:{:{:{peaceful ethnic cleansing:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}:.”

Whiff of Fascism?

Or perhaps one could detect a whiff when Trump suppressed journalists like :{:{:{Jose Diaz-Balart:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: in Texas and :{:{:{Jorge Ramos:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:0px;border:0px;font-weight:inherit;margin:0px;padding:0px;vertical-align:baseline"):}: in Iowa, telling the former, “You’re finished” and the latter to “go back to Univision.” When the brutal beating of a Black Lives Matter protestor at a Trump event was met with the statement, “maybe he deserved it,” it seemed as though Trump’s campaign had more clearly presented itself in relation to fascism, defined by journalist Arun Gupta as “a cross-class project of national renewal based on psycho-sexual appeals of racial purity and militarism, aimed against sections of the working class and bourgeoisie alike.”

There are more substantial underpinnings, however, which require a more thorough investigation of the content of fascism, itself, as well as Trump’s own flare for revolutionary rhetoric and violence. That much will be forthcoming in the next column.

===

That lack of trust extended to finances. Memos from the period revealed Abramoff's intense focus on fund-raising and his readiness to use the connections of his Beverly Hills based-father, a Diners Club executive with connections to Reagan's kitchen cabinet.

''Alfred Bloomingdale, a close personal friend of my family, told me to contact you immediately," Abramoff wrote to Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy's one-time counsel, on July 8, 1981. ''Although we are an arm of the RNC, we must become financially self-sufficient."

Abramoff added that ''because of his close association with the President, Mr. Bloomingdale was able to free up the RNC contributor list for our use. Within the next couple of weeks, we must raise $50,000 in order to mail and phone bank these lists. I have no doubt that we will pyramid that $50,000, to over $1 million within the first year."

Bond, now a former RNC official, characterized Abramoff's assertion that he had gained access to the RNC contributor list as ''outside the realm of reality. That list is like the Holy Grail . . . You can see his early prevarication."

Bloomingdale died in 1982.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn

Counterespionage

As Saypol's assistant at the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan, Cohn helped to secure convictions in a number of well-publicized trials of accused Soviet operatives. One of the first involved the prosecution of William Remington, a former Commerce Department employee who had been accused of espionage by KGB defector Elizabeth Bentley. Although an indictment for espionage could not be secured, Remington had denied his longtime membership in the Communist Party USA on two separate occasions and was convicted of perjury in two separate trials. Cohn also prosecuted 11 members of the American Communist Party Politburo for preaching the violent overthrow of the United States Government (see Smith Act). In addition, he was deeply involved in the Alger Hiss case.[citation ^needed]

[edit] The Rosenberg trial

Cohn played a prominent role in the 1951 espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn's direct examination of Ethel's brother, David Greenglass, produced testimony that was central to the Rosenbergs' conviction and subsequent execution. Greenglass testified that he had given the Rosenbergs classified documents from the Manhattan Project which had been stolen by Klaus Fuchs. Greenglass would later admit that he intentionally lied at the trial in order "to protect himself and his wife, Ruth, and that he was encouraged by the prosecution to do so."^{[^^7]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#cite_note-6) However, Morton Sobell, who was also convicted in the trial but maintained his innocence for decades, admitted in 2008 that he and Julius were both Soviet agents. Cohn always took great pride in the Rosenberg verdict, and claimed to have played an even greater part than his public role: he said in his autobiography that his own influence had led to both Saypol and Judge Irving Kaufman being appointed to the case. He further alleged that Judge Kaufman imposed the death penalty based on his personal recommendation.

The Rosenberg trial brought the 24-year-old Cohn to the attention of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover, who recommended him to McCarthy. McCarthy hired Cohn as his chief counsel, choosing him over Robert Kennedy, reportedly in part to avoid accusations of an anti-Semitic motivation for the investigations. Cohn assisted McCarthy's work for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, becoming known for his aggressive questioning of suspected Communists. Cohn tended to be disinclined to hold the hearings in open forums. This mixed well with McCarthy's preference for holding "executive sessions" and "off-the-record" sessions away from the Capitol in order to minimize public scrutiny and to question witnesses with relative impunity. Cohn was given free rein in pursuit of many investigations, with McCarthy joining in only for the more publicized sessions.

