The Strange Life and Suspicious Death of John McAfee

If you have ever owned a computer at any point over the past 35 years, you have undoubtedly heard of McAfee Antivirus. And chances are you have a very poor opinion of the software. McAfee is widely known across the internet as being a horrific combination of spyware, malware, and bloatware that is far worse than any of the viruses it alleges to protect users from. Of course, that’s just the common public perception of the software and not something that anyone would ever attempt to claim as absolute fact.

But it is a very popular opinion. So popular, in fact, that it resulted in the company’s founder, John McAfee, making the second most influential internet upload of his life. On June 18, 2013, John uploaded a video to his YouTube channel titled “How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus”.

The video featured John in a Hugh Hefner style robe, surrounded by strippers and guns, and it was not a particularly helpful tutorial. After snorting a mountain of bath salts, John pulled out a gun and shot the laptop as his means of uninstalling the antivirus program. It may not have been useful for people who actually wanted help uninstalling the software, but the video has received nearly 13 million views from people who were happy to see that John hated McAfee as much as they all did.

That’s just the kind of guy he was, though. John loved to troll reporters, the media, and the general public just as much as he loved drugs, guns, and women. Sounds like a fun guy, right? And hey, he probably was fun, so long as you didn’t piss him off.

But there’s much more to the story of John McAfee than just a millionaire software developer who hated what the company he had founded turned into. It’s the story of a drug dealer, scam artist, crypto bro, alleged sex offender, alleged murderer, and two time presidential candidate who was found dead in a Spanish prison after taking his own life.

Or did he? Before his death, John had explicitly stated that the US government told him they were coming to “kill yourself”, and that if he ever died in an apparent suicide, it was a setup and he was murdered. So let’s investigate and try to decide if John was really murdered, or if his public statements were just one last attempt to troll the media.

Early Life

Much like this story itself, the life of John McAfee was created by a glorious alliance between the United States and England. Don McAfee of the 596th Ordinance Ammunition Company was stationed in Cinderford in Gloucestershire, England while serving with the US Army during World War II. While in England, Don fell in love with (or at the very least knocked up) a British woman named Joan Williams. Their son John was born on the army base on September 18, 1945.

Once the war ended, the family moved back to Virginia where Don was from. In many ways, John’s childhood was unfortunately normal. His father is described as being an abusive alcoholic who would beat both John and Joan on a regular basis and for seemingly no reason. That’s obviously not good, but it seems like it was pretty much par for the course for any child growing up in the 1940s and 50s.

However, when John was 15 years old, his father shot and killed himself. That’s the official account anyway, though there’s heavy speculation that it was a murder staged to look like a suicide. This speculation stems from interviews John gave to his biographer decades later in which he appeared to slip up and heavily implied that he had murdered his own father and staged the scene.

Unfortunately, after the death of his father, John began drinking heavily and using drugs himself. That didn’t seem to hinder his studies though, as he finished high school and went to study math at Roanoke College in Virginia.

But in order to support himself and pay for college, John was going to need a source of income. And over the course of his undergraduate career, there were two different jobs that he had.

The first job was essentially just a scam, but not the illegal kind. John created his own personal enterprise going door to door selling people magazine subscriptions for free. This job taught him that the key to business was confidence, and he made what he described as being a fortune from the job. Note that “a fortune” is highly subjective, since this was from the perspective of a teenager in the early 1960s. Still, it gave him plenty of money to buy booze during college, which was the entire point.

You may be wondering how he was profiting off selling people free magazine subscriptions. Well the subscriptions were totally free, the buyers just needed to pay for shipping and handling. Basically, all he had to do was charge people more for their monthly shipping than it would cost him to go buy the magazines at a news stand, and he’d be making profit.

The whole point of a magazine subscription is that it’s cheaper than buying every issue off the rack, so while not legally a scam, the business model was still designed to utilize John’s charisma and confidence to exploit stupid people and overcharge them for a product.

Anyway, that business got him enough money to pay for all the liquor and beer he wanted during college, but he also needed money for drugs. To that end, he began selling cocaine. As John explained in an interview, anybody that did as much cocaine as he did would inevitably start selling cocaine as a way to fund their own habit.

Despite all of the substance abuse, though, John completed his degree in 1967 and went on to attend Northeast Louisiana State College to earn a doctorate in math. This didn’t last, though. It varies by college and degree, but part of the deal for being a PhD student is generally that you have to teach undergraduate classes. The flipside of that is that these doctoral programs are generally free for the student (and usually include a monthly stipend), so it’s not a bad deal, especially compared to how expensive an undergraduate degree is.

Now there’s no idea whether or not John was a good teacher, as that’s not why he was expelled. But in the opinion of one of his 18 year old students named Fran, he must have been a very sexy teacher, because he got expelled for banging her. In John’s defense, though, the two did get married, so he probably wasn’t just exploiting his position of authority to sleep with her. Or maybe he was and just made an impulsive decision to marry her after getting expelled anyway; it’s really hard to tell what was going through his drug-addled mind.

After getting kicked out of his PhD program, John got a job with NASA working as a programmer on the Apollo program. After that he got a job working for Univac as a software developer. For those who haven’t heard of it, Univac was a big name in computing back in the days of punch card computers, though they went out of business in 1986.

This job didn’t last long, as John got fired after he was arrested for buying a bag of weed. His lawyer was able to get him off without a conviction, but he still needed a new job. He had a college degree and had worked for NASA, but he had also been expelled from another college, fired from his most recent job because of illicit drug use, and probably couldn’t talk about anything related to NASA because it was all classified. But he did still have programming skills, so he put together a fake resume and got a job at the Missouri Pacific Railroad in St.

Louis.

Remember that this was the early 1970s, so almost everything was still analog. Missouri Pacific was in the process of trying to switch to a computerized system to route and schedule trains, so John was brought on for that project. Within six months he had built a system that was successfully optimizing all the routes and schedules, something he did while high on LSD.

Then one day John made a discovery. He learned about a new drug he hadn’t tried before by the name of DMT. He showed up for work one morning with his bag of DMT and snorted a line. It didn’t seem to have a noticeable effect, so he decided to snort the entire bag.

The exact implications of that are a bit hard to nail down. As best as can be figured out, an average recreational dose of DMT is 20-40 mg, and it is usually sold by either the gram or half gram. Even if we assume that John’s bag was half a gram, doing the entire thing would be a fucking lot. That’s ten strong doses all at once, which is the sort of thing that would break a person’s brain.

Which is exactly what happened.

According to John, “within an hour my mind was shattered.” He had no idea what people were saying to him, and the computer started spitting out schedules with trains routed to the moon. I mean, probably not in reality, but that was John’s perception of what was going on. It didn’t take long before he was hiding behind a garbage can in downtown St. Louis hoping that no one would see him. It’s reported that he was pretty much useless and out of it for three months, and he never returned to Missouri Pacific.

That obviously wasn’t the end of his career though. He took a number of relatively short lived jobs at companies like Xerox, never staying for more than a couple years. In 1983, he was working at a company called Omex. You might have thought that his little adventure with DMT might have scared John straight, but it absolutely did not. He didn’t ever do DMT again, but he was still starting every day with a line of coke and polishing off a bottle of whiskey by his lunch break.

The problem was that nobody really cared, because apparently John was a fucking genius. One of John’s coworkers described working with him, and said that even if he was shitfaced out of his mind, he was still able to easily solve problems that the combined might of the rest of the R&D department was unable to. He could ride up to work on his motorcycle just before noon, openly snort cocaine off his desk, and his employer didn’t even consider saying a word to him about it because he got results.

At least to an extent. John was determined to make every outrageous promise Omex had made to their investors a reality, quickly moving from one thing to the next. This resulted in a lot of failures, but if he couldn’t make it work then nobody else in R&D would have anyway. But eventually investors lost their patience with the company’s inability to deliver certain things, so funding began drying up. John was fired, which brought him to a breaking point.

Before leaving Omex, Fran had divorced him. He also gave away their dog, so now he was unemployed and completely alone. For days on end he would lock himself away in his apartment, just drinking, doing drugs, and debating whether or not he should end his own life the same way his father allegedly had. Fortunately he recognized this was a bad thing, so he decided to go see a therapist. That therapist in turn recommended that he try attending Alcoholics Anonymous.

