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Copyright 1989 Dennis King. All rights reserved. This material may
not
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author's
permission.
If you enjoy the excerpt, you can order the book.
Page 252: Chapter Twenty-six
Security's most amazing operation was its smear campaign against
New York attorney and power broker Roy Cohn. It was a classic
case of Freudian reaction formation - LaRouche the Red-baiter of
the 1980s, going after Cohn, the former aide to Joe McCarthy;
LaRouche, the propagandist for organized crime, going after Cohn,
its attorney and fixer; LaRouche, who lives like a millionaire
but last paid income tax in 1973, going after Cohn, who evaded
the IRS through similar tactics for most of his adult life. No
two antagonists ever deserved each other more.
The war on Cohn was triggered indirectly by an investigative
series I wrote for the Manhattan weekly Our Town in 1979. These
were the first articles to call attention to LaRouche's
neo-Nazism. Former NCLC members say the series freaked out the
national office staff. Especially affected were Jewish members,
who had rationalized the turn to neo-Nazism via various
self-deceptions.
LaRouche moved quickly to blunt the psychological effect on his
followers and launch a counterpunch. The first step was to
announce that the articles signaled yet another assassination
attempt against him.
Previously, such announcements had led to security alerts and
mobilizations, whipping up enough hysteria to keep his followers
from thinking about things he didn't want them to think about.
But for a security alert to be scary, the enemy must be scary -
not just a neighborhood newspaper but a giant global conspiracy.
Naturally that conspiracy had to include Jews and drug
traffickers. In a broadside entitled "We'll Destroy the Zionists
Politically," LaRouche announced: "I am a chief target . . .
because I have had the guts to identify the enemy boldly and
directly. Anyone attacking me in the way that the Zionist rag Our
Town did is fully in cahoots with . . . Dope, Inc."
LaRouche filed a $20 million suit against Our Town, which
retained Roy Cohn as its defense attorney. When Security
discovered that Cohn had represented Our Town on several previous
occasions, they blamed him for the articles. The NCLC issued a
leaflet with a picture of Cohn and the caption: "Roy Cohn, the
mobster who wants to see LaRouche dead." It described him as a
major figure in Dope, Inc., and one of the plotters behind the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. As the weeks passed, NCLC
ascribed more and more importance to Cohn in their global
conspiracies. This propaganda was too hysterically worded to have
much effect on the general public, but inside the NCLC it
effectively diverted attention. By constant repetition LaRouche
linked Our Town's articles to the name, face, and odious
reputation of Cohn. He even claimed Cohn had personally written
the series. This was a trick LaRouche had described well in
"Beyond Psychoanalysis" (1973): If one is faced with dangerous
thoughts, one can "block the process of assimilation" by the
"commonplace ruse" of slapping a nasty label on them. The Our
Town articles called for a chain-reaction label: Cohn, McCarthy,
Mafia, Faggot. This was effective because many of LaRouche's
followers were former leftists with a gut hatred of McCarthyism,
and Cohn was McCarthyism's premier living symbol. The NCLC
members thus could regard themselves as the successors of the
Rosenbergs, suffering jolt after jolt from Roy Cohn's Our Town,
Roy Cohn's New York Times, and Roy Cohn's Anti-Defamation League.
On another level the anti-Cohn rhetoric reinforced the NCLC's
anti-Semitism at the very moment when outsiders were harshly
questioning it. One of the oldest ploys of anti-Semites is to
focus on an individual Jew who is genuinely sinister, and to
describe his crimes in a manner that suggests that criminality is
an innate Jewish trait. The LaRouchians had frequently railed
against Meyer Lansky, the financial wizard of organized crime,
and long-deceased Jewish gangsters of the Prohibition era such as
Bugsy Siegel of Murder, Inc. But such figures had always been too
remote from the mainstream Jewish community to be convincing
symbols. Cohn, however, was a power in New York politics, with
ties to many prominent and respectable Jews. The LaRouchians thus
could allege that he represented both a Jewish conspiracy and
behavior patterns typical of rich Jews. (In fact, Cohn was an
aberrant personality who could have come from any ethnic group.
Neither of his two historic partners in demagoguery, McCarthy
and J. Edgar Hoover, was Jewish, and his most sinister clients
were Italians.)
Cohn's unrepentant McCarthyism, his homosexuality, his role in
selecting judges in New York, and his notoriously unethical
behavior before the bar all became grist for the propaganda mill,
topped off by his media image as the meanest man in New York - an
image he carefully cultivated to enhance the price of his legal
services and the effectiveness of his courtroom theatrics.
