Trump Revealed

by Michael Kranish

  • • •

  THE TIMING WAS TERRIBLE, coming just as Donald was growing increasingly anxious to pull away from his father’s shadow. He had lost patience with his father’s strategy of catering to lower- and middle-income residents of Brooklyn and Queens, and what was required to manage them. When he found tenants throwing trash out of the windows, he began a program “to teach people about using the incinerators.” Company employees warned him that he was “liable to get shot” if he tried to collect rent at the wrong time. He thought his father’s buildings lacked style, with their “common brick facades.” All for a profit margin that he called “so low.”

  Though a creature of his father’s business and a beneficiary of it, Donald yearned for something more. Fred, now sixty-eight, was settled in his routine of going to lunch, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, at Gargiulo’s, an Italian restaurant a couple of blocks from Trump Village, a neighborhood fixture since 1907. Fred was often accompanied by his administrative assistant, a woman named Ann, and his order was always the same: tortellini Bolognese with white cream sauce.

  It was a calamitous time for New York City. The metropolis lost 10 percent of its population in the 1970s, as crime escalated, whites fled, and the city teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. Graffiti-filled subways rattled along, badly in need of repair. A popular television show, All in the Family, featured the bigoted Archie Bunker character, who lived in Queens, near Trump’s childhood home. Coney Island had fallen into further decay, a shadow of its merry heyday. Donald, meanwhile, could look across at Manhattan and see a skyline in transition; when the twin 110-story towers of the World Trade Center were dedicated in April 1973, President Nixon hailed the moment as the inauguration of an era of revitalized international commerce. As the Vietnam War wound down, the protest music that had filtered out of folk clubs was being replaced by the pulse of disco.

  Donald preferred everything about Manhattan—the fancy restaurants, the slinky fashion models, the skyscrapers, the money to be made and spent. He disparaged his experience in the grittier parts of the city. His father’s outer-borough empire, Trump wrote, “was not a world I found very attractive. I’d just graduated from Wharton and suddenly here I was in a scene that was violent at worst and unpleasant at best.” This “unpleasant” world was the reality faced by millions of people, but it was far away from everything Trump knew—his luxurious surroundings in Jamaica Estates, the order of a military academy, the elite education at Wharton. He wanted something better. His father had found one path to riches; Donald saw a different one to even greater wealth. “The real reason I wanted out of my father’s business—more important than the fact that it was physically rough and financially tough—was that I had loftier dreams and visions,” Trump wrote. “And there was no way to implement them building housing in the outer boroughs.”

  In 1971, Trump moved into a Manhattan apartment on the seventeenth floor of a building on East Seventy-Fifth Street, which he furnished with velvet couches and crystal with help from an interior designer. He hired an Irish woman to be his maid. He parked his Cadillac convertible in a garage next door and each day drove the sizable distance to work at the Trump Management office on Avenue Z. The Upper East Side apartment had a certain appeal for a young man, in part because it was rent-controlled; city law prohibited the landlord from increasing the rent substantially each year. (In 1975, Trump handed the apartment over to his brother Robert. About that time, Donald spoke out against rent-control laws: “Everybody in New York gets their increases but the landlords, and we are going to put an end to that practice.”)

  After living in Manhattan for two years, Trump moved closer to his goal of building his own real estate business. Then the government filed suit against him and his father. Just as he was envisioning a new, Manhattan-centric Trump brand, the first thing most people heard about him was the accusation that he discriminated against black people. The prudent thing to do might have been to settle. The Justice Department wasn’t seeking a financial penalty or jail time; the government basically wanted a settlement in which the Trumps would promise not to discriminate. At that transitional moment, with authority passing from father to son, Donald needed guidance. One day shortly after the suit was filed, Trump and his father visited a top New York law firm, where attorneys advised them to give in to the government. Donald was torn. That evening, as he pondered the decision, Donald walked into a Manhattan discotheque. There he met the man who would help shape his life’s course as his father began to recede from the picture. This new acquaintance was adept at working the private and public corridors of power. He knew mayors and judges and senators. He moved at a whole other level than Donald Trump. The man’s name was Roy Cohn.

