Few individuals in recent times have cut such a controversial swathe through the business and sporting worlds as the self-styled former “pit leco” from Port Macquarie, who called the Upper Hunter and Newcastle home before departing to Singapore and then, apparently, to New York.

 Now, as then, Tinkler remains an enigma to all but his closest friends, and even they may be wondering if they really know the man who made – and lost – two substantial fortunes in quick succession.

 Along the way, Tinkler came to own two of the most important organisations in the Hunter Region – the Newcastle Knights and Newcastle Jets – and it’s his continued involvement with our two most high-profile sporting clubs that means he remains a pivotal figure in these parts, even if he is thousands of kilometres away.

 As a business reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, Manning spent a lot of his working days covering the Tinkler story, and in April this year, when he parted ways with Fairfax Media, he was able to work full-time on a book he had already begun assembling.

 Along the way, Manning helped on a Four Corners expose on Tinkler that ran on ABC television in late July. Now, after 18 months of research, the project is finished, and Boganaire: The Rise and Fall of Nathan Tinkler has been published by Black Inc, with a launch at MacLean’s Booksellers, Hamilton, on Wednesday. (See page 35 for the chance to win one.)

As this paper’s coal reporter, much of that side of Tinkler’s story was familiar to me, but Manning has chronicled his subject’s business dealings in far greater detail than anyone so far.

  Importantly, he has also shown the huge impact of Tinkler’s impulsive spending, especially the hundreds of millions of dollars he poured into the Patinack Farm thoroughbred business.

The terms of Tinkler’s tumble – trapped by a pincer of debt and falling commodity prices – is also well known, but Manning points to some little-remarked-upon aspects when he writes: “It is often observed that Tinkler’s rise and fall tracked the coal price, and that is true.

“In the simplest terms, his story is bookended by two major flips in world coal markets: he rose when China switched to become a coal importer, and he fell when the United States became a coal exporter. It all happened so quickly. Tinkler was quick to spot the boom that China unleashed upon Australia. But, like the rest of the coal industry, he was slow to appreciate the implications of the unconventional gas boom unleashed in the United States.’’  

 The accepted shorthand version of the Tinkler timeline is that Tinkler turned $1million into $442million with the Middlemount Coal deposit in Queensland, and then turned that amount into $1.2billion by buying Maules Creek near Boggabri from Rio Tinto, all in a couple of years.

 That’s true enough, but in Boganaire, Manning shows how Tinkler had burned through so much money by the time the Maules Creek transaction came around that he had to borrow the $15million he needed as a deposit on the deal, and that he only revealed that to his Asian-based backers at the very last minute.

He wasn’t using all that leverage by choice, as the wider world had believed.

The Middlemount $442million had been put into his bank account in May 2008.

 By February 2010, as he scrambled to close the Maules Creek deal, he was already so overspent on cars, horses, planes and real estate that it appeared he had no ready cash to hand.

That’s why Manning says in the opening chapter of the book that “starting from next to nothing, with his only qualification an electrical trade certificate, Nathan Tinkler would go on to make not one but two fortunes from brilliantly timed speculations on coal”.

But he also lost that second fortune, a process that began when he convinced the mainstream coal industry businessmen at Whitehaven Coal to merge their company with his Aston Resources in early 2012.

That deal probably added $100million or so to Tinkler’s paper wealth but tanking commodity prices soon put an entire era of resource speculation to the sword.

Tinkler’s next big move – some would say brazen, others foolhardy, attempt at a full takeover of Whitehaven – hit the boards in June 2012 and it ended in ignominy. After one toss of the coin too many, Tinkler was no longer calling the shots.

It was dressed up as a sale, but Tinkler apparently had little choice when he signed over his 19per cent stake in Whitehaven to his hedge fund backers in June this year.

In the intervening five months, little has been heard from Tinkler, who Manning says is supposedly still trying to cut a deal in Asia, although he appears to have moved digs from Singapore to the United States.

 Insolvency proceedings have been in train over any number of Tinkler Group companies, most of which appear to be nothing more than shells, many of them with substantial debts observers believe they might be unlikely to pay.

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EBTS to hedge funds are one thing. Professional investors such as Noonday’s Raymond Zage live their lives in the high-risk, high-return world of international finance.

But owing money to small creditors, when you are extremely wealthy, is something altogether different, and it’s this aspect of Tinkler’s character that has always been the most problematic.

As Manning writes: “Right from the beginning, as Tinkler scrambled to the top, he had left a trail of unpaid creditors behind him, but it wasn’t yet widely known.’’

Midway through last year, he recounts how “the Newcastle Herald’s journos were starting to cop flak for all the glowing coverage Tinkler was getting”.

“Hadn’t they heard the stories? They started digging, and it became clear that, below the radar, completely unreported, there were literally dozens of ‘little people’ who had been strung out by one or another of Tinkler’s operations.’’

As Manning sees it, the “dam wall burst” on Tuesday, August 21, 2012, with a Newcastle Herald report by Donna Page headlined “Trail of debt: Hunter firms call on Tinkler to pay the bills’’.

“He is estimated to be worth $915million and is said to be one of Australia’s richest men, but Nathan Tinkler has left a trail of debt devastating small business owners from the Upper Hunter to Queensland.’’

Manning refers to the  Newcastle Herald as ‘‘an heroic paper’’ in the book’s acknowledgements.

Through all of the controversies that have dogged the magnate, Manning points out that Tinkler rarely spoke on his own behalf, usually summoning employees and associates to front for him.