LaRouche transformed this into Cohn, the meanest Zionist in New
York, the personification of the alleged inner meanness of
Zionism itself. NCLC members then joined in the Cohn-hating much
as the fictional denizens of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four
rallied for hate sessions directed at the scapegoat Emmanuel
Goldstein. Critical thinking within the NCLC national office was
almost completely blocked, and no defections occurred for over a
year.
But LaRouche's troubles in the outside world were by no means
squelched. The New York Times echoed Our Town's findings in a
front-page series, and the story spread to newspapers in New
Hampshire, where LaRouche was making his Democratic primary
presidential bid. He tried to counter the reports by claiming he
was being libeled by Cohn and "the mob" as a result of his
antidrug stance, but such protestations were not effective with
the general public, and he received only 2,300 votes in the
primary. He thus faced a new dilemma: He had built up Cohn as the
enemy, but by the logic of this myth, Cohn had caused LaRouche's
humiliating New Hampshire defeat. All LaRouche had been able to
do to Cohn was fulminate. Some form of revenge would have to be
extracted if LaRouche's reputation as a dangerous fellow was not
to melt away.
A stroke of luck gave LaRouche the means to extract his revenge
in an extraordinary manner, boosting his followers' view of
themselves as a potent force and sending a message to the
Establishment: Don't mess with Lyndon LaRouche if you have
anything to hide. This lucky event was the convergence of the
LaRouchians' rage with that of Richard Dupont, a former lover,
business associate, and law client of Cohn's. Richard was the
co-owner of Big Gym, a gay health club that had been evicted from
its Greenwich Village quarters in 1979. Previously Richard had
dreamed of purchasing the property, but it ended up in the hands
of a real estate developer. Richard blamed this on Cohn's having
made a deal behind his back, and he started to talk to anyone who
would listen. He said that Cohn had been the silent partner in
Big Gym, and that Cohn's personal assistant, Russell Eldridge,
had been assigned to skim off cash and procure young men from
among the club's clientele to service Cohn's insatiable sexual
needs.
Through the years Cohn had double-crossed many clients, from rich
elderly ladies through mobsters, and always with impunity. But in
Richard he found a victim with an almost superhuman-thirst for
revenge and a cunning to match his own. Richard was determined to
bring down his powerful betrayer, and was willing to run whatever
risks were necessary. He contacted many of Cohn's past victims in
preparation for a lawsuit. He waged a campaign of hundreds of
crank calls to Cohn and various of his associates at their homes
and offices. He wrote "Roy Cohn Is a Fag" up and down the
sidewalk in front of Cohn's town house. He sent fire trucks and
police on a false alarm to Cohn's Greenwich, Connecticut, estate,
disrupting a dinner party that included Mr. and Mrs. Donald
Trump, the Baron and Baroness di Portanova, and Mrs. S. I.
Newhouse. When Cohn was in the hospital recovering from plastic
surgery, Richard slipped into the room, wearing a white coat and
with a stethoscope around his neck, to remonstrate with Cohn and
give him a bouquet of wilted flowers.
Richard also developed a remarkable network of informants in
Cohn's office and among Cohn's lovers. He knew where Cohn was at
virtually every moment. Secretaries, switchboard operators, and
business underlings all helped him, as did Cohn's lovers. His
most important source was George Dowling, who ran the skimming
operations at Cohn's porn theaters and parking lots. Dowling
despised Cohn and provided Richard with information of the most
sensitive nature. Richard then called up the head of real estate
at the Rock Island Railroad in Chicago and told him how Cohn's
associates were skimming off and double.ticketing approximately
$350,000 a year from parking lots leased from the railroad. The
Cohnheads promptly lost the franchise.
Said Kalev Pehme, a former Our Town editor who knew Richard well
and often dealt with Cohn on news stories: "Richard had a
profound understanding of Cohn's closet homosexual self-hate. He
constantly preyed on this and on Cohn's vanity. It was the
cumulative effect, one little thing after another, and suddenly
you had this powerful figure breaking down because Richard sent
him wilted flowers. Richard just kept hitting him like a
prizefighter, little blows, you're woozy, then you're gone."
Pehme attributed Richard's success in gaining the cooperation of
Cohn's lovers to this same psychological understanding. "Richard
would help them get over Roy. They were often innocent types, not
boys, but men, with battered egos, no self-esteem, completely
dominated and used by Cohn. Richard would commiserate with them
in the most astonishing compassionate way. He developed
tremendous rapport with them, and they told him everything."
In early 1980 a friend of Richard's was handed an NCLC anti-Cohn
leaflet in front of Bloomingdale's. She passed it on to Richard,
who asked Pehme about it.