Senator McCarthy (left) chats with Cohn at the Army-McCarthy Hearings

Cohn invited his friend G. David Schine, an anti-communist propagandist, to join McCarthy's staff as a consultant. When Schine was drafted into the army in 1953, Cohn made repeated and extensive efforts to procure special treatment for Schine. He contacted military officials from the Secretary of the Army down to Schine's company commander, and demanded that Schine be given light duties, extra leave and not be assigned overseas. At one point, Cohn is reported to have threatened to "wreck the Army" if his demands were not met.^{[8]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#cite_note-obitlat-7)^{[^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#cite_note-8)^{9]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#cite_note-8) This conflict, along with McCarthy's accusations of Communists in the defense department, led to the Army-McCarthy Hearings of 1954, in which among other developments the Army charged Cohn and McCarthy with using improper pressure on Schine's behalf, while McCarthy and Cohn counter-charged that the Army was holding Schine "hostage" in an attempt to squelch McCarthy's investigations into Communists in the Army. During the hearings, a photograph of Schine was introduced, and Joseph N. Welch accused Cohn of doctoring the image to show Schine alone with Army Secretary Robert Stevens.^{[8]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#cite_note-obitlat-7) Although the findings of the hearings blamed Cohn rather than McCarthy, they are widely considered an important element of McCarthy's disgrace. After the Army-McCarthy Hearings, Cohn resigned from McCarthy's staff and went into private practice.

After leaving McCarthy, Cohn had a 30-year career as an attorney in New York City. His clients included Donald Trump, Mafia figuresTony Salerno, Carmine Galante and John Gotti, Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, and the New York Yankees baseball club. He was known for his active social life, charitable giving, and combative personality. In the early 1960s he became a member of the John Birch Society and a principal figure in the Western Goals Foundation. He maintained close ties in conservative political circles, serving as an informal advisor to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.^{[1]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Cohn#cite_note-NYTObit-0)

Cohn was the grandnephew of Joshua Lionel Cowen, founder of the Lionel model train company. By 1959, Cowen and his son Lawrence had become involved in a family dispute over control of the company.

wacko?

http://american_almanac.tripod.com/witches.htm

Lucianne Goldberg could win the Chutzpah Award for her work as a literary agent fabricating tales of murder, corruption, and sexual dalliance within the Clinton administration. By her own admission, she worked for Nixon Special Counsel Murray Chotiner, as a dirty trickster for his Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), going so far as to infiltrate the 1972 Democratic Presidential campaign of Sen. George McGovern.

Goldberg's boss Chotiner, as we shall show, was not only Nixon's campaign strategist from the beginning of his political career, but Chotiner was an attorney who was so mobbed up'' that between 1949-52, he defended 221 members of the Meyer Lansky syndicate. He was eventually subpoenaed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy to testify before the McClellan Committee on his dealings with syndicate boss and money-launderer Meyer Lansky. Chotiner had long-standing ties with Lansky's Murder, Inc.'' lieutenant Benjamin Bugsy'' Siegel, with syndicate member Mickey Cohen, who took over Lansky's Hollywood and Las Vegas operations after Siegel's murder, and with Lansky lieutenant Morris Barney Moe'' Dalitz, who founded the La Costa Country Club in California, where President Nixon, Murray Chotiner, Sam Ehrlichman, and others met in 1973 to fix their Watergate cover stories. These associations with Lansky's Murder, Inc.'' apparatus make Lucianne Goldberg the Ma Barker'' of Clintongate.

Goldberg's son, Joshua, told this author that his mother also had a tie with Roy Cohn, who, like Chotiner became a Lansky syndicate attorney (in Cohn's case, after frying Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and then leaving his position as Sen. Joseph McCarthy's chief aide). As FBI and Army Intelligence records attest, Cohn was a homosexual who ultimately died of AIDS-related Karposi's sarcoma.

Around the time he became northeast chairman of Reagan’s 1980 campaign, he had another awakening when he started working with the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, former McCarthy henchman and also a Reagan supporter. “I’m still kind of a neophyte,” Stone admits, “still kind of thinking everything’s on the level. ‘Cause the truth is, nothing’s on the level.” At a 1979 meeting at Cohn’s Manhattan townhouse, he was introduced to major mobster and Cohn client Fat Tony Salerno. “Roy says to Tony, ‘You know, Tony, everything’s fixed. Everything can be handled.’ Tony says, ‘Roy, the Supreme Court’ Roy says, ‘Cost a few more dollars.’” Stone loved Cohn: “He didn’t give a s– what people thought, as long as he was able to wield power. He worked the gossip columnists in this city like an organ.”

