Disloyal: A Memoir

by Michael Cohen

  When I was single again, Bryan kept telling me how great this Laura girl his girlfriend knew was, so one day I dialed her digits. Before long, we figured out that we’d met years earlier, at Sprat’s on the Water, and we were both friends with Marat Balagula’s daughter. The connection was quick and undeniable: she was gorgeous and sweet and I was sociable and ambitious and family-oriented with a soft spot for my nieces; I liked her friends and family and was happy to spend time with them. In short order, we fell for each other, hard.

  When Laura and I started dating, I naturally met her parents. She was an only child and the apple of her parents’ eye, so to speak, so they doted on her, and when it became apparent that she and I were getting serious, they also took me under their wing. Laura’s family had immigrated from Ukraine in the early ’70s, so they were technically Ukrainian, but in reality, in the former Soviet Union, their only meaningful identity was that they were Jewish. This form of identification, religious and cultural, really defined the life of the Shusterman family, much as it was central to the Cohens.

  Laura and I were married at the Pierre Hotel on October 9, 1994, with 300 guests and a really lovely ceremony, and we soon had two beautiful bouncing babies, first Samantha and then Jake. We bought an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and enrolled the kids in Colombia Grammar, the oldest non-sectarian private school in the city. I was very involved in the school, joining the board of trustees and working on countless fundraisers. As with my investment properties, where I always wanted to join the board of the condos to keep an eye on how the business was being run, I wanted to be on the board of the school, as my most precious assets were in the school’s hands.

  By then, I based my burgeoning legal practice out of a modest two-story building I co-owned in an industrial section of Long Island City, in Queens, above the workshop of a taxi business run by me and my business partner, a man named Simon Garber, a Ukrainian Jew with a checkered past but a good eye for how to make money on medallions. Simon had started out as a student driving taxis in New York and then Chicago, before he went into business in Moscow—yes, the mind spins at the coincidence, but that’s all it was. By the ’90s, Simon was running hundreds of cabs out of a garage in the famous Meatpacking District, and he and I became partners as I started to transition much of my growing net worth into the rough-and-tumble taxi industry.

  I was always on the lookout for a good deal, always looking for an edge or inside scoop. At the time, I discovered that one of my personal-injury clients had to make himself scarce in a hurry, two steps ahead of the debt collectors and the law, because he’d consolidated all of his fifty taxi medallions into a single company. One of my client’s cabbies had negligently run over and killed a Wall Street trader, and the damages had been set at more than $10 million, effectively bankrupting my client’s company. He drained the medallion company of all the cash he could and lit out for Israel, leaving his company as a shell in the rearview mirror. Dealing directly with the liquidators, Simon and I purchased many of the fifty medallions in foreclosure, and I was on my way to getting rich.

  There was really only a single problem to my partnership with Garber: Simon was a party animal. Inevitably, he started to cadge cash and grant himself advances from company accounts against future revenues so he could indulge his desires. We started to fight and it quickly got very heated, as I could see his business, and by association my business, going broke.

  The solution I came up with was to go out on my own. I moved my office to Manhattan, to shared space with my younger brother Bryan in a building occupied by one of his clients, the son of the jeweler Harry Winston. At the time, the value of taxi medallions kept rising inexorably, to nearly a million dollars each, and I started to view myself as a wealthy investor who also had a legal license on the side. My real forte was doing favors for others. This included all manner of things, from help getting a doctor’s appointment with a leading specialist for friends in the middle of a health scare, to arranging for reservations at a hot restaurant, or a political tip for a reporter. When Saudi royalty wanted to purchase the Harry Winston building, I was involved in the negotiations, establishing good relations with Middle Eastern rulers in charge of a multi-billion-dollar investment fund. That was how I was starting to network, to move myself closer to the higher reaches of power and influence; I didn’t have a specific destination in mind, but I was plenty ambitious, and very energetic, and I reveled in the sharp-edged sport of getting ahead in New York City.