At his first meeting John broke down crying, so someone gave him a hug and told him that he wasn’t alone. Apparently that was all he needed, and he remained sober for the rest of his life. That’s what he claimed anyway, though some anecdotal evidence disputes this. There was also a really fun DUI arrest from 2015, but we’re getting way ahead of ourselves there.

After staying sober for a few years, John managed to get clearance for a job working at Lockheed. It was there, in 1987 that John read a magazine article that would change his life forever. An article about Brain.

The World’s First PC Virus

In the city of Lahore, Pakistan, there was a little shop called Brain Computer Services. It was run by two brothers, 24 year old Amjad Farooq Alvi and 17 year old Basit Farooq Alvi. Amjad had studied physics in school, but after graduating he began learning about computers. It started with an interest in hardware, with Amjad quickly teaching himself to repair computers. This was the primary business of Brain Computer Services, though they sold software as well.

You see, for younger readers who are used to buying everything on Steam, you used to have to go to the store to buy your software. And it was expensive as fuck. Computer games like King’s Quest retailed for $60 when it released in 1984, which is over $185 today. Unsurprisingly, professional software was even more expensive, often costing hundreds of dollars.

We had a way around that, though. Software was sold on floppy disks, and you would then install the files from the disks onto your computer. But once the process was complete, there was nothing stopping you from lending those disks to your friends so they could install it on their computers as well. Or, if the disks were required every time you ran the program, you could just make copies of the disks to give to people.

At the time, there was little companies could do to stop this sort of piracy. You could include some sort of software key, but most people didn’t even have dialup modems yet, so there was no way for a company to check how many people were using the same key. Instead, old software often relied on other forms of copyright protection, usually involving the user having access to something that came packaged in the original box.

When booting up software, you might be asked for a specific word on a specific page of the instruction manual. That was an okay solution, except people could just photocopy the manuals. To combat this, companies began printing whatever would be used for copyright protection on sheets of dark red construction paper that a person could read, but that you couldn’t photocopy because it would all just come out as black. This wasn’t an ideal solution either, as you could just copy the sheet by hand, but it was a pain in the ass.

However, in 1986, Amjad had a “better” idea. Or at least a more effective idea. Although his focus was originally on hardware and repairing computers, by this point he had taught himself to program and was publishing his own software. He made multiple custom programs for clients, but his main creation was a piece of medical software used for heart monitoring.

Unfortunately, Amjad soon caught wind that the software was being used all over Lahore, beyond the clients he had sold it to. That’s when he came up with the idea for his virus. The idea was that Amjad’s software would include a virus that would load itself into the computer’s memory. While there, the virus would infect any other floppies that were written to. Basically, anyone who tried to create an unauthorized copy of Amjad’s software would instead create an infected disk.

Even though the legitimate software contained the virus, it would never do anything if the user didn’t try to pirate the software. But anyone who copied the disks or tried to use an illegal copy would feel the full wrath of the virus…which was very minimal. It wasn’t really a malicious virus meant to destroy data or anything like that, it was just a nuisance. The virus would eat up a lot of the PC’s memory and make the floppy drive read data much slower.

People who weren’t overly familiar with their machines may not have even noticed how much slower it was running.

But for anyone who did realize it and tried to diagnose the problem, Amjad had left a very clear message. Inside the virus’s code, not at all hidden, was a message that began: “Welcome to the Dungeon” and ended with “Beware of this VIRUS… Contact us for vaccination.” And in between those parts of the message was the name, address, and phone number of Brain Computer Services, as well as a mention that the virus software was copyrighted by Amjad.

That certainly feels like writing down your crimes, something we frequently advise against. So why would Amjad have flagrantly left all of his contact information easily findable within the code for the world’s very first PC virus? Simple: because he wanted the infected users to call him. If someone contacted him to complain about the virus slowing down their computer, Amjad could then ask them, “Bitch, why are you trying to steal my software?”

While initially the virus remained localized to Lahore, the Alvi brothers made a somewhat bizarre decision. Despite clearly being anti-piracy, they began selling pirated software from their store. They would sell copies of professional software like Lotus 1-2-3, a popular spreadsheet program that retailed for $500, for just $1.50. Pakistanis who bought pirated software would receive genuine copies, but the brothers began loading the Brain virus onto copies of the software that they sold to foreigners.

Their rationale for this was that copyright law in Pakistan didn’t extend to software so the locals buying pirated software from them weren’t committing a crime, but that the other pirates needed to be punished. While that logic makes some amount of sense in a vacuum, it undermines the entire reason for creating the virus in the first place, as people copying their medical software apparently weren’t violating the law.

Regardless, by selling infected floppies to tourists and backpackers, the virus quickly spread all over the world. One of the things that enabled it to spread so widely is that, like mentioned, it wasn’t malicious, just annoying. An American who bought Lotus 1-2-3 from the Alvi brothers may have purchased an infected disk, but the software still worked. Because the software worked and most people didn’t immediately recognize that their machine was slowing down, people kept copying and distributing the virus.

Eventually people discovered what was going on though, and Brain Computer Services was inundated with angry phone calls from people around the world demanding that the company fix their computers. Although the virus had spread far and wide, nothing actually happened to the Alvi brothers. They never received any sort of punishment, and they’re still in business today, though the business has evolved from selling software. Unless they moved in the last few years, though, Brain is even still located at the same address “hidden” with the virus.

John first learned about the Brain virus from an article he read in the San Jose Mercury News. Although he was working at Lockheed at the time, John still had a number of other projects he was working on.

Among the stranger ones was the American Institute for Safe Sex Practices. It was an organization that gave members identification cards showing the date of their most recent negative test for AIDS. Promoting safe sex during the AIDS epidemic wasn’t a bad goal, but John was acting as an unnecessary middle man. After all, people could just show each other their negative STD tests rather than purchasing cheap little ID cards from John.

He had also purchased his local Bulletin Board Service, or BBS. Way back in the days before the worldwide web, the internet was primarily a collection of BBS’s (and also Usenet, for anyone that had a Unix machine instead of a PC). These were text based messaging systems kind of like an internet forum, and they tended to be extremely localized. Your computer’s modem would call the BBS that was usually just in some random guy’s house, and each BBS could only handle as many concurrent users as the owner had phone lines.

So usually one, and at most two.

Also, because every BBS tended to be extremely localized, it’s reported that John would host pizza parties in his home for the users of his BBS. Many of these people became the early employees of McAfee Associates, which is kind of neat.

Anyway, after purchasing the BBS, John tried to basically create a trade union for system operators called the National BBS Society. This never got off the ground, but John’s involvement with his BBS still turned out to be very important.

After reading about the Brain virus, John realized what a terrifying prospect it was (and also commented on how brilliant its creators were, even if he disagreed with what they were doing). Sure, Brain wasn’t a malicious virus, but it could have been. And maybe the next virus would be. Recognizing that people would need protection from this new type of threat, John wrote a program he called VirusScan.

He said he wrote the original VirusScan in a day and a half, a comment that a lot of people seem to take as a self-aggrandizing exaggeration, but it honestly seems pretty realistic. VirusScan was searching for and removing specific known threats, not searching for novel forms of malware. If John was even half the genius that people make him out to be, there’s no doubt in his claims that it took that little time for him to code.

Once his VirusScan was created, John uploaded it to his BBS as a shareware program. For anyone born after 1990, shareware was one of the most common ways that programs were distributed back in the day. Anyone was allowed to download the program and try it free, usually for 30 days, after which point they would be informed that if they liked the program and wanted to keep using it, it sure would be nice if they paid some money. The software typically wasn’t going to stop working if you didn’t pay, but it sure would be nice if you did.

Even if you were born after 1990, there’s a good chance that you’ve encountered shareware in the form of WinZip. WinZip was probably the most popular shareware program of all time, and if you ever used it you undoubtedly remember that it would always open with a dialogue box reminding you that you were welcome to give them money, but that ignoring the notification didn’t stop you from zipping and unzipping files.

Obviously, the majority of users weren’t going to ever pay for shareware programs, even if the creators were only asking for like five bucks. But that was totally okay with John. Quite frankly, John didn’t give a shit if any users paid him to use VirusScan on their home PCs, because that was never his goal. His goal was for the program to become so popular and seen as such a security necessity that people would install VirusScan on their work computers; that’s where the real money was.

