Money, money, money - Jason Shifrin

Welcome to the murky world of moneylenders in modern-day Britain, a world away from the go-getting young business tycoons grilled by Alan Sugar on his hit TV program The Apprentice?yet without Alan Sugar, this real-life story would not exist. Prepare yourself to enter a cold, hard, brutal environment where a loan for GBP10,000 can turn into a debt for GBP100,000 in a matter of weeks. With the worldwide financial recession bitting hard, many ordinary, previously law-abiding citizens have been forced to deal with the criminal underworld for cash loans in order to survive. This is the true story of one family man who found himself trapped in a financial meltdown that was beyond his worst nightmares. Jason Shifrin was brought up in a happy, solid family where his hard-working father provided everything a middle-class family could ever need. Business tycoon Alan Sugar was a childhood family friend who apprenticed the young Jason and encouraged him to enter the high-risk arena of big business from an early age. Sugar was the inspiration behind Jason's first steps towards being a self-made tycoon but when those early attempts failed, it led to Jason spending half his adult life running from the mob after getting into debt to gangster moneylenders to the tune of almost ten million pounds. As a result, Jason leads a bizarre double life as a loving husband and father, while also having to be the ultimate ducker and diver, afraid of his own shadow in case a bullet has his name on it. In order to survive, Jason even hired the services of one of the country's most notorious criminals to keep all the other gangsters off his back. He has traveled the world in pursuit of get-rich-quick schemes that might help him pay off his debts. This is a portrait of a middle-class Jewish boy trapped in a deadly world of violent, trigger-happy criminals.