  4

  * * *

  Roy Cohn and the Art of the Counterattack

  The nondescript stucco building at 416 East Fifty-Fifth Street bore little hint of what lay inside. No name was on the doorway or awning, just MEMBERS ONLY on a brass plaque. Known as Le Club, this discotheque was where Gotham’s glitterati gathered on a small dance floor, around a billiard table, and at a second-floor dining room. Club membership was limited to twelve hundred, including “13 princes, 13 counts, four barons, three princesses, two dukes.”

  Trump wanted in. In 1973, Le Club was a gathering spot for “some of the most successful men and the most beautiful women in the world,” Trump wrote, “the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy-five-year-old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden.” But this young newcomer hardly qualified for such an exclusive venue. The club rejected him. Trump cajoled and pleaded with management. Acceptance was granted on one condition: he had to promise not to go after married women who came to the club “because I was young and good-looking.” He boasted that he went there almost every night and “met a lot of beautiful, young, single women,” but said he never got “very seriously” involved with them in these early years and, in any event, couldn’t take them back to his apartment because his place wasn’t glitzy enough.

  It wasn’t just about the women or the music. To Trump, the wish to belong was part of his quest for connections. He wanted to befriend those who held sway in New York City, the power brokers who moved easily between the dealmakers and the politicians. On the evening after a lawyer advised Donald and his father to settle the racial-bias case, Donald went to Le Club, where he spotted a balding man with a memorable face: high forehead, piercing blue eyes, heavy eyelids, a fighter’s nose with a crooked streak running down it. He looked like Hollywood’s vision of a tough, a sharp contrast to tall, dashing Trump. Yet Trump was drawn to Roy Cohn—or, at least, to the power he represented, a power Trump could use at this difficult moment.

  • • •

  ROY COHN WAS BORN into power. His father, Albert C. Cohn, was a member of New York’s Democratic machine who became a justice on the state Supreme Court. Roy went to the elite Fieldston and Horace Mann prep schools in the Bronx and on to Columbia, graduating from its law school at age twenty. Through his family’s political connections, Cohn landed a job with the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. Just months later, Cohn received an assignment that transformed his career. He was asked to write a memo about Alger Hiss, a State Department official suspected of spying for the Soviet Union. After FBI agents told Cohn about alleged “Kremlin cells” in federal agencies, he became convinced communists had infiltrated the government. Cohn rose quickly in the US Attorney’s Office and later boasted that he took advantage of his family’s ties to New York’s five main crime families. (Years later, Cohn said he arranged for an ally to get the job of US attorney with the help of Frank “the Prime Minister” Costello, boss of the Luciano family, later renamed the Genovese. “In those days, nobody became US Attorney in New York without the O.K. from the mob,” Cohn wrote.)

  In 1951, Cohn worked on the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of espionage and passing atomic-bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. The couple were later executed, and Cohn c
laimed he had privately convinced the judge to send Ethel—not just Julius—to the electric chair. After that sensational case he worked in 1952 for the federal Internal Security Division, a new Justice Department office focused on rooting out communists. He soon learned that Senator Joseph McCarthy was launching an inquiry into whether communists had infiltrated the government, and the Wisconsin Republican hired Cohn as chief counsel to the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

  McCarthy made headlines by claiming he had a list of 205 State Department employees who were members of the Communist Party. Newspapers were filled with headlines about McCarthy’s “Red scare” and his claim that the government was filled with “loyalty risks.” With Cohn’s help, McCarthy launched a series of hearings about the supposed communist threat in the United States. He called scores of professors, Hollywood writers, government employees, and others to answer for their alleged ties to the Communist Party.