The plan worked, and VirusScan began getting installed on company computers. And whenever those companies called John in a panic because something was wrong with their computers or they needed an update to the software, he’d remind them that it might be in their best interest to pay for a corporate license to use the software. That kind of makes it sound like this was some sort of mafia protection racket, but it was just an ingenious method of marketing and sales.

Also, this may come as a shock to anyone who’s used McAfee Antivirus in the last 30 years, but John’s software actually was really good. It was seen as the gold standard among antivirus programs, and not just because of his shameless marketing. Sure, John’s marketing and fearmongering helped improve his market share dramatically, but he was still selling a good product that met a legitimate consumer need.

Within five years, VirusScan was being used by half of all Fortune 100 companies, and they were paying millions of dollars in licensing fees. John’s company, McAfee Associates, had virtually no overhead, yet they were making over $5 million per year from corporate licenses. It also sounds less like a company and more like a frat party, at least as John described it in later interviews.

He said how employees spent their lunch breaks fencing and performing Wiccan rituals, and that there was an office game among the employees where they earned points for having sex in different parts of the office. The highest possible score was for fucking on John’s desk, presumably while he was out of the office. That said, it’s unclear how much of that was true and how much was just John trying to create his own mythology.

But while Brain may have been the impetus for the creation of McAfee Antivirus, Michelangelo was the virus that was going to make John stupid rich. The virus was first detected in Australia in early 1991, but news didn’t really spread until some sort of virus conference in the Netherlands of April of that year.

Michelangelo spread in a similar way to Brain. It installed itself onto the boot sector of a computer, and from there it would copy itself onto any floppy disk inserted into the machine, which would then infect any computer those floppies were inserted into. Once a computer was infected…nothing would happen.

The virus was designed to spread far and wide, but it wasn’t going to actually do anything until March 6th, the birthday of artist Michelangelo, hence the virus’s name. Of course, it’s assumed that the creator of the virus didn’t choose the date for that reason and that it was probably completely random; or maybe it was the birthday of some girl who broke the creator’s heart. We have no idea why March 6th was chosen, but it was almost certainly not because of an appreciate for classic art.

Anyway, once the virus did activate, it was about as bad as a computer virus could be. Michelangelo would erase the computer’s boot sector and file allocation table, completely bricking the machine. Technically none of the user’s data was actually destroyed, but without the file allocation table the computer had no way to know where one file ended and another began.

Someone who really knew what they were doing could retrieve the lost data, but the average person could not. The best case scenario for most people was to just reformat their computer, reinstall DOS, and start from scratch with all of their previous files lost forever. This was a terrifying prospect, far scarier than the average computer virus, and it immediately started making headlines. Something that John seized upon immediately.

John did everything he could to ramp up the public’s fear of Michelangelo to 11, obviously stressing the need for antivirus protection while doing so. He spoke of the thousands of computers that his software had removed Michelangelo from, and that it was the third most common computer virus in the world.

This ramped up even more at the beginning of 1992, as the activation date for Michelangelo drew closer. To make matters worse, major companies like Intel had actually shipped products that were created on infected machines, meaning that the disks they were selling also contained the virus. This was pretty much the greatest free publicity John could have asked for.

Not only was the virus spreading more, but even powerhouses in the computer industry like Intel weren’t safe. Consumers had to do everything they possibly could to protect themselves, or they might lose dozens, literally dozens, of megabytes of precious data.

Despite all the fearmongering, or perhaps because of it and the efforts people took to protect themselves, March 6th came and went with little disruption. Thanks to the power of time zones, by the time Americans were waking up to turn on the morning news, reports had already come in from Asia and Europe that Michelangelo was a total nothingburger. John had been on The Today Show days earlier stating as fact that there were 5 million infected computers around the world, but when the dust settled there were only 10-20 thousand reports of computers losing data due to Michelangelo.

But again, maybe John wasn’t blowing things out of proportion with his claims. Maybe his software had just been that good at eradicating the virus. Either way, this couldn’t have gone better for John’s company. Brain had caused him to create an antivirus program that was quickly adopted, but PCs hadn’t been widely adopted yet and the virus wasn’t malicious, so it had all gone down with little fanfare.

Michelangelo, on the other hand, was a media spectacular. And John had positioned himself as the hero in the story.

In December of that year McAfee Associates officially became incorporated, and they had their initial public offering before the year was over. It was a massive success financially, with the IPO raising $42 million. But it turned McAfee into everything John hated. The original company was a handful of people pulling in $10 million per year for doing virtually nothing, except allegedly having sex all over the office.

Now he had to answer to stakeholders, the SEC, and the FTC. He was spending his life in boring meetings instead of doing fun stuff, and he hated it.

Luckily for John, he had a mild heart attack. Obviously 47 years old is a bit young for a heart attack, but he had also spent decades consuming a truly heroic amount of drugs and alcohol. But this medical incident caused the company’s board to bump John down from CEO to CTO, which theoretically allowed him to focus more on the technology and fun stuff. Still, he hated the vibe of the company ever since they went public, and he just wanted nothing to do with it anymore.

So in 1994, John sold off his entire stake in the company, along with the rights to his name. Realistically, it was the best possible solution for absolutely nobody. Sure, John pocketed a cool $100 million, but his name would be forever attached to what became considered the worst antivirus program ever.

And sure, McAfee was able to increase their profits more than twenty times over in just a few years, doing almost a billion dollars of sales in 1998, but their product was forever going to be linked by name to its insane and allegedly homicidal founder. And then of course there was the general public, who was forced to suffer with a garbage piece of software that inexplicably comes preinstalled on PCs and laptops from many major brands.

Oh, and if you’re wondering why McAfee didn’t just change the name of their program, they tried that over a decade ago when Intel bought the company. The antivirus was briefly marketed as Intel Security (which John publicly thanked them for), but the name change didn’t stick so it’s back to McAfee now.

Regardless, with John no longer involved in the company, he now had lots of time and money to do whatever he wanted. In 1994 he founded a new company, Tribal Voice, which created PowWow, one of the internet’s first instant messaging programs. Most of the features you would recognize from things like ICQ, Yahoo, and AOL messenger all originated on PowWow.

For the remainder of the 1990s, John kept a pretty low profile. He was involved in a number of Silicon Valley startups, but he and his $100 million largely stayed out of the media.

And Now For Something Completely Different

In 2000, John purchased 290 acres of land in Colorado and set up a yoga retreat, with himself as the instructor. For whatever reason, he had decided to go full spiritual guru, writing four books about yoga and meditation. At this point he was basically a cult leader, so he did exactly what you would expect a cult leader to do: started dating one of his teenage employees, Jennifer.

Oh yeah, John had married a flight attendant named Judy back in 1987, but they got divorced in 2002. That was potentially before the relationship with Jennifer began, but the exact date is unclear; he wasn’t exactly a one woman sort of man, so the relationships may have overlapped.

Running his retreat may have given John all of the attention and teenage girls he desired, but he still wanted more. John was used to living on the edge, grabbing life by the horns. Even if John’s new cultish life had made him the center of attention, yoga wasn’t ever going to provide the same sort of adrenaline rush that he was used to. And since hardcore drugs were no longer on the table, John was going to have to resort to something even more reckless to get his kicks.

To that end, he purchased a 157 acre piece of land in New Mexico as the base of operations for his new passion, an emerging sport he called aerotrekking. It started with John taking flying lessons, only to accidentally fly into US Air Force air space, resulting in him and his instructor coming face to face with a bunch of military men pointing guns at them. Except it wasn’t actually an accident. His instructor had told him to fly under some power lines, but John flew over them instead, triggering the air force’s radar.

After that encounter, he decided it was best to fly as low as possible. John and his instructor soon formed a club called the Sky Gypsies who were devoted to what they called aerotrekking. Basically, it was the “sport” of flying ultra-light aircraft. These planes are little more than motorcycles with paper wings, as there’s no cockpit or anything to protect the pilot.

But while these ultra-light planes had to make a lot of safety concessions in order to keep their weight down, what they got in exchange is a complete and total lack of regulation.

With the experience any pilot has, how would you feel knowing that you could just buy an ultra-light plane and start flying it today with no license and absolutely no regulations? The only catch is that you have to fly at extremely low (and dangerous) altitudes, to avoid entering restricted air space.

