Disloyal: A Memoir

by Michael Cohen

  “Is that right?” I replied.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Well, you might want to think about that,” I said, my temper rising. “Because I know for a fact that your son was on that ledge a few nights ago and he did a freaking Peeping Tom act on your neighbors. The kid was drunk, with a bunch of buddies having a party at your place. So they were screwing around and intruding on the privacy of your neighbors in a way that just might be a criminal offense under New York law.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, now sounding uncertain and scared.

  “You know that college your son has applied to?” I said. “The one you’ve been working so hard to get him in to? Well, how are they going to like it when I tell them that your son is a drunken pervert, spying on your neighbors? How about the police—what are they going to think? Your wife? Because that’s what’s going to happen.”

  “You can’t—”

  “I just did,” I said, cutting him off and now talking with menace in my voice. “This is as serious as a heart attack. What you’re going to do is execute the document I’m going to email you, in the next twenty minutes, or I’m going to bring hell down on your shoulders. Your choice.”

  Twenty minutes later, I was in Trump’s office brandishing the executed permission to enter the apartment and make the necessary renovations. The issue had eaten at Trump for months, the kind of infuriating dispute that got under his skin and drove him crazy; he wanted his way at all times, and he wanted it immediately.

  “No, shit, Michael, how did you get this?”

  “I can’t tell you,” I said.

  “C’mon. Why not?”

  “Plausible deniability,” I said. “Boss, there are some things you don’t want to know about, and this is one of those.”

  “Wow,” Trump said, contemplating the release with wonder and delight. “This is a real Roy Cohn move.”

  I knew there was no higher praise from the man I was starting to call Boss.

  * * *

  On the last day of my first week, I was summoned by a call from Trump’s assistant, Rhona Graff. She told me that Trump wanted to see me.

  “You called me, Boss,” I said, standing at the threshold to Trump’s office.

  “Yeah,” Trump said. “Grab your jacket. We’re going to the GM building for a meeting of the Trump casino board. We’re leaving in five minutes. It’s only a couple of blocks, so we’ll walk over.”

  “Yes, sir, I’ll bring my file.”

  This was the moment Trump was going to deploy my legal strategy on the board of TER. I was dutifully waiting at the elevator when Trump arrived in his customary oversized jacket and extra-long red tie. Descending to the ground floor and the pink marble atrium, Trump walked into the crowd of people shopping in the lobby, mostly tourists come to gape at the American excess the building personified.

  Stepping out of the elevator, an electric current traveled through the atrium as people turned, in disbelief, and caught sight of Trump’s distinctive orange combover and hulking presence. The Apprentice was the most popular reality show on television at the time, making Trump a genuine celebrity, but this was more than the adulation given to an actor or a rock star, it seemed to me. Trump embodied an entire portfolio of ambitions and desires and resentments, for countless people, including me.

  To an outsider, my attraction to Trump—or as I described it, my “obsession”—seemed to have its roots in money and power and my lust to possess these attributes, if even only by proxy. What other explanation was there for my starstruck, moth-to-the-flame compulsion to insinuate myself with a man so transparently problematic in myriad ways? But I knew the real answer, for me and others in Trump’s world, and eventually for a significant percentage of the citizens of the United States. The answer, I was coming to see, included something deeper than the obvious lures of money and power, though those were crucial factors. It was physical, emotional, not quite spiritual, but a deep longing and need that Trump filled for me. Around Trump I felt excited, alive, like he possessed the urgent and only truth, the chance for my salvation and success in life.

  It was only the beginning of my tenure with Trump, but this day was etched on my soul—even as I gave that soul over to the man I worshipped, a word that wasn’t too extreme to describe the devotion I was starting to feel. Trump could have quietly exited the building through a rear entrance, or in a car from the parking lot below, but he thrived on the attention the tourists and passers-by heaped on him. What was a cheap jolt of adrenaline for Trump, and a way of showing off to his new acolyte attorney, for me represented something mystical.

