NEW YORK — Once again, it was as much a New Year's Eve event as the annual dropping of the brightly lit ball at Times Square.
Limousines double-parked outside the elegant Upper East Side six-story town house. The parade of tuxedos and ball gowns through the thick oak doors easily rivaled a Hollywood premier. Champagne flowed freely--and so did tears when the thin, haggard-looking 58-year-old host slowly rose to speak.
"Since our President cannot run for office again," he joked, "I want you all to know I am available for 1988."
The ever-combative Roy Marcus Cohn may be down, but he's not out.
In the 1950s, Cohn was the brash young lawyer who hunted headlines and Reds for Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's stormy Senate subcommittee. In the 1960s, he beat three federal criminal indictments. He rode in private jets and Rolls-Royce limos, yet legally owned nothing but a wardrobe of $1,000 suits, defying frustrated tax and bill collectors. He became a confidant to cardinals, a patron of politicians, a lawyer for Mafia bosses, a friend to President Reagan.
Famed and feared for three decades, Roy Cohn today is fighting for his life--he says he has liver cancer--while a state judicial panel seeks to disbar him.
Both problems may come to a head in coming months. The Appellate Division of the New York state Supreme Court is considering a disciplinary panel's recommendation to disbar Cohn for three charges of professional misconduct, including mishandling clients' funds, illegally using an escrow account and employing "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation." Cohn's lawyers, contending that Cohn has already been "publicly disgraced," denied all charges in a final court brief on Jan. 15.
And Cohn faces a grimmer deadline. A doctor from New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center swore in an affidavit last Oct. 24 that Cohn has a "life-threatening disease"--which he did not identify--and could die in six months to a year if experimental drugs do not work.
Cohn has said doctors diagnosed liver cancer in October, 1984, finding a malignant tumor behind his ear and a benign growth in his leg. He said his cancer is in remission, though his red-cell blood count "gets lower than it should."
'Six Months to a Year'
"Six months ago, my doctors said I had six months to a year to live if the treatments did not work," Cohn said in a telephone interview from Greenwich, Conn., where he lives. "Apparently they worked. I feel fine."
"He says he's got it beat," said Sidney Zion, a longtime friend and author who has met Cohn regularly in recent weeks to help write his autobiography for Random House. "He's definitely improved."
Indeed, Cohn, a lifelong football devotee, attended the Super Bowl in New Orleans last Sunday, an aide said. Earlier in the week, Cohn appeared at a federal District Court trial in Manhattan to file a motion on behalf of alleged mob chieftain Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno.
Cohn's health is an emotional--and increasingly public--issue in the disbarment case. His lawyers pleaded for sympathy and dismissal last June, as the closed-door evidentiary hearings were ending, after Cohn's law partner, Thomas A. Bolan, suddenly testified that Cohn was "dying," warning: "It's a matter of months."
Bolan said Cohn's drugs had caused "tremendous, very severe side effects," including depression, disorientation and a memory so poor that the firm's switchboard operator was ordered to monitor his calls.
Notables Testified
When the panel granted additional hearings, a virtual Who's Who of New York notables showed up--36 in all, including three judges, an ambassador, church officials, law professors, real estate mogul Donald Trump and Rep. Mario Biaggi (D-N.Y.).
Barbara Walters, television personality and longtime friend, recalled that Cohn cried openly when he first confessed he had cancer and was taking interferon, an anti-viral drug. "I think that God has already punished him," she said. " . . . Maybe he has been punished enough."
New York Times columnist William L. Safire excoriated the panel for "this late hit." In a subsequent column, Safire attacked the "buzzards of the bar" who, he said, had "dredged up" charges "to get even with a hard-hitting anti-legal Establishment right-winger at a time he is physically unable to defend himself."
Rage Remains High
The debate now is "merely how Mr. Cohn's obituary will read--whether he will be identified as a disbarred lawyer, one who was ultimately exonerated, or one who died while charges were pending," Cohn's lawyer, Michael B. Mukasey, told the court.
"If the man is unable to practice law and is terminally ill, what's the point?" he asked in an interview.
Whatever Cohn's current health, his rage remains high. He bitterly denounces the court-appointed disciplinary committee of the First Judicial Department, which polices lawyers in Manhattan and the Bronx.
