We’re just south of the Gold Coast Glitter Strip, not far from where the convicted conman, who has had stints in jails around the world and generated headlines for the wrong reasons for decades, grew up in Paradise Waters. There are people everywhere. Parents apply sunscreen to their kids, before they make their way to the shallows to splash around.

Some beachgoers stop to watch our ­photographer position a deck chair on the sand and surround it by lights.

Foster, 56, pulls into the carpark in a shiny black Jeep with the top down. In the passenger seat sits his horse-trainer mate Bill Dawson, who helps lift a Malibu surfboard out of the back.

Foster bought the board in 2013 for nearly $10,000 at an auction of the most prized ­possessions of fake Tahitian prince Joel Morehu-Barlow – the man who swindled more than $16 million from the state government while working for Queensland Health.

Two attention-seeking conmen, clearly with similar tastes.

Foster strips down next to his car, changing into a fresh Hawaiian shirt. He wears them everywhere because he spent too many years in suits, he says.

“I’ve got a Meter Maid coming,” Foster declares. “You can use the photos or not, just thought it would be very Gold Coast,” Foster says.

FOSTER THE INFORMANT

It’s been an unusual year for the once high-flying salesman, who went on to became a notorious conman, crook, fraudster, and scammer. For once he was in court but not the one facing charges. He was set to testify against now-convicted killer John Chardon after sensationally claiming he had elicited a confession from the Gold Coast millionaire about how he killed his wife Novy, when the pair were both in Wolston Correctional Centre in February 2015. He made detailed notes and wore a wire for police after convincing homicide detectives he could get the man to fess up if they allowed the pair to share a cell.

But it was all for nothing. Foster’s evidence was thrown out by a Queensland Supreme Court judge weeks before the trial began this year. His ­testimony was deemed too unreliable and the court found there was “very real doubt whether the confession alleged was made at all”.

The decision enrages the 56-year-old every time the subject is brought up because he feels he was “prejudged” by Justice Ann Lyons on his past in a context where courts are constantly clearing paths for rehabilitation.

Chardon was found guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter in the absence of Foster’s ­evidence. The lubricant tycoon has now lodged an appeal against ­conviction for Novy’s death and 15-year sentence.

Foster had been in jail with Chardon while serving a 12-month sentence for civil contempt following his arrest at a Byron Bay hideaway in 2014, looking wild and woolly after a year on the run. Having already been sentenced, the decision to turn jail supergrass was a strange one, even for Foster, whose life has never ­followed a predictable path.

After observing Foster at court while covering the trial, I’m curious at the conman’s motivation to help the police after spending his life running from the law.

Foster tells Qweekend “without all the ­bullshit”, the reason he wanted to help police catch the killer was to make his mum proud. To prove after all these years he’s a changed man.

“She’s put up with Peter Foster the conman and Peter Foster the criminal and she’s dying and I wanted to make her proud after all of that,” he says of his mum Louise Foster, 88.

Foster says he’s run out of energy to convince those who don’t know him that he’s left his old ways behind. But spend any time with the man and you’ll find he recalls many of those moments in the limelight with huge fondness. He treasures the memories and tells rollicking tales of his ­exploits – like the time he bought a helicopter while living in the UK so he could use it to attend dinners and business meetings.

As he edges closer to 60, Foster claims he is tired of being “Peter the conman”, but it is just as evident he still doesn’t mind a taste of Peter Foster the celebrity. He is adamant he doesn’t care what people think of him, but there will ­always be a part of Foster that craves to be the centre of attention with a pretty girl by his side.

KID TYCOON TURNED CROOK

They used to call him “kid tycoon”. Foster was only 17 when he showed up on Glitter Strip as a boxing promoter in 1981, the youngest in the world. Before that, he had sold jewellery at the ­Gold Coast markets from the age of 12 because he “just loved selling”. He was then the baby businessman who leased a string of pinball machines to high-rise apartment buildings on the Gold Coast while he was still at school, making more than double the weekly wage of his teachers.

