Age, Biography, and Wiki
Roy Cohn was born on February 20, 1927, in the Bronx, New York City. He rose to prominence as a prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice, notably for the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn also served as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel during the Army–McCarthy hearings in 1954. His career spanned from public service to private law practice, representing clients such as Donald Trump.
| Occupation | Democrats |
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| Date of Birth | 20 February 1927 |
| Age | 98 Years |
| Birth Place | New York, New York, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Pisces |
| Country | U.S |
| Date of death | 2 August, 1986 |
| Died Place | Bethesda, Maryland, U.S. |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is limited information available about Roy Cohn's physical measurements like height and weight. However, his presence in public life was often noted for his controversial and influential persona rather than his physical appearance.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Roy Cohn was reportedly closeted and never openly acknowledged his personal relationships. His personal life was often overshadowed by his professional career and public persona.
Born to an affluent Jewish family in the Bronx, New York City, Cohn was the only child of Dora ( Marcus) and Justice Albert C. Cohn; Cohn's father was an assistant district attorney of Bronx County at the time, who was appointed as a judge of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court, later in his life. His maternal great-uncle was Joshua Lionel Cowen, the founder and long-time owner of the Lionel Corporation, a manufacturer of toy trains.
Cohn and his mother were close; they lived together until her death in 1967 and she was constantly attentive to his grades, appearance and relationships. When Cohn's father insisted that his son be sent to a summer camp, his mother rented a house near the camp and her presence cast a pall over his experience. In personal interactions, Cohn showed tenderness which was absent from his public persona, but he was vain and deeply insecure.
Greenglass would later change his story and allege that he committed perjury at the trial in order "to protect himself and his wife, Ruth, and that he was encouraged by the prosecution to do so." 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 Chief Prosecutor Saypol and Judge Irving Kaufman being appointed to the case. Cohn further said that Kaufman imposed the death penalty based on his personal recommendation. Cohn denied, however, participation in any illegal ex parte discussions.
Cohn dated Barbara Walters in college and remained friends with her. SI Newhouse, heir to the Condé Nast publishing empire, was Cohn's classmate at Horace Mann, and they remained lifelong friends. Cohn described Generoso Pope as "a second father". Cohn exchanged Christmas gifts with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover; they attended parties with their mutual friend, Lewis Rosenstiel, founder of liquor company Schenley Industries. Cohn referred to Donald Trump as his best friend. Cohn told journalists that Trump phoned him 15 to 20 times a day and according to Christine Seymour, his long-time switchboard operator, Trump was the last person to speak to Cohn on the phone before he died in 1986.
When Cohn recruited G. David Schine as chief consultant to the McCarthy staff, speculation arose that Schine and Cohn had a sexual relationship. Schine's chauffeur later volunteered to testify that he had seen the two "engaged in homosexual acts" in the back of his limousine, though there was no evidence that Schine ever had any romantic feelings for Cohn. During this period, Schine dated the actress Piper Laurie, and he eventually married Hillevi Rombin, a former Miss Universe, with whom he had six children. During the Army–McCarthy hearings, Cohn denied having any "special interest" in Schine or being bound to him "closer than to the ordinary friend". 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", Welch defined "pixie" as "a close relative of a fairy". Pixie was the brand-name of a popular inexpensive amateur camera of the era; while "fairy" is a derogatory term for a homosexual man. The people at the hearing recognized the implication, and found it amusing; Cohn later called the remark "malicious", "wicked", and "indecent".
In 1978, Ken Auletta wrote in an Esquire profile of Cohn: "He fights his cases as if they were his own. It is war. If he feels his adversary has been unfair, it is war to the death. No white flags. No Mr. Nice Guy. Prospective clients who want to kill their husband, torture a business partner, break the government's legs, hire Roy Cohn. He is a legal executioner—the toughest, meanest, loyalest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America."
