We don’t want to live near them. We don’t want to employ them. We certainly don’t want our children to mix with their children.

But we’re happy to see them locked up, and we don’t care if they’re abused. After all, they deserve it. Gypsies, Gyppos, Pikies…they’re all tramps, liars, and thieves.

Living in a county where it’s acceptable to think like this what future could a boy born in a layby to dirt poor Romany Gypsy parents expect? By 20, he might be in prison, dead, or at best, a prostrate and powerless prisoner of society.

But not this Gypsy. At 20, Alfie Best was investing in property, earning £200,000 a year, driving a Porche.

Alfie is a man who turns trash into treasure. His lack of formal education forced him to learn from the world around him. Travelling the country, living everywhere and nowhere, revealed opportunities where others could only see wasteland. And the bigotry and racism gave him no other option than becoming the most significant British success story of modern times.

But Gypsy Billionaire is not just another rags-to-riches tale about financial success. Alfie might be the richest Gypsy on the planet, but this is also a story about a man confronting the establishment and squaring up to the biggest challenge of our time—the cost of living crisis. 

At a time when banks are repossessing people’s houses and families are choosing whether to eat or turn on the heating, Alfie has worked tirelessly on a solution for sustainable, low-cost housing and cheap electricity. He is single handily changing the housing market—removing people from the cycle of poverty, debt, and subservience to the system. 

Since he started his first business at 14, Alfie has been stabbed by criminals, beaten by rivals, and shunned by MPs. But just like the Roma people, who have faced 1,000 of persecution, his resilience and resourcefulness have endured.