Disloyal: A Memoir

by Michael Cohen

  “Damn good thinking,” Trump said.

  Praised once again, I was walking on air as I made my way home to the now-completed Trump Park Avenue apartment, a short four-block jaunt. For a fleeting moment I felt sorry for E.J., having his company taken away from him in the blink of an eye. But that emotion was swallowed up by the recollection of the day’s events, Trump’s accolades, and the completion of the task. “Mission Accomplished,” I thought to myself, riding the elevator up to my apartment. I confess I never really did understand why pleasing Trump meant so much to me, and others. To this day I don’t have the full answer.

  In a matter of a couple of months, I had started falling under the spell of Donald Trump. The question no longer was what I would do for Trump—the question was what I wouldn’t do. And the short answer was that I would do and say pretty much anything. I had not only bullied a perfect stranger, without knowing the complexities or legal framework of the dispute, but I did it with gusto and an utter lack of conscience. Filled with pride, I didn’t wonder what lay ahead, or what other moral and ethical and ultimately criminal boundaries I would cross. Nor did I consider that Trump was testing my fealty and submissiveness, the way a gang leader assesses a new recruit, giving the wannabe small crimes to commit to see if he will act without question or concern for his own well-being. Donald Trump was like a mafia don, in a sense, and I wanted to be his soldier in the worst way, and I was ready to pass any test put in my path.

  Entering my new apartment on the 10th floor, I was greeted warmly by my wife Laura, daughter Samantha, twelve, and son Jake, seven. Eager to tell Laura about my heroic exploits, at least in my mind, I was shocked to see her face contort into a grimace as I related details of confronting and unmanning E.J. Ridings at the behest of Donald Trump. As the rush of words poured out, her face crinkled into a frown and she started to shake her head in disapproval. This mystified me as I continued to talk like a warrior returned from the field of battle, only to discover that what I thought was heroic didn’t look the same way to Laura. I was at a loss for words at my wife’s response; I thought for sure she would not only approve of what I’d done, but see it the way I did: as a triumph.

  “Your day sounds horrible to me,” Laura said, my shoulders slouching in bewilderment as I discovered there was another way to view what I’d done that day to please Trump.

  Bullying people to do things was not attractive to her at all. She wasn’t impressed by things like that. When I started doing work for Donald Trump, I wanted her approval, but she wasn’t going to give me praise for pushing someone else around. We didn’t talk a lot about business and my work, and she let me go my own way, but I wasn’t going to be admired at home for the things I was doing for Donald Trump, and I knew it. As our children grew older, they came to feel the same way. They would beg me to quit working for Trump, but I didn’t listen. It seemed to them that I wouldn’t listen to anyone, not even the people who loved me most, as I gradually gave up control of my mind to Trump.

  Chapter Two

  The Fixer

  Early in 2007, I received another call from Don Jr., asking for my assistance in a media relations matter that had come up. The younger Trump knew that I had a lot of connections in the press, from the New York Post to Politico from my two runs for elected office, and they needed a resident in one of their projects to provide a testimonial for an article being written about a proposed project in Jersey City, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, that I was considering investing in. I was happy to help, for no charge, as I now viewed the elder Trump as a pathway to the corridors of power in the city and beyond.

  I needed no instruction from the Trumps about what to say. This was the skill I would develop over the years, as I became Trump’s spokesman, thug, pit bull, and lawless lawyer. Trump viewed any representation of his name, brand, properties, or the products he endorsed to be a matter of the highest importance. He wanted all of his interactions with the press to be manipulated for maximum benefit, no matter the underlying truth, and in a postmodern society where the representation of the thing was more important than the thing itself, at least in Trump’s intuitive way of seeing power and spin, that meant a relentless willingness to lie, exaggerate, mislead, and above all brag and boast and boost.

  “Trump properties are solid investments,” I told the New York Post for an article about Trump titled “Upping the Ante” that appeared in February 2007.

  “Michael Cohen has great insights in the real-estate market,” Trump said about me in the article. “He has invested in my buildings because he likes to make money—and he does.”

  Trump concluded, “In short, he’s a very smart person.”

  This was the mutual-admiration society we were forming, or perhaps we were just metaphorically jerking each other off, to be a little coarse, but Trump knew I’d love it when he’d sent me a signed copy of the article telling me what a great job I’d done. And so I did.

  Now impatient for more Trump action, it was only a matter of another few weeks before he called me again. Instead of the show-of-strength feats I had performed for him the first two times, now he wanted to draw on my legal expertise, I discovered. Trump’s current lawyers had told him that the ongoing dispute with the board of directors of Trump International Resorts—what he referred to as the “casino board”—wasn’t going well. The company was in Chapter 11 and faced liquidation and ruination. According to Trump’s attorneys, he had no way to stop the board from continuing to limit and proscribe his ability to influence the company as liquidation closed in, yet again. The agreements that Trump had entered into were too restrictive, they said, terms drafted by white-shoe firms who had papered Trump’s deal with the publicly traded company.

