Roy Cohn Quotes

Belize: Hell or heaven? [Roy indicates "Heaven" through a glance] Belize: Like San Francisco. Roy Cohn: A city. Good. I was worried... it'd be a garden. I hate that shit. Belize: Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens. Roy Cohn: Isaiah. Belize: Prophet birds, Roy. Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind. And voting booths. Roy Cohn: And a dragon atop a golden horde. Belize: And everyone in Balencia gowns with red corsages, and big dance palaces full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion. And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers. Race, taste and history finally overcome. And you ain't there. Roy Cohn: And Heaven? Belize: That was Heaven, Roy.

And empathy? Even Trump’s former mentor, the notorious Roy Cohn, lawyer for gangsters and Joseph McCarthy, said that when it came to his feelings for his fellow human beings, Trump “pisses ice water” (Lange 2016).

ROY [COHN]:Please. Let me finish. Few people know this and I’m telling you this only because. . . . I’m not afraid of death. What can death bring that I haven’t faced? I’ve lived; life is the worst. (Gently mocking himself) Listen to me, I’m a philosopher. Joe. You must do this. You must must must. Love, that’s a trap. Responsibility; that’s a trap, too. Like a father to a son I tell you this: Life is full of horror; nobody escapes, nobody; save yourself. Whatever pulls on you, whatever needs from you, threatens you. Don’t be afraid; people are so afraid; don’t be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone. . . . Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way.

I fooled you, Ethel, I knew who you were all along. I can't believe you fell for that ma stuff. I just wanted to see if I could finally, finally make Ethel Rosenberg sing!

Roy(Cohn) was not gay. He was a man who liked having sex with men.

he’s lost without his original bulldog lawyer Roy Cohn, or his other former pit bull and personal attorney, Michael Cohen.

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

republishing it himself on Kindle to try to get the word out. In 2015, a Daily Beast reporter wrote a piece detailing the alleged rape of Ivana and was threatened by Trump’s aspiring Roy Cohn replacement, lawyer and future felon Michael Cohen.55

On New Year’s Eve of 1976, Trump proposed to Ivana, later presenting her with a three-carat Tiffany diamond ring. But before there could be a wedding, less than a year after they met, there was the prenup—ultimately, as many as four or five contracts. The negotiations between Trump and Ivana—Roy Cohn urged Donald to begin married life with codified financial arrangements—followed a pattern that came to define Trumpism: boasts of wealth and influence, a highly public airing of grievances, and dramatic battles staged in gossip columns and courtrooms. The marriage would start—and later explode—to the accompaniment of lawyers.

amateur magician himself, he had first seen Joe performing at the St. Regis for his classmate at Horace Mann, Roy Cohn, and had been impressed enough by Joe’s natural movements, his solemnity, and his flawless presentations of the Miser’s Dream, Rosini’s Location, and the Stabbed Deck to insist that Joe be engaged to baffle his

During the slow times in the summer, I would be invited to sit with Gaspipe or gangsters like Roy DeMeo, Anthony Senter, Joey Testa, and Frank Lastorino, a kind of Murderer’s Row of gangsters, like the 1950s Yankees batting lineup, only these guys really were murderers. This was when I first heard the name Roy Cohn, the infamous New York attorney who worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare and later was a lawyer for many mobsters—including Donald Trump.

We are living in Roy Cohn’s America, directed by his apt pupil, with the aid of a crime syndicate that does not recognize law, freedom, or the sanctity of human life.

In December 2016, Barrett, alarmed by Trump’s win, elaborated on Cohn’s influence: “Roy Cohn was the most satanic figure I ever met in my life. He was almost reptilian. I think he’s going to handle the swearing-in at the inauguration. They’re not going to bring a judge, they’re going to have Roy. And then Roy’s going to go back to the White House and fuck a 12-year-old. In the Oval Office.”10

In December 2016, Barrett, alarmed by Trump’s win, elaborated on Cohn’s influence: “Roy Cohn was the most satanic figure I ever met in my life. He was almost reptilian. I think he’s going to handle the swearing-in at the inauguration. They’re not going to bring a judge, they’re going to have Roy. And then Roy’s going to go back to the White House and fuck a 12-year-old. In the Oval Office.”10 Barrett died the night before Trump’s inauguration.