  My life was in excellent order as our children moved through elementary school and Laura and I shopped for a larger apartment in Manhattan. Taxi medallions were a high-leverage asset, and I used the easy finance available from banks based on the soaring valuation of the dozens of medallions I owned to acquire yet more medallions. There was risk involved, but in the early 2000s, they seemed like a safe bet. During these years, I tried a couple of other business ventures, including a gambling cruise line in Florida that didn’t work out, but what I was really doing was networking and getting to know people in New York City’s real estate and business circles, looking for deals and opportunities.

  It was at this time that I bought into Trump World Tower, along with my parents and in-laws, renting out the unit I purchased at a handsome return, along with a unit in the Trump Palace that I flipped for a tidy profit. Along the way, I started to chat with reporters for the New York daily newspapers, especially the tabloid New York Post, as I toyed with the idea of going into politics. I would feed journalists like Maggie Haberman and Richard Johnson tidbits about deals I heard about, and in return we’d gossip about politics and news events of the day. Along the way, I decided to run for office, specifically for New York City Council in 2003, standing as a Republican against the longtime Democratic incumbent Eva Moskowitz in my uptown district; I really had no ideological opinions, apart from being pro-business, but the real attraction for me was the thrill of the fight and the chance to gain power, impulses that would grow steadily and eventually lead to my ruin. I had a knack for public speaking; I was the kind of guy who gave speeches at birthday parties, cracking jokes.

  I didn’t win, but it whetted my appetite for the cut and thrust of politics, and I discovered how much I enjoyed the back-and-forth with journalists. The persona I was developing was that of a tough, no-nonsense but clear-eyed New York attorney and businessman who was willing to work hard but also fight hard. I had a foul mouth and a wise-ass sense of humor, I like to think, but I was also beginning to try to attach myself to more powerful players in the city in the hope of rising in the ranks.

  After my unsuccessful run for office, my brother and I moved our law practice to the white-shoe firm of Phillips Nizer, as I’ve said before, and I befriended a young real estate developer named Donald Trump, Jr. when Laura and I purchased three units in the new development, Trump Park Avenue, to consolidate into a single unit. That was life, as I knew it, and it was a great one, until the nondescript day in the fall of 2006 when my phone rang and the Trump family summoned me unto my destiny and my downfall.

  Chapter Five

  Catch and Twist

  The concept of “catch and kill” has now entered the vernacular, along with the #MeToo movement and a growing awareness of the ways that wealthy and powerful men bury the truth about their predatory sexual behavior, from the rapes of Harvey Weinstein to the depredations of Trump’s old friend Jeffery Epstein, who ran a sex ring for the rich and famous at his Manhattan mansion and Caribbean island—not to mention his Palm Beach cavorting with another self-styled playboy named Donald J. Trump. The root of the word conspiracy is literally “to breathe together,” and that was precisely what rich men and publications like the National Enquirer did to hide the truth about exploiting and abusing women.

  Those rich men included my Boss.

  The reality was far more brutal and awful than has previously been revealed, as I will demonstrate. The straightforward catch and kill is on
ly the simplest form of the true endeavor, which is to find, stop, and spin or twist any story or rumor that could harm the interests or reputation of the rich and powerful. Sex was only part of the story, as Trump viewed anything that could hurt his brand or name as a mortal threat. Saying he wasn’t as rich as he pretended to be was, in many ways, worse than calling him a sexual predator; calling out his buildings or branded products as third-rate was far more damaging, in his mind, than a story about grabbing women by the pussy. The task in a catch, kill, and twist operation was to bury the truth, and if that wasn’t possible, to distort it beyond recognition, to sow doubt and confusion and even fear.

  I knew this all from personal experience, which started in my earliest days working for the Trump Organization. In the beginning, it was obvious that my role as Trump’s personal attorney was essentially managing chaos, as he was always, always, always enveloped by crisis and teetering on the brink of disaster. It was exhausting, but also exhilarating, as I always had ninety-nine problems on my desk and a thousand things to do.