  In many ways, Trump Entertainment Resorts—or TER—was emblematic of Trump’s career as a showman and entrepreneur. Trump styled himself as an iconoclastic businessman in Manhattan initially, but his time in Atlantic City was when he became a real fixture in the tabloids. The first crisis for the company came in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, a potential catastrophe Trump had escaped in the short term by having his father Fred Trump buy millions of dollars’ worth of chips from the casino as a way to avoid reporting a loan to the casino regulatory board. Running to Daddy and using his bank account for a bail-out didn’t square with Trump’s image as a swashbuckling self-made billionaire, so this desperate move was little known and never discussed by Trump.

  Through Trump’s years of repeated boom and bust, casinos had remained at the heart of his brand and business strategy, nearly always with the result that creditors lost money loaned to these concerns—part of the reason virtually all of the banks in the United States refused to do business with him. In 2007, the board was now trying to negotiate a buyout with different suitors, hoping to attract private firms or publicly traded companies to acquire the failed enterprise.

  “Michael, what do you know about bankruptcy and Chapter 11 procedures?” Trump asked when I entered his office.

  “Very little,” I said. “Thankfully.”

  “The board is busting my balls,” he said, ignoring what I’d said. “My lawyers say that there is nothing I can do about it. I want you to read these documents and give me your opinion. I want you to find something I can use to bargain with.”

  Trump handed me two giant documents, both more than five hundred pages, each tome an ocean of legal technicality and detail.

  “Whoa,” I said, “this is like War and Peace times two.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I want you to bill me for your time on this one. Just don’t take advantage of your hours.”

  “I value your trust in me,” I said. “I would never take advantage of you.”

  “By the way, what is your hourly?”

  “The firm bills me out at $750 an hour.”

  “Shit,” Trump said. “You’re expensive. But you gotta understand
that I never pay lawyers their rack rate.”

  “I’m not worried. I know where you live and work.”

  Trump ignored my attempted joke.

  I went home and started to review the documents. My education in bankruptcy law was a dim memory from distant days in law school, and I was nobody’s idea of a legal scholar. But I could read the documents and cross-reference the various provisions and it was quickly evident that the odds were stacked against Trump. He’d self-evidently been negotiating from a position of weakness, which was typical for folks who are deep in debt and up against financial institutions used to getting their way. Trump was the chairman of the board, I saw, but it was really only as a figurehead. His rights as a member of the board were also basically nonexistent, in substance, and all of the real decision-making power was in the hands of others. The situation seemed dire—as might be expected for a company that had clearly been run into the ground by years of what seemed to be bad leadership and poor decision-making.

  It was clear that Trump wanted me to find some kind of loophole or legal technicality that he could leverage to his advantage. I was beginning to understand what Trump wanted from me. He didn’t want me to be like his other lawyers, measuring the merits of a situation and providing advice based on sound legal reasoning. He had lawyers who could provide that kind of guidance. He didn’t need me to be a lawyer when he was in the right. He needed a lawyer for when he was in the wrong: when he was trying to go around the law, or offer a twisted or tortured interpretation to an agreement that could be used to screw the other side.

  Roy Cohn was Trump’s Platonic ideal as an advocate. In the 1970s, Cohn had represented Trump when he and his father Fred were investigated by the Department of Justice for discriminating against blacks in his rental properties in New York City. The truth was simple, as I would come to learn: the Trumps were actually racist, scheming to keep African Americans out of their rental properties. But that didn’t matter to Trump. He wanted a lawyer who would fight when the cause was clearly racist and illegal.

  Roy Cohn had played the role of pit bull for Trump until the Boss dropped him like a hot potato in his hour of greatest need when he was dying of AIDS—a fate I should have considered as I insinuated myself into Trump’s world. That night, all I kept thinking was that I didn’t want to disappoint Mr. Trump. That’s how I put it in my mind. Like so many now, in Congress and in the press, I was willing to say and do anything to please Trump. I was exactly like Rudolph Giuliani would become: the crazed advocate mocking others and proving my unquestioning loyalty, even as it led to ruin.

  That night I obsessed over the documents. I read and reread the pages, looking for an angle, an argument, a way to give Trump an edge. Think, you dope, I said to myself. Think, you dope. I was pacing around the apartment, talking aloud to myself, getting mad at myself, finally outright yelling at myself like a demented football coach giving himself a furious halftime beat down: “Goddamn it, you can’t fail,” I hollered at myself. “Find something, goddamn it, find something.”

  “Stop it, Michael,” my wife Laura said to me as she watched me ranting and raving like a lunatic. “If there is something in there you’ll find it. Calm down. This is his problem, not yours.”

  Laura insisted we go to dinner with friends that evening, as we had planned, but I was hopelessly distracted at the restaurant. She took my hand and stroked me gently, reassuringly, and my worries faded away, at least for a while.

  But when we got home around midnight, I sat down with the documents and began to scour the terms again.

  “How long are you going to read tonight?” Laura asked.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said. “Sleep tight.”

  Laura rolled her eyes. “So stupid,” she said, heading to bed.

