From rural NSW to Mar-a-Lago: Why Aussie hacker Chris Wade was pardoned by Donald Trump
A Secret Service raid. An undercover FBI job. A friendship with a reclusive billionaire. From rural NSW to Mar-a-Lago, Chris Wade shares his surreal story for the first time. See the video.
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Exclusive: Donald Trump was chatting to Sylvester Stallone at his Mar-a-Lago estate after his election victory in November when he spotted someone he wanted the actor to meet.
“This is the world’s greatest hacker,” the President-elect said, “so hide your phone.”
Chris Wade could only laugh. Here he was, a kid who grew up without power in rural New South Wales, swapping jokes with the leader of the free world and Rocky himself.
“It was kind of surreal,” the 41-year-old said. Then again, so is the story of his two decades in the US that drew him inside what Elon Musk told Wade was “the centre of the universe”.
A Secret Service raid on his home. Two successful start-ups. An undercover job for the FBI. A David-and-Goliath legal victory over the world’s biggest company. And a friendship with a reclusive billionaire, founded on their mutual love of fish, that helped give him his life back.
Up until now, the full scale of this remarkable tale has been a secret, although not from Trump. At the end of his first term, a file with Wade’s name on it made its way into the Oval Office. There, armed with his signature Sharpie, the President pardoned the Australian.
“I got a pardon from the President of the United States,” Wade told his mum in Murwillumbah. “Yeah, but you needed a pardon,” she shot back.
For the first time, Wade is ready to explain why. To explain everything. Well, almost.
‘CAUGHT RED-HANDED’: RAID SHOCKS WADE
It was 6am when the doorbell rang. Wade, 23, was asleep next to his wife Lindsey, the prom queen of his dreams he met while travelling in the US after dropping out of school at 16.
Thinking her brother had arrived unannounced, Lindsey walked down the stairs of the couple’s Texas townhouse. Gun-toting men put her on the ground and stormed the bedroom.
“Get out of bed,” the men yelled at Wade. They were agents of the Secret Service, the body charged with protecting the President which is also responsible for stopping cyber crime. That day, that meant stopping the Australian.
For months, the self-taught hacker had been writing software to help a friend mask his identity to send spam emails. Given Wade could not work legally while he waited to become a permanent resident, it was an easy way for him to pay the rent as his wife studied.
He made about $US2000 a week, a windfall that appeared set to grow when someone else offered to pay for his proxies. This contact, however, was a fraudster-turned-spy for the Secret Service who was informing on Wade’s friend’s operation.
This was laid out to the Australian while he was handcuffed to a table in the Secret Service’s Dallas office that afternoon. Told he was facing criminal charges under anti-spam laws, Wade realised he had been “caught red-handed” and decided to co-operate.
But his honesty also changed the equation in the interrogation.
“I think they realised pretty quickly that I knew words they didn’t know,” Wade said.
The next day, the agents took him to a crime lab where they had reconstructed his garage.
“They expected everything to be some sophisticated cyber weapon,” he said, “and it was just an old toaster I was trying to fix.”
“I wasn’t some criminal mastermind … But I definitely could help them.”
THE SECRET DOUBLE LIFE OF A ‘GENIUS’ HACKER
Two days before the last Christmas of his first term, Trump pardoned 26 people. He issued detailed statements about 25 of them, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father Charles and his controversial former aides Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
The 26th was Christopher Michael Wade. Who he was or what he had done was not explained, beyond the vague assertion that after “pleading guilty to various cyber crimes”, he had “shown remorse and sought to make his community a safer place”.
Four years later, sitting in the Florida office of his tech company Corellium, Wade would love to share how he earned clemency. But that remains classified, because the expertise Wade demonstrated to the Secret Service turned him into the go-to hacker for them and the FBI.
“They worked on everything from large fraud, Bernie Madoff-style, all the way to terrorism,” Wade said. “It wasn’t like tracking down other hackers, it was real people doing real damage in the world.”
“They would say, we’re trying to break this encryption, or we’re trying to figure out how this thing works, or here’s a piece of code we’ve never seen before or malware, and they would ask for me to look at it.”
Former FBI special agent Chris Tarbell, who worked with Wade, said he was “a genius”.
“It was unbelievable how smart the guy was,” he said. “There wasn’t a technical hurdle that he couldn’t get past for me.”
After Wade’s arrest in 2006, he moved to New York to work for an algorithmic trading company while secretly moonlighting for the FBI.
“They’d call one day and say, we need this,” he said. “I’d be right in the middle of a meeting at work or at a bank showing a demo, and I’d be like, I’ve got to go take care of this.”
The cryptocurrency market was emerging, as was the dark web, and Tarbell said Wade offered knowledge the bureau did not possess. They sought his help in clandestine meetings at Starbucks and in late-night calls, sometimes with life-and-death deadlines.
“It’s super stressful,” Wade said, “because if you fail your piece of that, bad guys could be on the street, real people could be hurt.”
He loved the work but it took its toll. His own case was left in limbo until he nudged his handlers to bring it to a close in 2012, when he was sentenced to two years of probation.
“It was very difficult to start a family or anything when I was randomly disappearing … I couldn’t move on,” Wade said.
While his double life continued uncoerced after that, he encountered a new problem. Wade’s criminal record meant if he left the US, border authorities could block his return to the country. After a trip to Australia, he was grilled for hours until the FBI intervened.
“I promise, I’m a good guy, not a bad guy,” Wade pleaded.
In 2014, after he moved to Florida and married his second wife Amanda Gorton, an FBI contact called with an urgent message: “Don’t go home.” Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents were sweeping the area, with plans to detain and deport him.