  One afternoon early in my tenure, I was doing some routine work—likely cleaning up a mess made by Don Jr.—when my phone rang. It was David Pecker, the CEO of American Media, on the line. Pecker was a peculiar figure in the media, a former accountant with no journalism experience who’d parlayed a bean counter’s financial ability, along with a canny sense of timing and willingness to take up projects most would consider beneath their dignity, to become a real power in the press, running the National Enquirer and a string of smaller publications. Pecker had a signature thick moustache he’d worn for decades, and a taste for the best tables at the restaurants that were the hardest to get a reservation at—the kind of prestige marker typical for New York players keeping score on their status.

  I would discover that Pecker’s considerable power emanated from a virtually complete lack of morality or basic decency or shame, compounded by a brazen willingness to cover up rapes and assaults and despicable acts of all varieties, provided he was benefitting a powerful man and that he would receive a favor in return; in a way he was like me, a fixer, but on the next level, with tabloids doing his bidding. Pecker’s sly, secretive manner made him seem sphinxlike, but in private conversation, he was very matter of fact and transactional, always acting from the most reliable of motives: his own self-interest. He was a true master of the realpolitik of sex and scandal and power, I would discover, as he became a mentor and co-conspirator and then co-target of a federal criminal investigation.

  I’d known David for years, but this was our first conversation with me ensconced in my new role with Trump. When I started to work for Trump, another element of my curiosity was the window it might give me on how the world really worked at the highest levels—and this was my first lesson for the postgraduate degree in sleaze I was embarking on at the real real Trump University, not the fake, rip-off school the Boss used to fleece the gullible, but the genuine PhD-level education in manipulation and control I was about to get.

  “Michael, I need your help,” Pecker said calmly. “The husband of a woman named Jill Harth is alleging that Donald forcibly kissed her after cornering her at an event at Mar-a-Lago. It was a long time ago, in the early ’90s.”

  “What?” I blurted. “C’mon, that’s got to be bullshit.”

  “Michael,” Pecker replied patiently, like I was the naïf Grasshopper in an episode of Kung Fu and he was Master Po citing verses of wisdom from Taoist philosophy. “I trust you. Mr. Trump trusts you. Over time, you will learn that it’s not about the truth. I have been watching his back for years. When I spoke to Mr. Trump about this, he told me to call you—that you and I will work together and handle these problems together.”

  Trump and Pecker had been friends since the mid-1990s, part of the chauffeur-driven class who shared each other’s confidences and operated far above the lives of the little people who have jobs and pay taxes and follow the rules. Since Trump’s first flirtation with running for President in 2000, with the Reform Party, Pecker had trumpeted Trump’s cause in banner headlines and fawning profiles in the Enquirer, often citing bogus polls, and referring to him in sycophantic terms designed to thrill the real estate mogul as a “gazillionaire.”

  As with Trump’s first lie in our first conversation, this was another moment that I might have taken a breath and given pause. The truth doesn’t matter? Then what does? I assumed I was about to find out, and it shames me to say this, and this won’t be the last time you’ll hear me say this, but instead of wondering about the underlying morality or indeed the plight of a woman allegedly assaulted by Trump, I instantly felt excited to be included in such a small and exclusive circle. Mr. Trump trusted me? David Pecker trusted me? My chest puffed in pride as I pondered the fact that Trump only let a tiny, tiny number of his topmost executives into his inner circle and they’d worked for him for many years, some for decades. I really and truly was an insider now, I figured, with exhilaration.

  “David,” I replied. “Tell me the allegations.”

  Pecker offered a sanitized and abbreviated version of the story, in itself part of the way to avoid taking ownership of what we were really doing. According to Pecker, Jill Harth’s ex-husband had done some work for Trump at one of his casinos in Atlantic City years earlier, promoting an event called Donald J. Trump’s American Dream World Finals, a bathing beauty contest where the entrants had to sing and tell jokes. The judges were a panel of celebrities, including Trump, and there was also a “hottest, one-of-a-kind” car design competition, all staged in the Crystal Ballroom in the Castle Resort on the Boardwalk on Atlantic City. Trump had stiffed the ex-husband, Pecker explained, but worse, he’d continually hit on his beautiful then-wife Jill Harth, propositioning her in nightclubs in Manhattan and at a restaurant in the Plaza, culminating in offering her a tour of Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach by herself, and, while her then-husband cooled his heels in the dining room, showing her into his twelve-year-old daughter Ivanka’s bedroom and lunging at her, trying to force himself on her, pushing her onto his daughter’s bed and grabbing her genitals.

