Pain and Gain

The Untold True Story

Non-Fiction - True Crime
326 Pages
Reviewed on 02/23/2014
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Author Biography

Marc Schiller was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina immigrating to Brooklyn, NY with his parents when he was seven years old. An early entrepreneur, he started several small businesses by the age of nine. He attended high school in Brooklyn, participating in sports and was member of the school’s track team.

Marc received a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a MBA from Benedictine University. Marc has had a long and diversified career both as a professional and entrepreneur. His professional career has spanned the U.S. as well as internationally. On an entrepreneurial level, Marc Schiller has launched several successful businesses including two accounting practices both in Miami and Houston, a delicatessen in Miami and an options and stock trading company.

Marc Schiller currently works as an accounting and tax resolution specialist for a national tax resolution company.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Natasha Jackson for Readers' Favorite

Pain and Gain is the true story of Marc Schiller, a successful Florida business man who, one day in 1994, found his life spiraling out of control and hanging by a thread. The story starts out with a brief outline of Schiller’s life prior to coming to America and you see that for the most part, he had lived the so-called American Dream. But life in Miami proved to be more of a nightmare for Schiller. Pain and Gain – The Untold Story, or rather the events that almost ended the life of Schiller, began as these things tend to do, with a favor. Hiring the wrong person turned the life of this businessman and fraudster into a living hell and Marc Schiller invites us along for the thrilling, if terrifying, ride.

The story Marc Schiller tells is a fascinating one, combining different elements of human emotions such as greed and envy with pride. It’s not difficult to see how Marc, Jorge, and Lugo ended up on this collision course of destruction. Even though the story itself was intriguing, I found the writing itself somewhat stilted, whether because it is a true story or because the author was attempting to rewrite history. What made Pain and Gain – The Untold True Story so interesting was the fact that the victim was not an unassuming stand-up citizen. We learn that Schiller had his own criminal history that resulted in a guilty plea to Medicare fraud. Despite his own wrongdoings, one cannot deny the fortitude of someone to not only survive a murder attempt, but to turn the tables and work with the police to track down his would-be murderers and seek justice. There are things that could have been better with the story, but the story itself was too compelling and unbelievable to focus much on anything else.