Wade was at a fish store. He wanted a new pet, and Gorton was allergic to dogs and cats. So he did as he was told, browsing the tanks while the FBI called off the pursuit.
Wade’s lawyer later told him only a pardon could put him in the clear.
“I try not to think anything is impossible,” he said, “but at the time, I was like, I’m pretty screwed now.”
A SICK FISH AND A FRIENDSHIP WITH A BILLIONAIRE
Gemmy was sick. The Gem Tang, a striking saltwater fish from Mauritius, had been Wade’s birthday gift from Gorton. It was his favourite – and most expensive – pet.
Wade found an expert at Miami’s Seaquarium to treat Gemmy’s infection. The fish vet who visited his home was amazed to find tanks in every room, including a 3875-litre aquarium. He had only seen one similar collection, and wanted Wade to meet its owner Ike.
The pair were introduced at the Seaquarium and bonded over their unusual pets. Ike, in his 70s, told Wade he was a janitor at entertainment giant Marvel. When he climbed into a fancy car on the way to lunch, however, Wade wondered if his new friend was telling the truth.
Ike, it turned out, was Isaac Perlmutter, the billionaire businessman who took over Marvel in the 1990s and transformed the comic company into a Hollywood hit-maker. He also happened to be a donor to and friend of the one man with the power to help Wade.
One day, as he helped fix Perlmutter’s fish tank, Wade described his predicament and wondered if he should move back to Australia.
“No, you can’t do that,” Perlmutter replied, adding: “Let me ask my friend.”
“I didn’t know he meant the President,” Wade said.
Of some 50,000 pardon applications Trump received in his first term, he signed only 144. One of them was Wade’s, sponsored by Perlmutter and Mark Templeton, the former boss of tech firm Citrix.
They met in 2012 as Citrix considered buying OpenPeak, Wade’s employer. During the talks, Templeton floated connecting a mouse to an iPad. He vividly remembers Wade disappearing to buy a mouse and returning to show off software he had written to do just that.
“My guys didn’t believe it,” Templeton laughed.
Wade’s pardon plea was bolstered by his willingness to build such “impossible technologies” for whoever needed help, the ex-CEO said, like retooling Florida’s unemployment system to handle the flood of furloughed workers during the pandemic. But what really swayed Trump, Templeton suggested, was an influx of letters from the intelligence community.
“They all pointed to the same thing,” Templeton said, “that this is a young man who’s brilliant, who loves America, and has helped America in some pretty profound ways.”
Tarbell, the former FBI agent, was among those to write to Trump. He had never supported a pardon application but Wade had become his friend and met his family – no small feat given Tarbell was so protective of his privacy that he never wore his wedding ring.
THE SURPRISE CALL THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING
For the first time in years, Wade and Gorton were on holidays, and with much to celebrate. At the end of 2020, Corellium won a major victory in its legal battle with Apple.
Wade had a complicated relationship with the behemoth. After leaving OpenPeak, he founded a company called Virtual, allowing developers to test iPhone apps in a virtual environment. Apple soon came calling, and CEO Tim Cook agreed to buy the start-up. But Wade was unconvinced. He contacted Templeton and sold to Citrix instead.
In 2017, Wade created a more advanced version of Virtual and started Corellium with Gorton funded by “bug bounties” – ethical hacking missions to identify system bugs. This time, after more ill-fated acquisition talks, Apple sued Corellium for violating copyright laws.
“We fought as hard as we could, and we were right,” Wade said. In December 2020, a judge threw out Apple’s claims, setting a precedent for the industry.
As Wade and Gorton celebrated at a seaside restaurant in the Florida Keys, his phone rang. The name of Jared Kushner – Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser – suddenly flashed up.
“I wanted to tell you that the President just signed your pardon,” Kushner said. His wife Ivanka Trump then grabbed the phone to tell Wade: “We’re so happy for you.”
As soon as Wade received the paperwork, he applied to become an American citizen. It took a few months – the State Department was unfamiliar with applications from pardoned criminals – but eventually his passport arrived and he booked a trip to Australia.
It was only when he landed back in the US that it all sank in.
“Normally coming back in for me is the scariest thing,” Wade said.
“But we show our passports, and the guy is like, welcome home.”
STRANGER-THAN-FICTION STORY DESTINED FOR HOLLYWOOD
After he was pardoned, Wade went to thank Trump at Mar-a-Lago with Perlmutter, a club member whose table is next to the estate’s owner. They bump into each other often now.
“He likes to poke me about the pardon. He always makes a joke,” Wade said.
“You go there on a night the President is there and the whole place is buzzing … Every time I step into any of these places, I’m like, how did I get here?”
Until recently, that was a question Wade only needed to ask privately. But then The New York Times convinced a judge to unseal records from his criminal case.
“I didn’t want my customers, my investors, my friends to think the wrong thing,” Wade said to explain why he decided to share his story, or at least its unclassified chapters.
“I wanted people to know that, I believe, (the pardon) was earned.”
He is now in talks to turn his life into a Hollywood hit, albeit with some fictional tweaks to cover his confidential consulting. He thinks Liam Hemsworth could play him and inspire other Australians to do the impossible.
“I grew up in rural Australia and I didn’t finish high school,” Wade said, “and yet here I am. I’ve had two very successful companies, and I did it while I was working to try and make up for what I did.”
Templeton, who considers Wade to be like a son, suspects he is still paying his penance.
“I would be absolutely shocked if Chris isn’t still doing work for our intelligence community,” he said. Wade carefully says that relationship has “tapered off now”.
He is focused on making his business a success. And while he no longer has his fish tanks after selling his house, he sees Gemmy often. The now-healthy fish lives with Perlmutter.
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