Cohn was the subject of two 2019 documentaries: Bully, Coward, Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn, directed by Ivy Meeropol (a documentary filmmaker and granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) and Matt Tyrnauer's Where's My Roy Cohn? David Moreland appears as Cohn in The X-Files episode "Travelers" (1998). Roland Blum, played by Michael Sheen, is a dishonest lawyer inspired by Cohn, who appears in "The One Inspired by Roy Cohn", Season 3, Episode 2 of The Good Fight. Cohn is name checked in the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire". The Apprentice is a 2024 independent biographical drama film that examines Trump's career as a real estate businessman in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s, including his relationship with Roy Cohn portraying himself as Trump's attorney and mentor; the film was nominated for two Academy Awards, including for Jeremy Strong's portrayal of Cohn. The film explores their friendship while Cohn is shown leading an actively gay lifestyle in New York City while forming a closer business relationship with Trump.
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Net Worth and Salary
Roy Cohn's net worth is difficult to estimate due to his complex financial dealings and schemes. He was known for avoiding taxes and accumulating debts rather than building tangible assets. Despite earning significant income from his legal practice and business ventures, Cohn's financial health was often clouded by legal issues and financial mismanagement.
Career, Business, and Investments
Cohn's career was marked by his involvement in high-stakes legal cases and his role as a political fixer. He dabbled in various business ventures, including real estate, insurance, and entertainment, often using other people's money to finance these endeavors. His legal practice in New York City attracted high-profile clients, cementing his reputation as a formidable lawyer.
Roy Marcus Cohn (February 20, 1927 – August 2, 1986) was an American lawyer and prosecutor. He first gained fame as a prosecutor of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in their trials (1952-53) and as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel during the Army–McCarthy hearings in 1954. Cohn had been assisting McCarthy's investigations of suspected communists. In the 1970s and during the 1980s, he became a prominent legal and political fixer in New York City. He represented and mentored Donald Trump during Trump's early business career.
He rose to prominence as a U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor at the espionage trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, where he successfully prosecuted the Rosenbergs, which led to their conviction and execution in 1953. After his time as prosecuting chief counsel during the McCarthy trials, his reputation deteriorated during the late 1950s to late 1970s as he settled in New York City and became a private lawyer to many clients, including real estate magnates, political operatives, Catholic clergy and organized crime.
Cohn played a major role in McCarthy's anti-Communist hearings. During the Lavender Scare, Cohn and McCarthy alleged that Soviet Bloc intelligence services had blackmailed multiple U.S. Federal Government employees into committing espionage in return for not exposing their closeted homosexuality. In response, President Dwight Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 on April 27, 1953, to ban homosexuals, whom he considered a national security risk, from being employed by the federal government. According to David L. Marcus, Cohn's cousin, many Federal employees in Washington, D.C., who were exposed as homosexuals by Cohn and McCarthy committed suicide. As time went on, it became well known that Cohn was himself gay, although he always denied it. McCarthy and Cohn were responsible for the firing of many gay men from government employment, and strong-armed opponents into silence using rumors of their homosexuality. Former U.S. Senator Alan K. Simpson wrote: "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."
After resigning from McCarthy's staff, Cohn had a 30-year career as an attorney in New York City. His clients included Donald Trump; New York Yankees baseball club owner George Steinbrenner; Aristotle Onassis; Mafia figures Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, John Gotti and Mario Gigante; Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager; the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York; Texas financier and philanthropist Shearn Moody Jr.; and business owner Richard Dupont. Dupont, then 48, was convicted of aggravated harassment and attempted grand larceny for his 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. Cohn's other clients included retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, who has referenced Cohn as "the quintessential fixer". In the 1960s, Robert Morgenthau as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District indicted Cohn three times in six years on charges ranging from extortion and blackmail to bribery, conspiracy, securities fraud, obstruction of justice and witness tampering, and he was accused in New York of financial improprieties related to city contracts and private investments. He was acquitted on all charges.
