“When I heard that (MacDonald) was crazy enough to ask someone else to basically do the same thing . . . I figured, okay, this guy’s unhinged. This is a problem. It’s a pattern here.”
(Julie Roys) Chicago radio personality, Mancow Muller, says disgraced megachurch pastor, James MacDonald, asked him to find a hitman to kill someone. MacDonald’s former bodyguard is making a similar claim.
Muller said MacDonald— a celebrity pastor who was fired from Harvest Bible Chapel in February—asked him at least twice in 2018 if Muller knew a hitman MacDonald could hire. Muller said he thought MacDonald was joking at first. But during a conversation in December, Muller said it became clear to him that MacDonald was “really serious.”
Similarly, Emmanuel “Manny” Bucur, a deacon at Harvest and former confidant and volunteer bodyguard of MacDonald’s, said MacDonald asked him in 2015 to kill MacDonald’s former son-in-law. Bucur added that MacDonald offered to help him dispose of the body.
Bucur said he was upset by the request but didn’t report it because he figured MacDonald had spoken in anger and simply had a momentary lapse in judgment. Plus, Bucur said he has four daughters and understood MacDonald’s rage toward a man who had allegedly hurt his daughter.
Bucur agreed to tell his story anonymously on a podcast of Muller’s, which was recorded on Thursday but has not yet aired. Bucur said during the recording session, he heard Muller’s story for the first time and hours later, decided to go on the record with me.
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Podcast (short) Mancow and the Harvest Scandal
Research