Donald Trump's "hush-money" trial in New York is proving tricky for journalists to cover.
The building is under renovation so it's lined with scaffolding, limiting camera angles of people coming in and out.
No recording equipment is allowed in the cold, ugly and apparently slightly stinky courtroom.
When cameras do manage to find an angle of Donald Trump, he always seems very grumpy.
But the other key figure in the trial is Michael Cohen, and he never seems grumpy at all.
While Trump stomps in and out of the courtroom, Cohen seems to float.
He smiles for the cameras and makes little jokes. He talks about the case on his very weird TikTok live streams where he makes love heart gestures for money.
Michael Cohen is the star witness in both of the ongoing Trump cases in the state of New York.
He was once Trump's personal attorney and said he would "take a bullet" for his boss, but everything has changed.
Michael Cohen served years in prison for lying, tax fraud, bank fraud and campaign finance violations.
But he thinks everything he's gone through will be worth it if he can take Trump down.
The hush-money payments
In the final months of the 2016 US presidential campaign, Michael Cohen had to squash a negative story about his boss.
Former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal was expressing interest in talking to the media about an alleged affair she had with Donald Trump back in 2006, while he was married to Melania.
Cohen made the story go away by arranging for a friendly magazine to buy the rights to her story, but then never print it.
But then it happened again.
A few days before the election, Michael Cohen paid a porn star named Stormy Daniels $US130,000 ($196,600) to keep quiet about her alleged affair with Donald Trump too.
Trump reimbursed Cohen in a series of 12 instalments referred to as "retainer payments".
"Hush money" payments are not illegal but using undeclared money to help you get elected is questionable.
After Donald Trump was elected president, news stories started to appear about Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump.
Michael Cohen was not worried.
He was the President's personal lawyer, Donald Trump had his back, and nothing was going to happen to him.
That was what he thought, right up to the day the FBI knocked on his door at 7 o'clock one morning.
The raid
The FBI had discovered evidence of the hush-money payments while sifting through Michael Cohen's email inbox looking for evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
Their raid of his home took five hours. He and his wife Laura sat on their bed watching TV and offering the agents coffee.
The agents left with Cohen's phone, so he rushed out, bought a burner, and called the White House.
The President of the United States told him: "Stay strong, I have your back. You're going to be fine."
They hung up. That was the last time he and Trump ever spoke.
Michael Cohen spent the next four months in what he would later call a "waking nightmare".
He wanted to trust Trump and do everything he could to protect his boss. He wanted to believe that if he was convicted, the president would pardon him.
But Cohen was under a tremendous amount of pressure.
While Stormy Daniels was on 60 Minutes giving salacious details about her alleged affair with Trump, he was being chased around Manhattan by reporters.
And he started to worry that maybe his boss wouldn't protect him after all.
The flip
Cohen has written two books about this period of his life and it's clear it was tough for him.
The FBI returned all of his documents after making copies and Cohen spent his time reading through them, trying to find ones which would incriminate or exonerate him.
He watched the constant news coverage of his case, as pundits spent hours speculating about what was going to happen to him.
He was increasingly suspicious about things Trump was saying in the media.
For example, when he was asked about the Stormy Daniels payments, Trump would say: "You'll have to ask Michael."
Cohen thought that this suggested the raid had been ordered by Trump to throw him under the bus; to make him a scapegoat.
Then, Trump stopped paying for Cohen's defence lawyers. Cohen suddenly was faced with a bill of more than a million dollars in legal fees.
Michael Cohen decided if the bus was coming for him, he wanted to make sure it hit Trump too.
The guilty plea
Michael Cohen started making offers to the investigators to help them bring down Trump, but they said they would only accept his help if he admitted to other crimes he had committed.
This included tax fraud, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations — all of which they'd seen evidence of when they'd gone through Cohen's email account.
He thought those allegations were unfair, and that he was being unfairly targeted because he was close to Donald Trump.
Then the prosecutors threatened to indict Cohen's wife for tax fraud if he didn't plead guilty. Michael Cohen cracked.
Five months after the raid, he said he was willing to plead guilty to all crimes and prosecutors prepared a document for Cohen to sign.
It said Cohen had worked "in concert with" and "coordinated with" Trump to buy the silence of Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, intending to help Trump's presidential campaign.
At first, it seemed like Michael Cohen's plan had come together, but something was going on behind the scenes.
There were forces at work to protect the president.
The Trump allegations
It turns out that Trump-appointed officials at the top of the Justice Department were allegedly ordering prosecutors to cut out as many references to Trump as possible.
The following day, Cohen was presented with a 21-page document. Nineteen pages had been cut out, including key sections implicating the president.
It was Cohen's worst nightmare. Trump was going to get away with it, and Cohen was going to jail for three years.
The gloves were off. Cohen and his lawyers told anyone who would answer their phone that he was ready to tell the world everything he knew about Donald Trump.
Cohen brought all the receipts. He handed over everything he had on Trump.
He testified to the US Congress that Trump was "a racist, a con man and a cheat." He did every interview he could. He wrote two books from jail.
We now know that what he was doing was actually crucial to getting a case against Trump going.
Federal prosecutor Geoffrey Berman revealed that, under pressure from Washington, his office had stopped investigating the president for fraud and campaign finance violations.
But Cohen's constant waves of allegations and evidence against Trump were too powerful to ignore.
By the end of Trump's term in office, he had issued presidential pardons to all of his imprisoned cronies — except Michael Cohen.
The case
Earlier this year, Trump was fined half a billion dollars for bank fraud and tax fraud, in a case which relied heavily on evidence given by Cohen.
And now, Trump faces a criminal trial in relation to the Stormy Daniels payment.
Michael Cohen's entire life for the last six years has been leading up to his testimony in this trial.
He's hardly a perfect witness. He is a liar and a criminal. He is not at all impartial.
The question is — will his story be compelling enough for a jury to find Donald Trump guilty for a crime that Cohen has already served time for?
We will find out soon in that dusty, stinky old New York courtroom.
