by Neal Pollack
Cohen:
Depends on how you look at it.
Russo:
How am I supposed to look at it?
Cohen:
You can look at it any fucking way you want to, but it won’t matter. Let’s just say I’m older than you might think.
Bell:
OK. Where do you live?
Cohen:
I live in Manhattan. On the entire top floor in the tallest building in SoHo. Come on over. I’ll mix you the most expensive drink you’ve had all year. Or I’ll have my Filipino butler do it for me.
Russo:
Do you have any other residences?
Cohen:
[Counting on fingers.] Vermont, Malibu, and St. John in the Virgin Islands. Montana, maybe? Spain? I don’t remember. I own property everywhere.
Bell:
And you also have a yacht that you travel on frequently?
Cohen:
Hell yes. It’s the third-biggest yacht in North America.
Bell:
How have you been able to afford these homes and this yacht?
Cohen:
I could afford them because I bought them. With money that I fucking earned.
Russo:
How exactly did you earn this money?
Cohen:
Wouldn’t you like to know?
Bell:
That’s the subject of this inquiry, Mr. Cohen. The government suspects—
Cohen:
Suspects what? That I’m making a lot of money? Since when did the government fucking care about how people make their money? Are you going to tell me that I have weapons of mass destruction too? Your intelligence is bad.
Bell:
Look, there are irregularities.
Cohen:
Where?
Bell:
Where what?
Cohen:
Where are the irregularities? Tell me. I’ll iron them out. I’ll make them regular like my shit. I’ll eat a gallon of fuckin’ prunes.
Russo:
It’s a matter of cash flow really. There’s—
Cohen:
Too much cash? In all my lives, I’ve learned you can never have too much cash.
Bell:
What do you mean, “all my lives”?
Cohen:
What do you think I mean?
Bell:
This is getting off track. We’re trying to investigate—
Cohen:
I know. You’re trying to investigate why I have so much fucking money.
Russo:
You could put it like that.
Cohen:
I’ll tell you.
Russo:
Please do.
Cohen:
Ever since I was a kid, in this timeline . . .
Bell:
This timeline?
Cohen:
[Holds up finger.] Just let me talk, you’ll get used to it. All I could think about was money. How much there was, how much I didn’t have, how I could get it. All of it. Or as much of it as the world would let me have. I wanted it all. All the fucking money.
Bell:
You started making it young.
Cohen:
As soon as I had any.
Bell:
And when was that?
Cohen:
I got $2,500 for my bar mitzvah.
Russo:
What did you do with that money?
Cohen:
I sank all of it into the stock market. A third went to Coleco, a third went to Telex, and a third went to Home Depot.
Russo:
Why those stocks?
Cohen:
Because I knew they were going to boom.
Russo:
How? Did you have insider information?
Cohen:
Sort of.
Russo:
From where?
Cohen:
From my fucking brain, OK? I know, always, which stocks are going to do well and which aren’t.
Russo:
How?
Cohen:
Experience. Vast, endless, soul-sucking experience.
Bell:
I don’t understand.
Cohen:
Neither do I. In any case, I sat on the stocks for about eighteen months, held the Home Depot—which was only going up—and traded in the other stocks. Half of that I plowed into Apple, and the other half I bet on the Chicago Bears to win the 1986 Super Bowl.
Russo:
That couldn’t have made you too much money. The Bears had pretty low odds that year.
Cohen:
True enough. But I also correctly predicted the score and the MVP. Who does that, huh?
Russo:
Not many people.
Cohen:
The answer is, fucking no one. Except for me. I haven’t made a bad bet in a hundred years. So I came out of that with about fifty grand, all of which I bet on the Mets to win the World Series in seven games against the Red Sox. I made that bet in April, when the odds were 250 to 1. So I really racked it up. I was 18 years old, or 138 years old—who knows the difference and who cares, I made a million dollars. And that was fucking nothing.
Russo:
I have a note here that says your personal worth now is—
Cohen:
About six billion dollars. Give or take a hundred million every time. It depends. Markets fluctuate. Real estate depreciates. And it’s really going to depreciate around next year at this time. Sell off your assets if you can.
Bell:
You’re telling us that you made all this money—
Cohen:
Legally, that’s right, and no government cocksuckers are going to come in and take it away from me.
Russo:
We’re not from the IRS, Mr. Cohen.
