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10/30/2017 Eavesdropping on Roy Cohn and Donald Trump | The New Yorker

N s Desk

Eavesdropping on Roy Cohn and


Donald Trump
By Marcus Baram April 14, 2017

Donald Trump and Roy Cohn in October, 1984. Many of Trumps private conversations with his late mentor
were eavesdropped on by Cohns longtime switchboard operator and courier.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BETTMANN / GETTY

I n early March, President Trump sent four tweets accusing his predecessor of
wiretapping the phones in Trump Tower in the months before the 2016 election.
The tweets were just the latest manifestation of Trumps preoccupation with
eavesdropping and surveillanceone that can be traced back decades. As BuzzFeeds
Aram Roston reportedlast summer, during the mid-two-thousands, Trump kept a

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telephone console in his bedroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort, in Palm Beach, that
allowed him to listen in on phone calls between his employees and, sometimes, sta
and guests. (Trump denied this.) In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Trump allowed Tony
Schwartz, his ghostwriter, to listen in on his private phone calls with bankers, lawyers,
and developers, as Schwartz wrote The Art of the Deal. And, in the nineteen-
seventies and eighties, many of Trumps private conversations with his late mentor, the
lawyer Roy Cohn, were eavesdropped on by Cohns longtime switchboard operator and
courier, whose activities were later exposed.

Cohn, who had been an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy, in the nineteen-fifties, was a
political fixer and lawyer who represented New York power brokers, from the Yankees
owner George Steinbrenner to the mob boss Carlo Gambino. Trump was one of his
favorite clients; before Cohns death, of AIDS-related complications, in 1986, the two
men talked up to five times a day and partied together at Studio 54 and other night
clubs. Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy, Trump told the writer Tim
OBrien, in 2005. He brutalized for you.

Christine Seymour had recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College when she
started working at the back of Cohns oce as a switchboard operator, connecting calls
with clients including Nancy Reagan, Gloria Vanderbilt, and the mobsters Gambino
and Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno. She listened in to all of them, Susan Bell, Cohns
longtime secretary, recalled recently. Not at his direction, but he knew. A pretty
brunette, Seymour was, according to her brothers, brash and funny, with a gossipy sense
of humor. Cohn had his reasons for tolerating her behavior. She was very ecient, and
he liked that about her, Bell said. She would work anytime, day or night. She was
always at his beck and call.

After Cohn died and his law firm dissolved, Seymour left the city and moved to
Florida. She settled in Key Colony Beach, a sleepy town at the bottom of the Keys,
where, in the early nineties, she started writing a book, Surviving Roy Cohn, based
on her notes on the eavesdropped calls. It must have seemed an ideal moment for a
project that promised to take the reader inside the town house of one of the most
scandalous figures in recent New York history. In 1993, James Woods was nominated
for an Emmy for his portrayal of Cohn in an HBO biopic, Citizen Cohn, and

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Angels in America, Tony Kushners play dramatizing Cohns struggle with AIDS, had
dbuted to acclaim on Broadway.

On the morning of May 5, 1994, theNew York Postran a column by Cindy Adams
with the headline Savvy Chris Spills the Beans on Roy Cohn. In her
characteristically breezy manner, Adams wrote about Seymours book project, listing
the secrets she would expose. (How a porno flick was filmed in the oce and business
was conducted while someone was being whipped; How Sen. Joe McCarthy hid the
fact that he was gay. . . .) Chris taped conversations, she wrote. She kept a log
three spiral notebooks a dayof transactions. Adams wrote that Seymour monitored
every call in or out, knew everything, everyone, knew where all the bodies were buried.
The story ricocheted through the city, and Cohns former law partners and staers
received phone calls from several other anxious clients, worried that their secrets would
be revealed.

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Five months later, on October 20, 1994, Seymour was driving her blue two-door Yugo
on a highway in Florida at dusk when she collided head-on with a tractor-trailer and
was instantly killed. She was forty-six, and the book was still unfinished. Seymours
collaborator on the book, an author and literary agent named Jerey Schmidt, was at
home on Long Island when he got the call from Seymours mother, Adele, who lived in
nearby Shoreham. As he recalled recently, on hearing the news of Seymours death, he
panicked, took a box of the notebooks, and burned them.

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As for the recordings, none of Cohns former employees can confirm that Christine
made any. But Christines brother, Brian, who once worked as a crew member on
Cohns eighty-foot yacht, Defiance, told me that when Christine moved to Florida, she
had handed him three small reel-to-reel tapes that she claimed she had made. The
tapes were, he recalled, in god-awful shape, spooled and unspooled and crinkled. He
stored them in his mothers attic, where he later found them, in 2009, after she passed
away. We just tossed them in the trash, he told me. In the spring of 1995, Schmidt
told the syndicated columnist Liz Smith that some tapes still existed and would soon
be the basis for a Broadway musical, written by Seymour and Schmidt, with music by
Jeanette Cooper. Nothing Sacred is really Seymours story; her eavesdropping is at
the heart of the drama. The play kicks o with Cohns voice heard over the telephone
wire. On one of her first days, she tells a colleague that Cohn is on the phone with
Nancy Reagan, adding, Oh, I wish I could hear what theyre saying. The oce
manager replies, Go ahead and listen. Roy doesnt mind. Later, she adds, Some of
the most important conversations of the twentieth century have come through the
switchboard. And theyre all on tape. One of the first songs includes the line, This
damn phone, needs a chaperone / Someone wholl defend, the fortress of a friend / In
exchange shell learn things she would never know. After one staged reading of
Nothing Sacred, in the winter of 1997, at the Dicapo Opera Theatre, on the Upper
East Side, Schmidt got caught up in other projects, he said, and the play was never
produced.