That sounds incredibly appealing and not at all problematic, but not all pilots go through the expense of buying a plane. Because ultra-light aircraft aren’t registered or regulated in any way, some people choose to just build their own in their garage instead.

And again, the whole point of this is to fly through canyons and stuff at extremely low altitudes, possibly so low that trees keep scraping the bottom of your aircraft as you quickly maneuver through rugged and potentially unpredictable terrain. Statistics on just how dangerous aerotrekking is don’t exist. Because of the unlicensed, unregistered nature of this, and because the planes don’t enter FAA airspace, the FAA doesn’t track accidents and the National Transportation Safety Board doesn’t investigate them. What could possibly go wrong?

The first thing to go wrong, though, was that there wasn’t any infrastructure set up for this, so John bought land and set up seven bases across New Mexico and Arizona where people could land, store their planes, and resupply. The Sky Gypsies then became less of an informal club and turned into a school where John and his employees would train people who were interested in learning to fly ultra-light aircraft.

Among those employees was John’s 22 year old nephew, Joel Bitow. Joel showed a lot of talent for flying and quickly began working as an instructor for John, despite only having 65 hours of flight experience himself. That is emphatically not okay, and it ended exactly how you would expect.

At 9:30 am on November 1st, 2006, Joel and his passenger, 61 year old Robert Gilson, took to the skies. It was a clear day with ideal flying conditions, but the voyage ended with Joel crashing the ultra-light aircraft into the side of a canyon, killing both of them.

Unsurprisingly, John was sued by Robert’s relatives for wrongful death. He was facing a multi-million dollar lawsuit, but that was only the beginning of his financial problems. John had a lot of investments around the country, and many of these investments were tied to real estate. As you may recall, there was a bit of a financial crisis in 2008 that was triggered by the housing market. John’s fortune fell from a peak of $100 million to reportedly just $4 million.

Of course, the $4 million figure was reported by John personally, and he later admitted it was a total lie. He made a big show of selling off all his properties for pennies on the dollar and making sure the media knew he had lost nearly all of his money, not that $4 million wasn’t still plenty. Regardless, by publicizing his own financial collapse, he thought he could stop people from trying to come after him for money.

It wasn’t just lawsuits, either, of which there were multiple, not just the one from Robert’s family. People tried to take advantage of John and his apparent generosity all the time, because people described him as being somewhat gullible and a horrible judge of character. One of John’s former friends likened him to a D&D character with 18 intelligence and 3 wisdom. Essentially, he was smart enough to find a way out of nearly any bad situation he found himself in, but he lacked the common sense to stop winding up in those situations in the first place.

And in 2009, John had an idea to try to escape all of his problems: he was going to move to Belize. Technically this wasn’t actually his idea, as his lawyer had told him that any financial judgment that came down from a US court wouldn’t be enforceable in Belize. He purchased beachfront property on the island of Ambergris Caye, bringing a few hangers on with him. Among them was Jennifer, as the two were still in a relationship.

Despite being with her for potentially nine years at that point, one of John’s first orders of business in Belize was creating a full on harem. He was regularly involved with seven women at once, though who those women were rotated. And they also weren’t all women, as it’s reported that there was at least one member of the harem who was only 16 or 17 years old at all times. In interviews John was very open about dating teenage girls in Belize, because the age of consent there is 16, so technically it was all legal.

But at 64 years old, he was exactly four times the age of some of these girls.

As a fun bit of math, the only way it would have been possible for a girl to both be a quarter of John’s age and to fall within the socially acceptable “half your age plus seven” metric would be if John was negative 28 years old.

But it wasn’t just women (and girls) that John was stockpiling in Belize, he also had guns. Lots and lots of guns. He also had his own personal security force who he armed with these guns. Basically, John moved to Belize to build a harem and his own private military. And also to bribe public officials, which allowed him to gain residence far quicker than the law allowed.

A few months after arriving in Belize, John went to a beachside resort for lunch. While there, he caught a glimpse of an attractive woman who was staying at the resort. He began talking to her, probably with the intention of adding her to his harem, only to discover that she was a 31 year old Harvard researcher and microbiologist. Her name was Allison Adonizio, and she explained to John that her work was in a new field called “anti-quorum sensing”.

Basically, quorum sensing is how bacteria cells communicate with one another. It was first discussed in the 1970s with regards to a specific bacteria, but in 2001 it was proven that quorum sensing existed across all bacteria. Allison’s work was focused on trying to disrupt this communication as a way to neutralize bacteria, ideally creating a new class of antibiotics that would circumvent the problem of drug resistant bacteria by not actually killing them, just disabling them.

John was immediately interested in this idea, so he offered to hire Allison and build her a brand new, state of the art lab with whatever equipment she wanted. The offer was a literal dream come true, so she immediately took him up on it and moved to Belize to run her very own lab. In February of 2010, they cofounded the company QuorumEx dedicated to the mission of revolutionizing the antibiotics industry.

Unfortunately, while the job was theoretically supposed to be a dream come true, working with John was anything but. Allison was a real scientist trying to do real research, but even if everybody around John said that he was a genius, he was still a douchey Silicon Valley tech bro and over the top hype machine. He started every new business venture with the philosophy of “move fast and break stuff”, even when that “stuff” had been his own nephew.

John wasted no time in trying to promote their venture, ignoring the fact that legitimate research takes time. But that was okay. If it was going to take years to properly perform the necessary experiments, they could just fake it until then.

According to one witness, when the media was coming to interview them and show off the company’s lab, John instructed an employee to fill beakers with coloured water to make it look like they were doing cool science shit. I mean, Allison genuinely was doing cool science shit, but her research wasn’t as visually appealing to reporters as bottles of coloured water that would make them go, “oooh, science!”

It took less than a year for Allison to become disillusioned with John, at which point she decided it was time to leave the company and go back to researching at Harvard. She may not have got to run her own lab with assistants working under her back in Cambridge, but at least she was working with people who cared about and understood science instead of having to deal with the whims of a hyperactive marketing machine who wanted to monetize a product that didn’t yet exist.

It certainly didn’t help matters that John was becoming increasingly paranoid. He thought there were white men in black suits watching his property, likely spies from the pharmaceutical industry who were trying to steal their research. There were also seemingly unsubstantiated rumours that the nearby village of Carmelita was a major hub for international drug smugglers. Even though he had told Allison that his property was in a safe area, his increasing insanity (and the constant presence of armed guards) became a bit of a concern.

However, according to Allison, when she tried to quit, it went about as bad as you could possibly imagine. She claimed that when she tried to tell John she was leaving, he drugged her then sexually assaulted her. Obviously John denied those claims, and it was never handled by the courts. It’s not like there would have been video evidence or anything like that anyway, so it all comes down to whether or not you believe John would have been capable of something like that.

Some time afterwards, John started a new relationship. Even though he insisted that he never drank or did illegal drugs since first attending AA back in the 80s, John became a regular at a place called Lover’s Bar. It’s possible the bar got its name because the owner was also the proprietor of multiple brothels, but that may have just been a happy coincidence.

Regardless, the owner prided himself on finding customers exactly what they wanted. The owner first asked John if he would be interested in some women, but he declined. If women weren’t what John was after, he offered boys instead. Again John said no, but the owner wasn’t one to give up.

One day, John showed up and was introduced to a 16 year old sex worker named Amy. She was open about having been abused and sold for sex to dozens of men by her mother growing up, and also about the fact that she carried a gun and would not fall in love. And apparently, that’s exactly what John was looking for.

Since he had also grown up in an abusive home, John said that her story resonated with him. He saw himself and Amy as essentially being the same person, which is quite convenient since a lot of people are probably thinking right now how much John should go fuck himself. And he agreed, because Amy was quickly moved into his home as his new girlfriend.

This was the last straw for Jennifer, who moved back to the US after her failed attempts to demand Amy be thrown out of the house. She and John had been together for about 12 years at that point and she had put up with all of the other women, but moving a 16 year old who everybody described as being visibly insane and dangerous into the house as his newest girlfriend was a bridge too far.

It turned out that she was right to want Amy thrown out of the house. Even though John had fallen in love with her, she didn’t feel a goddamn thing for him. The population of Belize is largely impoverished, with massive income inequality. According to recent data, the average person in Belize survives on just $4 USD per day.