Born in Mackay, Foster went to the then all-boys Aquinas College in Southport. He left in Year 11 but later finished his Year 12 Certificate at TAFE on his mother’s request.

“I wanted to get out in the world,” Foster says.

It wasn’t long before he did.

Foster met Muhammad Ali in the US in early 1980s because he wanted to give the boxing great a bronze sculpture that had been made by a Gold Coast artist. He’d hatched a plan to dip the sculpture in gold and sell it in the Middle East. The ­heavyweight loved it.

By 1983, the kid tycoon had become a TV ­producer and filmed a documentary while living with Ali and his wife Veronica. She was the one who introduced Foster to Bai Lin tea, the product that would later get him into hot water after first becoming a booming success. Foster reportedly made $30 million from selling the slimming product in England, Europe and South Africa, claiming it would result in weight loss.

He recruited Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, to promote the product and it became a major sponsor of Chelsea football club. It was through that product Foster met singer and page-three girl Samantha Fox in London and the pair began a romance.

But by 1994, Foster had been fined £25,000 for a trading standards offence after the packaging had not stated that Bai Lin should be taken in conjunction with a calorie-controlled diet.

Later in the UK, he was famously embroiled in what became known as the “Cheriegate” scandal. Foster was dating Carole Caplin, best friend and “lifestyle guru” to Cherie Blair, wife of then British prime minister Tony Blair. He had helped then British prime minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie negotiate a property deal. It all seemed to go well until Foster was outed as the slimming tea fraudster and refused re-entry to Britain as a result.

In his lifetime, the conman has seen the inside of 20 jails across five countries. If he could go back, he’d change it all. Kid tycoon would have a different life. He’d become a real estate agent like his mum and “own the Gold Coast” by now.

“If there is a better salesman, I’d like to meet him. If there is a better marketing man, I’d like to meet him,” he says.

But as Foster tells me the first time we meet over a long lunch, even God can’t change the past. And Foster has had a chequered past to say the least.

A LITANY OF CRIMES

Foster has been convicted of misleading and ­deceptive conduct, contempt of court, civil ­contempt, attempting to induce false testimony and was three years ago permanently banned from being a company director or having any business in the diet or health industry.

His first brush with the law was when he was 20, when he was fined for attempting to make a fraudulent insurance claim when a boxing match he promoted fell through.

By 1989 he was sentenced to four months’ jail in California for selling Chow Low Tea and claiming it could lower cholesterol. Five years later he was fined thousands over the Bai Lin tea scandal.

In 2003, he was booted out of Ireland, where he had fled after “Cheriegate”. Three years later he was arrested in Fiji under accusations he had falsified a residency permit, but the charge was later withdrawn.

The last time Qweekend interviewed Foster in-depth was in 2005. He was in self-imposed exile in Fiji, also claiming to have turned over a new leaf. But in 2007, he was arrested in Brisbane and charged with money laundering. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to fraudulently obtaining almost $300,000 from a bank in Micronesia.

In 2012, after a trial, Foster was found guilty of contempt of court for breaching an order to stay out of the weight-loss industry and was banned from selling diet products for five years.

But he didn’t attend his sentencing hearing in the Federal Court in Brisbane and a warrant was issued for his arrest in 2013. At the time, he claimed to the press he was hiding in Fiji and released a photograph of himself holding a Fijian newspaper. But one year later, Foster was arrested in Byron Bay. He had been living in a $1.3 million five-bedroom mansion. He was later imprisoned for civil contempt.

In 2016, Foster was sentenced over the weight loss spray SensaSlim, which fleeced almost 100 investors out of $6 million. He was fined more than $600,000 and permanently disqualified from managing corporations and banned from working in the weight loss industry.

In 2018, Foster again made headlines after pleading guilty in Sydney to using a false name to lure investors into the betting scam Sports Trading Club (STC). It was later revealed during a NSW Supreme Court grilling of high-profile Sydney lawyer Leigh Johnson that Foster had allegedly used money from the STC Ponzi scheme to fund his luxury lifestyle.

