On the Friday before Easter, Donald Trump was sitting inside his Mar-a-Lago oceanside resort in Palm Beach, Florida, stewing over the headlines he kept reading about the growing likelihood of a contested Republican National Convention in July.

In need of instant advice, Trump picked up the phone and did what he's often done for the last 30 years: He dialed up his longtime political confidant, Roger Stone.

"Can they really f--- me on this convention?" Trump asked, somewhat incredulously. "If I have the most votes, can they really take this away from me?"

Stone told him indeed they could, and likely would, if he was short of the 1,237 delegates needed to avoid going to a second presidential nominating ballot in Cleveland. Trump heard Stone out, and then requested the name of someone who could help him catch up on the inside game he was rapidly losing to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz: the tedious, onerous hunt for loyal delegates, state by state, district by district.

Stone recommended Trump contact Paul Manafort, a man the real estate mogul first met nearly 28 years ago, ironically at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans. That year, Manafort was the deputy convention manager for Vice President George H.W. Bush. Trump was in town and curious to see how a convention was really run; Manafort thought it'd be neat to get his picture with The Donald. The two convened in a trailer outside the Louisiana Superdome during a steamy weekday for a friendly chitchat.

It's unlikely that either foresaw being reunited again close to three decades later under such extraordinary circumstances: Trump as the front-running but thoroughly exposed candidate for the GOP nomination and Manafort as the white knight and uber-lobbyist tasked with saving him from his campaign's ineptitude at navigating a convoluted delegate-driven system.

"A lot of these losses Trump had that he is bellyaching about could've changed with good staff work," says Frank Donatelli, a Washington lobbyist who served as White House political director for President Ronald Reagan.

After dining together at Mar-a-Lago, Trump quickly made the decision to hand Manafort the most crucial role in his campaign at this late stage: convention manager. The job combines artistry and hard-boiled science, and the person filling it must act as part negotiator, part schmoozer, part steamroller, and – perhaps most importantly – part mathematician.

"We used to refer to him as 'The Count,'" recalls Scott Reed, who worked with Manafort on the 1996 Republican National Convention for Bob Dole and now directs political strategy for the U.S Chamber of Commerce. "All he needed was a cape when he entered a meeting, like the Count of Monte Cristo. He is a serious person, proven vote counter and knows how to get a job done."

What's clear now is that if Trump does ultimately capture the Republican nomination – either outright or through a multiple-ballot convention – it's Manafort who will reap a fair share of the credit.

Historically low-profile, he quickly raised eyebrows when he popped up on CNN not long after his position was formally announced in late March, professing Trump would "absolutely" net 1,237 delegates by June.

"Why the confidence?" anchor Chris Cuomo pressed.

"Because I know the votes," Manafort replied.

'He Kicked Our Ass'

Manafort was exposed to the convention setting at a very young age because Republicans in his native state of Connecticut use the process to nominate U.S. Senate and gubernatorial candidates.

His enrollment in Georgetown University undergraduate and law school programs brought him to Washington, where he became active in the Young Republicans and landed a position in Gerald Ford's Presidential Personnel Office.

Ford was soon embroiled in a highly spirited nominating fight with Reagan, the former California governor who was remaking the Republican Party with a formidable challenge to the establishment from the right.

Many of the elder statesmen and consultant class of today's Republican Party – like Stone, Donatelli and Charlie Black (currently an adviser to Ohio Gov. John Kasich) – signed on to help the insurgent Reagan. Manafort stuck with Ford.

At 27 years old, he was given the assignment of gathering and counting delegates for Ford in the Northeast, a critical region of strength for the president because Reagan neglected to file delegate slates in many of those late-voting states.

Stone, working for Reagan, was empowered to try to find converts. He remembers traveling to Rhode Island, where he took the late Providence Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci to dinner to try to persuade him to switch his vote to Reagan.

"I was trying to peel him off of Ford. I said, 'Think about it.' We finished dinner and he went right to a phone and called Manafort," Stone says now. "Manafort had everything tied down so tight we couldn't move anything. He kicked our ass . He knows how to negotiate, just like Trump."

Ford narrowly defeated Reagan at the convention thanks to the perks only an incumbent president could provide to cement delegate loyalty.

That early work established Manafort as a tactician to be reckoned with. He was organized, dogged and understood the arcane mechanics of the delegate system.

He also espoused a trait that many say Trump and his team are desperately lacking. "He has the patience of Job, just like [James] Baker," says Craig Shirley, a conservative consultant and author of "Reagan's Revolution," a book on the 1976 primary campaign. "I've never seen Paul lose his temper, lose his cool."

Fresh off his success helping Ford, Manafort had planned to run for national chairman of the Young Republicans in 1977. But the ill will that lingered among Reaganites was so palpable that he deferred to his friend Stone. Instead, Manafort would run Stone's convention race, as a way of uniting the conservative coalition.

Manafort organized Stone's supporters and brokered a deal to bring delegates from Michigan, Texas and Illinois into Stone's fold. One of the memorable sweeteners: Manafort promised a leader of the Illinois Young Republicans a place on Stone's ticket in the position of auditor.