Stone, who going back to his class elections in high school has been a proponent of recruiting patsy candidates to split the other guy’s support, remembers suggesting to Cohn that if they could figure out a way to make John Anderson the Liberal party nominee in New York, with Jimmy Carter picking up the Democratic nod, Reagan might win the state in a three-way race. “Roy says, ‘Let me look into it.’” Cohn then told him, “‘You need to go visit this lawyer’–a lawyer who shall remain nameless–’and see what his number is.’ I said, ‘Roy, I don’t understand.’ Roy says, ‘How much cash he wants, dumbf–.’” Stone balked when he found out the guy wanted $125,000 in cash to grease the skids, and Cohn wanted to know what the problem was. Stone told him he didn’t have $125,000, and Cohn said, “That’s not the problem. How does he want it?”

Cohn sent Stone on an errand a few days later. “There’s a suitcase,” Stone says. “I don’t look in the suitcase . . . I don’t even know what was in the suitcase . . . I take the suitcase to the law office. I drop it off. Two days later, they have a convention. Liberals decide they’re endorsing John Anderson for president. It’s a three-way race now in New York State. Reagan wins with 46 percent of the vote. I paid his law firm. Legal fees. I don’t know what he did for the money, but whatever it was, the Liberal party reached its right conclusion out of a matter of principle.”

nation mag book rev

...

hated, he was only one of numerous creators of the isms, and his role has probably been greatly overrated simply because he was so adept at publicizing himself.

In any event, the importance of Roy Cohn's life after that "short, wild ride" in Washington thirty-five years ago was of no significance at all. Except as it illuminated, and still illuminates, the society that fawned over him and allowed him to flourish. In that respect, but only in that respect, it was of enormous significance.

Von Hoffman reminds us that Cohn "lived in a matrix of crime and unethical conduct," "derived a significant part of his income from illegal or unethical schemes and conspiracies," and thrived "cheek by jowl with so many men of sharp practice and dim luster in business and politics" that Cohn's pal Joey Adams, the comedian, would say of Cohn's dinner parties, "If you're indicted you're invited."

But important unindicted people were invited, too. And they went. Large slices of the upper crust of New York and Washington snuggled up to him, laughed and entertained one another with stories about his crimes as though they were choice insiders' jokes, and wrestled for the privilege of partying with Cohn and his crooked and perverse friends. Why choose his company? The sleaze of Roy Cohn was no secret. Why ignore it? Why excuse it? The only important questions forced on us by these books have nothing to do with Roy Cohn, but everything to do with judges and lawyers and publishers and writers and TV stars and politicians and developers--the wealthy and the powerful people who for many years ate Roy Cohn's shit with a grin.

An example. Cohn was attorney for Studio 54, which von Hoffman identifies as "perhaps the most glamorous, fashion-setting nightclub to popularize drug use among white-collar people." Cocaine was its mother's milk. "That the establishment was run on lines contravening half the laws in the statute book made it not one whit less popular." For special celebrities, the wildest parties were held in the basement, where, along with high society's homosexuals, transsexuals and transvestites, one could find many illustrious souls who were there for the kick of watching and smelling. It was in Studio 54's catacombs, writes von Hoffman, that Cohn held some of his biggest birthday bangs, attended on at least one occasion by "the important officials of the Democratic, Republican, and Conservative parties, most of the city's major elected officials, a number of congressmen, the Chief Judge of the United States District Court and Roy's usuals, comedian Joey Adams, columnist William Safire,Donald Trump, Si Newhouse, Sidney Zion, and doubtless many another that the excluded Voice reporters did not pick up on standing outside in the street."

Why were those people there, sucking up to Cohn?

And what were people like Geraldine Ferraro and Alan Dershowitz ("who was a somewhat well-disposed acquaintance of Roy's") doing at other Cohn parties and showing up as character witnesses when he was about to be disbarred?

And aren't liberals a bit troubled when they read that one of their old standard-bearers, Murray Kempton, had "a contemptuous affection for Roy"? What is contemptuous affection? Is that what liberals feel who are too gutless to hate?

Is it possible that the New York legal community is as riddled with corruption as even the surface evidence in these books indicates? To be sure, Cohn was ultimately disbarred for lying, for stealing insurance money received after the burning of a yacht on which a crew member died (murder?), for trying to cheat a client out of $100,000, and for forging a signature--but the bar's blustery pretense of morality did not come until Cohn was so sick he could never have practiced law again anyhow. Where were the pious attorneys when he was riding high? It wasn't that they were ignorant of his shenanigans. Von Hoffman says that "some of the most important and influential practitioners of law in the United States had an idea of what kind of lawyer Roy was years before he was expelled from his profession"; indeed, more than an "idea." Cohn was famous among lawyers for winning cases by "delays, evasions, lies, and fixes," and by some he was "considered the brains behind whole networks of thieving public officials."

It's because they provoke, endlessly, questions about supposedly decent people--not because they give an elaborate resume of Cohn--that these two books are important social documents.

