It takes some time for Michael Cohen to work his way to a table at the grillroom of the Loews Regency Hotel, on Park Avenue. He’s been a regular at the hotel’s famous power breakfasts for more than two decades, and on several recent visits staff members reached out to him for handshakes and bro hugs. These days, the restaurant, with its twenty-seven-dollar pancakes and sumptuously upholstered banquettes, represents a welcome refuge for the erstwhile “Personal Attorney to the President,” as Cohen used to describe himself. Outside the friendly cocoon of the hotel, he has attracted a bipartisan coalition of adversaries—Democrats who remember his years of service as Donald Trump’s fierce and profane fixer, and Republicans who abhor Cohen’s transformation into a vocal Trump critic. Robert Mueller, the special counsel, apparently has a different view of him. Cohen pleaded guilty, last year, to campaign-finance and financial-fraud crimes in the federal court for the Southern District of New York, in Manhattan, and Mueller got Cohen to plead guilty to lying to Congress. But Mueller referred to Cohen’s testimony more than a hundred times in the recently released report of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and he used Cohen’s testimony to establish one of his central conclusions: that Trump and his allies may have obstructed justice, by attempting to steer Cohen into protecting the President.

On May 6th, Cohen will begin serving a three-year sentence at the federal prison in Otisville, New York, seventy-five miles north of Manhattan, leaving in his wake a grieving family, vanishing wealth, and gloating enemies. In hostile tweets, the President has called him a “rat” who “makes up stories,” and insinuated that Cohen’s family members had committed other crimes. Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, told me last week, about Cohen, “I think he is a pathological, dumb liar.” Prosecutors in the Southern District have rebuffed Cohen’s attempts to offer evidence against Trump and others, thwarting his hope of reducing his sentence or delaying his surrender date. Congressional committees continue to demand his time. Cohen, who is fifty-two, has an unlined face, more or less permanently set in a hangdog scowl, and a voice that retains the unmistakable trace of his childhood on Long Island. In conversation, he jumps from topic to topic in a jittery staccato. To sit with him today is to listen to a fugue of self-pity and rage, from a man who also exhibits some understandable bewilderment at his plight. “I now have congressional committees asking me for more information based upon information that I had already given,” he told me at the Regency. “I’m not going to take another minute out of my family’s time with me in order to do anything anymore without knowing what benefit there is now to me.”

Cohen is one of only two people to receive a substantial prison sentence in the investigation that arose out of the 2016 election. In August of last year, Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted of financial fraud and avoiding taxation on millions of dollars in income, among other crimes, and he is currently serving seven and a half years. Unlike Manafort, Cohen wasn’t the principal beneficiary of most of his crimes; Donald Trump was. Cohen pleaded guilty to violating campaign-finance law by orchestrating a payment of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to the porn actress Stormy Daniels “at the direction” of Trump. Cohen also acknowledged violating banking laws to obtain the money to pay Daniels; he admitted to a campaign-finance charge regarding a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar payment to silence the former Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal, to benefit Trump’s Presidential campaign; and he pleaded guilty to making a false statement to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump tower in Moscow, so that he could align his account with Trump’s own false public statements on the subject. In charges unrelated to Trump, Cohen also pleaded guilty to tax evasion.

Cohen chose to do Trump’s bidding for a decade, and that included lying to reporters and others as well as committing felonies on his boss’s behalf. In pleading guilty to all the counts against him, he surrendered his right to contest the charges before a jury. In the light of all this, Cohen has at best a modest claim on our sympathies. And yet there can be little doubt that he is a fall guy in Trump’s web of misconduct, and these days he looks like a victim as well as a perpetrator.

For many years, Michael Cohen’s life amounted to a realization of the American Dream: personal happiness and financial success on a grand scale. His father, Maurice, escaped from Poland during the Holocaust, and found his way to Canada, where he went to medical school. A head-and-neck surgeon, he moved to New York, met Sondra, a nurse, whom he married, and settled with her in Lawrence, one of the Five Towns, on Long Island. There, the couple raised four children, all of whom became lawyers. Michael graduated from American University in 1988, and from Thomas M. Cooley Law School, in Michigan, in 1991. In New York, he worked at a negligence-and-malpractice law firm for five years, until his fortunes turned when he became acquainted with the Shusterman family.

Fima Shusterman and his family emigrated to the United States from Ukraine in the early seventies, and, in New York, he first made ends meet by driving a cab. He did a stint in the garment business and started buying taxi medallions when they were rapidly appreciating in value. Shusterman’s rise was only slightly slowed when he pleaded guilty, in 1993, to participating in a tax-evasion scheme. After he testified against his accountant, in Brooklyn federal court, he received a sentence of probation. Around this time, Cohen met Laura Shusterman, Fima’s daughter, and the two were married. Cohen ultimately joined forces with the Shusterman family in the medallion business.

Cohen prospered during the post-9/11 recession, which particularly affected the New York City taxi industry. Many Sikh drivers, who wore turbans and beards, felt threatened by anti-Muslim sentiment and left the business. Cohen picked up more medallions at depressed prices, and he and his father-in-law came to control almost three hundred of them. In time, Cohen was worth some ninety million dollars on paper. In the early two-thousands, Cohen and his in-laws bought apartments in Trump World Tower, at 845 United Nations Plaza. The families later bought other Trump apartments as investments, and Cohen met and became friendly with Donald Trump, Jr.

At the time, the Trump Organization was dealing with a rebellion of the condominium board at Trump World Tower, and Don, Jr., suggested to his father that Cohen, who was still practicing law, might help to resolve it. Cohen told me, “They wanted to take his name off the building, and we quietly got enough votes where we got rid of that board and inserted our own. That’s how I got to meet Mr. Trump, and then he asked me to do some other things for him.” Trump never paid Cohen for resolving the board controversy, but, in 2007, he hired Cohen to work for the Trump Organization. Cohen’s title—executive vice-president and special counsel—reflected his unique position at the company. “My role was specifically for him, as his special counsel—anything that came up, that upset him, that related to him, that others wouldn’t be able to deal with or needed special handling,” Cohen said. He was to take care of any matters, personal or professional, that Mr. Trump, as Cohen still always refers to him, wanted him to address.