Mark Frank Montoya has never been one to shy away from being over the top.

As the dude who arguably did more than anyone to popularise the baggy “Gangster” style of snowboarding in the late 90s and early 2000s, he was all about rocking the blingest chains, the biggest rings, and the most ridiculous “look how I be rollin’ like a pimp!” style.

But even for a man who loved to big himself up (or make a tit of himself, depending on your point of view) this latest move is a pretty bold one. The gangster from the block seems to be launching a new career as a self-help guru.

Yup, MFM is gonna teach you how to turn your life around, make a million bucks and generally (as he puts it) “Live like a Boss!”

And best of all, the one-time G-Unit has donned a collared shirt and re-invented himself as the bastard child of Donald Trump and The Church of Scientology to help you do it.

Seriously, have a look at his recently launched website (which bills him as a “Financial Freedom Specialist, whatever that is!) it’s comedy gold.

Here we have a dude who just a few years ago was declaring himself “Thug 4 Life” (by doing some shoddy lip-syncing to Kool G Rap’s tune for his Back in Black part) telling us about “The tax advantages of having a home based business”.

He’s not a ghetto snowboarder any more, he’s a “world-class professional athlete” who built “several million dollar businesses as a serial entrepreneur”.

The fact that several of these businesses, like his Block chain of hotels and his clothing line Sound have folded ignominiously in the meantime doesn’t really matter, cos you see, Mark knows “The Secret Weapons of Entrepreneurial Freedom”.

And (for a small fee, obviously) he can help reveal them to you. Via the medium of very reasonably-priced set of instructional DVDs.

These “secret weapons” appear to involve a lot of CAPITALISATION of words like YOUR MONEY and SUCCESS, a smattering of pseudo-philosophical bullshit and plenty of chat about “Mastering the Freedom Mindset”.

Oh and if his logo is anything to go by, a couple of tigers and some samurai swords too.

Check out this particularly choice passage:

95% of us have been programmed to “do what we’re told” and “do what everybody else does” our whole lives. “Get good grades, so you can get a good JOB”, they told us over and over again! Sadly, we spent many valuable years in a corrupt school system, never learning a thing about MONEY or LEVERAGE. These exact 8 books below are some of the first that directly caused my success and helped me achieve immediate and extraordinary results in my life.

Far be it from us to doubt him, but we’d always thought Mark had achieved “success” by being actually rather good at snowboarding, rather than reading self-help books?

Either way, we can’t help wishing that he’d stuck to the snow and left flogging bullshit “make-a-million, get-rich-quick” schemes to Stephen Covey and those annoying internet pop-up ads.

It’s not the coolest thing for an ex-pro to be doing really is it?