And always there are troubling questions about the press. Why was it-- if von Hoffman knows what he's talking about--that, at the very height of Cohn's criminal career, only one newspaper of general circulation, the

New York Daily News

, communicated to the subway straphangers that "the glamor lawyer was a crook"? Besides theNews, only The Village Voice and The American Lawyer told the truth about Cohn. At the same time, The New York Times, the most prestigious of the print media, continued to put Roy in its news columns in a most favorable light, while CBS News, then the most prestigious of the broadcasting media, did alaudatory 60 Minutes piece." Sometimes lawyers settled cases with Cohn not because they couldn't whip him in court but because they feared that Cohn would smear them and their clients through easy manipulation of the press. As one lawyer told Steven Brill, publisher of The American Lawyer:

We weren't buying off the lawsuit. We were buying off Roy Cohn. It's Cohn we were interested in, and what he said he could do to us in the press...He can get a headline in The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times icking up a phone....These papers printed uncritical, big headline accounts of Cohn's charges.

Someday William Safire, a very old and very close friend of Roy Cohn, may be so kind as to entertain us in his New York Times Magazine column, "On Language," with a discussion of "press ethics," complete with illustrations of its oxymoronic qualities drawn from the press's relations with Cohn. He might even want to tell us, for example, what he thinks "sellout" means, in reference to the work of gossip columnists and political columnists.

When these columnists--people like Liz Smith and Safire himself-- become conduits for the self-serving dirt supplied by a fellow like Cohn, and then give him the kind of publicity that he can change into power and money, is that selling out? Is it the same as giving and accepting a bribe?

Is Sidney Zion's book on Cohn the ultimate sellout? Zion, a former New York Times reporter, admits that Cohn did many favors for him, including helping him expedite a liquor license for a saloon Zion was buying, and he admits that Cohn was "the best source I had" for news tips. In return, says Zion, he gave Cohn "advice" on how to handle the people at The Times. As for other things Zion did for Cohn, he says vaguely, "He never asked me to do anything I wouldn't have done for him anyway." Which, given the fact that Zion refers to Cohn as "old buddy," is not very reassuring. For me, the whole Cohn-Zion relationship seems such a cozy swap-off that I would feel foolish indeed to bet on the accuracy of anything in Zion's book--either the so-called autobiographical part, which allegedly was dictated by Cohn in the closing period of his life when his mind was beginning to wander, or the defensive commentary of Zion. There are times when I suspect that Zion is using Cohn's "autobiography" to take care of some of his own vendettas. In any event, one should be very slow to trust anyone who--after conceding that Cohn had trashed the Bill of Rights, was a "rogue," a "legal executioner" and a "notorious bastard"--excuses his close friendship with Cohn by quoting that excruciating cliche of H. L. Mencken's: "What a dull world it would be for us honest men if it weren't for its sinners."

Let us look more closely at this cuddly fellow.

The biggest problem in Roy Cohn's life was being aJew. He wanted to be a Jew, but at the same time he was ashamed of being a Jew.

Typically for Cohn, the pleasure of being a Jew was that it opened many avenues to be exploited and manipulated. (His father, Al, a respected judge--apparently no small accomplishment in New York--and political crew boss, first opened many of these avenues for him.) Cohn was skilled at tapping the fatherly instincts of older Jews. Hey, what a smart boy! And how mannerly! As a sapling attorney he courted fellows like Judge Jerome Frank, who came to despise Cohn, and Judge Irving Kaufman (more on him later). All his life, Cohn particularly sucked up to Jewish journalists, because he practiced law through headlines. He became a tout and gossip procurer for Walter Winchell, who returned the favor by giving Cohn his first national notoriety, and he was very close to the once-powerful columnist George Sokolsky, in whom Cohn saw a second father, and Richard Berlin, head of the Hearst newspaper conglomerate. Cohn was virtually a member of the newspapering Newhouse family; throughout his adult life he was in daily contact with Si Newhouse, and on one occasion old Samuel Newhouse gave Cohn a half-million bucks, free and clear, to get him out of a jam. And, as already mentioned, The Times in the Abe Rosenthal era was an entirely friendly dumping ground for Cohn's politically murderous gossip (such as the unproven rumor that Hamilton Jordan had partaken of cocaine at Studio 54).

