Long before Rob Goldstone used his iPhone to quickly write "the most famous email in history" to Donald Trump Jr, the chubby Brit was a young journalist sniffing for scoops in Sydney.
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In the late 1980s his first Australian media job was at Sydney radio station 2UE.
"I was a reporter and presenter and my sports intern was a guy called Peter Overton who is quite well known in Australia now," Goldstone laughed in an interview with AAP.
Goldstone then moved to Australian Associated Press where he positioned himself as "the go-to reporter for big entertainment stories".
When Michael Jackson announced his 1987 Bad tour of Australia Goldstone demanded he be assigned to cover it for AAP.
"It was obvious if they didn't let me do it I'd do it anyway," Goldstone said.
Goldstone not only covered the tour, but he befriended Jackson's publicists and minders, became a member of the entourage as a "de facto tour publicist" and filed exclusive after exclusive story.
It was such a rush and career high Goldstone knew his days at AAP were over when the tour ended.
"I was like, 'Oh God! I can't go back and cover Woollahra Council. I have to go and do something else'," he said.
He entered the world of public relations.
It was a globe-trotting career path that eventually put him into the same orbit as US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and grillings in front of US congressional committees.
The Manchester-born 57-year-old tells his extraordinary life story in his new book, Pop Stars, Pageants & Presidents: How an Email Trumped My Life.
Goldstone first became involved with the Trumps in 2013 while representing Azerbaijani pop star Emin Agalarov.
Goldstone and Agalarov came up with the idea of Trump's Miss Universe pageant being held in Moscow that year and they helped plan it.
The Miss Universe experience then made Goldstone a conduit between the wealthy Agalarov family and the Trumps.
On June 3, 2016, five months before the US presidential election, Agalarov asked Goldstone to set up a meeting between the Trumps and a "well-connected Russian attorney" in New York.
"Emin told me that the attorney had potentially damaging information about questionable funding by Russians to support the Democrats and, by extension, their candidate Hillary Clinton," Goldstone wrote in his book.
Goldstone thought it was a bad idea to set up the meeting, but still tapped out an embellished email to Trump Jr.
The email stated how the "Crown Prosecutor of Russia" met with Emin's father Aras and "offered to provide the Trump Campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father".
That email would become a central piece in what some believed was proof of collusion between Putin and the Trump campaign.
"If it's what you say, I love it," Trump Jr wrote back to Goldstone.
The June 9, 2016, meeting between Trump Jr, his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then campaign chairman Paul Manafort with Russians, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, went ahead in a Trump Tower boardroom.
Goldstone was present.
It was a fizzer, according to Goldstone, with Veselnitskaya doing a "bait and switch" and using it instead to attempt to persuade the Trumps to overturn the Obama-era Magnitsky Act designed to punish Russian officials.
There was no transfer of Clinton dirt files and a disinterested Manafort rarely took his eyes of his phone during the meeting, Goldstone said.
Goldstone can't say if there was Trump-Russia collusion because he says he was just a small piece of a "huge jigsaw puzzle".
He also does not know what his next career move will be.
His life in front of cameras and special counsels has made it difficult to work as a publicist.
Goldstone, however, does not rule out moving back to Sydney and covering Woollahra Council meetings.
"Maybe I'll go back and work for AAP," he said.
Australian Associated Press