Radical Pique

When Stanley Cohen talks, you can tell that what he likes is not so much arguing as convincing. Every sentence — and there are always lots of sentences — has the ring of the self-evident. Of course directed violence is a valid extension of self defense under certain political circumstances. Yes the media is controlled by a handful of right-wing barons who slant the news to protect their financial interests. Naturally the criminal justice system, by design, puts the downtrodden at a disadvantage.

If Cohen manages somehow to make all of this sound charming , it's because he is radical political lawyer, and convincing is both his job and his passion. Cohen's latest client — his most notorious to date — is Moussa Mohammed Abu Marzook, the senior official in the militant Islamic organization Hamas, who is currently being held at Manhattan Corrections Center. The Israeli government blames Marzook for organizing a string of murderous terrorist attacks in the Middle East, and in October will present its formal case to extradite him to Israel to stand trial for these crimes. Cohen, who is a young-looking 41, got the case after getting a phone call (from “a voice I recognized,” as he tells it, with a conspiratorial grin) instructing him to go to MCC and meet with Marzook, who had just been arrested at Kennedy International Airport upon returning from a visit to the Middle East. “I introduced myself and said 'I'm your lawyer,' Cohen says. Marzook gave him a once-over — beard, hair pulled into a ponytail, turquoise earring — and looked mildly horrified. “But I had been given two code words, so I said the code words and he said, 'Ah!',” Cohen smiles hugely, throws his arms wide, and mimics Marzook's hearty Arabic greeting, “'Salam alaikom!'”

Sound vaguely unsavory? Well, so go the meetings of a true political lawyer and his client. And indeed, if Cohen is as not as well known as fellow members of the radical bar like Weinglass, or William Kunstler, or Lynne Stewart (who is currently defending the militant Egyptian cleric Sheik Oman Abdel Rahman on charges of director a terror bombing conspiracy), it's not for lack of credentials. At Legal Aid in the Bronx from 1983 to 1989, he worked on, among other things, the defense of Larry Davis, who famously shot his way out of a confrontation with police and eluded capture for 17 days in 1986. In private practice, he was indicted for seditious conspiracy by the Canadian government for his role as a negotiator on behalf of a faction of Mohawk Indians when a dispute over reservation gambling escalated into an armed confrontation with Canadian authorities.

Then along came the East 13th Street squatters. These occupants of five buildings on the Lower East Side are fighting in court to keep the city from seizing their squats. Cohen spent much of the summer fighting for their quixotic cause in court--and in the media. “It's given me a chance to jump at the beast again in a very public way,” Cohen says fondly of the squatter case, in which a ruling is expected in early September. Then he revs up again, making it clear for whom he thinks the public should be rooting: “A chance to go after people who are mean spirited and corrupt and arrogant and completely removed from accountability.”

This sort of thing does not endear one to the powers that be, or to their lawyers. Cohen's opponent in the squatter case, for example, is city corporation counsel Terryl Sellers, whom Cohen loudly called “a lying sack of shit” in one out-of-court confrontation. “I wish that I could say something nice about Stanley,” Sellers says somewhat diplomatically. “That's the best you're going to get out of me.” A judge is expected to rule on the latest round of the squatter battle within a week of Labor Day.

In the Marzook case, Cohen hasn't really had time to infuriate anybody, but he has gotten death threats, and for a brief time had police officers checking IDs of office visitors. This is okay with Cohen, particularly if the visitors to his walkup office on Avenue D — the one with “Attorney” scrawled in black marker by the buzzer — include members of the national and international press corps. “All the Israeli press wants to know is how a Jew can represent the head of Hamas. I ask them, 'How can a Jew not represent the head of Hamas?'” he says with finality. On recent Sunday morning, Cohen heard from the press again. A wire service reporter wanted to know if there was any link between Marzook and the bomb scare at JFK. Cohen says he pointed out that Hamas has never been blamed for terrorist actions outside of Israel and the occupied territories. And besides, his client is merely the head of the political wing of Hamas, and thus not linked to any of the violence committed by renegade cells. “My new way of putting it,” he says, “is that he is the Gerry Adams of Hamas. A political leader only.”

The next day The Times used the exact same comparison, without attributing it to Cohen — another small victory in the court of public opinion.

This story appeared in the Talk of the Town section of the
September 11, 1995, issue of The New Yorker.