WHERE ROY COHN WAS
For decades before he died of AIDS in 1986, Roy Cohn predicted that the first sentence of his obituaries would identify him as the lawyer for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s commie-hunting subcommittee. He was right. But Cohn worked for McCarthy less than two years. For 30 years more, he cultivated fame as a pit-bull lawyer, party animal, crooked businessman, tax cheat, and deadbeat. “Don’t Mess with Roy Cohn,” Esquire magazine warned in 1978. “He is a legal executioner—the toughest, meanest, vilest and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America. He is not a very nice man.”
Born in Manhattan in 1927, Roy was the only child