And amidst all of this poverty was John, the American millionaire. From the start, Amy had just planned to make him fall in love with her and then rob him, and her plan worked. At least the first half.

One night, Amy got out of their bed while John was sleeping, grabbed his revolver out of its holster, and pulled the trigger. Maybe she got squeamish about murder, or maybe she really did feel something for him. Either way, she had missed his head, firing into the pillow beside him. The sound blew out John’s eardrum, but he was otherwise unharmed.

We’ve already established that John was extremely paranoid and surrounded by armed guards, so what do you think happened to Amy? If you guessed that John bought her a house a kilometer away, you would be correct! He didn’t want to break up with her, he just thought it would be better if she had her own place where she could sleep that wasn’t right next to John and his revolver.

That decision came a little later, though. The first thing John did after Amy tried to shoot him was took away her TV and phone for a month. In a later interview he said that, “when she tried to shoot me in the head, what I saw was a frightened child.” I really don’t know how to process any of that, and I especially don’t know how John did.

I’d hope that this goes without saying, but if you have the power to ground a person who you also referred to as a “frightened child”, you should not be putting your dick inside that person. And just like a child, Amy responded to the news of being grounded by arguing, “But I didn’t even kill you!”

This happened in 2012, but it was hardly the most important thing that happened to John that year. In early April of that year a local politician had demanded a $2 million campaign donation, which John refused. A second request came in, but John again refused to pay up. Two weeks later, his property was raided by the Gang Suppression Unit of the Belize Police Department.

They arrested John on suspicion of possession of illegal firearms and operating an illegal drug lab. When told he was being arrested because they believed he was manufacturing meth, John replied that it was an interesting theory but that he hadn’t sold drugs since 1983.

The timing of this made it seem like obvious retaliation for John’s refusal to pay a bribe to his local representative. To be fair to the authorities they did find a ton of guns on John’s property as well as a lab, but all of the guns owned by John and his security guards were legal, and his lab was just the regular science lab where they had tried to create a new form of antibiotic. There was no trace of any illegal drugs, so John was released from custody without being charged.

Eventually John found a way to smooth things over with the authorities, though. He had set up Amy with a place to live in Carmelita, and she told him stories of how horribly crime ridden it was. Wanting to keep the area safe, John built a prison and donated guns, batons, stun guns, pepper spray, and other supplies to the police department. He also paid police to patrol Carmelita during their off hours.

The donations came on Thursday, November 8th, with media outlets reporting that “the hatchet was formally buried” with regards to the (short-lived) feud between John and authorities. And that would last for all of 48 hours.

You see, John had a neighbour he didn’t get along with. The neighbour, 52 year old Gregory Faull, was another American ex-patriot. Gregory had serious issues with John, and especially with his dogs. John owned a bunch of dogs, which were often described as loud, aggressive, and dangerous.

Not only did Gregory frequently complain about the dogs, he also complained about the noise from the loud trucks that went to and from John’s property at all hours of the night. Many of these complaints were made to John personally, though Gregory did file official noise complaints as well. Nothing ever came from the complaining though. The authorities apparently couldn’t be bothered with something as minor as a noise complaint, and John didn’t really give a fuck what anybody said.

The day after John’s donations to the police, he discovered that some of his dogs had been poisoned. A couple were already dead, but John had to shoot four of them himself to put them out of his misery. It was never proven who did this, and John didn’t actually think there was an obvious suspect. Even though he and Gregory butted heads, John maintained that Gregory never would have killed the animals because he was a dog lover.

In fact, John claimed that all of his neighbours loved dogs (just not necessarily his dogs), so none of them would have been capable of the crime.

He seemed to be alone in that assessment, though. Most people drew the conclusion that Gregory, as the most vocal opponent of John’s dogs, was the person most likely to poison them. That perception became all too relevant on the morning of November 11th when Gregory was found dead in a pool of his own blood, having been shot to death. Since people had assumed that Gregory was the person most likely to have killed John’s dogs, John then became the prime suspect in Gregory’s murder.

The assumption was that the murder was his revenge for what happened to his dogs.

John had a different theory, of course. He wasn’t the one that killed Gregory, the Belizean government had. By mistake. Obviously the government had tried to kill John, but they got the wrong house. I’ll leave it to you to decide which of those two theories sounds more likely.

The Gang Suppression Unit again visited John’s property, but he saw them coming. Officially they just wanted to talk to him as a person of interest, but John didn’t believe that for a second. The government had killed the wrong man the night before, and now they were coming to finish what they had started. Throughout his entire life John had always seemed to come up with a brilliant plan to escape any trouble he found himself in, and that day was no different.

Short on time, he decided to evade authorities by running out to the beach, burying his body in the sand, and putting a cardboard box over his head.

That sounds ridiculous and we only have John’s word to go on for that, but it’s not necessarily impossible. He may have escaped the police that day, but he knew that he was going to have to go on the run. It was time to get the Hell out of Belize, but he couldn’t do it alone. In order to flee Belize, John was going to need the help of his teenage girlfriend. Not Amy, though she had been invited to come along as well, but rather his 18 year old girlfriend Samantha.

Oh yeah, and he was also going to need Rocco Castoro, the editor-in-chief for VICE magazine to fly down to Belize with a camera crew and film his entire escape. John felt that if he had reporters documenting his journey that it would be harder for authorities to unceremoniously murder him and dump his corpse in the jungle, which he apparently assumed was their plan. But hey, it’s not like VICE was going to be directly responsible for John’s arrest or anything.

Life on the Run

John laid low for about a month, hiding out and donning a variety of disguises. His picture was all over the media, what with him being a person of interest in a murder, so everybody knew what he looked like. But they also had pictures of the rich, well put together American who was living in Belize. So the first part of John’s disguise was to stop bathing and combing his hair, making himself look disheveled or even homeless.

He also used a variety of wigs and other disguises to keep himself hidden whenever he traveled in public, which was often just to see Amy. Because the only thing more disgusting than a 16 year old being in a sexual relationship with a 64 year old, is that same relationship but with the 64 year old having not bathed in weeks.

Anyway, John had an interesting history with the media. He frequently befriended journalists from various outlets so he could share his life story with them. Inevitably John would burn all of those bridges when the journalist published something he didn’t like, but he still had a lot of contacts. While in hiding, he released public statements through the media claiming that the Prime Minister of Belize was going to murder him if he was ever captured.

The Prime Minister responded to these allegations by calling John paranoid and “bonkers”.

There was a bridge John had yet to burn though, which was VICE. And this was exactly the kind of story they were eager to cover. Rocco and a videographer traveled to Belize to accompany and film the escape from the country, and that footage later become the Netflix documentary Running with the Devil. For anyone wondering about the legality of something like this, it’s apparently completely fine. VICE wasn’t there to help John escape, they were just documenting the process. And also completely fucking it up.

On December 3rd, VICE published a short article titled “We Are With John McAfee Right Now, Suckers”. It was just a little blurb saying that they were with McAfee documenting his journey and that they would release the footage “in the coming days”. By which they meant about ten years later, which is when the documentary finally came out. But in addition to the short paragraph they published, the post also contained an image of John and Rocco standing together in the jungle.

Turns out this was a big mistake, and VICE were the suckers all along.

You might be thinking there was something in the background of the photo that gave away their location, but it was just trees and dirt. Not even Rainbolt could have pinpointed where in Central America they were by looking at this photo. That’s okay though, because any idiot with a right click button could have figured it out. You see, image files have a little something called Exif data.

Exif contained all sorts of metadata including the date, time, and fucking GPS coordinates where the picture was taken. And apparently nobody at VICE had the foresight to wipe the Exif data before publishing the photo.

According to that data, John was hiding out in Guatemala, which he had entered illegally. Originally VICE tried to cover their asses by saying they altered the Exif data to give a false location, but this was incredibly stupid and nonsensical. The only reason they would have faked the location was to throw people off their trail, but immediately declaring it was fake would have completely undermined that.

More importantly, if VICE’s claims were actually true, that would have meant they were criminals. It’s pretty cool that journalists have the leeway to freely document other people’s crimes, even in a situation like this, but if they had faked the Exif data that would have meant they were no longer mere documentarians and were actively aiding and abetting a fugitive. So yeah, this little ruse didn’t last very long, which is fine because nobody believed their lies anyway.

