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Creepy attorney and Trump Mentor Roy Cohn with drunken Sen. Joseph McCarthy from Grand Chute, Wis.

The devastating duo of Donald and Roy
So, we have the Divided States of America ruled by President Donald Trump, raised in a 23-room mansion and schooled in a wealthy private elementary private school through seventh grade, attended high school at a private boarding school, the New York Military Academy, college at Fordham University and then the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania where he said he was at the top of his class!

And then we have Roy Cohn, the only son born into an affluent Ashkenazi Jewish family, where his father was an assistant district attorney (who later became a judge at the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court), who attended Fieldston School, the Horace Mann High School, and was such a good student he graduated from Columbia University Law School at the age of 20, worked as a clerk for the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was admitted to the bar at age 21, and became an assistant U.S. attorney immediately.

In 2017, when a federal investigation was going to take place to see if Russia had helped Trump’s campaign against Hillary Clinton, the president was very angry and yelled: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Roy had died from AIDS almost 40 years earlier. (From this point in the column I will use Donald and Roy to identify them.)

They had known each other for only 15 years, but in those 15 years they had used each other to gain fame and fortune in New York City, so each one had a picture of the other on their office walls with glowing notes written to each other.
Why did these two men have such a close relationship when neither had empathy for anyone else?
Donald claimed he was proud he never changed diapers, although he had five children. Go figure that one.

I will attempt to answer with quotes from many sources I have collected through the years.

Roy, a rather small homely closeted gay man, met Donald, a 6’3” handsome, blue-eyed blonde under 30 at a private dining club called Le Club in a small white house with a brass “Members Only” plaque of devious purpose.

His first reaction: “One day this kid is going to own New York.”

A lawyer who worked with Roy said: “Roy loved to surround himself with attractive straight men.”

Quotes of a totally ignorant “Ritchie” and a chaotic genius
Donald, after being introduced to Roy: “I don’t like lawyers. I think all they do is delay deals, instead of making deals, and every answer they give you is no, and they are always looking to settle instead of fight. I’m just not built that way. I’d rather fight than fold, because as soon as you fold once, you get that reputation of being a folder.”

Roy, when asked by Donald how he should react to a government charge he discriminated blacks: “Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove that you discriminated.”
Donald thought it was splendid advice. In 1927, Donald’s father was arrested with other white-hooded Ku Klux Klan at a riot in Queens.

Songwriter-entertainer Woody Guthrie was a renter in one of 15,000 apartments owned by Donald’s father Fred. Here is the song “Old Man Trump” written by him: “I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate/ He stirred up in the bloodspot of human hearts/ Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower/ Where no Black folks come to roam.”

Donald about being by Roy’s side at events: “I got to know everybody important in New York.”

At a fundraiser with Roy at 30 years of age, Donald met William F. Buckley, Jr, Supreme Court justices, the New York mayor-elect, and many New York rich.

Buckley said to Donald and others: “Roy is a man who has triumphed over his tormentors, and he deserves the credit we are here to give him so enthusiastically.”

Roy, during a trial on racism, accused the government of using “Gestapo-like interrogations like stormtroopers.” The judge reprimanded him. Roy responded: “I have never brought a charge against the FBI in my life. I have personal reasons why I haven’t. My relationship with the FBI is much too close.” 

Roy was a “close” friend of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who, in the end, was also gay.

Roy, in 1975, told an attorney taking Donald’s deposition: “Leave Donald alone. He’s going to be big one day.”

Roy spread the word around town that Donald was “worth $200 million.” Donald rode around in a limo with vanity plates and car phone but was not worth $200 million.

In 1977, Donald paid $42,386 in taxes on an income of $118,530. In 1978 his salary was less than $100,000.

Donald: “I’m not an attack dog unless I’m attacked!”

Donald learned from Roy: Always avoid a paper trail, do not take notes, and, if possible, do business over a phone. Later, Roy told a reporter: “Donald calls me 15 to 20 times a day.”

In a newspaper interview that had called Donald and Roy attack dogs, Donald responded in 2016: “Well, I don’t see myself as an attack dog, I see myself as somebody that’s made lots of money and done a great job and put a lot of people to work, but I don’t see myself as an attack dog unless I’m attacked.”

Donald learned from Roy how not to pay bills. Roy never had a credit card, left his house without two cents in his pocket, and invoices and bills piled up on his desk and were never paid.

A friend said: “Roy had a reputation of being a celebrity cheapskate and flimflammer.”

Another said: “He lives like a millionaire, buys like a millionaire and pays like a pauper.”

