You’d have to have been living in a cave (or on another planet) over the last twenty years if you don’t know who actor Mark Wahlberg is. The forty-eight-year-old went from being a marginal musician in the early 1990s to an A-list actor by the end of the decade. Today, besides being one of Hollywood’s top actors, he is a director and has his hands in a variety of different business and philanthropic ventures.
But “Marky Mark,” as he was known during his brief music career, has a truly shady past.
Wahlberg grew up the youngest of nine children in south Boston. After his parents divorced in 1982, Mark spent most of his time living with his mother—and getting into trouble. He was close to his older brother Donnie and, as the two were bussed to different schools in Boston, they fell in with the wrong crowd. They began experimenting with drugs at a young age and joined a local white gang.
Donnie would go on to devote most of his time to his musical talents. Although Mark also showed promise in that regard, he spent most of his time doing and selling drugs and committing an occasional hate crime.
By the age of fourteen, Wahlberg had dropped out of school and had dedicated most of his time to being a local thug. Wahlberg and his crew were known to have chased black kids out of their neighborhood on at least two different occasions, shouting racial slurs in the process. But the worst assaults took place in 1988.
On the night of April 8, 1988, Wahlberg was looking to get drunk. Since he was low on funds, he grabbed a five-foot-long stick and began looking for a mark. A short time later, he came across Thanh Lam walking down the sidewalk with two cases of beer. Wahlberg looked at the man and said “Vietnam fucking shit.”
Wahlberg then hit Lam over the head with the stick, knocking him unconscious. The police quickly arrived on the scene, which sent Wahlberg fleeing on foot.
Desperate to avoid arrest, Marky Mark tried to solicit another man, Hoa Trinh, to hide him from the police. When Trinh refused, Wahlberg beat him. Marky Mark then tried to flee the area but was arrested not far from the scenes of the attacks. Initially, he was charged with attempted murder due to the serious injuries Trinh suffered—the victim was hospitalized and suffered permanent damage to one of his eyes. Because he had a good lawyer and was still a juvenile, Wahlberg was allowed to plead guilty to felony assault.
Though he was faced with the possibility of serving several years in a Massachusetts state prison, he only served forty-five days.
Years later, Wahlberg reflected on his life of crime.
“As soon as I began that life of crime, there was always a voice in my head telling me I was going to end up in jail. Three of my brothers had done time. My sister went to prison so many times I lost count. Finally I was there, locked up with the kind of guys I’d always wanted to be like. Now I’d earned my stripes and I was just like them and I realized it wasn’t what I wanted at all. I’d ended up in the worst place I could possibly imagine and I never wanted to go back.”
Luckily for Wahlberg, his older brother Donnie was well-connected in the entertainment industry as a member of the world-famous boy band, New Kids on the Block. (Mark was actually a member before they got famous, but his life of crime pulled him away from the group.) After meeting with agents and record producers, Mark Wahlberg was given a new image: Marky Mark, the bad boy white rapper who was still approachable to teenage suburban girls.
Wahlberg’s career took off and most people forgot his past, at least until he applied for a pardon in 2014. When Marky Mark’s crimes were made public once more, many people, including the woman who initially prosecuted him, questioned why he should be given a pardon.
Wahlberg withdrew his pardon application and publicly stated that he would never apply again.