AMERICAN SCOUNDREL - KAI BIRD & SUSAN GOLDMARK

It’s hard to overestimate how insanely evil the life of Roy Cohn was. He’s like the Forrest Gump of evil, 4th reich, 2nd half of the 20th century, US evil. And to it’s credit this book does get into all of it. Rosenbergs, his insane parents (the book posits that his father married his famously ugly and mean-spirited mom to advance into a judgeship), McCarthy, Hoover, Reagan, Trump, studio 54, mob lawyering, AIDS, all that and more. The man, at least according to this book, broke down crying to a lover while he was dying of AIDS that he was “evil” and also a “genius”. A true maniac and demon. There is insane stuff about his personal life, like John Waters saying that he was always fucking beautiful 15-21 year old rent boys, like the maid at his Providencetown house saying, “I am so sick of changing his bed with this fist-fucking that goes on over there, nothing but bloody sheets and bloody gloves”. Incredible reporting. My gripe with this thing is that it doesn’t draw the darker but I would say clear conclusions that Roy Cohn’s life, laid out like this, cries out for. Namely, he’s very obviously plugged into a sort of dark parastate nexus of fascist anti-communist people and organizations that operated in the post war years he was active. There is a whole chapter on the Hoover allegations, and I do applaud the book for not glossing over this issue, which really is the entrance to the dark cave of Roy Cohn, both the specific Susan Rosenstiel Plaza hotel, late fifties parties and the more general Hoover-having-gay-sex-dressed-as-a-girl (apparently he was called Mary during these sessions) allegations. And when they, the authors, go to asses this rumor they rely on mainstream Hoover biographers who seem to think it’s probably not possible since Hoover was too careful and was a lifelong celebite homosexual. Now, this is preposterous because he lifelong spousal relationship with his number two man (who was deeply involved in Hoover’s plot to kill MLK) but also because it makes so much less sense than him being gay, on some freaky shit, and blackmailed. It explains his reluctance to deal with the Mob and his closeness with Cohen. Cohen’s house was robbed in ‘62 and the thieves stole his extensive pornography and who knows what else film collection, and he eventually learned that the stash had been recovered by the FBI he said that the films were, “kinky-even to me,” which is chilling, and he suggested that Hoover would enjoy them and Hoover apparently responded that he “already had”. Or the fact that he told people throughout his life that the FBI wouldn’t touch him and he had a good relationship with them, despite clearly committing crimes, including child sex crimes, in public view, constantly. What’s the most obvious explanation here? Or, take a different chapter-long anecdote from this book that I’d never heard. Cohen, apparently, once ordered up a boy from the Kincora boy’s home to be shipped to him in Rome. He eventually, it would seem, helped this boy get a visa to live in the USA. The Kincora Boy’s Home was a Belfast orphanage that operated a child-prostitution ring. It gets crazier after it came out that the person running this home was also the leader of a Loyalist paramilitary group during the troubles that was connected to MI5, who, it would seem, were using this arrangement to blackmail people. Lord Mountbatten, last Viceroy of India, mentor to the current King and lifelong pedophile, was among the clientele. So here we have another state-connected crime syndicate that Cohen was plugged into. Surely there are non-MI5 ways for a rich pedophile to get kids in Rome, what does it say that Cohen was using this one? Doesn’t his life make so much more sense, especially his total safety from consequences, if we see him as a sort of Jeffery Epstien figure. This comparison makes even more sense when you look beyond the truly lurid and attention-grabbing sex-trafficing to the other services they provided. From Khashoggi, to Iran-Contra stuff, to Clinton and Trump, to the tech world, Epstein also has a Gump-like quality in terms of deep-state evil; he was an operator in this world, the kid-sex stuff is only one element of that. Cohen is the same way, he keeps popping up and being protected in all these shady, shadowy corners of American history because he’s a clandestine player in this world. But truly, the most troubling aspect of the book is how thoroughly Cohen has won. Not only is his protegee president, we live in the world he helped create and shape. Like Gil Scot-Heron said, “not every dream you are in is your own.”