Tosin Alabi’s shift at Gina’s, a restaurant near the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, was supposed to start at 9am, but he arrived six hours late at 3pm, without even calling ahead or letting his boss know. It wasn’t the first time the young father in his twenties had pitched up outrageously late — nor the latest he’d ever been. Once he disappeared in April and turned up for work in July as if nothing had happened. Most employers would have long since fired Tosin. He had fallen in with the wrong crowd, staying out until 3am, and found routine difficult. But he was lucky: his employer, Gina Moffatt, believed in second chances.
This was because Gina had once been given a huge second chance herself. In her twenties, Gina was an out-of-work chef and single mother when she was sent to Holloway Prison for smuggling class-A drugs into the UK. She was carrying a package for a family friend on a flight from Ghana to London and claimed she was unaware of its contents, but it made no difference. She was given a six-and-a-half-year jail sentence.