Cohn worked on the 1980 Reagan campaign, where he befriended Roger Stone. 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, he dropped it off at the office of a lawyer influential in Liberal Party circles. Reagan carried the state with 46% of the vote to Carter's 44%, with Anderson taking over 7% 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."
In 1971, Donald Trump first undertook large construction projects in Manhattan. In 1973, the Justice Department accused Trump of violating the Fair Housing Act in 39 of his properties. 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. Representing Trump, Cohn filed a countersuit against the government for $100 million, asserting that the charges were "irresponsible and baseless". The countersuit was unsuccessful. 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." 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. 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.
Cohn was the grand-nephew 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. Under Cohn's three-and-a-half-year 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.
Cohn inspired several fictional portrayals after his death. Probably the best known is in Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1991), which portrays Cohn as a closeted, power-hungry hypocrite haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg as he denies dying of AIDS. In the initial Broadway production, the role was played by Ron Leibman; in the HBO miniseries (2003), Cohn is played by Al Pacino; and in the 2010 Off-Broadway revival by the Signature Theatre Company in Manhattan, the role was reprised by Frank Wood. Nathan Lane played Cohn in the 2017 Royal National Theatre production and the 2018 Broadway production. Cohn is also a character in Kushner's one-act play, G. David Schine in Hell (1996). That play may have been inspired in part by the National Lampoon comic strip "Roy Cohn in Hell" (February 1987), which depicts Cohn joining Hoover and Senator McCarthy in the underworld. In the early 1990s, Cohn was one of two subjects of Ron Vawter's one-man show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith; his part was written by Gary Indiana.
Social Network
Roy Cohn did not have a social network presence as he passed away in 1986, well before the advent of social media platforms. His influence was largely through his professional and personal connections in the legal and political spheres.
Maureen Dowd wrote in an article for The New York Times which described Matt Tyrnauer's film Where's My Roy Cohn?: "Roy Cohn understood the political value of wrapping himself in the flag. He made good copy. He knew how to manipulate the press and dictate stories to the New York tabloids. He surrounded himself with gorgeous women. There was always something of a nefarious nature going on. He was like a caged animal who would go after you the minute the cage door was opened."
Several people have asserted that Cohn had considerable influence on the presidency of Donald Trump. Ivy Meeropol, director of Bully, Coward, Victim: The Story of Roy Cohn, said "Cohn really paved the way for Trump and set him up with the right people, introduced him to Paul Manafort and Roger Stone—the people who helped him get to the White House."
Vanity Fair's Marie Brenner wrote in an article about Cohn's mentorship of Trump: "Cohn—possessed of a keen intellect... he 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… 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."
Education
Cohn was educated at Columbia University, where he developed the skills that would propel him to prominence in the legal world.
After attending Fieldston School and the Horace Mann School and completing studies at Columbia University in 1946, Cohn graduated from Columbia Law School at the age of 20.
After graduating from law school, Cohn worked as a clerk for the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for two years. In May 1948, at age 21, he was old enough to be admitted to the New York bar. He became an assistant U.S. attorney later that month. That same year, Cohn also became a board member of the American Jewish League Against Communism.
Consensus among historians is that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of being a highly valued NKVD spymaster against the United States, but that his trial was marred by prosecutorial misconduct—mainly by Cohn—and that the Rosenbergs should not have been executed. Distilling this consensus, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz wrote that the Rosenbergs were "guilty—and framed."
The young Cohn also attached himself to several older powerful men who, in return, provided Cohn with assistance. One of them may have been New York's Cardinal Francis Spellman, whose own alleged homosexuality has been a subject of controversy in the Catholic Church. Although Cohn always denied his homosexuality in public, he had a few known boyfriends over the course of his life, including his assistant Russell Eldridge, who died from AIDS in 1984, and Peter Fraser, Cohn's partner for the last two years of his life, who was 30 years his junior. Speculation about Cohn's sexuality intensified following his death from AIDS in 1986. In a 2008 article published in The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin quotes Cohn associate 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."