On the other hand, Roy Cohn seems never to have come to terms with being a Jew. "Roy never tried to deny his Jewish heritage," writes von Hoffman, "yet at the same time it seemed as though he sometimes sought out people who thought less of him for having it." Many of his closest allies, people with whom he went far out of his way to collude in wickedness--J. Edgar Hoover, numerous congressmen and senators--did not like Jews. Cohn's parties frequently were heavy with people who didn't like Jews. Cohn gave some of von Hoffman's interviewees the feeling that he enjoyed being called a kike, and he frequently used the term himself. A New York Post gossip columnist recalls that "he could be like many Jews that I've known. He could be terribly anti-Semitic...Roy was always calling people kikes--you know, terrible Jewish epithets-- 'Typical kike remark,' he'd say; 'kike' this or that about money, a favorite word of his." Cohn had no closer friend or more loyal supporter than Si Newhouse, but it is said that Cohn, behind his back, called him "Jewhouse."

One might fairly assume that Cohn hated himself for being a Jew and spent a great deal of his life tormenting Jews to show that, down deep, he could be just as anti-Semitic as the most bigoted WASP. One must bear in mind that it took some doing in Cohn's early adulthood to achieve that equality, for it was an, era when few respectable clubs accepted Jewish members and when most respectable private universities had Jewish quotas. What's more, there was, at least when Cohn was very young, still a sharp social distinction between German Jews and Russian Jews, the former considered much spiffier, the latter being Cohn's lineage (though Roy's mother pretended otherwise). This Jewish schism was no laughing matter. Indeed, the German Jewish banking establishment (the Loebs, the Kuhns, the Lehmans), von Hoffman tells us, teamed up with the Anglo-Saxon-controlled New York Clearing House to destroy Roy's much-beloved uncle Bernie, once a powerful banker who spent two years in Sing Sing. Roy Cohn never forgot the people who caused this family tragedy, and he never forgave. But he also learned from it what he considered a vital lesson: that it wasn't smart to be too different, too Jewish. While he made a career of insulting and ridiculing the WASP-defined ruling class, he worked ceaselessly to become a part of it, accepted by it, admired by it. He wanted nothing to do with losers, particularly Jewish losers, which may account for his having never been known to mention the Holocaust.

These were not rare sentiments. Many Jews felt just as he did, totally willing to exploit their Jewishness and at the same time ashamed of it, angry because they were prisoners of it.

In Cohn's life, this resulted in grotesque ironies. Toward the end of his brief fling as Senator Joseph McCarthy's high executioner, when other senators were pressing McCarthy to fire him, McCarthy warned them on orders from Cohn, who many believe controlled McCarthy far more than McCarthy controlled him, that if he were forced to fire Cohn it would be an obvious act of antiSemitism "and Winchell and Sokolsky would have plenty to say about that."

Cohn's using the "anti-Semitic" threat took balls indeed, seeing as how he had been for several years the foremost example in America of what he called the great anti-Semitic tradition of putting "a Jew...to catch a Jew." Cohn helped "catch" many Jews, politically and socially. And on at least one occasion he not only helped catch Jews but kill them as well.

This, of course, was in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg espionage trial. On the record, Cohn, as an Assistant US Attorney, was what a later American Bar Association report called "the third-ranking member of the prosecution staff." In fact, as von Hoffman correctly insists and as the "Cohn" of Sidney Zion's book boasts, he helped persuade presiding Judge Irving Kaufman (in illegal ex parte discussions) that the death penalty was the right penalty. Von Hoffman points out that the bar association subcommittee (whose most important member was Simon Rifkind, a chap "quite close to Roy") later exonerated both men of carrying on in such an unfair fashion. But Zion quotes Cohn as saying that while he had no influence on Kaufman's sentencing Julius to the chair--after all, quoth Zion's Cohn, "Kaufman told me before the trial started that he was going to sentence Julius Rosenberg to death"--he did perhaps persuade Kaufman to fry Ethel. Kaufman, says Zion's Cohn, "was concerned about a possible public opinion backlash if he sentenced a woman to the electric chair, particularly a mother with two young children." Cohn continues:

Irving Kaufman has said that he sought divine guidance in his synagogue before deciding upon the sentences. I can't confirm or deny this. So far as I know, the closest he got to prayer was the phone booth next to the Park Avenue Synagogue. He called from that booth to a phone I used, behind the bench in the courtroom, to ask my advice on whether he ought to give the death penalty to Ethel Rosenberg. We often communicated during the Rosenberg case in this manner.

Cohn advised him to shoot the juice to her because "she's worse than Julius. she was the mastermind of this conspiracy."

