Investigations: Going Which Way?

From the time, at 26, when he exploded into the nation’s headlines as chief staff inquisitor for Senator Joe McCarthy, Lawyer Roy Marcus Cohn has looked like a young fellow who would certainly go places. He still does.

But last week, after a federal grand jury in Manhattan socked him with an eight-count indictment, it appeared that where Cohn, now 36, might gowas into a federal penitentiary.

The son of a Democratic New York state judge, precocious Roy Cohn graduated from Columbia University’s Law School at 20 (a year before he was eligible to enter the state bar), investigated Communists for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, became a special assistant to Harry Truman’s U.S. Attorney General James McGranery, and in 1953 went over to the staff of Joe McCarthy’s Senate Investigating Subcommittee.

Storm of Snarls. For the next 18 months, Cohn was at the center of one of the stormiest, shrillest periods of U.S. political history. Few who ever saw or heard him will forget the malevolent, heavy-lidded stare with which he pinioned witnesses; the adenoidal snarl as he closed in for the kill against a suspected Communist (the McCarthy Committee caught precious few, if any); the public obsequiousness to Senator Joe; the arrogant impatience toward Democratic committee members.

Cohn was the sort that many people love to loathe. Among the legion of enemies he made in those days was the counsel to the Democratic minority on the McCarthy Committee—another youngster, named Bobby Kennedy. After one committee hearing, Cohn and Kennedy almost came to blows right before television’s eye; another time, Kennedy threatened to quit his job unless Cohn toned down his ways.

But unlikable as Cohn may have seemed, he was admired by many Americans as a relentless, even ruthless, anti-Communist investigator. He certainly had no stronger advocate than McCarthy, who called him “the most brilliant young fellow I’ve ever met.”

It was, therefore, ironical that Cohn did so much to bring about McCarthy’s eventual downfall. The way it came about was that Cohn had a bosom buddy, G. David Schine, the wealthy, not-too-smart son of a hotel-chain owner. Cohn sponsored Schine as an unpaid McCarthy staff investigator. Together, the two went to Europe on a Keystone Cops binge, searching for Communism and mismanagement in U.S. Information Service offices abroad. Soon after their return, Schine made the mistake of getting drafted as a buck private into the U.S. Army. Cohn tried to crowbar the Army into granting Schine special privileges, and out of that effort came the famed Army-McCarthy hearings. As an indirect result of those hearings, Cohn was forced to resign from his committee post and McCarthy was officially condemned by the Senate. After that, McCarthy never wielded much influence.

But Cohn was different. He bounced right back to New York, where, as a bachelor, he still shares a seven-room Park Avenue apartment with his widowed mother. He became a partner in a highly successful law firm and began looking for what he has called “the sweet deal”—high finance. Borrowing $900,000 from Hong Kong and Panamanian moneylenders, he gathered control of the flagging Lionel Corp. (toy trains, electronics, etc.) in 1959. For a while Lionel picked up, but it fell back again, losing a whopping $4,500,000 in 1962 alone. Entrepreneur Cohn also bought a swimming pool company, invested in a New York City bus line, a small loan company, a national travel agency, helped form syndicates that promoted two Patterson-Johansson heavyweight championship boxing matches in 1960 and 1961, and last year’s Patter-son-Liston fight.

Almost all of Cohn’s financial enterprises were characterized by constant litigation—suits, countersuits and Government investigations. Moreover, while several of Cohn’s companies lost money, his own wealth grew to an estimated $2,000,000. Then came last week’s federal grand jury indictment, accusing Cohn and another attorney, Murray Gottesman, of perjury, conspiracy to commit perjury, and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

The Agreement. The charges against them stemmed from longtime investigations into stock swindling in the United Dye & Chemical Corp. In 1956 the Securities and Exchange Commission began looking into charges that a bunch of Las Vegas gamblers had taken over

United Dye and were illegally manipulating the company’s stock. On the basis of that probe, a federal grand jury took over in 1959. The jury was particularly interested in four men. Three of them, Samuel Garfield, Irving Pasternak and Allard Roen, were Las Vegas operators; the fourth, Allen K. Swann, was their attorney.