Another source said: “He would go to restaurants, and he just ran a tab. I never saw him actually pay. He just didn’t care.”

In 1976 Roy’s law firm had not paid bills for office furniture, office supplies, and owed $10,121.92 on expenses for a company plane. In 1976 he owed $370,000 in back income taxes. By 1985 it was more than $3 million.

In an article published in Parade: “I am an expert on the subject. Keep one step ahead of them (IRS). If there is a problem, change bank accounts so they can’t grab your funds by knowing from your records where you bank.”

He opened tiny accounts in tiny banks in rural Connecticut. His houses, Rolls Royce, plane and yacht were leased or held in the name of shell companies. Roy’s townhouse was in the name of his law firm’s office manager.

Roy’s friend Roger Stone: “Donald is a man working without a net. He uses the strategy of Roy Cohn to be in your face, to attack, to drive the argument. Politics is about who dominates the dialogue.”  (Please note that there is never a mention that Donald lies all the time and has no relationship with truth.)

People knew that Roy was lying when he said: “To be absolutely frank…”

Donald had a picture on the wall of Roy, and when he was in negotiations in person in his office and was having a bad time, he would point to Roy’s picture and say: “Would you rather deal with him?”

In an interview recently, he said: “He (Roy) was a wonderful lawyer. He did a very good job. Other people would say that they weren’t happy with him. But that’s the way life goes, right?”

In 1986, five weeks before he died of AIDS, Roy was disbarred “for unethical conduct” by the New York Supreme Court after attempting to defraud a dying client by forcing him to sign a will amendment.

Roy and the mobs of New York helped Donald build Trump Tower
Donald brought Roy into his real estate business to get building permits and zoning exceptions. The Bonwit Teller building he was demolishing was an old landmark with historical Art Deco friezes and grilles over entrances which were promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They were destroyed by Donald’s jackhammers.

He got into more trouble by hiring 200 undocumented Polish workers of a window washing company to demolish the building. Low wages and terrible working conditions brought worker protests. Roy replaced the Poles with House Wreckers Union Local 45, controlled by a New York mobster. The Polish workers sued, but it took 15 years of court battles until Donald wrote a $1.4 million check to settle the case.

He also hired S&A Concrete to pour cement for Trump Tower, which was owned by mobster “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castelliano, the boss of the Gambino mob, one of the five “mobs” that controlled much of the sins in New York. Roy oversaw these operations and sold apartments in Trump Towers to members of the Luchese crime family.

Donald asked Roy to intervene when Mayor Ed Koch denied a tax abatement for him for building Trump Tower because it was for the wealthy New Yorker, not the poor.

An angry Donald called Koch’s housing commissioner: “I want you to know that I am a very rich and powerful person in this town and there is a reason I got this way. I will never forget what you did.”
He called Roy to fight. After three court battles the New York State Supreme Court decided it would approve the abatement. Mayor Koch referred to Donald as “piggy, piggy, piggy.” Donald responded by calling Koch a moron and that he was “extremely nasty, mean-spirited, and very vicious, an extremely disloyal human being.”

Donald enthusiastically endorsed aide’s statement he was most powerful man on the planet — like Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Mao and Hitler.

What happens when Donald with Roy’s shadow reaches the gate?

If there is a God, She will probably order an Angel to guide Donald-Roy through Dante’s “Inferno” of the nine circles of Hell, with Circle Nine the largest:

(1) Limbo is for the unbaptized,

(2) People overcome by lust are blown around in violent storms,

(3) Gluttons are forced to lie about in vile slush with mouths filled with mud

(4) Greedy and avaricious hoarders push heavy weights around against each other

(5) Wrathful, liars, slothful, and sullen fight each other in a swamp and the River Styx,

(6) Heretics are trapped in flaming tombs,

(7)The violent are in a river of blood, are torn by huge birds, and chased by ferocious dogs through thorny bushes,

(8) Fraudulent people guilty of deliberate evil, pimps and seducers, false prophets, and flatterers are “steeped” in human excrement,

(9) the largest circle filled with traitors to family, political entities, guests, and betrayers of Christ.
Satan himself, trapped in ice, is a giant terrifying beast with six eyes in the very center of Hell because he has committed the ultimate treachery against God.

In conclusion, it appears Donald and Roy fully qualify for attendance in the bottom eight circles. Donald just lied again: “U.S. economy is the best ever” – while we lost 23,000 jobs in July and the national debt hit $40 trillion!! 

Read the more than 14,000 lines in Dante’s Inferno.