Roy Cohn was dead and no longer a threat, and so Trump exposés abounded as Ivana opened up her own world to the press. These included scathing early 1990s Vanity Fair profiles, including one in which twelve-year-old Donald Trump Jr. told a reporter that Trump did not love him, did not love himself, but only loved his money;52

mentor of his business career, attorney Roy M. Cohn. Short and sallow-skinned with deep-set droopy blue eyes and a receding hairline, Cohn was one of the most controversial legal minds of his time. As

pioneered by Roy Cohn and polished by Rubenstein, who had represented other Trump and Epstein colleagues like Rupert Murdoch and Adnan Khashoggi.

Thanks in part to the tutelage of Roy Cohn, his first lawyer and the one he admired most, Trump approached the courtroom with his customary cynicism. All that mattered was winning, regardless of what norms, or people, he had to trample in the process.

He bragged about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and hit the town with scumbag aficionado Roy Cohn. As president, he pardoned notorious criminals like Joe Arpaio and Scooter Libby and cultivated friendships with authoritarian leaders like Kim Jong Un, Erdoğan, and Putin. It is rare for Trump to hide even the sleaziest of contacts, but he has taken pains to conceal his

It doesn’t feel ironic anymore: American and former Soviet operatives are a linked entity, and prestigious institutions manufacture history in a way that would make George Orwell shudder and Roy Cohn proud. In 2017, The New York Times published an article

America “is no country for the infirm” because infirmity indicates a failure of enjoyment. To be sick is thus to be guilty. The sick illustrate the persistence of dissatisfaction and distance within the society of enjoyment. In acknowledging the sick, one acknowledges lack as well. Hence, like Roy Cohn, we opt instead for nonstop motion, for trying to eliminate the distance that the sick would introduce into the contemporary world.

Almost all of the USFL veterans interviewed for this book considered the Donald Trump of the mid-1980s and the Donald Trump of 2017 to be eerily familiar. Thirty-three years after insisting his fellow owners would pay for Doug Flutie, he was insisting Mexico would pay for a border wall. Thirty-three years after being accused of cozying up to Pete Rozelle, he was being accused of cozying up to Vladimir Putin. Thirty-three years after Roy Cohn and Harvey Myerson, his chief advisers were the equally controversial Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. Thirty-three years after insisting the USFL needed to move to fall ASAP (then lacking a concrete plan for implementation), he was insisting America needed a ban on immigration ASAP (then lacking a concrete plan for implementation).

Or the pathetic spectacle of Rudy Giuliani committing harakiri for Trump, just like I used to do, somehow imagining that the fate that befell me and Roy Cohn won’t happen to him—as if the rules of gravity have been suspended magically.

Mr. Trump then complained about Mr. McGahn writing things down. “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes.” Mr. McGahn maintained he took notes because he was a “real lawyer” and they create a record. “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn,” Mr. Trump said. “He did not take notes.” But Mr. McGahn did. And so did plenty of others.

The worst thing about Mr. Trump is his association, once removed via his former lawyer Roy Cohn, with the red and lavender scares of the 1950's. The second, in spite of his billions, is the membership of his personality in the petty middle class, a chronically insecure group of people who feel they must constantly prove themselves, making him a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! His brother, who eventually killed himself with alcohol, did not fit into the family business because he felt, for example, higher quality but more expensive windows should be installed.

JENNIFER ENGSTROM (the Angel at Kansas City Repertory Theatre, 2015): I feel like we are in a bizarro Part 3 of Angels in America, and the ghost of Roy Cohn is sweetly caressing the nuts of an American president who rides naked on horseback with Vladimir Putin.

Don't tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.