He learned the whole thing from Roy Cohn. When I was on the staff of the Village Voice I was assigned to what Mary Nichols, the City Editor, called the “Roy Cohn desk.” That meant I kept an eye on lawsuits Cohn filed, and lawsuits filed against him. He sued unsuccessfully to close a methadone clinic on the block on the Upper East Side where he lived in a townhouse that was owned by a legal corporate entity that didn’t have his name on it. That was so the place couldn’t be seized from him by the IRS, with which he had a years-long legal struggle, or by people who had won lawsuits against him for defrauding them, of which there were many. One of Cohn’s favorite scams was going on the road to a speaking engagement in a small midwestern or southern town. While he was being wined and dined by the local cognoscenti, he would be introduced to a local banker and quietly taking him aside, ask for a brief “bridge loan” for $50,000 or so to get through a temporary cash shortage. When the loan came due, Cohn would refus…