At the age of 12, Michael Maisey was smoking crack and treading the corridors of crime. Now a businessman, author, mentor and father, he tells Tessa Parry-Wingfield about turning his life around...
We meet for coffee at Twickenham Studios, the glamorous ghosts of Ellen Terry, Ivor Novello and the late Lord Attenborough hovering at our elbows, memories of war horses and elephant men stained into the silent walls. It is just a stone’s throw from where Michael Maisey grew up.
But it is also a world away.
On the run from his violent father, Michael lived successively with his mother in a women’s hostel in Isleworth, on the Green Dragon Estate in Brentford and in a shelter at Kew – all before he had reached the age of one.
Then it was back to Isleworth and a flat on the Ivybridge Estate. It was here that the future businessman, campaigner and author, who now owns an award-winning estate agency nearby, grew up in an urban archipelago of despair. At home, there was physical and sexual abuse.
By the time he was 12, Michael was on hard drugs and heading for years of anger, resentment and crime.
“Everyone was selling drugs,” he recalls. “Everyone was doing them. I wasn’t the only 12-year-old. No one could get jobs, so everyone just did drugs – and crime. It was all around me.”
Cool, confident and charming, the Michael of today – now based in Devon – is unrecognizable as the teenager who was three times confined to Feltham Young Offender Institute, for robbery, assault and attempted murder in turn. The first time was when a raid on his local corner shop went wrong. He was just 15 and armed with a fake gun.
Yet it could have been so different. As a child actor, Michael enjoyed a stint on Birds of a Feather, the hugely popular BBC sitcom. A window on the world inched open. Then the turbulence at home slammed it shut.
“I’d had neglect and physical harm. Sexual abuse from my uncle was the final straw. ‘The world is not friendly,’ I thought. ‘And the only way to survive is to be mean.’ Drugs, crime, prison: these are all by-products of child trauma. The world is painful and you’re constantly trying to quell that pain. Above all, you’re very angry.”
At 18, Michael hit rock bottom and attempted suicide after an imposed heroin detox in prison. Mercifully, however, he survived to hear his alcoholic mum speak the words he’d always longed to hear: “I am sober.” With someone to rely on for the first time in his life, Michael turned the spotlight on his own drink demons by attending Alcoholics Anonymous.
Key to the programme was to take responsibility and say sorry to the people he’d hurt – he had 45 people on his list. It took him between the ages of 18 and 25 to become truly sober.
“I’d been in the darkness so long that I didn’t even know I was in it,” he admits.
Now his book Young Offender – coaxed into life by his actor friend Tom Hardy and written with the help of author Chrissie Manby – is in the Feltham prison library. It’s a heart-wrenching page-turner, a humble and candid insight into an unimaginable world. Michael’s fervent hope is that it will send out a message: ‘It doesn’t have to be like this.’ Yet revisiting the anger was no catharsis, and Michael had his therapist on standby throughout the writing process.
“It was extremely painful going back over it all,” he admits. “It’s not about me or money or fame. It’s about poor kids in prisons all over the world who have no hope.”
In his spare time, Michael mentors young offenders and addicts, many of whom are now experiencing the anger he recalls from the maelstrom of his youth. One memory of a visit to Feltham, as a reformed ex-convict, stands out.
“They look at me and just see a pretty white boy, so I always spend the first two hours building trust. Recently, I asked a group of inmates why they felt angry. The ‘Jack the Lad’ of the group piped up with: ‘I’m not angry, bruv.’ I suggested that, as he was in for a violent crime, he probably was a bit.
“The room went silent. Then he blurted out: ‘I am angry because my mum is dead.’ The tears came and all the prisoners gathered around and we had a group hug. Well, the number one rule in prison is not to cry, so the prison guards were looking on as if we were cavemen and we’d just created fire. It was an amazing moment.”
Sober for more than a decade, now married and a father to two beautiful girls, Michael, 37, is a different man. And just five years ago, he was even honoured by the London Borough of Hounslow for his services to the community.
At first, still wrestling with a poor self-image, he thought the accolade was “a wind-up”. In those days, he admits, he used to look in the mirror and see “that little criminal from Ivybridge with no GCSEs”.
And although his violent days are behind him, a recent appearance as a recruit on Channel 4’s SAS: Who Dares Wins pushed him to physical and psychological extremes. This particular series of the show, in which ex-Special Forces soldiers recreate the secret SAS selection process, was set in the Chilean Andes.
The lack of sleep was gruelling enough, but it was the pugilistic element that was hardest to deal with. Up against a wealthy barrister in the ring, Michael refused to fight properly. He feared that the old, angry Michael would emerge, defying years of hard graft spent keeping him at bay. As a result, he was knocked down three times – and out of the show.
“I got home thinking: ‘I’ve done the right thing.’ It really showed how much I’d changed – I didn’t lose my head. Then again, I didn’t get through to the next round either. It took so much strength to be the physically weaker one.”
Even so, the court of public opinion failed to find wholly in his favour.
“That’s the problem for men: punching someone in the head is somehow seen as a stronger stance,” muses Michael. “What message are we sending out?”
His own prescription for life, delivered with humility and passion, is one of restoration and hope. At home in Devon, he hosts biannual men’s retreats based on the kind of healing that once helped him.
He also has thousands of book sales to his name. Young Offender has just been published in the USA – a land in which he’d still be serving time for the crimes he committed in his teens – while the London launch this summer at Richmond Hill Hotel provided striking testimony to his startling transition.
“I used to walk past the hotel in awe of the cars and seeing the insane money. Now, there I was on stage, talking. The tears were coming. It was so hard to wrap my head around it. All this was out of reach for someone like me.”
Spurred on by Tom Hardy, Michael has started acting again. He has another book in him too, he says, and has also written a feature film. Yet his greatest blessing is far more fundamental. It’s the one no man in his family ever had: the ability just to be there for his kids.
Young Offender, by Michael Maisey, is published by Macmillan