Having helped dispose of the Rosenbergs, Cohn responded to his destiny by moving temporarily to what he called the "capital of cutthroats," Washington, where he got the job with McCarthy's committee that Bobby Kennedy had sorely wanted and that he hated Cohn for beating him out of. (And, being the true son of his father, Bobby probably hated Cohn for being a Jew.) Cohn's vigorous and sometimes crazed part in the Communist witchhunts of the era had nothing to do with patriotism. As a patriot, he can be measured by the fact that he "slithered out of the armed service," to use von Hoffman's phrase, in both World War II and the Korean War in a very crafty way. A congressman was pressured into appointing him to West Point--not once, but three times; each time Cohn failed the West Point exam, but he could not be drafted as long as he was trying to get in, so he managed to delay long enough to see the end of World War II from the safe perch of Columbia Law School. And when the draft was revived in the Korean War, Cohn again successfully avoided service by joining the National Guard.

If patriotism did not drive him to Washington, what did? He says he went to "cure my inferiority complex." Since he had never as a lawyer shown the feeling, be must have meant something stemming from his Jewishness. He was ashamed that Jews were getting something of a reputation as far-lefters. "Not all Jews are Communists," he said in the McCarthy days, "but most Communists are Jews." Like his mentor columnist Sokolsky, whose sympathy for Jews was so limited that he had "what von Hoffman calls an "apparent willingness to accommodate himself to European fascism," Cohn was very worried "lest the non-Jewish public get the idea that Jews loved Moscow more than America." The McCarthy committee's shoveling into the affairs of the Army at Fort Monmouth was particularly fruitful in this regard, so much so that Jewish groups complained that "most of the witnesses at the hearings were Jewish" and "most of the scientists suspended at Fort Monmouth were also."

Significantly, the most important actions taken by Cohn in Washington were self-destructive. He destroyed forever all chances for real acceptance by either the Jewish or WASP upper class. And he destroyed his alter ego, McCarthy.

He did the first by forcing two favorites of the WASPish old-school-tie Foreign Service to resign. He ruined one career by threatening--plenty ironic, considering Cohn's later recreational preferences--to expose an old homosexual affair, and he ruined the other career by threatening to expose an old secret marriage. He did this to avenge the way the Foreign Service had made him and his colleague G. David Schine look so ridiculous in their book-burning tour of Europe--a tour which Cohn would years later admit was "a colossal mistake." Adds von Hoffman, "how big a colossal mistake he probably never understood."

He had gone out in the world and done things to men, non-Communist, non-criminal men, which would never be forgiven. The trip had changed the course of his life; this was not a question of a Democratic boy going to work for a Republican senator; this was welding himself to a political faction that people from his background despised. Publicly, there was no way back for Roy.

To the establishment, Cohn "had stamped himself a varlet. Roy had to sneer at Harvard, Yale, and the Union League Club; that world was [now] closed to him forever."

As for McCarthy, drunken and malleable and dumb, Cohn destroyed him by forcing him to hound and hound the Army to give Schine favored treatment in boot camp, a pursuit that was tactically insane and ultimately led to the hearings that ruined McCarthy and of course ended Cohn's Washington career. The anti-Army crusade was so bizarre as to make one almost believe Cohn willed his own defeat.

Cohn returned to New York City and went into the practice of law at a level where most payments were under the table.Here again, Cohn was turning inside out the Jewishness of his early training and environment. Thanks to a judge who was a friend of Cohn's father, he was taken into a solid and reputable law firm (Saxe, Bacon & O'Shea, later Saxe, Bacon & Bolan) in 1957, and he managed within a dozen years to destroy its reputation by both sloppy lawyering and shady lawyering. It became known as the law firm that bought off judges, suborned witnesses and won cases through trickery and political pressure. "The acts Roy was committing," writes von Hoffman, "were the antithesis of what he had learned from men like Jerome Frank; they were an affront to the rock-sure morality of the conscientious Jewish professional and business men of his growing up."

"By early 1963," von Hoffman goes on, "Roy had won himself a reputation, among reporters and editors willing to believe the worst if given a little evidence to hang it on, as a sleazy man of affairs." This is one of the several times that von Hoffman shows a strange contempt for Cohn's critics. What's with him? What does he mean by "a little evidence"? Von Hoffman lists mountains of evidence: looting enterprises by collecting excessive fees; asking other lawyers around his firm to sign false affidavits (and telling one who wouldn't, "I can't afford your Harvard ethics"); asking clients for money to bribe the judge and then pocketing the bribe money; or not telling clients he was going to bribe judges, and doing it. His money was spread widely. "If fixing the clerks wouldn't accomplish his goals," says von Hoffman, "Roy would tamper with witnesses." There were strong suspicions that he sometimes defrauded his own law partners. On at least one occasion he allowed top Mafia bosses to hold their meeting in his office so that, if wiretapped, what they said could not be used against them in court because of the lawyer-client relationship--a relationship with the Mafia, it should be added, that was much too extensive and friendly and covered too many years to be in any way innocent. (Indeed, if Zion's Cohn is to be believed--always a big if--he got Irving Saypol, the prosecutor in the Rosenberg case, appointed US Attorney through the good offices of Frank Costello, it being the case, says Cohn, that "the mob had for years decided the appointment of the US attorney.")

