Roy Marcus Cohn ( KOHN; February 20, 1927 – August 2, 1986) was an American lawyer, prosecutor, and conservative political activist. He first gained fame as a prosecutor of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in their trials (1952–1953) 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.
Cohn was born in the Bronx in New York City and educated at Columbia University. 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.
In 1986, Cohn was disbarred by the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court for unethical conduct after attempting to defraud a dying client by forcing him to sign a will amendment leaving his fortune to Cohn. Cohn died five weeks later from AIDS-related complications, having vehemently denied that he was HIV-positive. Cohn has been the subject of many media portrayals before and since his death.
Roy Marcus Cohn was born on February 20, 1927 into an affluent Ashkenazi Jewish family in the Bronx, New York City. He was the only child of Dora (née Marcus) and Justice Albert C. Cohn; Cohn's father was an assistant district attorney of Bronx County at the time, and was later appointed as a judge of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court. His maternal great-uncle was Joshua Lionel Cowen, the founder and long-time owner of the Lionel Corporation, a manufacturer of toy trains. A botched pediatric surgery to modify the appearance of his nose left Cohn with a prominent scar.
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.
Cohn's maternal grandfather Joseph S. Marcus founded the Bank of United States in 1913. The bank failed in 1931 during the Great Depression, and its then-president Bernie Marcus, Cohn's uncle, was convicted of fraud. Bernie Marcus was imprisoned at Sing Sing, and the young Cohn frequently visited him there.
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.
As an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Cohn helped to secure convictions in a number of well-publicized trials of accused Soviet moles. One of the first began in December 1950 with the prosecution of William Remington, a former Commerce Department employee and member of the War Production Board who had been charged with espionage following the defection of former KGB handler Elizabeth Bentley. Although an indictment for espionage could not be secured, Remington had denied his long-time membership in the Communist Party USA under oath on two separate occasions and was later convicted of perjury in two separate trials.
While working in Irving H. Saypol's office for the Southern District of New York, Cohn assisted with the prosecutor's case against 11 senior members of the American Communist Party for advocating for the violent overthrow of the U.S. Federal Government, under the Smith Act.
By November 19, 1952, he was also reported to be working as adjunct professor at New York Law School. There, he taught criminology and legal ethics. Cohn was no longer teaching at NYLS by 1981, with his last reported activity being in 1979.
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 assisted the espionage activities of his brother-in-law by acting as a courier of classified documents that had been stolen from the Manhattan Project by Klaus Fuchs.
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 for Ethel based on his personal recommendation while Kaufman had told Cohn he decided before the trial began that he was going to impose the death penalty on Julius. Cohn denied, however, participation in any illegal ex parte discussions.
Consensus among legal scholars 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' execution in 2016 was merely ill-advised, in 2018 shifting to unwarranted. Summarizing both these consensuses, Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz wrote that the Rosenbergs were "guilty—and framed."
The Rosenberg trial brought the 24-year-old Cohn to the attention of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover. With support from Hoover and Cardinal Spellman, Hearst columnist George Sokolsky convinced Joseph McCarthy to hire Cohn as his chief counsel, choosing him over Robert F. Kennedy. Cohn assisted McCarthy with his work for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, becoming known for his aggressive questioning of suspected Communists. Cohn preferred not to hold hearings in open forums, which went well with McCarthy's preference for holding "executive sessions" and "off-the-record" sessions away from the Capitol 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.
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. whom Cohn and McCarthy exposed as homosexuals 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."