Pehme warned him that the LaRouchians were a cult, but Richard
figured any enemy of Cohn was worth meeting. He soon recognized
that, cult or not, they had the resources to do what he and other
Cohn victims had not been able to do on their own. As to the
LaRouchian ideology, it simply was of no interest to him.
Over the next few months Richard met on numerous occasions with
Paul Goldstein and other Security staffers, providing them with
devastating information about Cohn's personal life, finances, and
professional double-dealings. The result was collected and
published in a magazine, Now East, whose two issues were devoted
almost entirely to stories about Cohn and other attorneys at
Saxe, Bacon, Bolan & Manley, as well as their clients.
Goldstein, Richard, and members of the New Solidarity editorial
staff plotted out the first issue and its follow-up at Richard's
apartment on West Eighth Street. Richard insisted that there be
no anti-Zionist rhetoric, which he knew would destroy the
magazine's effectiveness. Pornographic cartoons depicting Cohn in
flagrante were drawn by a LaRouchian staff artist, while other
cartoons were plagiarized and adapted from The New Yorker.
(Richard supplied the captions.) The advertisements were taken
without permission from legitimate gay publications. The entire
production was written, laid out, typeset, printed, and paid for
by the LaRouche organization, under Goldstein's direct
supervision. Yet its masthead listed a fictitious editorial staff
and the address of a telephone answering service used by Richard.
For Richard, it was sweet revenge. For the LaRouchians, it was a
weird inversion of their experience with Our Town. The latter had
dared to lay out the LaRouchians' dark secret, their closet
Nazism. Now the LaRouchians were laying out Cohn's secrets.
As soon as the press run of the 52-page magazine was completed at
LaRouche's PMR Printing Company, the bundles were whisked off to
Staten Island and stored in George Dowling's garage. From there,
they were distributed by Richard, his friends, and members of the
Security staff. The first copies were passed out during New
York's Gay Pride parade in June 1980. Copies of this and the
subsequent issue were distributed to Cohn's clients and
colleagues, to Manhattan's federal court judges, and to the city
rooms of the metropolitan dailies. Stacks were left at East Side
restaurants frequented by Cohn, such as "21" and P.J. Clarke's.
Charles Tate recalls being assigned to pass out copies at a
meeting of a conservative Catholic group attended by Tom Bolan,
one of Cohn's law partners.
The first issue's lead article was an "Open Letter to the Gay
Community" bearing Cohn's name, in which he purportedly confessed
his homosexuality and apologized for selling out Big Gym. Other
articles provided details about the skimming operations at
Cohn-linked businesses and a combination of real and fictitious
stories about his glitzy clients such as Buddy Jacobson, Gloria
Vanderbilt, Steve Rubell of Studio 54, Baron and Baroness di
Portanova, and Gloria Steinberg, estranged wife of financier Saul
Steinberg. In addition, Now East included the names of young men
who allegedly had slept with Cohn, details about his health, and
a drawing of a graveyard with his name on a tombstone.
The second issue followed in November, with a cover drawing
labeled "Roy Cohn . . . Fairy." It included articles about a male
model alleged to be Cohn's latest lover, Cohn's tax-evasion
methods, and how he double.crossed several clients including an
organized crime boss.
Veteran Cohn watchers say that much of the information in the two
issues was accurate, some was exaggerated, a few things were
concocted. But even the false material bore an aura of
believability (and hence a great capacity for embarrassing and
humiliating Cohn) because of the skillful way in which it was
interwoven with the factual material - the secrets that no one
else had ever dared print about New York's vaunted "legal
executioner." The reported incidents of professional misconduct
were far more outrageous than those which led to Cohn's
disbarment in 1986, shortly before his death from AIDS. In
addition, the magazine discussed Cohn's silent partnership in a
Staten Island Parking lot skimming operation run illegally on
city Property by Enrico Mazzeo, former real estate manager for
the city's Department of Marine and Aviation. Mazzeo already was
the target of a Brooklyn federal strike force probe. In November
1983 he was found dead in a car trunk in Brooklyn, the victim of
a gangland-style execution.
Cohn was desperate to stop the flow of information to Richard,
but there were just too many inside sources. When John LeCarre's
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was dramatized on television,
Dupont and the LaRouchians began to refer to these sources
collectively "Geraldine" - after LeCarre"s "Gerald the Mole."
