Tom Bolan
 Tom Bolan  (lawyer) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | May 30, 1924 |
| Died | May 2017 (Age 92) |
| Nationality | US |
| Alma mater | St. John’s University |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
| Member of | Knights of Malta |
| Party | Republican |
Silent partner to the sexual blackmail operative Roy Cohn in their politically potent law firm for three decades. | |
Thomas Anthony Bolan was a U.S. lawyer who played the silent partner to the sexual blackmail operative Roy Cohn in their politically potent law firm for three decades.[2][3] He was at a May 1989 meeting aboard Robert Maxwell's yacht.
Bolan was a founder of the Conservative Party in New York, a patronage dispenser in the state for President Ronald Reagan, an adviser to Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato and a confidant of William F. Buckley Jr, being a board member of his National Review magazine.[2]
Background
Thomas Anthony Bolan was born on May 30, 1924, in Lynn, Mass., to Thomas J. Bolan, a lawyer, and the former Margaret Cremin. He graduated from Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn and got bachelor’s and law degrees from St. John’s University.[2]
Career
He flew 35 bomber missions over Nazi-occupied Europe as a decorated navigator during World War II.
Bolan was a federal prosecutor against accused Communists and the racketeer Frank Costello and, in the 1950s, as an assistant United States attorney in Manhattan, built a tax evasion case against the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a Democrat who was a United States representative for Harlem.[2]
Bolan quit in 1960 to join Cohn. The firm, which they bought four years later, eventually moved from the financial district into a townhouse on East 68th Street in Manhattan, where its partners included Stanley Friedman, the Bronx Democratic leader who was later convicted on federal corruption charges.[2]
Bolan represented a range of clients, including the Archdiocese of New York and Donald J. Trump.[2]
As executive director of Feature Sports Incorporated, a firm formed by Cohn and William D. Fugazy, the limousine magnate, Bolan was also a fight promoter who handled the heavyweight championship bouts between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson.
After Reagan was elected in 1980, Bolan headed his transition team in New York and was named a director of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the independent federal agency that helps American businesses invest in emerging markets. When D’Amato won election to the Senate that year, Bolan was the only aide who accompanied him on his first visit to Washington. He played a prime role in the senator’s recommendations for federal judges.[2]
Around 2000, he was part of what prosecutors said was a plot to bilk insurance companies of more than $200 million through a fake charity concocted by Martin R. Frankel, a stock trader. In a scheme involving priests and a high Vatican judge, prosecutors said, Mr. Frankel had set up the charity, the St. Francis of Assisi Foundation, and then tried to use it to buy several American insurance companies.
