Law: Cohn Ko’D

To his enemies he has been almost literally the devil’s advocate, the ruthless attorney who made his name as the whispering aide to Senator Joe McCarthy during the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. To his friends and clients, including politicians, mobsters and plutocrats of every description, he is the ultimate courtroom fighter.

Last week Roy Cohn, 59, found himself on the losing side of what may have been his most crucial legal battle. A five-judge panel of the appellate division of the New York State Supreme Court ordered him disbarred. Ruling on four charges by a state disciplinary panel, the judges described his professional conduct as “incredible,” “startling” and “reprehensible.”

In one incident, the judges decided, Cohn spent nearly two decades evading repayment of a $100,000 loan from a woman whose divorce he had handled in 1966. Cohn claimed the money was simply an advance against future services, but the court cited 23 documents, some of them written by Cohn himself, indicating that it was a loan. Cohn’s firm returned the money in 1984, but only after the misconduct proceedings against him had started. The court also found that a $94,000 escrow account entrusted to Cohn’s firm was misappropriated in a “bizarre series of events,” and that on his application for admission to the bar of the District of Columbia, Cohn lied. The most dramatic accusation concerned the will of Lewis S. Rosenstiel, the millionaire founder of Schenley Distillers. In December 1975, as Rosenstiel lay dying and allegedly incoherent in a Miami hospital, Cohn repeatedly tried to obtain his signature on a document naming Rosenstiel’s granddaughter, her husband and Cohn himself as executors of his will. One hospital attendant testified in a Florida court that Cohn “tried to take (Rosenstiel’s) hand for him to sign” the codicil to his will. The lawyer eventually emerged with a document bearing what the New York judges described as “a number of ‘squiggly’ lines which in no way resemble any letters of the alphabet.”

Cohn has claimed lately to be suffering from liver cancer, which he says is now in remission. Even so, throughout the proceedings the old courtroom pugilist was unrepentant. “This is just a bunch of nobodies trying to get me because I’m a somebody,” he told reporters in April. He may now seek to appeal his disbarment.