As the investigation proceeded, Cohn, according to the charges, conspired with Garfield to prevent the four men from being indicted by the grand jury. Cohn got Gottesman into the act, and Gottesman, says the indictment, went to see Morton Robson, who was then chief assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District in New York (though he was not in charge of the United Dye case), “to effectuate the agreement.” What happened after that has not been spelled out in the charges against Cohn. The fact is, that none of the four men was indicted by the 1959 grand jury.

Bribery? That was only the beginning. In 1961 another grand jury looked into the United Dye case. This time, Garfield, Pasternak, Roen and Swann were indicted. All four pleaded guilty. Pasternak was sentenced to 21 years in prison, but his actual entry into prison has been deferred. None of the other three has yet been sentenced—leading to the obvious conjecture that, with this sort of club hanging over their heads, one or all of them may yet end up as witnesses against Cohn.

All this, in turn, led to still another grand jury investigation. Beginning last year, it was aimed at discovering if bribery, threats or any other illegal tactics had been used to prevent indictments by the previous grand juries.

This time, both Cohn and fellow Attorney Gottesman were called to testify before the grand jury. Both, says the indictment, conspired with others to give “evasive, fictitious, fraudulent, vague, false and manufactured testimony.” Furthermore, they conspired “corruptly, and by threats and threatening communications, to influence, intimidate and impede, and endeavored to influence, intimidate and impede witnesses before grand jurors.”

But Roy Cohn is nothing if not a windmilling fighter—and no sooner had the indictment been handed down than he began swinging out on all sides. The charges against him, he cried, were “conceived by intimidation, threat and blackmail, a vendetta to get my scalp.”

The villain, he claimed, was U.S. Attorney Robert Morgenthau “and company,” who “have abused the power of their office . . . misused public funds . . . sought perjured testimony” out of “personal animus, the desire for political revenge, and an attempt to pander to the longstanding prejudice of his superiors.” Among the “superiors,” Cohn hinted darkly, was Attorney General Bobby Kennedy, his old foe from the McCarthy Committee days. “History speaks for itself,” Cohn told a press conference. “I have never been invited to any of his swimming parties.”

That Certain Feeling. As for Morgenthau’s “vendetta,” it all went back a dozen years or so, Cohn explained, when he was investigating charges of Communist spy infiltration into the Treasury Department. In the 1940s, Cohn recalled, Communist Helper Harry Dexter White was working in the Treasury, and Robert Morgenthau’s father Henry was Treasury Secretary. “I have no personal malice toward Morgenthau senior,” added Cohn charitably, “but Morgenthau junior has harbored a feeling about this.”

The feeling is so strong, claimed Cohn, that Robert Morgenthau hired “an international bounty hunter” to go out and “get something on Roy Cohn.” Cohn accused Morgenthau of leaking stories about him to the press, of harassing him through the Internal Revenue Service, of spreading word through Federal Detention Headquarters that any prisoner willing to implicate Cohn might get a break, and of offering immunity to “gangsters and racketeers in order to get perjured evidence against me.” And he referred to “a prominent case recently concluded” in which Morgenthau “obtained the sentencing of all the defendants except those from whom he sought to extract something unfavorable concerning me. To whip these defendants in line, he has ‘deferred’ their sentences with promises of leniency if they play his game, and threats of long jail terms if they do not.” Cohn did not indicate whether the “prominent case” was the United Dye scandal, or if the “defendants” were his old friends from Las Vegas.

The Fight to Come. So blatant is this vendetta, declared Cohn, that a jury trial in a federal court would really not suffice for the presentation of Cohn’s evidence. He would much prefer a public investigation by a bar association or the Senate Judiciary Committee. In any case, he is prepared to battle all the way. He should, for if he is found guilty of all the charges against him, he could get $36,000 in fines and 40 years in prison.