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Michael D. Cohen caught his future boss’s eye after buying apartments in two of Donald J. Trump’s New York buildings about two decades ago. During a dispute with the condo board at Trump World Tower, Mr. Trump saw Mr. Cohen’s potential as an enforcer — and soon handed him an office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower.
Mr. Cohen’s colleagues at the Trump family real estate business saw his job as something of a mystery. They spotted him inside Mr. Trump’s office, overheard him yelling from his own and watched him walk the hallways with a pistol strapped to his ankle.
“He said he was a lawyer,” Jeffrey McConney, Mr. Trump’s former corporate controller, testified last week about Mr. Cohen’s precise position, drawing laughter from the courtroom.
Mr. Cohen was indeed a lawyer, in the sense that he had graduated from law school, worked as a personal injury lawyer and occasionally performed tasks that approximated legal work under the amorphous title of executive vice president of the Trump Organization and “special counsel” to Mr. Trump.
He also scouted the occasional deal, including foreign projects that never materialized, like a plan for a Trump Tower in Moscow. But more often, Mr. Cohen’s duties were in line with a description he has given himself: “designated thug.”
There was the time, Mr. Cohen recounted in one of his books, “Disloyal,” that he threatened to tank a paint company with bad publicity to get thousands of gallons of free paint for Mr. Trump’s golf resort outside Miami.
And the time Mr. Cohen hired a computer programmer to rig an online CNBC poll to ensure that Mr. Trump would rank among the most influential business people alive.
And the time he threatened to ruin the college admission prospects of a child whose family was a tenant in a Trump building, so that they would not obstruct a renovation.
Mr. Cohen also helped Mr. Trump draft some of his nastiest social media snipes, including at fellow celebrities such as the actress Rosie O’Donnell.
He also protected the Trump family, emails and other records show. He helped Mr. Trump’s youngest son, Barron, find a private school. He helped his oldest, Donald Trump Jr., dig out of an ill-fated business venture. And, on occasion, Mr. Cohen has said, Mr. Trump put Mr. Cohen on the phone with his wife, Melania, to reassure her that he hadn’t been unfaithful.
Mr. Cohen was also one of the strongest believers in Mr. Trump as a possible president when he flirted with running in 2012, setting set up a website, ShouldTrumpRun.org, and going on a scouting trip to Iowa.
Although he had no formal role on the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen nonetheless raised millions of dollars, recruited Black supporters and was an enthusiastic booster of Mr. Trump on television.
But his greatest service came behind the scenes, arranging payoffs to two women who had threatened to go public with stories about having sex with a married Mr. Trump. One of those, to the porn star Stormy Daniels, is at the heart of the case against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Cohen made the payment out of his own pocket just before the 2016 election and was reimbursed by Mr. Trump, who prosecutors say falsified business records to disguise the reimbursement as ordinary legal expenses.
In August 2018, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to a number of crimes, including breaking campaign finance laws with those payments. During his plea, he told the court he had paid the hush money “at the direction of” his former boss.
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