  McCarthy ramped up the allegations, claiming the nation’s armed forces had been infiltrated by spies and subversives. Cohn’s friend G. David Schine, who worked for McCarthy as an unpaid consultant, had been drafted into the army and faced the possibility of being sent to serve overseas. Cohn allegedly said he would “wreck the army” if Schine wasn’t allowed to stay stateside. That prompted the army to accuse McCarthy and Cohn of trying to get Schine special treatment. Facing heavy criticism, McCarthy launched a counterattack. He suggested that a junior attorney at the law firm that employed Joseph Welch, the army’s counsel at the hearings, once belonged to a communist front group. Welch famously turned the tables on the senator, saying, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” The Senate censured McCarthy and Cohn resigned. McCarthyism became shorthand for political witch hunts; the senator’s influence dissipated and he died in 1957. Cohn, however, insisted he had “never worked for a better man or a better cause.” He not only survived, he returned to New York to become one of the city’s most influential men.

  Working from a Manhattan town house, Cohn represented clients ranging from the Catholic archdiocese to discotheque owners, real estate moguls, and mobsters. He boasted of avoiding federal taxes, which got him in trouble with the government. In the two decades following the McCarthy hearings, he was indicted on charges ranging from obstruction of justice to bribery to extortion, but he always seemed to get off. To fight his legal battles, Cohn honed a set of hard-boiled tactics and a rhetorical style that would serve him far beyond the courtroom. By the early 1970s, Cohn was looking for a client with wealth and connections, one he could mold to his liking.

  • • •

  ON THE MORNING OF October 15, 1973, the day the Justice Department announced it was suing the Trumps for racial bias, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times written by Roy Cohn. The column was in the form of a letter to Spiro Agnew, the former vice president of the United States. Agnew had resigned days earlier after pleading no contest to federal income tax evasion. Cohn, who had famously avoided federal income taxes for years, was outraged.

  “Dear Mr. Agnew,” he wrote. “How could a man who made courage a household word lose his? How could one of this decade’s shrewdest leaders make a dumb mistake such as you did in quitting and accepting a criminal conviction? If you had stood your ground as you promised the public you would, I give you my opinion that your chances for legal and political survival were excellent. That opinion might mean something, because I went through three separate criminal proceedings very similar to those with which you were threatened. . . . I was offered ‘deals’ and ‘plea bargains.’ I turned them down and fought. When it was over, I had obtained three unanimous jury acquittals.”

  Trump, up against a discrimination charge, was being urged to settle, but hated the idea. Cohn, appalled that the vice president would cave in to the allegations against him and resign from the second most powerful office in the land, represented the argument against settling. Then Trump wandered into Le Club. And there was Cohn, the man who never settled. Trump sat down and explained the dilemma he faced.

  “I don’t like lawyers,” Trump told Cohn. “I think all they do is delay deals. . . . Every answer they give you is no, and they are always looking to settle instead of fight.”

  Cohn agreed.

  Trump continued, “I’d rather fight than fold, because as soon as you fold once, you get the reputation of being a folder.”

  “Is this just an academic conversation?”

  Trump was thrilled that Cohn was listening to a “nobody” like him. Now he courted Cohn: “No, it is not academic at all.” Trump explained how the government had just filed suit, “saying we discriminated against blacks in some of our housing developments.” Trump said he didn’t discriminate, and he didn’t want the government forcing him to rent to welfare recipients. “What do you think I should do?”

  “My view is tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove that you discriminated. . . . I don’t think you have any obligation to rent to tenants who would be undesirable, white or black, and the government doesn’t have a right to tell you how to run your business.” Cohn assured Trump, “You’ll win hands down.”

  Trump liked what he heard—not just about the case, but the whole “go to hell” philosophy. From that moment, he adopted the Cohn playbook: when attacked, counterattack with overwhelming force. One of the most influential relationships in Trump’s life was now under way. As their relationship grew, he admired Cohn’s brilliance, but worried that he could at times be unprepared and a “disaster.”

  When Cohn boasted that he had spent much of his life under indictment, Trump asked whether Cohn had really done what was alleged. “What the hell do you think?” Cohn responded with a smile. Trump said he “never really knew” what that meant, but he liked Cohn’s toughness and loyalty.

