For several decades, Roy Cohn (1927-86) was the man you needed to know if you wanted to get to know the sort of people who knew Roy Cohn – in other words, all those prominent New York City-based gangsters, politicians, socialites and billionaires who enjoyed greasing one another’s wheels while making loads of money through whatever means necessary. From an early age, the well-connected Cohn proved adroit at utilising those connections, ranging from J. Edgar Hoover and Cardinal Spellman to Donald Trump, back when the future president was merely an up-and-coming Manhattan real-estate developer and would often refer to Cohn as his ‘mentor’.

Cohn’s mantra was: ‘Never waste time on regrets, never show any doubts and never, ever apologise’

Cohn’s mantra was: ‘Never waste time on regrets, never show any doubts and never, ever apologise’

As Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark describe in this enjoyably good biography of a genuinely awful person, Cohn was the son of a struggling Bronx lawyer who earned a judgeship by marrying Roy’s mother, an affluent woman who was called ‘mean, vicious, ugly, and foul-mouthed’ by those who knew her. The Cohns went on to become one of the first Jewish families allowed to rent on Park Avenue. For most of his young life Roy profited from one family connection after another – such as his first job as a United States attorney a year after he passed the bar exam and, at 23, his first partnership in a prominent Manhattan law firm.

Cohn didn’t know the law so much as how to get great publicity while practising it.........

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