Private investigator Ken Gamble, the executive chairman of IFW Global, an international asset recovery firm, says he has assisted investors duped by the STC scam to get some of their money back.

He tells me Foster is “the master of deception”.

“Everything he tells you is a lie,” Gamble says. “He’s a person who fabricates documents, falsifies names and he’s been doing this his whole career and that has been well-documented in many different court cases.”

Gamble and Foster have history. In 2015, reports emerged Foster may have been involved in ordering a hit on the private detective in the Philippines, where Gamble was living at the time, after tapes emerged of Foster allegedly asking a friend about how to “arrange it”.

Foster was never charged over the allegations and maintained the recordings were fabricated.

“He has cheated and robbed hundreds of people out of money. These are typical hardworking Aussies, mum and dad investors, trying to do well,” Gamble says. “He puts on this persona that he’s trying to make his mother proud, but he’s a cunning (man).”

THIS CHARM ING MAN

Foster is smart, quick-witted and incredibly charismatic. Even police officers who have spent time with him call him a “likeable rogue”.

So why then did he lead a life of crime?

“Because I’m an idiot,” he explains over coffee at a Currumbin cafe after the photographer has left and we’ve said farewell to the Meter Maid.

Foster tells me he Google-searched slimming tea for the first time in 20 years before the shoot. He lists many brands and what they contain – noting there are about 40 different types now being marketed in Australia and no one has been charged for selling those.

“I never sold a product I didn’t believe in passionately,” he tells me over breakfast. “I’ve never been charged with taking money or stealing money. The perception is simply that whatever I’m involved with is a scam.”

Take the $10,000 Louis Vuitton surfboard that used to belong to Morehu-Barlow, for example. Foster says people claim it is a fake but he bought it online from Brisbane-based ­Antique and Fineart Auctions, when Barlow’s fraudulent items went under the hammer in 2013. The fake prince was in jail at the time and an old cell buddy had phoned Foster to gossip about the new prisoner. His jail mate told him Barlow had been given the board after spending nearly $1 million on luxury items at the designer store.

Foster genuinely wishes his life had turned out differently. “Being in jail, doing what I’ve done is not something to be proud of.”

I ask Foster repeatedly: “What would you say to people who don’t believe you’ve changed?”

Foster has a skill for turning every conversation about this topic into another engaging anecdote from his past; stories of celebrities he met or glitzy nights out on the town until he finally realises I’m not buying his deflected answers.

“Am I like the drowning man letting the ocean take him? Maybe,” he says with some ­deflation. “But I don’t think I give a f--- anymore about what people think of me.”

B OLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

A few weeks before the photo shoot I meet Foster for lunch at Omeros Bros Seafood, not far from Sea World. It’s the first time I’ve seen Foster outside of the court precinct and he’s in his element, despite telling me he’s exhausted after staying up all night helping a friend close a business deal. Foster knows the restaurant staff by name and not long after we arrive he asks the waiter to send a drink to everyone in the kitchen on his behalf. The restaurant is quiet and I easily spot the man in the trademark Hawaiian shirt. After lunch he’ll take me to the Tommy Bahama store at Marina Mirage where he buys his shirts and asks which one he should buy for the upcoming photo shoot. I tell him to get a pink one but he choses pale blue button-up with a price tag of nearly $200.

During lunch a drink arrives at our table – the waiter tells him it’s a virgin cocktail.

The tropical-looking drink turns up just as Foster finishes telling the story about how he gave up booze three years ago because Peter FitzSimons noted in his weight-loss book The Great Aussie Slimdown that old Foster was looking a little fat when being pulled out of a bush in handcuffs after a year on the run.

He tells me he wrote to FitzSimons and said thanks a lot but he’d try the diet. The journalist suggested Foster ditch the bottle of champagne a day and so he did, Foster says.

“This is from the woman behind you, Peter,” the waiter says placing the mocktail on the table.

The woman behind us gives Foster a smile and seconds later is lacing arms with my interview subject who has stood up to greet her.