Cohn's most despicable crime as a lawyer, the professional crime for which there is no forgiveness, was defrauding his clients. He did it in myriad ways. Sometimes he would take their money, promise his personal help and turn the case over to the most unpracticed members of the firm, young men who had never even been in court; occasionally he dumped cases on law students who were just hanging around. Sometimes Cohn would take a client's money and turn up in court so poorly prepared that it was inevitable the client would go to jail. Indeed, he seldom made formal preparations for a trial but instead relied on what one close associate called his talents as an "intimidator and bluffer and bullshit artist." Sometimes he would take a client's money and give no representation at all, none: pure swindle.

There was, in fact, nothing so unprofessional, so unethical, that he would not do it to a client. Perhaps his most memorable trick was to turn rat, stool pigeon, on one client in an effort to save another. Von Hoffman writes:

One disco owner, a client of Roy's who had been paying Roy to bribe New York City officials to get a zoning variance, had confidential lawyer-client tax information turned over to the government to rescue the owners of Studio 54 from impending incarceration. It didn't work, but the man, who went to the penitentiary himself, might have taken Roy with him had he learned of his attorney's treason soon enough.

And of course Cohn constantly--constantly--leaked stuff to the press about his clients to get publicity for himself. It was this total disloyalty that made some observers wonder what Safire and Zion and others in Cohn's retinue were talking about when they spoke of his loyalty. Steven Brill, of The American Lawyer, told von Hoffman, "He was the most disloyal person to clients imaginable...I really want to know why Bill Safire likes him so much. Loyalty? Dogs have loyalty. He was never loyal to clients."

Cohn was notorious as a deadbeat. Except for what he owed homosexual prostitutes, he never paid his bills. Creditors could always sue him, of course, but "suing Roy could be a costly waste of time. The lawyers' fees might soon equal the size of the debt and the case would not go to trial, particularly in New York City where Roy had one or perhaps two judges, who must have been on his pad, because they would grant any postponement, any preliminary motion he asked for." Occasionally a creditor would win a suit, but they virtually never collected because he had nothing they could attach (as the IRS discovered; he went to his grave owing it $7 million). He rented or leased everything. He had no bank account. He wasn't paid for his legal work but got phony "loans" or lived on a kind of millionaire's barter system. Very often he paid his own staff with bad checks. Indeed, Cohn could have been prosecuted for fraud because of the pattern of his non-payments.

His life was spent in a cocoon of filth and disrepair. "The expression used to describe Roy's abodes time and time again was 'shit house,' " writes von Hoffman. His bedroom was decorated with frogs: frog drawings, frog paintings, frog decals, frog patterns on sheets, on nightshirts, on wallpaper, froggies everywhere; it was a room "bulging with stuffed animals, in this enormous turn-of-the-century townhouse, the plaster cracking, the paint all but gone from the walls, leaks squirting, and drafts finding their way through the ill-attended cracks."

His table manners were notoriously foul. He would eat from other people's plates, using his fingers, dipping his fingers into their gravy. He craved sweets but feared getting fat, so, as one boyfriend recalled, "In these fancy restaurants he'd order the yummy desserts, eat them and then spit them out into a napkin."

Was this the dapper lawyer whose name endlessly splotched the gossip columns of New York, the celebrated man-about-town fixer who threw parties at Studio 54 that mayors and congressmen and Harvard lawyers fought to be invited to? The same. If you see a split, splintered, shattered personality here, you're right. There was a deep streak of madness in Cohn, perhaps inherited from his mother's side. His maternal grandmother was deranged. One of his mother's brothers was "either mentally retarded or brain-damaged." Some members of the Cohn family thought Roy's mother should have been institutionalized. Everyone agreed she was extremely neurotic at the very least.

But the madness, I think, was also generated by self-hatred. (As a reward for wading through these two biographical bogs, I am surely entitled to indulge in a bit of amateur psychoanalysis.)

How could he avoid self-hatred? He betrayed his moralistic Jewish inheritance, betrayed his political party (he never quit claiming to be a Democrat), tricked his friends, defrauded his law partners, cheated his clients, treated his profession like a whorehouse. It was only natural, and doubtless subconsciously to him seemed absolutely just, that as punishment he destroy his own reputation and his body.