  Cohn worked hard to polish his reputation as gritty, cooperating with an Esquire profile titled “Don’t Mess with Roy Cohn,” which described him as a man who enjoyed getting indicted and fought every case as if it were a war. “Prospective clients who want to kill their husband, torture a business partner, break the government’s legs, hire Roy Cohn,” Ken Auletta wrote. “He is a legal executioner—the toughest, meanest, loyalest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America. He is not a very nice man.” Trump served as a supporting witness in the piece. “When people know that Roy is involved, they’d rather not get involved in the lawsuits and everything else that’s involved,” Trump said. Cohn “was never two-faced. You could count on him to go to bat for you,” which was exactly what Trump wanted Cohn to do in the racial-bias case.

  Cohn unveiled his strategy two months after the Justice Department filed suit. On December 12, 1973, Trump walked before a phalanx of cameras at the New York Hilton to announce Cohn’s audacious plan. Cohn filed a counterclaim against the government, saying the Justice Department had made false and misleading statements. He sought $100 million for the Trumps. Donald told reporters that the government was unfairly trying to force his company to lease apartments to people on welfare. If that happened, Trump said, “There would be a massive fleeing from the city of not only our tenants, but communities as a whole.”

  Trump rejected any suggestion that his view was based on race. “I have never, nor has anyone in our organization ever, to the best of my knowledge, discriminated or shown bias in renting our apartments,” he swore in an affidavit. Cohn filed his own affidavit lamenting what he called an “abuse” of government powers. “The Civil Rights Division did not file a lawsuit,” Cohn said. “It slapped together a piece of paper for use as a press release, and only secondarily as a court document. It contains not one fact concerning the discriminatory practices against blacks by the Trump organization.”

  Making his case for a $100 million payout to the Trumps, Cohn said, “No matter what the outcome of this case, I suppose the damage is never going to be completely undone because you are never going to catch up with these initial headlines.”

  FIV
E WEEKS LATER, DONALD and Fred Trump, accompanied by Cohn, took their seats at a table at the US courthouse in Brooklyn for the Eastern District of New York. Goldweber, the idealistic twenty-six-year-old Justice Department lawyer, made a dramatic appearance, drenched from a downpour because she had been unable to find a cab. She felt nervous as she settled in and prepared to face the famously cutthroat Cohn.

  At issue was whether the judge should let the Trumps’ countersuit continue or, as the government wanted, to toss it out. Cohn spoke first, ridiculing the government for requesting racial breakdowns of the residents in Trump buildings. There are “a number of blacks who live in there, that we know visibly,” Cohn told the court. “I have taken a ride and looked at some of them and blacks walk in and out and I assume they are not there for any improper purpose and they live in the place. But they want us to go, apparently, and canvass all fourteen thousand of these units and find out how many blacks live there and how many nonblacks live there, and I suppose how many Puerto Ricans live there or non–Puerto Ricans.”

  Goldweber urged the judge to let the government’s discrimination case go forward: “The defendants have refused to rent apartments to persons on account of their race and color. They have made discriminatory statements with respect to the rental of these dwellings. . . . They have represented that their dwellings were unavailable for rental, when, in fact, such dwellings were available.”

  Judge Edward R. Neaher sided with Goldweber, dismissing Cohn and the Trumps’ $100 million counterclaim and ordering that the case go forward. Goldweber promptly requested depositions from the Trumps and said she had no patience for delay tactics. That prompted Cohn to write to Goldweber: “Dear Elyse, I never knew you were such a hot-tempered white female! . . . We will see you with Mr. Trump and the other witnesses next week.”

  Trump said in his deposition that he was “unfamiliar” with the Fair Housing Act that banned discrimination. He also initially said that he didn’t count a wife’s income when calculating whether a couple qualified financially to rent a Trump apartment, saying he relied only on income from “the male in the family,” although he subsequently revised that statement.