Manafort also loved shaking things up to disorient his opponents. Normally at the Young Republicans convention, delegates are seated in alphabetical order by state, so Alabama is close to Arkansas, and so on. The night before the votes in 1977, he changed the seating plan in order to scramble his rivals' surroundings, making it trickier for them to organize.

"It made communication by the opposing forces more difficult," says a Republican who attended the convention.

Stone won that convention and served as chairman of the Young Republicans into 1979. He also forged a lasting bond with Manafort that would later take them into business together, along with Black, another one of Washington's premier lobbyists.

Cashing in at All Costs

Established as a great convention fixer, Manafort went on to serve on Reagan's convention teams in 1980 and 1984; as a deputy convention manager for Bush in 1988; and as Dole's convention manager in 1996.

But he also cashed in on his newfound fame in the nation's capital, launching the Washington-based lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly.

At times, he could be remarkably transparent about his motives. After he obtained more than $40 million in federal taxpayer money for a low-income housing complex in New Jersey, of which he became a part owner , he candidly admitted to Congress, "You could characterize this as influence peddling."

Yet simply doing business stateside wasn't enough, as many lobbyists in the Washington circuit find.

It can be far more lucrative to venture overseas where the rules guiding governance are looser and the scrutiny is diminished. Manafort quickly began racking up clients from across the globe, no matter their interest, ideology or baggage. This led him to work with an assortment of questionable international characters, from former Ukrainian Prime Minister and President Viktor Yanukovych to a repressive Nigerian general and a Kashmiri group accused of having ties to Pakistan's intelligence service.

Manafort's counsel to the much-maligned Yanukovych ahead of the 2006 parliamentary elections in Ukraine is one of the most glaring on his resume due to Yanukovych's close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has signaled he could work with.

Yanukovych also had earned the scorn of President George W. Bush's White House during the Orange Revolution that protested Ukraine's 2004 presidential vote after charges of fraud and corruption invalidated Yanukovych's victory.

But Manafort doesn't appear to have any qualms meddling in complicated U.S. interests, even when there's a Republican occupying the White House.

Ahead of the 1986 presidential election in the Philippines, Manafort's firm received a nearly $1 million contract geared largely toward courting U.S. media on behalf of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, according to Newsweek. The election's results were marred by fraud and eventually led to the dissolution of U.S. support for Marcos, with Reagan threatening to cut off aid and leaning on him to step down.

"He worked for the worst Ukrainian president," Ukrainian journalist Sergii Leshchenko told Quartz. "He's a political lobbyist who does not care about the reputation of the client."

Manafort's controversial work likely cost him a role at John McCain's 2008 Republican National Convention, even though his lobbying partner at the time, Rick Davis, was McCain's campaign manager. The Arizona senator was leery about associations with lobbyists to begin with, and one McCain strategist told Newsweek, "The Ukrainian stuff was viewed as too much."

Manafort did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but his defenders say he's not unusual for delving into dicey high-priced global work that could lead to perceivable quandaries.

"There isn't a Republican or Democratic consultant worth his salt who hasn't done an overseas campaign where the rules are different," Shirley says.

Another GOP consultant not supportive of Trump but who has known Manafort for decades says, "I thought this stuff would've been a big deal. But Trump's so controversial himself that Paul's tame in comparison."

In Manafort's eyes – whether it be repairing the image of Yanukovych, greasing contacts for Marcos or securing delegates for Trump – it's all part of the game.

"If politics has done anything for us, it's taught us to treat everything as a campaign,'' Manafort said in a 1989 Washington Post piece, explaining his firm's lobbying tactics. "You have to have a strategy. The reason we are successful is because we are strategists."

It's All About the Game

Throughout his long career, colleagues and observers say Manafort has never expressed any type of hardened political ideology.

While many Republican loyalists agonized over choosing between Ford and Reagan, Manafort's transition from working for one to the other was seamless.

"He's not particularly close to any kinds of activists," Donatelli says. "He sometimes chuckles when those types of things were raised. He's all about the game. He likes this stuff – it's fun."

This helps explain Manafort's attraction to Trump, a client he's working for pro bono, according to the campaign. Since his appointment less than a month ago, Manafort has already consolidated control over operations far beyond delegate wrangling, according to various news accounts, reducing the overarching strategic role of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.

Tuesday night after Trump's smashing victory in the New York primary, it was Manafort who appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox News program, exhibiting stone-faced confidence about Trump's prospects of sinking Cruz before the convention: "There's not going to be a second ballot, so there's not an issue," he said.

Manafort's rapid rise up the ranks in Trump's world surprises no one who's worked with him before. Associates describe him as eager to set an agenda, propel it forward and see it through, diplomatically but with a firm grip on the power levers.

"Manafort is doing this for all of the right reasons. He knows and respects what Trump has done this cycle, and he knows he can get the job done," Reed says. "Plus he is Donald's peer, not someone Trump can bully and boss around."

But the pressure on Manafort is only likely to intensify in the coming weeks, as the primary moves out west to Indiana and Nebraska – smaller states less inclined to favor Trump. Even with wins in the Northeast, Trump's race to 1,237 delegates still will be a strenuous state-by-state slog, all the way to the final day of voting on June 7.

And if Trump falls short, Manafort's much-heralded skill set will be put to the test in a way no convention manager's has since 1976. At 67 years old, this endeavor also might mark the capstone of his storied career.