The day after this little mix-up occurred, John released a statement saying that he was in fact in Guatemala. He then met with Samantha’s uncle, Telésforo Guerra, who happened to be a criminal defense lawyer. John told Guerra that he planned to marry Samantha, but this was undoubtedly a lie. This is purely speculation, but the likely motive was that he wanted Guerra to see him as his niece’s wealthy benefactor rather than as her creepy old abuser.

The first order of business was to apply for political asylum. John believed that the Belizean government was trying to frame him for murder (or so he claimed), so they argued he was fleeing the country because of political persecution. A day after the papers were filed, the verdict came down that no, he would not be granted asylum. The President of Guatemala made a public statement that John’s actions were that of someone trying to flee a murder charge, and that there was no evidence of political persecution.

He wanted to make it clear that Guatemala was not going to be a safe haven for people trying to escape charges in other countries. John was then arrested and placed in jail for entering Guatemala illegally.

While John had expected his asylum request to be granted, Guerra had a backup plan. He could file all sorts of injunctions and stuff that would buy them time in Guatemala before John was extradited back to Belize, but he needed time to file them. There was going to be about a four hour window where the Guatemalan government could toss John in a van and ship him back to Belize before any injunctions would take effect.

Just the thought of being extradited back to Belize made John’s chest hurt. A lot. Almost like an elephant was sitting on it. His left arm went numb, too.

Luckily, his jailers had a duty of care, so John was shipped off to the hospital. VICE was still following him around at this point, and when medical staff began to undress John to deal with what seemed like a very obvious heart attack, he requested that they not undress him in front of the cameras. Which was a very normal way for someone in the midst of an urgent medical episode to act.

Needless to say John was faking the heart attack, something he readily admitted to on numerous occasions afterwards. He actually faked heart attacks on two occasions while in custody in Guatemala, ensuring he wouldn’t be extradited to Belize. After about a week I guess the Guatemalan government decided they were done with John’s bullshit, so he was deported back to the United States.

The Libertarian Dream

Being deported to the United States was fantastic news for John. Sure, he had never shown up to court to deal with the lawsuit from the family of the man his aerotrekking company killed and now owed $2.5 million from a default judgment (money he had no intention of paying), but it’s not like he was wanted for any crimes in the US. And he technically wasn’t wanted for any crimes in Belize, either. He had been labeled as a suspect and a person of interest in Gregory’s murder, but they never officially filed charges.

As far as the US government was concerned, John was a free man. So he flew to Miami and decided to party it up on South Beach.

In his first month back, John solicited the services of a 31 year old sex worker named Janice. It was just another job for Janice, who had no idea who John was. But Suave knew exactly who John was and how much money he was allegedly worth. And in case it wasn’t obvious from context clues, Suave was the name of Janice’s pimp.

He demanded that she give him information about where John was staying, but for some reason she refused. Later on the two ran into one another again, and they began dating. In 2013, Janice became John’s third and final wife. After getting married, they moved to Portland, Oregon for a bit.

Things went fine for a while, but eventually the couple got into a fight and separated. John moved to Tennessee, and Janice, unsure what to do, called up her old pimp. And Suave knew exactly what to do: they were going to kidnap and ransom John.

This never successfully happened though, thanks to Janice. Just like the plot of about 90% of all superhero movies, she successfully protected him from the danger that she was responsible for creating. Suave would instruct her to do things like leaving doors unlocked, and she always complied. However, she would also do her best to steer John out of danger and leave little hints that he needed to keep an eye out.

And sure, it thwarted the kidnapping attempts, but I’m not sure that was the best thing for John’s mental health. He was already extremely paranoid, convinced that the government of Belize and drug cartels were coming to kill him. He had turned the Tennessee home into a fortress with cameras everywhere, barricades, and what he referred to as the most armed bedroom in America. He eventually got so paranoid that he unloaded a bunch of rounds into his own walls because he thought there was someone hiding in the air ducts.

That was finally enough for Janice, so she came clean about Suave’s kidnapping plans and her part in them. Most people would have ended the relationship right there, but John had already continued dating Amy after she tried to shoot him in his sleep, so what’s a little kidnapping conspiracy between a husband and wife? She had told him the truth, so it was all water under the bridge.

Now you may be wondering how John was supporting himself through all of this. Even if his fortune hadn’t dwindled to only $4 million, he still spent a fuckton of money in Belize, and he wasn’t ever going to be able to go recoup any of that by selling off his properties or the lab equipment. There’s no way to know how much money John had left when he returned to the US, but he was able to make money by doing paid speaking engagements.

John was paranoid, had been described as a “psychopath” by someone he hired to write his biography, and was potentially a murderer. But people still thought he was brilliant enough to pay him to hear what he had to say.

We’ll get to his other primary moneymaking venture in a moment, but in 2015, after John and Janice had moved to Tennessee, he got pulled over and arrested for driving under the influence and carrying a firearm while under the influence. You may be thinking, “wait a minute, I thought John was sober ever since he started AA back in the 80s?” And sure, he certainly said that he was. But if you’ve ever known any “recovered” addicts, about half of them are downing copious amounts of Adderall or whatever other drugs they can get a doctor to give them an unnecessary prescription for.

While it does seem John stopped drinking or doing illegal drugs, by all accounts he had no problem taking drugs that were not yet illegal or ones that he had been prescribed. And to be fair, I don’t think I would consider John’s prescription for Xanax to be unnecessary, especially since he told the arresting officer that as soon as his name was put into the system, the FBI was going to come looking for him. Dude probably needed something much stronger than Xanax for his anxiety and paranoia.

While the video of the arrest was interesting to say the least, things certainly could have gone much worse. John had been prescribed the Xanax legally, and it appears to have been a new medication for him. He tried to argue that his doctor hadn’t informed him not to drive until they saw how he reacted to the dosage, but it didn’t matter. In Tennessee (and many states), you can be charged with DUI for legal, prescription drugs if they impair your ability to drive.

John spent some time in the county jail for his crimes, but not that much. This is America, so it’s not like we take DUIs seriously.

Back to John’s other new source of revenue, though. He had already spent years as a Silicon Valley tech bro, so now that it was the 2010s it only made sense for him to return as a crypto bro. John engaged in multiple crypto pump and dump schemes, netting himself a fortune. In 2017 he went so far as to say that if Bitcoin didn’t reach $500,000 by the end of 2020, he would eat his own dick live on TV.

A year or two later he even doubled down, saying it would reach $1 million or he’d eat his dick. Obviously, neither of those things happened.

But before he made that prophetic wager, in 2015 John decided he was going to run for President of the United States. He first announced his candidacy in September of that year as a member of the newly formed Cyber Party, but a couple months later he decided he was going to vie for the Libertarian nomination as well.

And honestly, John McAfee should have been the Libertarian Party’s wet dream. He was a self-made millionaire, a household name, and he firmly believed in all of the party’s ideals. For anyone unfamiliar with what the Libertarian Party believes in, they are essentially just anarcho-capitalists who also throw out some lip service to ideals of social liberalism to make their party seem more palatable to the average person.

And John was all about that. He didn’t believe in any sorts of regulations, and thought that taxes were illegal. He also argued that the free market should operate unrestricted and with no redistribution of wealth, which ignores the fact that the free market is inherently designed to redistribute wealth from the bottom to the top.

Libertarian candidates (or any 3rd party candidates for that matter) have never done well in the US, but in 2016 they were going to have their big break. For the first time ever, the debate between the three Libertarian candidates was going to be aired live on national TV. Unfortunately for John, he failed to win the nomination. I’m sure a lot of the Libertarian base loved his anti-tax policies, but it was hard to get people to vote for an alleged murderer. Or at least it was back in 2016.

It was around this time that McAfee’s life started to really go downhill. He had been able to pump and dump a bunch of cryptocurrencies, but the government decided that maybe that shouldn’t be legal after all. John had been paid to hype up various crypto assets on Twitter, which he did without ever disclosing the posts were sponsored. After successfully hyping up the price, he and his associates would dump their investments and cash out, leaving a bunch of suckers with worthless tokens.

