Born in Long Beach, New York, Robinson is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia (1967). While still at school, he wrote for television and radio, including a weekly children's show, and was on the writing staff of The Mike Douglas Show, a nationally televised daily talk show. He continued working in the media during his four-year stint as an officer in the United States Air Force. Charged with running a press and public relations office for five generals at the height of the Vietnam War, he hosted a weekly talk show, scripted and directed several film projects, wrote short stories for national magazines and moonlighted as a disc jockey on local radio.

His magazine credits include Playboy, McCalls, Barron's, Gourmet, Ambassador, True, Mademoiselle, Reader's Digest and TV Guide; his newspaper credits include The New York Times;The Washington Post, The San Francisco Examiner, The Christian Science Monitor and International Herald Tribune (for which he was a major contributor of features during the 1970s). In Britain his feature journalism has appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, Independent on Sunday and The Mail on Sunday, among others.

He moved to the UK in 1982, with more than 600 published stories and articles to his credit, to concentrate on writing books. In 2007, he returned to New York and now divides his time between the US and the UK.

Between 1986–1994, he published three biographies: Yamani – The Inside Story, about Saudi Arabia's former Minister of Oil Ahmed Zaki Yamani; Rainier & Grace, written about and with the cooperation of Monaco’s sovereign family and reissued in 2014 as Grace of Monaco after the fictionalized 2014 French biopic of Grace Kelly's life; and Bardot – Two Lives, also written with the cooperation of Brigitte Bardot.

Robinson won the 1990 Benedictine Award as "After-Dinner Speaker of the Year".

Considered "one of world's leading experts on international financial crime" Robinson wrote his 1995 investigative tour de force, The Laundrymen, in which he uncovered the true extent of global money laundering. The book reveals how hundreds of billions of dirty dollars are derived mainly from the drug trade, then reinvested throughout the world by otherwise legitimate businessmen, lawyers, accountants and Bankers. Business Week described it as "[a]n indictment of governments and banks".

In 1998, he published a sequel to The Laundrymen, titled The Merger – How Organized Crime is Taking Over The World. In it, Robinson described the disturbing lengths that transnational organized Criminals go in order to build multi-national corporations; explained why organized crime is the major beneficiary of globalization; and claimed that transnational organized Criminals have become the most powerful special interest group on the planet.

In 2005, he wrote his first "as told to" with an old college friend, Joseph Petro: Petro's autobiography, Standing Next to History – An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service. In 2007, Robinson co-authored Ronnie Wood's autobiography, documenting Wood's years as a rock star and member of the most famous band in the world, The Rolling Stones. In 2009, he published his third "as told to": Leading From The Front, co-written with British Entrepreneur, Gerald Ronson.

The Takedown, subtitled "A Suburban Mom, A Coal Miner's Son and the Unlikely Demise of Colombia's Brutal Norte Valle Cartel", was released in August 2011.

The second book in this series, "Jeffrey Robinson's Criminal Intent – The Swiss Wash Whiter" was published in 2013.

His other non-fiction titles include: The Risk Takers (his first UK best seller) which highlighted the high-fliers of City Finance, recounting their tales of money, ego and power; The Minus Millionaires, a sequel to The Risk Takers, in which he wrote about ‘risk takers’ who had lost fortunes; The End of the American Century, for which Robinson gained access to secret archives in the former Soviet Union to reveal hidden agendas of the Cold War; The Hotel, stories gathered over five months as a fly on the wall in what is, arguably, the best hotel in the world; The Manipulators – A Conspiracy to Make Us Buy, exposing the marketing world’s "hidden persuaders" 40 years after Vance Packard; and Prescription Games, an insider’s view of the global pharmaceutical industry, where science and marketing are deliberately kept apart and where, all too often, profit dictates who lives and who dies.

Robinson has appeared on NBC News, ABC News, CNN, Fox News, BBC Breakfast, BBC Newsnight, ITN, Channel 4 News, CBC, CNBC, Sky News, BBC World, NBC's The Today Show and Bloomberg Television. He has scripted and narrated various series for BBC Radio, including one on radio stars Amos and Andy, and one on American soap operas, "Tomorrow at the Same Time". He also wrote the BBC Scotland's Radio Three Drama of the Week, "Rossum’s Cyber Cafe", based on the Karel Čapek play "RUR".