  “That’s Donald Trump,” the rumblings began amongst the midday crowd in the atrium. Growing more loud, like a wave rippling over the large space and turning to an excited din, the exclamations turned to “That’s Donald Trump!” and catcalls saying, “Tell my son he’s fired!” Trump stopped for selfies and signed whatever was put in front of him, from clothing to baseballs to bare skin.

  The voyage from the elevator to the revolving door onto Fifth Avenue was perhaps one hundred feet, but Trump and I had barely moved a few feet when the crowd started closing in.

  I remember this like it happened yesterday. Trump glanced in my direction, gave me his devilish grin and winked at me. He motioned for me to come closer as the masses started to jostle and push to get closer. When I was right next to him he whispered, “This is what Trump is all about.”

  The energy, the action, the chaos, it was intoxicating and I never wanted it to stop. I was a junky in need of a fix. Even though the attention wasn’t for me, I didn’t care. I was in the Very Important Person section of this small, exclusive club, and I loved being there.

  Finally arriving at the GM Building, catty corner from Central Park South, Trump again did selfies with the security guards, and then we went up to the meeting of Trump Entertainment Resorts.

  In the boardroom, I outlined Trump’s position on the buyout proposals under consideration and how he controlled the parking lot and food court and both were in a state of disrepair, putting TER in default. As Trump’s designated hard-ass, I described the consequences for the board if they failed to heed Trump’s directions on the matter—insolvency, chaos, disgrace; I laid it on thick and heavy.

  As I spoke, Trump suddenly interrupted. I surmised that he felt that his attorney had brought the issues to a head and now it was time for the billionaire to bring down the hammer. I watched in silent admiration as Trump laid down the law to the board in a dramatic and overbearing fashion, the board likewise stunned into silence. The food court and parking lot were shit holes, he said, and the disgraceful disrepair entitled him to demand the breaches of contract be remedied. In the meantime, that gave him veto power over the company—and that meant that the board had to do what he wanted, whatever that happened to be.

  Then Trump suddenly stopped talking. The meeting was far from over; it was really only just beginning, with many difficult, unresolved issues to be addressed. But Trump didn’t care. He sensed he had an advantage, however transitory or weak in substance, and so this was the moment he ended the meeting, as if he were yelling cut on the set of his own personal reality television show.

  “Michael—we’re done, let’s go,” Trump said. “This meeting is over.”

  My head was spinning. Still high from the adoration in the atrium at Trump Tower, now I was storming out of a high-powered board meeting with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line and Trump had suddenly, unilaterally, melodramatically, called an end to the proceedings, apparently for no other reason than that he could.

  Trump’s supposed victory was pyrrhic, and short lived. As events emerged in the coming months and years, Trump Entertainment Resorts would fail to find a buyer. Despite Trump’s histrionics, it ended up in bankruptcy again in 2009, owing in excess of $1 billion. In 2014, the company would file for bankru
ptcy yet again, turning union members into another class of stiffed debtors. Its assets dwindled to the pathetic specter of a hulk of an abandoned wreck once known as the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City waiting for its demolition. With blown-out windows, gilded ceilings collapsed, and giant holes in shoddy floors, the eyesore and firetrap illustrated the delusional and failed business endeavors of Trump. A blight on the boardwalk, once the epitome of Trump’s wildly ambitious approach to business outlined in The Art of the Deal in the 1980s, the bluster and bullying that Trump displayed at the board meeting might have given me pause. But it didn’t. To the contrary: I was even more ardently astounded by Trump’s performance.

