I’m not dropping a heavy hint to book publishers when I say I’ve been daydreaming this week about what it would be like to ghostwrite Michael Cohen’s inevitable memoir, set to appear—I’m guessing—in the fall of 2020.
Cohen doesn’t look or sound like someone at home with the printed word, but neither does his former boss, who claims to have written, if not read, more than a dozen books. Like Donald Trump, he will need a hack in the back room to shape his memories and observations into full sentences. I see Cohen’s book as more personal and reflective than Trump’s The Art of the Deal or Think BIG and Kick Ass. I see a book with a softer focus, something intimate and shareable, a worthy addition to the grand tradition of American publishing: From Stooge to Stoolie: How I Learned to Live Again, Laugh Again, and Love Again—and How You Can Too. The jacket photo will feature a pastel sweater draped casually over the shoulders of the nominal author, covering his prison jumpsuit.
The evolution of Michael Cohen is now an accepted thing—we all know, or are supposed to know, that over the last year, or even longer, Cohen was transformed from one kind of guy into another. The story is being spun by an unavoidable man named Lanny Davis, whom Cohen rescued from the Washington slagheap and hired to play his attorney on TV. Davis describes a tale of penance and rebirth, a slow journey from darkness to light. “He made a turn,” Davis told PBS’s Judy Woodruff, who seemed to be buying it, “after serving Mr. Trump and doing a lot of things he’s not so proud of.”
Anyone who has savored the countless profiles that have been written about Cohen or has seen him defending his old boss on TV—seen the large forehead and the jutting jaw, the eyebrows always raised and the mouth half open to facilitate breathing—will be surprised to hear that he was spiritual-awakening material. In his press coverage he comes off as a Hollywood stock figure—a goon, an errand boy, a lackey, a henchman: Think of Henry Hill in Goodfellas or the less fortunate Luca Brasi in The Godfather. The difference is that nowadays, to find work as a lackey, you need a law degree.
Cohen got his from Cooley Law School—not to be confused with Cooley High, but close. Cooley became instantly famous among the political class when the Washington tip sheet Politico discovered that Cooley was once listed as the least selective law school in the country. Cohen wasn’t training to be a professor of torts at Yale, however. He was a guy from Queens, chasing ambulances in search of clients and flipping condos in Manhattan and Jersey City, until he met the ultimate guy from Queens.
It was real estate, what else, that brought them together. Cohen’s friendship with Trump began with an act of sycophancy. In 2006 Trump levied a huge assessment on the tenants of one of his buildings, where Cohen himself lived. The tenants organized a rebellion, refusing to pay. Lawsuits followed, as they do with Trump. Cohen took Trump’s side in the dispute, lobbying and cajoling his neighbors, representing him at meetings of the condo association. Cohen happily accepted a large increase in his own building fees for a place just a pace behind the man who didn’t write The Art of the Deal, which is not only Trump’s favorite book but Cohen’s as well. He bought several more Trump properties.
“Once some buyers go Trump, they never go back,” wrote the New York Post in 2007, in a piece describing the many apartments Cohen owned in Trump buildings. “Trump properties are solid investments,” Cohen told the Post. “He’s a very smart person,” Trump replied.
Trump hired Cohen as a vice president in his company, and Cohen worked his way to a point where he could plausibly describe himself as Trump’s personal lawyer. These were the dark years. He became notorious in New York for his belligerent defenses of Trump, calling reporters, rivals, and litigants and dropping F-bombs as if he were flying over Dresden. One story seems to sum up the Trump-Cohen relationship. (It originated in a Wall Street Journal profile and has become a staple of the Cohen literature.) Trump agreed, with obvious reluctance, to come to the bar mitzvah of Cohen’s son. Trump arrived late, then gave a speech describing the extraordinary efforts that Cohen and his family had made to get him to come to the ceremony. Cohen beamed. Thank you, sir, may I have another?
Cohen’s salary at the Trump organization was $400,000 a year, but he found other ways to make money. He is a man of many talents, spying opportunity everywhere. According to his plea agreement, Cohen even brokered the sale of . . . fancy handbags. One transaction involving a Birkin bag (by Hermès) brought him a $30,000 fee. Other income came from millions of dollars’ worth of taxi medallions, which he leased to taxi operators in New York and Chicago. Cohen found he could make as much money from the operators as from the medallions. One operator, for instance, asked Cohen for a loan of $2 million. Cohen opened a personal line of credit at 5 percent interest. Then he loaned the money to his friend at 12 percent interest. With Cohen’s encouragement the loan grew to $6 million, generating what even New York lawyers call “real money.”
But Cohen was more often a borrower than a lender. In time his life became a dizzying carousel of bank debt. He drew money from one bank to pay off enough of the loan from another so he could lie about both to get more loans from a third. In the whirlwind the payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal must have seemed a nuisance, redeemed only by the fact that they illustrated his indispensability to “Mr. Trump.” “I’d take a bullet for him,” Cohen famously said. Trump—also famously—didn’t reciprocate Cohen’s affection, and when the president-elect declined to give him a job in his new administration, Cohen’s journey from darkness to light began.
The journey’s pace picked up considerably this April, when FBI agents raided his office and home. Snooping through millions of files found in drawers and on hard drives, prosecutors discovered he hadn’t paid taxes on his profitable dealings with taxi drivers and handbag collectors. The open-and-shut cases of tax evasion were the leverage prosecutors used to force Cohen to turn on Trump.
Of course, in Lanny Davis’s narrative, no force was necessary, beyond the lure of virtue, which is its own reward. As spring turned to summer, Cohen began to see Trump for what he was, Davis says. While FBI agents rummaged through his life in hopes of destroying it, Cohen was repelled by Trump’s continued attacks on FBI agents. “I respect the FBI as an institution, as well as their agents,” Cohen told ABC in his only post-conversion interview. “When they searched my hotel room and my home . . . the agents were respectful, courteous, and professional. I thanked them for their service and as they left, we shook hands.” (Thank you, sir, may I have another?)
Then came Helsinki. Cohen watched Trump’s press conference with Vladimir Putin. “After Helsinki,” Davis told the Today show, Cohen “worried about the future of our country with somebody who was aligning himself with Mr. Putin. . . .
“That’s the kind of thing that caused Michael Cohen to change his mind and decide to dedicate himself to telling the truth to the American people.”
Moved by patriotism, embraced by family, the journey of Michael Cohen from stooge to stoolie is now complete. You don’t have to believe it, but as a book it’ll make bank.
