The nightmare kicked into high gear with something that seemed innocuous—one of those innocuous but annoying living-in-New-York-City things: A flood in my upstairs neighbor’s apartment had led to a flood in my apartment, causing a lot of damage. We had to move into a hotel for a few days while repairs were made.
So at 7:00 a.m. on the morning of April 9, 2018, my wife and I were sitting together having breakfast in the Loews Regency Hotel, when there was a knock on the door. Nobody knocks on your door in a hotel unless you call for room service. We hadn’t.
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I walked to the door in my shorts and T-shirt, looked through the peephole, and saw what must have been two dozen men and women in black suits standing in the hallway. No one was smiling. It was pretty obvious who they were, but I had no idea what they wanted.
So, I opened the door and said, “Can I help you?”
The lead agent was central casting: standing about six foot two, broad-shouldered, well-manicured. Over his right shoulder was one of the biggest men I’ve ever encountered. He was at least six inches taller than the lead agent, and actually had to step sideways to pass through the doorframe. He didn’t say a word; he didn’t need to.
We didn’t know it at the time, but meanwhile, simultaneously, 48 other agents converged on my apartment that was undergoing renovation due to the flood, as well as my law office and our safety deposit box at TD Bank.
The lead agent handed me a federal warrant, issued by the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney’s Office, dated 4/08/2018 and signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Henry B. Pitman at 7:54 p.m.—not even twelve hours before. The warrant said my home, hotel room, and offices were to be searched for evidence related to conspiracy, false bank entries, false statements to a financial institution, wire fraud, bank fraud, and illegal campaign contributions.
The agent asked me to unlock and hand over my cellphones, and step into the hallway.
Knowing that I was a licensed firearm owner, he asked me if I had any guns with me. I told him I had two, on the night table in the bedroom—a Glock-43 and a Glock-27. The agent asked me if they were loaded, to which I responded that they were. He then asked if the guns were chambered. I responded that they were not. We stepped back into the room as they secured the firearms for the duration of the search. Upon conclusion, they returned them to me.
Despite the president’s later allegations that they had busted down our doors and ransacked our properties, I want to emphasize that that wasn’t true. They were very cordial, very professional. They had even waited for my son to leave for school before coming up to the room. We offered them tea or coffee. They didn’t want any.
They spent five hours going through our rooms. They went through the sofas, looked behind curtains. They looked on top of and beneath cabinets, and even removed, checked, and photographed all of my daughter’s stuff in her underwear drawer. They photographed everything—even going through pillowcases. To this day, I still don’t understand the need to photograph my college-aged daughter’s underwear.
To make matters more disturbing, in the middle of it all, in walks my daughter herself, meaning to surprise us with a visit from college. Instead, the surprise was on her. She sat with us for the duration of the hours-long raid, watching the spectacle unfold. (She would later tweak the agents on social media about their examination of her underwear drawer, noting that all they’d found was a pack of cigarettes she’d been hiding from Laura and me. “Busted,” she tweeted.)
Each of the bedrooms had a safe, and I was directed to open them. In the master bedroom the safe contained some assorted jewelry as well as an envelope containing nine thousand dollars. On the outside of the envelope was written “Real Real.”
The agents had laid out everything they found on the master bedroom bed and fanned out the $9,000 found in that “Real Real” envelope and photographed it as if it were Pablo Escobar’s millions in his safe house.
They asked why we had the cash. Laura told them, “This is my ‘Real, Real’ money.”
One of the FBI agents turned around and said he didn’t understand, “Do you have money that isn’t real?” Maybe he thought I was a counterfeiter too, who knew?
Laura calmly explained “Real, Real” was a high-end consignment shop that sells merchandise like shoes and dresses. She had been saving over the course of six months to shop there.
I couldn’t tell if they were disappointed not to find the 10 million in cash that the Steele [Dossier] claimed I possessed to pay off the Russians for [Paul] Manafort’s deals and mistakes.
Interestingly enough, as Laura and I sat on the couch watching television while the agents continued to search our hotel room, a commercial for the “Real Real” came on and I yelled at the agent in charge to come take a look. “Hey, the ‘Real Real’ has a commercial on, come take a look,” I called out.
Throughout, we didn’t get upset. Not in the slightest. There was nothing that we had done that would have caused us any worry.
So I was beyond surprised when they walked out of the hotel apartment with a dozen boxes.
Excerpted from Revenge, by Michael Cohen; published by Melville House, 2022.