  Deep in the night, sitting under my lone light in the living room overlooking Park Avenue, I stumbled upon the hook. I carefully reviewed the sections related to the “Trump Mark,” as it was defined in the agreements, double- and triple-checking what looked like a potential hole in the brick wall the elite lawyers had constructed around Trump. My reading was perhaps unorthodox, and it certainly strained the underlying business intentions, in all likelihood, but it seemed like there was a defensible legal argument. Or at least enough of a suggestion of one to raise an issue for Trump to bring before the board.

  The concept revolved around the licensing agreements that Trump had with the company, as they related to the Trump Mark, and his ability to remove his name from a property if he was dissatisfied with how it was being managed. Trump could claim that TER was in default and that they had failed to cure the breach, I argued. Although there wasn’t, in fact and in law, really a reason to claim a breach, times were very rough in Atlantic City, yet again, and available funds were being spent on general maintenance and payroll, leaving certain elements of the Taj to fall into disrepair. Throughout all of his permutations since the early ’90s, including bankruptcies and financial disaster, Trump had somehow managed to retain control of the food court and parking lot of the casino. If he alleged that both weren’t properly maintained—that they were pigsties—Trump could use that as a basis to refuse the company access to those areas. A casino with no parking or food services would be in serious trouble, I knew, allowing Trump to have the upper hand as he demanded “necessary repairs”—which he would then slow walk or block from being done.

  The logic of the two-page memorandum I wrote to Trump was immediately apparent to him. Trump effectively had no special rights as a board member or chairman, but this approach gave him a virtual veto over the company’s activities.

  “No food, and worse, no place to park the thousands of cars for staff and visitors,” I said to Trump.

  “Yes,” said Trump. “Nice.”

  Trump held up the memorandum. “How much time did you put into this?” he asked.

  “It took me around one hundred hours,” I said. “The invoice is going to be around $100,000.”

  “Geez,” said Trump. “I thought we were friends.”

  Trump eyed me, weighing what to say next.

  “Look, you clearly love this shit,” he said. “It’s exciting here and you get to do great things. You must hate it over there, at that sleepy old firm. It’s not you.”

  “What are you saying, Mr. Trump?” I asked.

  “Would you be interested in working for me, directly, answering only to me?

  I didn’t know what to say—because I was dumbfounded.

  “Can I have a day or two to think this over?” I asked.

  “No,” Trump said. “I’ll send my guys over to pack up your office and bring your stuff here in the Trump Tower, to my floor. I’ll set you up in Ivanka’s old office.”

  Trump offered a lowball salary. I countered and we met in the middle, less money than I was making at my firm. But I was already wealthy, with my taxi medallions and real-estate holdings worth millions, so it wasn’t the pay that most interested me. The attraction was the action: the game, the deals, the thrill of the chase.

  “Don’t tell anyone how much I’m paying you,” Trump said. “I don’t pay anyone that much.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But what about my invoice?”

  “Invoice?” he said. “You want to get fired on your first day?”

  * * *

  I didn’t think about the fact that I had been recording my hours at my law firm, and that Trump owed the firm the fees, not me personally, another indication of how untethered from a normal way of behaving I was beginning to act. My little brother still worked at the firm and he was soon getting harassed by the billing department for the Trump payables, the first step in our falling out of touch as I entered the hall of mirrors of Trump’s world.

  Sitting in my new office on the 26th floor a few days later, my new desk neatly tricked up with two phones and two staplers and two legal pads at the ready, I read about an ong
oing dispute in the Trump Park Avenue development, the building where I lived. During the renovations, from its former glory as the glamorous Delmonico Hotel—the place where the Beatles met Bob Dylan, to give just one example of its storied history—the construction crew hadn’t removed a ledge-like feature from one of the higher floors on the back of the building. The ledge looked like a balcony, but it didn’t have railings, and thus constituted a significant danger to residents, making it impossible for Trump to obtain the necessary certificate of occupancy without its removal.

  For months, Trump executive Matthew Calamari had tried to resolve the issue with the owner of the unit with the ledge, to provide access for a crew to remove the hazard, but the man had refused to cooperate; he was unwilling to put up with the dust and noise and adopted a belligerent stance. I noted the man’s name, recognizing him as a fellow resident I saw in the lobby from time to time. I was filing the matter away, hoping a solution would bubble to the surface, when I went to dinner that evening with some friends who also lived in TPA. Over veal parmigiana at an uptown eatery called Elio’s, I heard a scandalous story from our friends: the couple had been in their bedroom the night before, making love, when they were startled by the sight of a drunken teenage boy leering at them from the ledge of the apartment next door. My friends were furious, saying that the kid was about to go to college and they weren’t sure what to say or do about the Peeping Tom intrusion.

  This was incredible good fortune, I knew instantly: the name of the kid involved was the same as the man who had been giving the Trump Organization a hard time. The tables were about to be reversed, with prejudice, I realized with scarcely concealed delight.

  The next morning I called the man, introducing myself with my new title of Executive Vice President and Special Counsel to Donald Trump, and laid out the case for allowing access to remove the ledge, as a safety hazard and a courtesy. I was patient and lawyerly.

  “I’m not doing shit,” the man replied.