  Walking through the lobby at the GM Building the day of the Trump Entertainment Resorts board meeting was like the experience at Trump Tower, only even more intense, with as many as a thousand people jostling for a peek, a photo, an autograph, some connection to a man so many held in awe. I felt like I belonged to something—someone—special and important. It didn’t occur to me that the entire spectacle had been staged for my benefit. Not because I would actually benefit in any way, of course, but that it was part of a performance meant to draw me into Trump’s centrifugal force, precisely in the way a con man draws a mark into his world. Like a confidence artist, Trump was showing me that he inhabited a different type of reality, one that he would share with me alone, a world that was filled with wonder and excitement and power and intrigue and adulation. All I had to do was do what I was told, without question or a second thought. I didn’t just accept this invitation; I leapt at it. I wasn’t Trump’s mark as much as I was his acolyte, a willing participant in a fantasy that heightened my senses and my sense of self.

  “Stay close, my man,” Trump whispered to me in the lobby. “These are Trump people. Isn’t this something?”

  Chapter Three

  The El Caribe

  At the same time as I dreamt of nothing but business and money and power as a child, to the extent a small boy can comprehend such ambitions, I never dreamed that I’d be working for a billionaire real estate tycoon in the heart of Manhattan. I grew up in a very nice center hall colonial in Lawrence, one of the well-to-do suburbs known as the Five Towns on Long Island, just outside New York City. There were four bedrooms, with an extra room in the back for our live-in help, and we were a prosperous and happy family. The atmosphere in my home was very Jewish, not so much religiously as culturally. My father Maurice was a Holocaust survivor from Poland. As a kid, aged six, he’d had to hide in the woods with his family during the German occupation of the Second World War, which had a formative impact on him. My Dad wasn’t hugely religiously into Judaism when I was a kid, but he was very proud of his heritage as a Jew, and that formed a big part of my identity growing up and hanging around with other Jewish kids, many of them the children of refugees from the former Soviet Union.

  During the war, my father’s family had the relative good fortune to wind up in a Russian internment camp instead of one of the German death camps in Poland, such as Auschwitz. His family was prosperous in Poland, though his father was only a butcher, and when they were released after the war, they traded their jewels to finance a voyage to Ellis Island and the American dream. But they were turned away in New York because they were all ill with malaria, so the family was sent to Toronto, Canada, where my dad was raised and educated. After graduating from medical school in Toronto and specializing in ear, nose, and throat medicine, along with reconstructive head and neck surgery, he came to New York in the 1960s when he was in his late twenties to teach at the Downstate Medical Center, where he met my mother, Sandy, a surgical nurse.

  Living in the suburbs, I went to yeshiva for elementary school, and I was a good kid—sweet and sensitive, if you can believe it. But by middle school, another aspect of my character was emerging. I became the class clown, always joking around with my buddies and getting on the teacher’s nerves. I could have been a good student, but to the frustration of my parents and a long succession of teachers, I didn’t care much about grades or studying. From as early as I can remember, I was interested in business and making money. I was the kind of kid who set up a lemonade stand outside our house, with a couple of neighborhood boys, and when cars didn’t stop, I went into our yard and dragged a picnic bench into the middle of the street to force them to slow down. Adults driving home thought it was adorable and hilarious that a six-year-old had such chutzpah, but we made a fortune that day and we blew it buying ice cream for all the kids we knew.

  I had an older sister, Melissa, a little sister, Lori, and a younger brother, Bryan. As a kid I could have had my own room, but when Bryan was born, I volunteered to have him share it with me. He was seven years younger than me, but I’d always wanted a little brother, so Bryan became not just a sibling, but someone I wanted to mentor and protect and inspire.

  For high school, I went to Woodmere Academy, a good private college-prep school filled with preppies. I hung out with the popular crowd, for the most part, but I had friends from all kinds of groups. I stood out from the crowd because I never took a drink, not even one sip of beer, so I was often the designated driver when we went out at night. I was a responsible kid, well dressed, polite to adults, but always with the quick joke to my buddies. As strange as it might sound, given how badly I got lost as an adult, in school I hated bullies, or anyone who picked on someone weaker. I started to lift weights, because I was so skinny, and I have never suffered from cowardice or feared confrontation, so I had a few fistfights—always, I believed, for a good cause.