Schmidt still lives in Stony Brook, on Long Island, where he runs NYCreative
Management, a literary agency. Last September, we met at the Strand one afternoon
and then walked across the street for a cup of coee. It was a warm afternoon, but
Schmidt was wearing a black suit with a bright yellow tie. He handed me a yellow
packing envelope, containing some things left behind in Roys oce. Inside the
envelope were several floppy disks, a cassette tape, the Nothing Sacred screenplay, a
1981 invitation to a Ronald Reagan Presidential Inauguration party, the consent form
to participate in an AIDS drug trial, a few faded photographs, and dozens of notes, some
of them stained, written in Seymours hasty longhand. The notes contain lists of the
clients who called Cohns oce, including their personal phone numbers; Seymours
reminiscences of her experience working with Cohn, including lunch orders for
pepper-sausage-and-mushroom pizza slices; and her description of Cohns
conversations with Trump, Steinbrenner, Vanderbilt, and Nancy Reagan, among others,
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and what appear to be direct quotes from some of those phone callsalthough its
almost impossible to know how much of Seymours account in the notebooks and
script is true.

Some of the Roy Cohn-related documents that are still in Jerey Schmidts possession, including the
handwritten notes ofCohns switchboard operator, Christine Seymour. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOS
GINARTE FOR THE NEW YORKER
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOS GINARTE FOR THE NEW YORKER

One of Seymours notes describes Cohns eorts to advance the judicial career of
Trumps sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, who served as a federal appeals-court judge for
decades, until stepping down soon after Trump assumed the Presidency: Roy got the
White House to give her her judgeship, Seymour writes. Roy was out and the call
came in to tell her she got it. I took the call and called her to tell her. Ten minutes later,
Donald called to say thank you. (Barry did not respond to requests for comment.)

Seymour also describes some of Cohns political dirty tricks, including that he had
researched Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, with
the assistance of Trumps adviser Roger Stone. (Roger Stoneworked with Roy very
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10/30/2017 Eavesdropping on Roy Cohn and Donald Trump | The New Yorker

heavily before and after elections. Was the one with Roy to find out the dirt on the
Ferraros.) Stone, who first met Trump through Cohn, initially did not think much of
the brash young real-estate developer, Seymours notes indicate. Roger did not like
Donald Trump or his new house, told me they were losers, but if Roy used them, he
would, too, she writes. When I recently asked Stone about this, he said the notes
make no sense, adding, I was very impressed with Donald Trump when I met him.

According to Seymours notes, Cohns frequent phone pals included Nancy Reagan
and the former C.I.A. director William Casey, who called Roy almost daily during
[Reagans] 1st election. Cohn also enlisted his friend and the owner of the New York
Post, Rupert Murdoch, to help bring down Ferraros campaign: Whenever Roy wanted
a story stopped or item put in, or story exploited, i.e Ferraroand her family, Roy
called Murdoch. Cohn killed stories that would hurt his friends. When he found out
that 60 Minutes was about to do a negative story about Reagans potential Vice-
President, Senator Paul Laxalt, of Nevada, Roy called the producer of 60 Minutes and
asked him to take it o the schedule. The longtime 60 Minutes producer Lowell
Bergman, who didnt talk to Cohn himself, confirms that the story never aired amid
pressure from lawyers, including Cohn.

Another note says, Donald was the last one Roy spoke to on the phone, perhaps
referring to Cohns last days, in 1986. Seymour also noted that Trump could be two-
faced, and described how he had once heard from an assistant that a lawyer working
for Cohn wanted to leave his firm and immediately told Cohn about the treachery.
Trump did things like that always. Roys line on him: He pisses ice water! It appears
that Trump was aware of her eavesdropping; Seymour claims that Trump told Cohn
that she was listening in on the phone calls. Seymours jottings also suggest that she
had eavesdropped on the call between Cohn and his doctor on November 4, 1984,
when Cohn was told that he had been diagnosed with AIDS. A poignant note records
that, when he got the news, Cohn responded, Should I commit suicide now or later?

Some of Seymours claims in the notes are disputed by Bell, who says that Cohn rarely
called the White House, though he was friendly with Nancy Reagan. Bell also doubts
that Cohns last conversation was with Trump, who, she said, abandoned his lawyer
when he found out that Cohn was H.I.V.-positive. They were so close, they talked at
least several times a week, she said. And as soon as he found out, he took all his cases

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away from Roy except for one and got new lawyers. After all theyd been through
together. But the notes, and the lingering mystery of what secrets were contained in
the lost notebooks, continue to inspire rumors and, perhaps, a legacy of paranoia. Brian
Seymour told me that Christine had a photographic memory, but he cant say for sure
what is true and what isnt. She probably knew a lot about a lot of things, but shes not
here anymore, he said.

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