Mark Wahlberg Once Stole Someone’s Car 15 Times
Mark Wahlberg had a checkered past before his Hollywood stardom. His wild days as a youth included stealing the same car not once, but multiple times.
How Mark Wahlberg stole the came car 15 times
Wahlberg’s dark past has been heavily documented, even by the actor himself. The Departed star would get into trouble several times as a youth for a variety of reasons. One of the extracurricular criminal activities he indulged in during his spare time was car stealing.
“I used to take my mother’s car when she was sleeping,” Wahlberg once said according to Mirror.
He and his friends would also frequently drive around their home state of Massachusetts in a Monte Carlo they took 15 times. If only because the owner of the car made it incredibly easy for them to steal it.
“We’d pop the tilt steering and [the owner] never got it fixed. We’re hanging around, we’re hooking school… and we’d go take the car, we’d drive around and we’d hide it by my house for a couple of days and they’d find it, he’d get it back, we’d go and take it again,” Wahlberg once said according to Contact Music.
He remembered that, although the car had very little features, it was still fun to drive around.
“There was no radio or anything… but it was a good means of transportation and most of the time, when he found it, there was more gas than when we took it,” he said.
Eventually, the owner caught on to Wahlberg and his crew, and tried to prevent more theft.
“One time he actually came out in the morning… and the poor guy tries to block the driveway and I’m not gonna stop and I’m not gonna get out because the guy’s upset and obviously this has been going on for a while,” he said.
Why Mark Wahlberg found it difficult to turn his life around
Wahlberg has expressed deep regret over his antics in the past. He asserted that his recklessness caused so much damage, that to make financial amends would cost him his entire net worth.
“A woman asked me, ‘Would you like to pay all the people back for all the stuff that you stole, all the damage that you caused?’ I said, ‘If I did, I’d be broke, my kids wouldn’t go to college,’” he said.
The actor felt he was a product of his upbringing. Given the environment he grew up in, it was difficult for Wahlberg to choose a path different than the one he was born into.
“When I walked out my door — violence is also all that was there,” Wahlberg once told The Guardian. “[I was] always in trouble, and I was kind of little. In the circumstances where I was being preyed upon, at times, I had to protect and defend myself. It’s not an easy thing to navigate as a teenage kid who’s 5’2, 120 pounds, with grown men.”
It required a lot of effort to separate himself from a community he was so used to. But he was willing to do the work to make a better life for himself.
“I took it upon myself to own up to my mistakes and go against the grain and not be a part of the gang any more — to say that I was going to go and do my own thing,” he said. “Which made it 10 times more difficult to walk from my home to the train station, to go to school, to go to work.”
Mark Wahlberg went from stealing cars to owning his own dealership
In addition to being one of Hollywood’s biggest actors, The Fighter star turned to selling cars as a bit of a side hustle. He established Mark Wahlberg Chevrolet of Avon not too long ago with car dealer Jay Feldman. The dealership is based in Ohio, where Wahlberg felt more at home in than his own place in Hollywood.
“I’ve always stayed connected to real people,” Wahlberg said in an interview with Autobody News. “I live in LA because I’m in the movie business but I’ve always stayed connected to real people. I’m more comfortable and more at home in places like Ohio.”