Shit like this happened all the time because nobody was really sure what the status of cryptocurrency was, and John became the SEC’s test case for this. He was indicted on counts of securities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering because of his crypto antics, though he was never actually put on trial for this. They couldn’t put John on trial because he had already fled the country to escape the other charges against him.

Remember when I said that John thought that taxes were illegal? Well that wasn’t just an attempt to pander to the Libertarian base. He really put his money where his mouth was, which was as far away from Uncle Sam’s grubby little hands as possible. Despite how famous the story of Al Capone is, John decided he just didn’t want to pay taxes anymore.

In January of 2019 he publicly declared that he hadn’t filed taxes in eight years, and he was never going to file them ever again. At that point, he, Janice, and some bodyguards hopped onto his yacht and went on the run from the law. Months earlier he had declared that he would again be running for president in 2020, so when he announced he was fleeing the country he also announced that he would be running his 2020 presidential campaign in exile from international waters.

Eventually he dropped out of that race and tried to become the vice presidential running mate for another member of the Libertarian Party, but nobody wanted him on their ticket. I can’t possibly imagine why.

Something else happened in 2019 though, something that has remained really important. On August 10, 2019 in the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York, Jeffrey Epstein definitely hung himself. And no, there was no connection between John and Epstein, at least not as of the most recent release of 3.5 million new files. At first I was kind of surprised John wasn’t in the Epstein files, as they sure seem like they’d be best friends.

But John was very open about the fact that he frequently slept with teenage girls, so there was no reason for him to fly to Epstein’s pedo island in secret.

But even if they weren’t friends, Epstein’s suicide terrified John. A few months after Epstein’s death, John tweeted, “Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: ‘We’re coming for you McAfee! We’re going to kill yourself’. I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn’t. I was whackd. Check my right arm.” Below the message was a picture of his right arm with “$WACKD” tattooed on it.

Many of you might be thinking that’s a very weird way to stylize the word. If you want to leave off the E for some reason that’s fine, but why put a dollar sign at the front? Crypto bros will immediately know why, but the question was answered at the bottom of John’s tweet, which contained a link to his personal website where he was selling the $WACKD crypto coin. Because what’s the point of being a high profile figure in crypto if you can’t exploit literally everything for money.

In the summer of 2019 John docked his yacht in the Dominican Republic, and he was arrested for possession of all sorts of illegal firearms. The yacht was searched and weapons were confiscated, but after four days he was released. Eventually, he made his way to Europe where he thought he would be safe from the US government.

Or at the very least he thought he could keep himself safe. He still used disguises and even hired body doubles to throw authorities off his trail, but eventually authorities were going to catch up with him. On October 5, 2020, John was arrested in Spain at the behest of the United States. He remained in prison for almost nine months while the Spanish National Court handled the question of whether or not to extradite him.

On June 23, 2021, the court finally authorized John’s extradition to the United States to face trial for all of his financial crimes. Hours later, he was found dead in his cell from an apparent suicide.

Many people did not believe that official narrative, though. John had made it clear that he believed multiple governments were trying to kill him, and he had even made that tweet saying if he was ever found to have killed himself that no he didn’t. There was another even more interesting tweet he made a few months before getting the WACKD tattoo, though. In June of 2019, John had tweeted:

“I’ve collected files on corruption in governments. For the first time, I’m naming names and specifics. I’ll begin with a corrupt CIA agent and two Bahamian officials. Coming today. If I’m arrested or disappear, 31+ terrabytes of incriminating data will be released to the press.”

Although he didn’t use the actual phrase, it was very clear to most people that John was threatening a dead man’s switch of epic proportions. At over 300 gigabytes, the Epstein files contain millions of documents, images, and videos revealing massive amounts of corruption and criminal behaviour. And John was claiming to have 100 times that amount of incriminating information on multiple world governments.

Of course, John said a lot of things. He had convinced a reporter that the goal of his antibiotics lab in Belize was to create a female version of Viagra, and in 2018 he made a bunch of tweets and statements convincing a surprising number of people that he was attempting to join a whale fucking club. To make that claim even more ridiculous, he didn’t even say that they were fucking captive whales.

Instead, members would swim alongside whales in the ocean, somehow matching their speed, and insert their penises into the whale. Hopefully I don’t have to explain this, but no human in the world can come anywhere close to swimming at the same speed as a whale.

So was this dead man’s switch a real threat, or was it just another attempt by John to troll the media? Or maybe it was less of a troll and more of a bluff. For many people, the answer was revealed in John’s last Instagram post, which was made a few days after his death. The posthumous post was just a picture of a giant letter Q. Shortly afterwards, the account was deleted.

The Theories

Obviously there are going to be three main theories surrounding John’s death. The first is the official story, that he took his own life after hearing about the extradition order. The second is that he was Epsteined in his cell. And the third is that John isn’t actually dead.

The idea that John was murdered is by far the most popular, though there’s a lot less evidence for this than with Epstein. That said, the circumstances surrounding his death and the subsequent investigation by Spanish authorities certainly do raise a lot of questions.

According to the Spanish investigation, there was absolutely no evidence for anything except suicide. There was CCTV footage from the jail where John died which showed him killing himself, and the autopsy confirmed what the footage showed. For many people that might sound conclusive, but the thing is the CCTV footage and the autopsy were never released. Spanish authorities investigated, decided the case was straight forward, and presented “trust me, bro” as their only evidence.

And you know what? Fine. I mean, this was a high profile death of someone who explicitly stated he would never kill himself so it’s not actually fine, but they seemed to think it was such an open and shut case that there was no reason to reopen the investigation or release their findings.

There was just one glaring problem with the official story. Not only did they refuse to release the video footage or the autopsy, they also didn’t release John’s body. For years. It took about two and a half years before John’s body was finally sent back to the United States, at which point Janice learned that it had been improperly stored for the first six months and thus she would not be able to have an independent autopsy performed.

Despite those long delays, though, Janice did claim that she was shown the CCTV footage from the prison where John died. And if her story is to be believed, there was clearly something suspicious.

According to her version of events, John was still alive and breathing when the guards found him. She said they tried to perform CPR on him, but that they didn’t even remove the noose from around his neck before doing so. And by noose I mean like a shoelace or something, but her point largely remains. She said that, as a trained nurse, she knew that the first thing you do before performing CPR is make sure the airway isn’t obstructed, so it was insane that they didn’t remove the ligature.

This is largely true, but it kind of glosses over something very important. It’s true that you need to make sure the airway is clear before performing CPR, but that’s actually the second thing you do, not the first. The first thing you do is confirm that the person is not breathing, because there’s no reason to perform CPR on someone that is breathing on their own. I have no idea why she would claim that the guards performed CPR on John if he was in fact still breathing when they found him, and that whole thing calls into question her entire story.

But to many people, that discrepancy in her story didn’t matter. And in a broader context, it still might not have. Even if we ignore Janice as being an unreliable source, and I absolutely believe that we should, it’s still well documented that the official autopsy was never released and John’s body was inexplicably held in Spain until the very end of 2023. That is incredibly bizarre, and it was the sort of thing that was only going to fuel speculation (which was of course further fueled by Janice’s claims).