Manning shows how Tinkler burned through a  number of underlings – some of them very senior and very well remunerated – but two people who have lasted the distance are Hunter Sports Group chief executive Troy Palmer and Sydney publicist Tim Allerton.

  As Manning observes, relations between the Tinkler group and the Newcastle Herald worsened throughout last year, and after a front-page story in October about a Knights tax bill “Tinkler snapped” and Hunter Sports Group “banned Newcastle Herald journalists from attending Knights and Jets press conferences or other media events”.

 Manning says Palmer blamed the tall poppy syndrome but as more people “came out of the woodwork ... to tell of their encounters with Tinkler” he would never again “shake the trail of creditors that followed him”.

 NATHAN Tinkler is such an unconventional businessman – such a driven individual – that it’s natural to wonder what sort of person he really is.

As Manning notes in his book, his attempts to speak with Tinkler were rebuffed and none of his immediate family would talk.

By the time Manning began his research, Tinkler appeared to be on the way down, and his enemies – or his critics at least – were growing.

Manning says he resisted the temptation to peer too deeply into Tinkler’s private life. The Sydney-based writer also resisted the urge to psychoanalyse Tinkler, to find some horrible hardship in his childhood to account for his reported cavalier treatment of some creditors and colleagues alike.

In an interview this week, Manning said he had tried to tell the truth about Tinkler “to the best of my ability and in a way that captures the good and the bad”.

“The biggest thing Nathan’s done is that he’s shown what’s possible. That an electrician can amass a fortune worth hundreds of millions of dollars within three years and that is a huge inspiration,’’ Manning says.

“You can’t underplay the significance of that and I think that‘s why a lot of people don’t want to come right out and criticise him. He is obviously very intelligent and sharp but ... he could be so rude and so contemptuous of those around him that he alienated people to the point where it was self-defeating.

“If he could have learnt to bring people along with him a bit more it could have turned out so much better.

“Look at the Hunter Ports plan to put a coal loader on the old BHP steelworks site.

 ‘‘I’m not raising it to endorse it but it did have some merit. It’s still vacant, it didn’t require the dredging that the other loader proposal, T4, did, but it all had to happen so fast, and he was so abrasive that he couldn’t keep people onside.”

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HE state of Tinkler’s shrunken empire was laid bare in March this year when he was hauled into court to give evidence in a suit over the wind-up of a company of his called Mulsanne Resources.

Although Tinkler insisted to the court that he still had plenty of assets – even if he was cash poor – Manning says the reality of the situation was that regardless of how much he said he had, he did not put his hands on the $15million it would have taken to get the liquidator off his tail, and the public nose out of his affairs.

The inescapable conclusion, according to Manning, is that Tinkler is struggling, although he believes no one should write him off given his track record so far.

“Given the liquidator’s examination it is highly unlikely there are significant assets hidden away,’’ Manning says.

“Almost all of his properties are for sale and have debt against them. Patinack is for sale and has debt against it. Hunter Ports is just a book entry, Aston Metals is in administration and Buildev has been the subject of wind-up orders.

“The Knights and the Jets are both cash drains no matter how you look at them and,  given the uncertainty that remains over Tinkler’s finances, it’s hard to see where he is getting the money to keep them ticking over.’’ 

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HEY, THIS WAS HIS TOWN

 REMEMBER when everyone was calling Newcastle ‘‘Tinklertown’’? It was 2010, excitement over the Maules Creek coal proposal had pushed Aston Resources shares up to $9 each and Tinkler was at the peak of his rags-to-riches tale.

“Perhaps nowhere did it resonate more strongly than Newcastle, his adopted home town,’’ Paddy Manning said. “For a time, Tinkler would become a kind of benefactor Newcastle had never seen before.’’

Manning says some of his giving went under the radar but Tinkler certainly donated to John Hunter Children’s Hospital, Ronald McDonald House and the Westpac Rescue Helicopter Service and he has helped keep Surfest afloat.

Then there’s the Knights and the Jets.  Tinkler paid a total of about $5million for the Jets, and it was  a deal that would later attract   acrimony; a success fee paid by the football league to Tinkler’s go-to man, Ken Edwards, an undiscovered injury to star forward Jason Culina and a belief he paid millions of dollars more than other owners for a club licence all combined to cool Tinkler’s already limited ardour for the round-ball code.

But rugby league is another game entirely, as far as Tinkler is concerned, and while the battle for the Knights was one of the  most dogged sports administration fights we’ve seen, it played out Tinkler’s way, and with massive initial public support.

 With coach Wayne Bennett bringing a swag of representative players and Newcastle exports with him, the Knights changed look yet again but, after finishing seventh and falling one game short of the 2013 grand final, hopes are high for the final two years of Bennett’s reported $1million-a-year tenure.

Having bought into Newcastle development company Buildev in 2008, Tinkler was also moving into the property business, and, as Manning noted, ‘‘even declared it [Buildev] would tackle the city’s most intractable urban renewal project, the redevelopment of the Hunter Street mall”.

There was debate over the reasons for Tinkler’s dash into sports ownership and Manning believes it was at least partly aimed at winning “hearts and minds” in his battle to build a coal loader on the former steelworks site.

 As Manning writes, former premier and Infrastructure NSW head Nick Greiner later described the coal loader proposal as “bloody-minded nonsense”, but there was a time when Tinkler, styling himself as “the residents’ champion” , looked like he might succeed.