Cohn went to his old antagonist Manhattan District Attorney
Robert Morgenthau with a desperate request for help. In October
1980 Richard was indicted on thirteen criminal counts, mostly
acts of petty harassment which, under ordinary circumstances, a
district attorney wouldn't waste his time on. The Village Voice
noted that Morgenthau and Cohn had seemed very chummy at a party
the night before Richard's 6 A.M. arrest. The Voice believed the
indictment said more about Cohn's power in New York politics than
about Richard's criminality.
Morgenthau's office was well aware of the involvement of the
LaRouchians with Richard. Assistant DA Harold Wilson called Our
Town about them on several occasions in August and September
1980. Yet none of them were indicted. Richard's attorney, John
Klotz, believes a political decision was made to let them off:
"Just after Richard's arraignment I went to Wilson. I said,
'Let's work something out, we'll help you get LaRouche.' Wilson
said to me, 'After I convict Dupont, I will immunize him and put
him in front of a grand jury. I don't need your help.'"
That second grand jury was never convened. Former associates of
Cohn and LaRouche say that an agreement was arrived at: LaRouche
would stop harassing Cohn, and there would be no reprisals
against LaRouche. Now East ceased publication, and New Solidarity
scaled back its attacks on Cohn. According to Anne-Marie Vidal, a
former member of the NCLC inner circle, LaRouche aides paid a
substantial sum to Cohn to introduce LaRouche to important people
and persuade the media to leave the NCLC alone. According to law
enforcement sources, such a deal was indeed made, but Cohn never
delivered what he had promised.
Dupont's trial in the summer of 1981 lasted five weeks. Wilson
never once mentioned the defendant's LaRouche connection or the
involvement of the LaRouchians in Now East, although its
distribution was included among the charges against Dupont. This
was an extraordinary omission. LaRouche's probable involvement
had been mentioned repeatedly in The Village Voice. Bringing his
name into the case could only have strengthened Wilson's hand,
especially with Jewish members of the jury. Nevertheless, the
prosecution maintained that Dupont published and distributed Now
East alone. Defense counsel Klotz's questioning of Richard
brought out that he was dyslexic, never graduated from high
school, had no experience in newspaper layout or any other aspect
of newspaper work, and could not have produced the magazine on
his own. This left a hole wide enough to run a bulldozer through.
All Wilson had to do was ask Richard who his accomplices were,
and then claim that Richard, far from being a little guy seeking
justice, was a sinister ally of the infamous LaRouche. But this
was no ordinary trial. It was a political trial in which the real
prosecutor was not Wilson but Roy Cohn, disguised as the star
witness. And Cohn had gained a vested interest in keeping
LaRouche's name out.
Everything about the wilted-flowers trial was potentially
explosive: a homosexual Dallas, with Cohn as J.R., providing a
window into the profoundly disturbed world of power in New York.
But Judge Bentley Kassal's rulings, the prosecution's tactics,
and Cohn's influence with the media kept that window mostly
closed. If it had been opened, the public would have learned much
about high-level New York political corruption, foreshadowing the
Donald Manes-Stanley Friedman-Mayor Koch scandals of the
mid-1980s. But editors at the metropolitan dailies allowed the
trial only minimal play. Even The Village Voice only nibbled at
the edges. There were no TV cameras on the courthouse steps.
People v. Dupont disappeared into the Memory Hole.
The jury found Richard not guilty on both felony counts, but
guilty of six misdemeanors. To convict him of crank phone calls
to Cohn cost the taxpayers over $250,000. But when Michael
Hudson, a victim of straight-forward loan fraud by the
LaRouchians, went to the DA's office in 1982, he was told his
complaint was too complicated (unlike the
sexually-politically-psychiatrically entangled Dupont case!).
Indeed no prosecutor seemed to be willing to take on LaRouche. In
1979 a New York Times editorial had urged a probe of his
nonprofit Fusion Energy Foundation. But the State Attorney
General's office, which is in charge of monitoring nonprofit
organizations, took no action. It was one of the few times this
publicity-conscious office ever ignored The New York Times.
Meanwhile, LaRouche's NCLC developed Manhattan-centered scams in
the early 1980s that~according to subsequent indictments and
civil RICO suits-would rip off the public for tens of millions of
dollars. Even as this was beginning, The Village Voice and Our
Town published articles pointing out LaRouche's financial
improprieties and links to racketeers. Neither Morgenthau's
office nor State Attorney General Robert Abrams' office nor the
Federal Strike Force showed any inclination to look at this. The
first real probe in 1984 had to begin in Boston. Abrams only went
after LaRouche in the summer of 1986, when Roy Cohn was safely on
his deathbed and several state attorney generals from Alaska to
Florida were already on the case-investigating a conspiracy that
began in Abrams' own backyard.
* * *
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