As everyone knows, Cohn, "the bestk-nown non-showbusiness homosexual in the country," died of AIDS.

When he was young, he dated girls. He claimed to have been engaged to Barbara Walters at one time. They were friends for many years, but he had few other women friends. Some who knew him well say he hated women.

Just how long he was a homosexual is not clear. Zion says a doctor told him that Cohn had been having sex with men since he was 15. Von Hoffman cites a reporter who remembers seeing Cohn in the homosexual bars around Washington when Cohn was in his mid-20s. But others say they knew-- because they shared hotel rooms with him--that Cohn engaged in straight sex as a young man. Always with prostitutes. Not nice girls. And even with the prostitutes, one of his old pals says, "He seemed to be one of those people who was just weird about sex the way he was weird about everything else."

Von Hoffman indicates that Cohn really came out of the closet when his mother died. Others have said the same. It isn't surprising that they link the twists and turns of his sex life to his mother, an extremely dominating woman. She and Roy were so close it was rumored he used to date her. In any event, by the 1970s Cohn found his relaxation in places that were, as a lover reported, "wall-to-wall anywhere from sixteen-year-olds to thirty-year-old body builders who'd be wearing dungarees with a surface tension of sixty pounds per square inch. We're talking about guys with huge musculature packed into T-shirts with stuffed crotches [sic], bikini briefs stuffed with Kleenex--a 'big box' is what it's called."

Cohn was a particularly nasty homosexual. He was often a favored guest at the ranch of multimillionaire Shearn Moody, who readily provided, we learn, "many little boys of the night" to guests who desired them. The story is that one night Cohn desired a boy who turned out to have warts on his penis, but Cohn said, "Oh well, I don't care." And the first thing you know, Cohn had "venereal warts on his anus."

Cohn's appetite for sex was hearty, to say the least. One of his longtime lovers told von Hoffman, "The joke was five a night at a hundred a pop. Roy was incredibly promiscuous." Another said, "Roy had to have sex every night, and no matter what the cost...he would have someone there. If it wasn't me, it was Peter, Dirk, a guy named Bill who did porno movies....no matter what, he had to have it every night. And then he would beat off afterward to pornography...I think for all the times he liked to be on the top so much, he loved being on the bottom."

Cohn was rumored to have humped, or been humped by, Schine, his colleague of the McCarthy days, but von Hoffman says there is no evidence of such a relationship. Ditto the rumors that he humped, or was humped by, his dirt-supplying pal J. Edgar Hoover. Ditto the rumors that he humped, or was humped by, Cardinal Spellman (who reputedly was hot for choir boys) all very, very close friends of Cohn, to be sure, but by von Hoffman's reckoning they serviced one another only in political ways.

What of Cohn's rumored relationship with homosexuals around Reagan?

When Roy's name comes up among straight people with an inside knowledge of Washington politics, particularly Democrats, there is speculating about him and the "lavender Mafia," which is the group of closet homosexuals in important positions in the Reagan administration. Whether a "ring" of such men, bound together by power, politics, and sexual preference, exists depends as much on semantics as observed behavior. However the ring question is resolved, one of Roy's paths of access to the Reagan administration, but only one of several, was his connection with certain homosexual men near the White House.

This seems to be a line of investigation that von Hoffman was too lazy to pursue. Roughly how many men does he mean? How close to the White House do these rumors take us? How high do they go? (He does mention one "important operative in the Reagan camp," whatever that means.) Von Hoffman leaves these questions alone.

Typically disloyal, Cohn gave no support to homosexuals who were trying to win public acceptance. He called them "fags," did all he could to make their lives miserable, lectured against them, berated politicians for any display of tolerance toward homosexuals and urged laws to restrict their freedom. To his death he denied that he was homosexual, but the Dorian Gray scene of his lying of AIDS said it all: "Roy...lay in bed, unheeding, his flesh cracking open, sores on his body, his faculties waning" and with a one-inch "slit-like wound above [his] anus."

It's said that the one true love in Roy Cohn's life was his spaniel, Charlie Brown.

Robert Sherrill

August 12, 2009

⁶ (http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-eight/#bkfrftnote206) From :{“Roger Stone:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{, Political Animal”:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}: by Matt Labash:

Cohn, Roy e s q

Legal career in New York[

Representation of Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch

Lionel trains:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Later career and disbarment:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Sexuality:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Lavender scare[

Death:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Media portrayals...

Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn exposed in new documentary that contains ominous warning about the president’s downfall

Evolution (1970s and 1980s):{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Shifts in strategy (1990s and 2000s)

Counterespionage

[edit] The Rosenberg trial

New York Daily News

Attachments