Michael Cohen was sentenced to prison for things he did for his boss

IT ALL BEGAN with a sign. In 2007 Michael Cohen was living in a Trump-branded property in New York. The building’s board of directors wanted to remove the Trump name from the tower. Mr Cohen organised his fellow residents into a resistance movement. The directors were ousted, the Trump branding stayed, and Mr Cohen, then a lowly lawyer at the Trump Organisation on a salary of $75,000 a year, was made an offer he could not refuse. Would he like to become an executive vice-president and special counsel to Donald Trump, with a salary of $500,000 a year? Yes he would.

That decision led Mr Cohen to become personal lawyer to the president of the United States and, ultimately, to be sentenced to three years in prison on December 12th, for crimes ranging from tax evasion to lying to Congress. It would have been longer had Mr Cohen not proved helpful to the special counsel, Robert Mueller, in his investigation into links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.