Roy Marcus Cohn was one of the most prominent and controversial lawyers in the United States between 1950 and the mid-1980s. Cohn's combative personality, which first came to the public's attention during Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's anti-Communist Senate hearings in the 1950s, attracted many famous clients, including organized crime bosses, Roman Catholic Cardinal Francis Spellman, artist Andy Warhol and real estate tycoon Donald Trump.

Cohn was born on February 20, 1927, in New York City, the son of a prominent state trial court judge. A precocious student, Cohn entered college early and graduated from Columbia University Law School in 1947 at the age of twenty, which made him one year too young to sit for the bar exam. After reaching 21, he joined the U.S. district attorney's office in New York and immediately became involved in the investigation and prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for providing atomic bomb secrets to...