  Ms. Harth had managed to escape somehow, but Pecker explained that now the ex-husband wanted to sell the story to the National Enquirer, getting paid for dirt on the star of The Apprentice.

  Unspoken was the fact that the ex-husband had no clue who he was dealing with at the National Enquirer and the real power dynamic at work. Jill Harth’s former husband imagined he was talking to journalists about a potential story about a powerful figure that would be certain to get national attention; sure, it was a tabloid, the kind of publication sold at the check-out counter in grocery stores, and of course he was hoping to make money, and the whole subject was covered in the kind of slime that would make any respectable reporter run away. But even the tenuous hold the National Enquirer had on journalistic standards, which Trump extolled when it served his purposes, even that fig leaf was a sham. David Pecker wasn’t going to deal fairly or seriously with the ex-husband of some nobody woman with a long-forgotten salacious claim about his old friend. The whole concept was ridiculous. That wasn’t how the world worked, I was beginning to glimpse, as I realized Pecker’s allegiance was to Trump, and the truth truly didn’t matter. As soon as Pecker had heard about the pitch of the Harth story, he told me, he’d intervened and done what he had done for years: called Trump in order to conspire to cover it up, or catch and kill, as it’s known. Trump had told Pecker to call me, and so it was that I was being knighted into this inner sanctum. Now it fell to me to solve this problem, I was told by Pecker. He wouldn’t run the story, of course, but I needed to find a way to keep it under wraps.

  Walking down the hallway to Trump’s office that day in 2007, I dreaded what was about to happen. I had to go into the Boss’s office and question him about a woman he’d in all likelihood sexually assaulted, a subject I felt certain would piss him off. I knocked timidly on the door and Trump looked up from his newspaper and waved me in. I sat
in the middle red Egg chair and gulped, figuring I’d use indirection and express my gratitude instead of putting Trump on the spot—it felt like obsequiousness was necessary, as usual.

  “I just heard from David,” I said. “I am honored that you feel comfortable with me handling these types of matters for you.”

  “You know David trusts you,” Trump said. “So do I. Just don’t make me regret my decision.”

  “Never, Boss,” I said. “Are the allegations true? Do we have a contact number for her?”

  “I know she called Rhona a few times,” Trump said, not answering my question, again par for the course. “Man, she’s really great looking. She’s in love with Trump. Go get the file of her emails from Rhona and then handle it with David. No stories on this. Got it?”

  “Of course, Boss. I know what to do.”

  “Let me know how you do,” Trump said as I left.

  Trump’s assistant, Rhona Graff, had her own office, and I was surprised that when I told her what I was after, she nonchalantly opened a filing cabinet and flicked through scores of files, finally pulling one out and handing it to me. It was like troubles such as the one I was now charged with dealing with were a matter of routine and scores of others had made similar allegations. Back in my office, I opened the file and read the emails from Ms. Harth to Trump. There were notes seeking employment as a make-up artist for Trump on The Apprentice, and as his personal stylist. The emails expressed admiration for the Boss and there was no mention of sexual assault or improper behavior; they were most definitely not the kind of notes that might be written by a woman who’d been attacked, or at least that was how it seemed to me. Like the letters of recommendation for Trump University, which purported to speak to a ninety-eight percent approval for the transparently worthless degree, the backstory to Ms. Harth’s emails was no doubt more complicated; not many people come into contact with the fantastically wealthy and the entrée into their world and the economic benefits that come with such proximity. As I knew all too well, there was an urge to please and stay in the good graces of a man with Trump’s power, and victims of sexual assault often act in ways that don’t seem consistent with the aftermath of an assault, as we’ve all learned in recent times.