“Isn’t he gorgeous?” she says. “Peter ­Foster might be a conman, but he’s the nicest one I’ve ever met.”

Foster says he doesn’t care what people think but he acts like someone who wants those he meets to like him.

When Meter Maid Kelly Maybury shows up for the shoot, Foster is keen to know about the woman, who is more than 35 years his junior.

She’s got a tattoo on her ribs that reads ­something about the “true meaning of loyalty”.

Foster asks her what it means.

“It means I’ve been f---ed over by a few ­people,” Kelly says, settling down on the side of the deck chair in her gold bikini.

“See, she’s probably got a story for you,” Foster suggests, leaning a little closer to Kelly.

The infamous conman is used to having a beautiful woman by his side. In 1986, that woman was megastar Samantha Fox, after she started promoting his diet products.

In her biography, she described Foster as “one of those people who could make almost anything feel like a party”. Another apt analysis.

He says the pair called it quits after a falling out when they were visiting Australia from the UK in 1987.

But in 1994, they rekindled their relationship after Valentine’s Day when Foster sent his signature champagne and strawberries to her dressing room before a gig and they had a whirlwind second-chance affair. The relationship ended soon after Foster says he told Fox he thought it was “finally time to admit she was gay”.

In 2003, Fox made headlines after announcing she was in a relationship with her female manager Myra Stratton. He tells me he once bought Fox a tiny horse, which was the smallest in Europe, as well as a four-carat diamond for Valentine’s Day in 1987.

“I’ve had such wonderful opportunities for an ordinary looking bloke from the Gold Coast to date some of the most beautiful women in the world … but it’s a shame there (isn’t) one still left at the table,” he says.

His biggest regret is losing his reputation and the ripple effect that has had on finding a partner in later life.

“Now, the girlfriends, or the mothers, or the family of any woman would say: ‘That’s Peter Foster, he’s a conman’,” he says. “They might say: ‘What will the neighbours think?’ So I think it would be very difficult, it would take a very independent person, who could make up their own mind.”

ALL FOR HIS MUM

As we leave Omeros, Foster remembers he’s got to stop on the way home for his mum’s cigarettes. His greatest love affair has always been with her. Louise Foster spends her days smoking in her house. She has dementia but she still likes to watch the news, I’m told. His life is now largely focused on her and her care.

Foster says it’s about time he gave back ­everything she gave him.

“She’s dying. A little bit more every day,” he tells me. “She just fought cancer and it’s just wear and tear and getting old at 88. We don’t have much time left.”

Foster and Louise live in a canal-front property on the Gold Coast. He’s not working at the moment and relies on his family for financial support. He says it swings in roundabouts and he used to do the same for them. He says he doesn’t want to have to send his mother to a nursing home. Louise, then known as Louise Pelotti, was the first female real estate agent on the Gold Coast.

“She was big time. Now there are more women than men. She faced all the fear and ­resentment people had before women today ever had to,” Foster explains.

He calls her his greatest defender, who offered unwavering support in the face of public ridicule of her only son.

“We’d called them another typical FFU – a Foster f--- up,” he says of his indiscretions. “Any good you find in me is because of her. The bad you find in me, I have no idea where that came from.”

He says Louise is the reason he cosied up in a cell with a killer. The reason he wanted to help the police with John Chardon’s case. The reason for his life. “I don’t think it was about redemption,” he says.

To those who don’t believe he ever really made Chardon confess, Foster says he’d never lie about murder, even if he has lied about a lot of other stuff. He has countless notes of conversations with the killer to prove the hell he went through to get it. Foster says he did it to make his mum proud and he never wanted to be outed as a prison supergrass.

“Do you want the story without all the bullshit?” Foster says of how he got the alleged confession from Chardon. “I could sell myself to Chardon. There wasn’t a benefit. It came at a great cost. It was never to redeem myself in the eyes of the public because it was always supposed to be anonymous. I just did it for my mum.”

That might be true. But I think there is a part of him that has enjoyed the attention and saw a challenge in it all. In the end, it’s another story to his list of enthralling dinner-party tales.