‘I plotted to kill my rapist’: Pastor and ex-gangland criminal enforcer Mick Fleming reveals how he planned to stab man who attacked him when he was just 11 – but chose to forgive him and turn his life around instead
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A former gangland criminal enforcer-turned-pastor has revealed how he plotted to kill the man who raped him aged 11 after spotting him by chance in a McDonald’s three decades later.
Mick Fleming, 57, is now a reformed pastor who runs a Christian charity in Burnley called Church on the Street.
Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, he revealed how he arranged to meet his attacker and had two knives. But he decided instead to forgive his rapist and turn his life around, which led to him meeting Prince William and Kate Middleton when they visited his project last year.
Mr Fleming has spoken about his astonishing life of abuse, addiction, crime, suicide, religion and redemption in first episode of a new human interest series launched by MailOnline on our YouTube channel called ‘My Story’, which will feature people with extraordinary life stories.
To watch the full episode click here.
Mick Fleming, 57, is now a reformed pastor and runs a charity called Church on the Street
Pastor Mick Fleming meets Prince William and Kate Middleton in January last year in Burnley
Mr Fleming told how he grew up in a ‘loving’ working-class family in Burnley but his life ‘completely changed’ aged 11 when he was on the way to school.
Mr Fleming worked as a drug runner and debt collector, and was once arrested on suspicion of murder although never charged
He said: ‘I went out to school one day, just kind of like this happy go lucky kid. Bit of a mummy’s boy really. And on my way to school I was attacked.
‘I still sometimes get them little flashbacks. It’s a taste in my mouth of like a woolly jumper coming across my mouth and not being able to breathe. Sadly, I was raped.
‘I didn’t understand what was happening. Understood the pain, the fear. And the man that did it, I was on the floor after and he picked me up off the floor by my throat and he said that if I told anybody he’d kill my mum and dad.’
Mr Fleming said that he went to school and continued through the whole day without speaking, adding: ‘I never said one thing all day and nobody noticed.’
He added that he did not feel he could cry because he thought his mother or father might have heard him and then his attacker would find out and kill him.
Mr Fleming therefore bit his bed covers and ‘cried for hours’ but nobody heard.
Pastor Mick Fleming stands with William and Kate during their trip to Burnley in January 2022
He eventually plucked up the courage to tell his father what had happened, but just as he was about to tell him, his father informed him that his sister Ann, 20, was dead following a heart attack.
READ MORE Pastor who was a violent drug dealer before setting up a charity for the disadvantaged and homeless meets Prince William and Kate
He said his father told him: ‘Come in son, sit down, your sister’s dead’. Mr Fleming told how the sound of ‘pain and love mixed together’ still ‘haunts me’.
He continued: ‘For me, it’s the sound of Jesus on a cross and it’s the sound a mother makes when she loses a child.’
Mr Fleming said it ‘filled the house and bounced off every wall’.
He said he thought at that moment that he could never speak about being raped, and instead went upstairs and took some of his mother’s painkillers which she used to help with her bad back.
He continued: ‘I laid on the bed and this little boy went to heaven. I just floated out of my own body. There was no pain. I felt so comfortable and relaxed.
‘It was like somebody was wrapping a quilt around me and loving me. And then sadly as the painkillers wore off I came back down to earth with a real big bang.’
Mr Fleming spent the next 30 years addicted to alcohol and drugs, and was dealing aged just 14 – soon earning more money than his father.
Mr Fleming is a former gangland criminal enforcer and drug dealer who lives in Burnley
He worked as a drug runner and debt collector, and was once arrested on suspicion of murder although never charged. He was also arrested for armed robbery and firearms offences.
But he eventually managed to stop taking drugs and drinking, and had been clean for about a year when he was in a McDonald’s branch and happen to spot the man who had raped him 30 years earlier.
Mr Fleming said: ‘I looked across the room and I saw an alcoholic. I bought him a coffee and something to eat and I arranged to meet him the next day and talk to him and try to help him.
‘And he did, he turned up the next day and I went in the same place and I helped him. And he died two years later. But he died with a type of faith and a type of understanding of something bigger than him.
‘He died sober and he got his family in his life, I guess. I never told him, he was the man that raped me.’
Mr Fleming set up Church On the Street, a charity and church housed in a former gym which offers a safe space for up to 200 people who may be struggling with life
Mr Fleming said the ‘truth of what happened’ was that the second time he met him, it was to ‘kill him, it wasn’t to help him’.
He continued: ‘I had a knife up my sleeve and I had one in my sock, because if somebody took the knife off me whilst I was killing him, I’d take the one out of my sock and finish him off.
‘I’d spent 30 years slavering over if I ever saw him again. All my pain, all my fears, all my anxieties were from this man, and he had to die. It’s like the power to do it was so strong.
‘I wasn’t going to do it to get away with it. I was going to do it in front of everybody, almost like as a piece of work. Look what happens to people who do that.’
When Mr Fleming walked into the restaurant, he said he intended to kill the man – but was ‘stopped him in his tracks’ when the man smiled at him.
Mr Fleming is pictured appearing on ITV’s Good Morning Britain earlier this year on April 26
He said: ‘I heard a voice. Not a schizophrenic type voice, it was in my head, in my thinking, and it was inside. And it just said ‘mate, why are you living in his sin?’
‘And it just stopped me in my tracks. put the knife back up my sleeve. why are you living in his sin? And it wouldn’t go away. And it just kept coming back and coming back into my thoughts.
‘So I went and bought two coffees and sat down. Shaking inside. And he’s just talking and I’m thinking you need… I couldn’t understand what were happening to me.
‘I got this moment of absolute clarity. And it was (that) forgiveness is never saying it’s alright what you’ve done to me, ‘there, there, there’, because I thought that’s what it were. That’s impossible for me, ‘there, there, there, it’s alright, it doesn’t matter’, because it does matter, it destroyed my life.
‘But forgiveness was saying I’m not going to live in his sin. Because if I live in his sin, I kill him, I go to jail, other people, my family, and the sin goes on and on and on and on. Or I choose not to live in it. And it were just so simple for me in that moment.’
Mr Fleming ended up going to the University of Manchester to study for a degree in theology
He said his life changed from that point onwards and he found a ‘type of faith’ that he was ‘drawn towards’.
Mr Fleming ended up going to the University of Manchester to study for a degree in theology, but failed his first year, because he struggled to read and write.
He was diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia but eventually achieved a 2:1 degree and was later ordained.
He set up Church On the Street, a charity and church housed in a former gym which offers a safe space for up to 200 people who may be struggling with life.
It provides a food bank, clothing bank, hot showers, laundry, a cafe, recovery groups, addiction and mental health support.
Last year, Mr Fleming released his autobiography, Blown Away: From Drug Deal to Life Bringer.
Upcoming guests on MailOnline’s ‘My Story’ series include Michael O’Brien of the Cardiff Newsagent Three, and the Marines who fought off pirates in the Amazon
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