Judging Irving Kaufman and Roy Cohn

A fixture of the New York political and social scene until his death from AIDS in 1986, Cohn made himself indispensable to some of the biggest movers and shakers of the late 20th century, including Joseph McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, members of the Genovese crime family, and Donald Trump. A friend to the rich and famous, he was the anathema of liberals and the left.
As an assistant prosecutor in the espionage case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Cohn illicitly lobbied trial judge Irving Kaufman to impose the death sentence, carried out by electrocution in June 1953. Cohn later admitted to fellow lawyer Alan Dershowitz that he had helped frame Ethel Rosenberg by coaching false testimony from her brother David Greenglass, a miscarriage of justice later confirmed by Greenglass in a 60 Minutes interview.