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But Cohn was different. He bounced right back to New York, where, as a bachelor, he still shares a seven-room Park Avenue apartment with his widowed mother. He became a partner in a highly successful law firm and began looking for what he has called "the sweet deal"—high finance. Borrowing $900,000 from Hong Kong and Panamanian moneylenders, he gathered control of the flagging Lionel Corp. (toy trains, electronics, etc.) in 1959. For a while Lionel picked up, but it fell back again, losing a whopping $4,500,000 in 1962 alone. Entrepreneur Cohn also bought a swimming pool company, invested in a New York City bus line, a small loan company, a national travel agency, helped form syndicates that promoted two Patterson-Johansson heavyweight championship boxing matches in 1960 and 1961, and last year's Patter-son-Liston fight.
Almost all of Cohn's financial enterprises were characterized by constant litigation—suits, countersuits and Government investigations. Moreover, while several of Cohn's companies lost money, his own wealth grew to an estimated $2,000,000. Then came last week's federal grand jury indictment, accusing Cohn and another attorney, Murray Gottesman, of perjury, conspiracy to commit perjury, and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
The Agreement. The charges against them stemmed from longtime investigations into stock swindling in the United Dye & Chemical Corp. In 1956 the Securities and Exchange Commission began looking into charges that a bunch of Las Vegas gamblers had taken over
United Dye and were illegally manipulating the company's stock. On the basis of that probe, a federal grand jury took over in 1959. The jury was particularly interested in four men. Three of them, Samuel Garfield, Irving Pasternak and Allard Roen, were Las Vegas operators; the fourth, Allen K. Swann, was their attorney.
As the investigation proceeded, Cohn, according to the charges, conspired with Garfield to prevent the four men from being indicted by the grand jury. Cohn got Gottesman into the act, and Gottesman, says the indictment, went to see Morton Robson, who was then chief assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District in New York (though he was not in charge of the United Dye case), "to effectuate the agreement." What happened after that has not been spelled out in the charges against Cohn. The fact is, that none of the four men was indicted by the 1959 grand jury.
Bribery? That was only the beginning. In 1961 another grand jury looked into the United Dye case. This time, Garfield, Pasternak, Roen and Swann were indicted. All four pleaded guilty. Pasternak was sentenced to 21 years in prison, but his actual entry into prison has been deferred. None of the other three has yet been sentenced—leading to the obvious conjecture that, with this sort of club hanging over their heads, one or all of them may yet end up as witnesses against Cohn.
All this, in turn, led to still another grand jury investigation. Beginning last year, it was aimed at discovering if bribery, threats or any other illegal tactics had been used to prevent indictments by the previous grand juries.