Mad Max: The teenage criminal who almost got away with stealing Guy Fieri’s Lamborghini
It’s like a scene you’d wade through in a really, really low-rent Mission: Impossible movie.
The year was 2011, halcyon days before the world started steamrolling towards a fiery end. At the age of 17, San Francisco native Max Wade repelled from a high window onto the roof of a British Motors store with one motive in mind. He’d spotted an eye-catching yellow Lamborghini Murcielago being towed into the shop. Come rain, come shine, come several large men with guns, he was going to steal it.
Not for any old reason, though. No, it turned out that Wade was doing it not to sell the beast for anything close to its $200,000 market value. He wasn’t doing it for street cred. He wasn’t doing it to film and put it on YouTube. No, fundamentally, he was a 17-year-old boy doing something really, really stupid and really, really dangerous. Why else would he be doing this but for love?
It’s true. Wade was risking life and limb to use Tom Cruise tactics to steal a car worth more than most living spaces in the world to impress a girl he had a crush on. It’s not often that I say this, but dudes rock.
To make it even better, for a period of time, the mad bastard got away with it. Then, it emerged that the Lamborghini belonged to celebrity chef and novelty shirt enthusiast Guy Fieri. Something that Wade had no idea about at the time.
Unfortunately, Wade would have to take solace in just how cool the actual act of stealing the car was, because everything would go horribly wrong shortly after that.
What happened to Max Wade next?
It turned out that stealing a car to impress a girl sometimes just doesn’t work. Even when it’s a canary yellow Lamborghini that belongs to the host of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. Unsurprisingly, his taste in cars is as garish as his taste in hairstyles, who knew? While Wade got away with the car theft, he very much didn’t get away with shooting at a pickup truck containing that girl and the man she was dating two years later in 2013.
After the cops were called on Wade, he was brought in for questioning. The said questioning led to the discovery of a lockup he was renting in Richmond, California. Stored in this laptop was the revolver he used to shoot at his rival (he wasn’t aware the girl was in there as well), the motorbike that the gunshots came from and the Lamborghini. One can only assume that it had been there ever since he drove it out of the repairs shop. That said, yellow Lamborghinis must be fairly common in California, if anywhere.
Wade was sentenced to 21 years in prison – during his time incarcerated, he became something of a folk hero, with a rap song written in his honour and even Fieri himself calling him a “brave kid” for stealing his car in such a daring manner, but whatever happened to Wade on the inside must have changed him for the better, as he had his sentence reduced by ten years and was released on parole in 2024 after 11 years for good behaviour.
Hopefully, he’d gotten over the girl by then, too.