Last fall, around the time when he was called to testify as part of the Congressional investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, Cohen got an offer to sell an apartment he owned for nearly two decades in Trump World Tower for about $3.3 million. In order to avoid taxes on the sale, he executed a 1031 exchange, in which the profit from the sale was re-invested into another, more expensive residential property. In November, Cohen went into contract on a 2,697 square-foot 19th floor Tribeca apartment for $6.7 million.

The building, still in development, was not close to being finished when he went into contract. This complicated his ability to secure financing from a bank, which would likely require a temporary certificate of occupancy. Since Cohen needed to comply with the 1031 exchange’s timing requirements, the developer—a longtime friend—offered a short-term $3.5 million mortgage, assuring him that the building would be complete and units would start closing in late winter or early spring of 2018.

Around the same time, Cohen found himself checking a rickety toilet in the marble-clad bathroom of the apartment he shared with his family in a different Trump building. As he fidgeted, the toilet exploded, expelling chunks of porcelain—and Cohen, himself—across the room, while errant pieces cracked nearby marble fixtures. The toilet had been recalled. The Cohens, alas, were unaware.

The renovations were only completed a few weeks before they left for a winter holiday trip to London. While they were gone, the so-called “bomb cyclone” descended on New York—a freak and devastating winter storm, which became doubly poignant for Cohen after an upstairs neighbor, according to a person familiar with the situation, accidentally left a window open. A pipe from the neighbor’s dishwasher froze and exploded. For days, while Cohen was across the Atlantic, water flooded into his apartment. The ceilings collapsed. The wood floors buckled. The walls were ruined. Most everything needed to be gutted and the family had to move out. They relocated to the Regency, a hotel a few hundred feet from their home. Insurance continues to foot the bill for his hotel stay. Then came the real natural disaster, Stormy Daniels.

The Tribeca apartment closed in early April, around the time when the F.B.I. executed its search warrants. No bank would give them a mortgage on the apartment once the temporary mortgage from the building sponsor ended. “The flood in the apartment, kicking off the year that Cohen’s had?” one person close to Cohen said to me recently, “there’s your metaphor. The idea of him living this high life in a suite in the Regency couldn’t be further from the reality.”

Cohen’s mounting financial pressure—the result of real-estate transactions, the waning value of his taxi medallions, his prodigious legal fees—remains at the forefront of his mind moving forward, according to people familiar with the situation. The government is reviewing the documents seized in April, but he has not yet met with prosecutors.

Now, Cohen, who has worked every day since he was a teenager, does not have much to fill his days. His clients have disappeared. Stories that he believes are untrue circulate on cable news for days on end. Even the contents of the shredder in his officer have come under the scrutiny of investigators. Buzzfeed reported earlier this month that the records included notes about a taxi business involving Gene Freidman, a taxi medallion manager who agreement to cooperate with the government. That Freidman was referred to as his “business partner” rankled Cohen. Freidman, he told friends, simply operated his medallions.

Cohen’s mood has lifted some after the ABC interview and since his new lawyers came on board. According to two people familiar with their thinking, Davis and Cohen are not shying away from comparisons others are drawing between Cohen and John Dean, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel, who was the first member of the Nixon administration to directly implicate the president in the Watergate cover-up. This, it seems, has buoyed him. As he walks about New York City these days, people whisper, Did you see who that is?, and point their phones in his direction to surreptitiously snap photos. He watches cable news, often seeing his face splashed across the screen; he waits for what’s next; and sometimes, he gets seated in a restaurant next to Michael Avenatti.