Bell:
But we could call them in if you like.
Cohen:
I paid my taxes. Paid ’em all, except for the ones I didn’t have to pay.
Russo:
OK. Why don’t you tell us what you did with this money?
Cohen:
I bought shit.
Russo:
What kind of shit?
Cohen:
Real estate, watches, cars, TVs, a movie theater, a boat—I bought all the shit.
Russo:
Drugs?
Cohen:
I bought my first yacht. I parked it at a private dock off my property in the Hamptons. It was 1993. Of course there were fucking drugs. I did them all. Weed, amphetamines, Ecstasy, smack, crack, jack, fuckin’ horse tranquilizers, acid, tequila mixed with absinthe, raw hash. It was always a party. A male prostitute injected liquid psilocybin into my dick. On my front lawn. During Sunday brunch.
Bell:
Sounds fun.
Cohen:
It was fun. One time I stuck a tennis ball up my ass, dipped my hand into a bag of cocaine, and jerked off until I screamed.
Bell:
That doesn’t sound like quite as much fun.
Cohen:
My doubles partner was not happy.
Bell:
Are you on drugs right now?
Cohen:
I should be. You got any?
Bell:
Wouldn’t you like to know?
Russo:
Agent Bell, stop flirting with the witness.
Cohen:
She can’t help it. All women are attracted to my unlimited wealth and bad-boy attitude.
Russo:
Cut the shit, Cohen.
Bell:
[Clears throat.] You mentioned some sexual acts earlier. Was there, um, a lot of sex in your life?
Russo:
Bell, not relevant.
Bell:
It might be.
Russo:
[Sighs.] Fine.
Cohen:
Was there sex? Was there sex? When you’re rich and young and omniscient, there’s always a shit-ton of sex. I’ve been fucking about three women and about one man a week for the last twenty years. Just the other night I had my dick in someone else’s mouth while I was snorting coke off a stripper’s tits and another stripper was shoving a dildo up my ass. It was fucking awesome.
Bell:
You’re lucky you’re not dead.
Cohen:
Is that what you’re investigating me about? Fucking and doing drugs? Because I could name names. [Cough cough.] Robert Downey Jr., Cameron Diaz.
Russo:
To be honest, Mr. Cohen, we don’t care about any of that.
Cohen:
There was this time when I put nipple clamps on my balls.
Bell:
Go on.
Russo:
No, Agent Bell. That’s enough. What we want to know about is . . .
Cohen:
You want to know why my clients make so much money.
Russo:
Exactly.
Cohen:
It always comes around to that. Everyone thinks I’m working a fucking scam.
Russo:
You started Cohen Partners in 1995.
Cohen:
Just in time for the first dot-com boom.
Russo:
And what was Cohen Partners exactly?
Cohen:
Well, at first we were an investment brokerage pretty exclusively. It was just five of us in a midtown office. The other four were only there because I couldn’t make all the calls myself.
Russo:
What calls?
Cohen:
To clients.
Bell:
And who were these clients?
Cohen:
Anyone who wanted to take a ride on the Cohen carpet. We didn’t care how much money they had. If they had faith in our advice, then we’d give it to them.
Bell:
What advice is that?
Cohen:
I would never advise a client to buy a stock that I wouldn’t buy myself. In fact, if I haven’t bought it, I won’t promote it.
Russo:
And what do you get in return for this advice?
Cohen:
I get a fucking 10 percent commission if I sell it personally, and 3 percent of whatever my partners sell.
Bell:
And your partners are fine with that?
Cohen:
They don’t complain. They do OK. Look, there is nothing wrong with taking commission when you’re in business. It’s a legitimate model. And my rates are fair, especially considering that I have never had a client ever who has lost money. Unless—
Bell:
Unless what?
Cohen:
Unless they don’t listen to me.
Russo:
And what happens if they don’t listen to you?
Cohen:
Then I have ’em whacked.
Bell:
Excuse me?
Cohen:
Naw, I’m kidding. If they don’t listen to me, they don’t make any money. Or they lose some. Either way, they learn their lesson. No one ignores me twice.
Bell:
Or else you have ’em whacked, right? [Winks.]
Russo:
Bell, he’s a suspect in a federal investigation. You can’t wink at him.
Bell:
Fuck off, Russo, it’s my interrogation technique.
