Peter Wade: Blood on the tracks

He's a successful businessman. He lives in a luxury apartment in New York City. He's bankrolling a film co-starring the rapper Ice-T. But Peter Wade has a guilty secret. Joyce Wadler meets him

The view of the Hudson River from the 33rd floor of the gleaming New York City apartment house is the view of a successful man. Is it coincidence or an act of contrition that even so high up, Peter Wade can hear the sound of the trains?

Nearly 20 years ago, Wade, teenage alcoholic and pothead, was part of a late-night prank that caused the death of a railway conductor. A gang of teenagers hanging out at a switching station in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, decided that it might be fun to throw the switch; a six-carriage train flew off the tracks with such force that it smashed through the walls of an adjoining pasta factory. The conductor, John Duffy, father of six, was killed.

Wade, just shy of his 16th birthday at the time, was one of the boys whose hand was on the switch. Charged as an adult, he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter, and spent 22 months in prison.

Now, he is an American success story: criminal become Wall Street moneymaker become screenwriter/director/co-producer, making an independent movie about his life, which is now being edited. The movie, starring an unknown, Chris Gunn, and the rapper Ice T, will be called Tracks. And how was Wade able to rope in Ice-T? He approached him when he was parking his Ferrari in the garage of their building.

You might expect a man who is able to bankroll a movie of his life to be cocky, but Wade, 35, is quiet and articulate, given to mild, self-mocking smiles and stories about how his girlfriend left him, taking the dog. He loved that dog, too. It was a little black shih-tzu that used to lie on his stomach when he was too depressed to get off the couch.

Wade is not embarrassed to tell you that there was a time he was depressed a lot. His voice is sprinkled with the phrases of a man deep into analysis – "dysfunctional", "unexamined life" – for a reason: he has eight hours of therapy a week. He was truly not able to understand the pain he had caused the family of the man he had killed until he began therapy, he says.

And no, he says, he did not realise until he had moved in that from his luxury apartment you could hear a train whistle. "I thought it was rather ironic," he says. "A message from above, maybe."

His knowledge of film-making has, up to now, been confined to a few college courses. He is picking up 40 per cent of the film's budget, estimated at $1m. Still, it would not be entirely fair to call this a vanity production. Perhaps part of the reason he is making the film is an attempt to explain his past, Wade says. But he does not portray his younger self as "the nicest kid in the world".

"You see an angry, unlikable teen who ultimately, I hope, you will have compassion for at the end of the film," he says. "But you may never get there. I showed the script to some professional screenwriters, and they said the lead character was too unlikable. I thought about changing it, but I decided that would not be the truth."

There was a point in his life, Wade says, when "I thought so little of myself, I thought I was undeserving, that I had to embellish stories to get attention and pity from people".

He insists that he does that no longer.

And so, Wade's story, according to Wade: his parents came from England and settled in Fair Lawn; his father was an electrician. He was also an alcoholic who beat Wade's mother and sometimes beat Wade as well. The first time this happened, Wade was a child in his cot.

"I was crying, and he picked me up and punched me in the face," he says. "Later on, when I was older, my mother used to push me around in the supermarket, and I would punch people as I passed them. She told me about it when I was older. 'You were a little terror...'"

He adds with bitterness: "Gee, Mom, I wonder why? I was an angry kid."

Wade also says that his father raped him when he was 11. Two years later, when his mother finally said she was leaving, his father threatened to kill himself.

"The next day, he hung himself," Wade says. "I went out to take out the garbage, there he was. I screamed at first, but I wasn't as emotional as I am in the film. I thought: Thank God he's dead. He's just saved me from a prison sentence." That little, self-mocking smile. "Ironically, I ended up in a prison anyway."

By the time he was a teenager, Peter Wade had become an alcoholic himself. He got up, smoked marijuana, showed up at school for registration at 8.30am, and then left and hung out with his friends, waiting for the local liquor stores to open at 10am.

He calls the derailment "the accident". People always wondered what he could have been thinking to do such a thing, he says. The truth is, he wasn't thinking anything, he says. He was drunk and stoned. Yes, he admits, it was true that he and his friends had broken the lock on the switch two days earlier, but he would not call the derailment premeditated. Someone yelled, "Let's throw the switch!", and they did. Then they ran.

The police picked him up that night. The case, one of the first in New Jersey in which a juvenile was treated as an adult in the criminal system, dragged on for two years. Wade pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter, and at 18 he went to prison. Seven days after his release, he started classes at Trenton State College, graduating with a BA in economics.

He got a job as a data collector at the financial-services provider Standard & Poor's, through a friend of a friend who knew his story, and worked up to bond analyst. Then he went to the global investment bank Lehman Brothers. Wade told his story only to those people with whom he had become close, but at times he wondered if anyone recognised him. No one did. His first job paid $18,000; his last contract was for $950,000.

In prison, Wade had made a list of the things that it would take to bring him happiness. Get out of prison. Get a college education. Get a good job. Make a lot of money. Have a relationship with an intelligent and beautiful woman.

"I believed that when I had achieved all these things, I would be happy," Wade says morosely. "A year or so before I quit Wall Street, I had all the things on my list. A month or two earlier, I had found the woman and started dating her, and I was more unhappy then than at any point in my life, and I didn't know why."

The girlfriend left him – they have two houses and three dogs together. He began therapy. Two years ago, he quit Wall Street and began work on his movie.

The husband of one of the train conductor's daughters, John Hetlyn, angrily said that his wife Stephanie had been crying ever since hearing about the movie two weeks ago. When Wade is asked whether he has ever apologised to the family, he says that he has not, although he has a scene in his movie where he says the things that he would "if I were brave enough to say them".

Can he remember them?

"I might be able to," he says, then adds: "I always wanted to be so sorry that I wouldn't be able to live with myself, so remorseful that the pain would be too much to bear. I thought that if the guilt was too much to bear, I would be a decent person. But I didn't have those feelings. I didn't feel that bad, that evil, because I didn't feel anything. I was only numb.

"Now I know that it is the worst pain imaginable. It will hurt for the rest of your lives. For that, I'm sorry."

He also says that making the film has been the first time that he has been able to feel joy or pain. Shooting completed, the pain – his pain, not the pain of his victim's family – appears uppermost.

"The rape scene was very difficult," Wade says. "I shot it using the camera as if it was the boy, from the boy's point of view. You see the father coming at you, you see the boy falling on his face on the bed, staring at all his little toys.

"The boy who plays me, Casper, is so cute. He wasn't there. But you see this little boy and he's so sweet and you think: How could anybody do that? How could anybody possibly want to hit him?"