  My dad had a medical practice in Brooklyn and he worked long hours, so I grew close to my Uncle Morty Levine, my mother’s older brother. He was a playboy bachelor who never had kids, and he still lived at home with my grandparents, leaving him time to hang out with me as he cruised around Brooklyn in his Bentley. Morty was also a doctor and basically a member of my nuclear family because he was at our place so much, eating meals or just hanging out. But his main interest in life was running the swanky catering hall and mob hangout he owned in Mill Basin called the El Caribe. Morty was a real ladies’ man, with flashy cars and always a different woman on his arm, but he just loved consorting with the wise guys who were members of the El Caribe. To Morty, the mobsters were funny, irreverent, a little scary—maybe even a lot scary—but they had a mystique about them, and there was no question about their willingness to break the rules, or the law. This approach to life was contagious, and I caught the bug just like my uncle had.

  Ever since I was a kid, I have had a strong sense of loyalty, along with its evil twin of fury at betrayal. When I was in high school, one of my teachers told my parents that I was one of the most loyal friends he had ever seen—but that I was also the worst enemy to those who didn’t repay my loyalty. The teacher meant it as an insult, I knew, but I took it as a compliment.

  The roots of this part of my character harkened back to my days at the El Caribe watching wise guys from the Gambino and Lucchese crime families and how they behaved. They always had a specific kind of energy around them, a charisma that I found compelling. They were constantly joking around and playing tricks and pulling pranks on each other, which I liked, and which came to be how we acted at the Trump Organization—like gangsters, but in suits and ties. At the same time, the men in the El Caribe demanded and commanded respect. They were gangsters, and the sense of fear that people felt around them—that I felt around them—was very powerful.

  In the 1980s, Brooklyn was a very different place than it is now. The borough was riddled with mobsters—Italian, Russian, dirty cops on the take; it was like the whole borough was dedicated to organized crime. The El Caribe was at the white-hot heart of the scene in that era. The country club was the kind of place where a mob boss like Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso threw his daughter’s wedding, a nice affair with a bottle of Moët on every table and representatives from all five families and their wives dressed to the nines. There was the Emerald Room and the Tiar
a Room and the Venetian Hour Room, with candlelit white linen dining with real silverware. It was classy, in a specific over-the-top Brooklyn ethnic way: Corinthian columns, giant chandeliers, garish luxury.

  For me, the real action at the El Caribe was in the summer at the swim club and gym, where wise guys swam laps, worked on their biceps, and plotted murders, and I was right in the middle of it. If you believe some in the press, this somehow made me half a mobster. This was where a lot of the false speculation about my connections to organized crime came from. The allegations that I was a mobbed-up teenager are ridiculous, the fevered fantasies of journalists all swept up in conspiracy theories as crazy as the lunatic right that Trump attracts. I was a high school student: I didn’t whack guys; I went to algebra class.

  But there was a kernel of truth to the notion that the El Caribe did play a role in shaping my persona and teaching me the principles that I have lived by, for good or ill. The role model of the Brooklyn mobster tough guy from the ’80s was definitely part of how I acted in the Trump Organization and during the 2016 election campaign. The Boss himself grew up in Queens, and he also drank from the same mob-infused waters of New York City mafia machismo. Trump’s father Fred also had long experience with the wise guys of Brooklyn, who controlled the cement industry, and he had taught his son how to stay on the good side of the mafia and ensure construction projects came in on time by greasing the right palms.

  The things I learned at the El Caribe were loyalty, friendship, and omerta—or the mafia code to keep your mouth shut. I was just a kid, but I was in close proximity to some of the biggest and toughest and most dangerous gangsters in New York, and therefore the world.

  To me, even though I didn’t understand what was really happening—that all the talk about loyalty and honor and the family was bullshit and that all that mattered was money and power, much like in the Trump Organization—I was attracted to the scene. Very attracted. To my young eyes, it seemed like they were answering to a higher power—not religious, of course, but a strong, ruthless tribal loyalty that gave them the courage and ambition to do precisely what they wanted, no matter the consequences.