So if John was murdered, who did it, and why? Well, no specific person has been named, it’s all a bunch of conspiracy theories about corrupt government officials or possibly organized criminal enterprises. And to be fair, John had pissed off a lot of people and multiple governments. Most of the talk is about the Deep State and three letter agencies in the US government, though some believe it was corrupt officials in the Spanish prison system who orchestrated the murder. There doesn’t seem to be any clear motive for Spanish officials to murder John, but other governments might have motive, particularly the US, if the claims of having 31 terabytes of kompromat on US officials was to be believed. Again though, John was known to lie all the time. Or at the very least to troll. He made it well known that he enjoyed trolling people, especially those who took themselves too seriously, though he would be very offended at the idea of being called a liar. Besides, nobody could possibly have that much evidence of a major conspiracy involving all sorts of politicians and billionaires, right? Wrong, because Epstein sure as fuck did. It may not have been 31 terabytes, but it was still a metric fuckton of incriminating pictures and correspondence involving countless politicians and wealthy individuals. But there may have been another person with just as much compromising information, a man by the name of Rusty Shackleford. I am sure many readers have no idea who that is, but many others will have immediately recognized the name. Rusty Shackleford was the alias used by the conspiracy obsessed Dale Gribble on King of the Hill to keep the government from tracking what he was doing. It was also the name of a YouTube account that appeared in 2019 to upload drone footage from Epstein’s island. The uploads began before Epstein’s death, and they continued until the authorities raided the island. Rusty even had drone footage of the raid itself. In one video, the drone was outside the window of a building being searched by the NYPD and FBI. The police spotted the drone and began trying to stack and tape cardboard boxes to obstruct its field of vision. After they spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to cover the window with cardboard, one of the officers finally realized they could just close the curtains. That’s some good work, boys. The YouTube account was eventually taken down, though you can still find reuploads of the videos. The name Rusty Shackleford even shows up in Data Set 8 of the Epstein files, with regards to this YouTube channel. The file in question seems to be internal communications between police, probably the NYPD, and some government official. It’s all redacted so it’s impossible to know who, but the letter is addressed to “Officer [redacted]”. Regardless, the letter talked about one video in particular uploaded by Rusty that contained footage of a laptop in one of the buildings on Epstein’s island, a laptop that the authorities never recovered. Clearly Rusty Shackleford was trying to collect information about Epstein and his associates, and trying to do so anonymously, hence the use of a conspiracy themed cartoon alias. So imagine my surprise to discover that Rusty did an interview with the publication Rooster magazine. It wasn’t an in person interview, of course, but he still communicated with one of the journalists for the magazine. He explained that he had been surveilling the island “in one way or another” for 22 months. The identity of Rusty Shackleford has never been confirmed, but there is only one specific name that has ever come up in conversations about the person: John McAfee. Even back in 2019, before John’s own suspicious death, people immediately tied him to the account. Think about it: he claimed to have all sorts of compromising information about important people, he was hidden on a Yacht somewhere in the Atlantic, and, despite trying to maintain his anonymity, Rusty wasn’t able to resist talking to the press. If Rusty Shackleford was going to be someone well known and not just some random QAnon enthusiast, surely it had to be John. If that were the case, then maybe John really did have a lot of incriminating information about people, and he was still trying to collect more of it as his own insurance policy. That’s what a lot of people believed, which is why they believe that whoever killed Epstein in his cell did the same thing to John over the same information. Another theory is that John was killed because he knew the answer to one of the internet’s biggest mysteries: the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the creator of Bitcoin. And the reason the US government was willing to kill John to keep this information secret was because they were the ones who created Bitcoin in the first place (specifically the NSA). According to the theory, Bitcoin was created by the government essentially as a psyop. The mission was never for Bitcoin to be a major success and drive the price to the insane values it’s at today, the goal was just to psychologically condition people to become accepting of digital currencies. This was all done to pave the way for the adoption of Central Bank Digital Currencies, or CBDCs. And of course CBDCs would bring us one step closer to the globalist agenda. There’s just one thing, though. These murder conspiracies assume John had access to highly sensitive information, but he also claimed to have a dead man’s switch. Most media outlets refer to the dead man’s switch as being a speculative conspiracy theory created by QAnon thanks to the Q post on Instagram, but I’m not sure why. He may not have used the phrase, but his tweet about 31+ terabytes of information that would be released if he was arrested or disappeared is pretty explicit. John definitely claimed to have a dead man’s switch, but the secrets he was hiding have never been revealed. Or have they? One theory is that the information, or rather the key to unlocking it, is hidden somewhere in the blockchain for the $WACKD crypto coin. I am genuinely unsure how this is supposed to work, but nobody has found anything anyway so it’s probably not true. But if the dead man’s switch hasn’t been activated, that leaves fans of John with only one possible option. There are some who believe he is still alive and on the run. In 2024 there were multiple reports of him being seen in San Salvador for the Bitcoin Halving Party, though there weren’t any pictures taken of him. Another reason people suspected John hadn’t died was the Q post from Instagram. This one is really easy to explain though. Although John owned the @OfficialJohnMcAfee Instagram page, he wasn’t actually the person to post on it. He publicly stated multiple times that someone else ran the account for him, and that person must have just decided to feed into the conspiracies that people were creating. John wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. There are also those that believe the dead man’s switch wasn’t activated because it was destroyed. The day after John’s death, a condo building in Miami collapsed. It was reported that not only did John own a condo in the building, but that he had previously tweeted that he was keeping the 31 terabytes of data in his condo in Miami. Of course, both of those things were lies. He didn’t own a condo there and the screenshot of the alleged tweet was fake, but the news still made the rounds. And since that happened immediately after his death, a lot of people immediately fell down the conspiracy rabbit hole before having time to find out it was all fake. Besides, why would somebody as paranoid as John go through the trouble of setting up a dead man’s switch only to then tell the entire world where it was hidden? That’s bush league. Realistically, the switch was never activated because it never existed. It was probably a combination of a bluff and a publicity stunt. Then again, John did know a lot of people with whom he engaged in illegal or at least highly questionable activities and financial dealings, so it’s possible that he really did have sensitive information he left with someone. It’s also possible the person in control of the dead man’s switch is just as paranoid as John, so they’re too afraid to leak it to the public for fear of their own safety. Wrap Up There are a lot of conspiracy theories surrounding John’s death, but personally I don’t buy any of them. In my opinion, John really did end his own life. He was 75 years old and about to be extradited to the United States to face trial and a potential sentence of over 100 years in prison. There’s no way he was ever going to get that much, but at his age any meaningful sentence would have been a life sentence anyway. Everyone who knew him said how brilliant John was, but he had finally got himself into a position he couldn’t find a way out of. I really don’t think it’s unrealistic to believe that John decided it was better to just end his life there rather than spend the rest of it in an American prison. It certainly makes sense with the timing of his death coming mere hours after the extradition order came through. So long as John was in Spanish prison, there was always the chance he could find a way to avoid extradition and thus be set free; after all, it’s not like he was being charged with any crimes by the Spanish government. But once that extradition was finalized, the game was over. Maybe he could weasel his way out of the fraud and money laundering charges, but they had him dead to rights on the tax stuff. John hadn’t just evaded taxes, he had grabbed a megaphone and openly told the IRS to go fuck themselves before running away to international waters. No defense attorney in the world could have beaten those charges, so there was no chance John would ever walk free again. He was smart enough to know that, so I’d wager he just decided he had already had a good run and it was time to say goodbye. Many people will counter that assessment by bringing up his tattoo and the tweet in which he said he would never take his own life. And yes, John did say that, but as I already addressed with the whole whale fucking club, John said a lot of things. Now look, I’m not denying that he was paranoid as fuck and genuinely thought people were trying to kill him. I just don’t think that’s what the tattoo or the tweet were about. That tweet was just an advertisement for his new cryptocurrency. John was already on the run at that point, so it’s my opinion that this was one last pump and dump for the road. The fact that he could tie the coin to Epstein’s death and his own paranoia was just a brilliant piece of marketing. Looking at the price history of $WACKD, the coin was created at the end of August in 2019, so about two weeks after Epstein died. It also takes some amount of time after a coin is created for it to be listed on any exchanges, so it was likely created even closer to Epstein’s death. John’s tweet about his own potential demise didn’t come until three months later at the end of November, showing that there was plenty of time to think this through. My guess is that when news of Epstein’s death broke, John immediately had the idea to make $WACKD as a way to exploit and monetize the news. In the time between creating and listing it, however, I suspect he realized he could tie himself into the equation as well to really increase its marketability. I imagine that’s why there was such a long delay between him creating the coin and finally pushing it. I admit it’s undeniable that the life of John McAfee was truly insane. If someone created a character like him in a work of fiction, it would probably be ridiculed for being far too outlandish. As such, it’s hard to believe that this man who was larger than life would have had such a boring death. But it really is the most believable option. I do still have some questions, like why Spain took so long to return John’s damn body to his widow, but the questions that remain unanswered aren’t enough for me to suspect foul play. This isn’t a case like JFK, MLK, or Epstein where there was very clearly something going on besides the official narrative. For John’s death, the official story really does make sense. There is one final question I just can’t figure out the answer to though. In 2016 during John’s crypto arc, he tried to found a new cybersecurity company named John McAfee Global Technologies. This led to a lawsuit and countersuit between John and Intel (who owned McAfee Antivirus) over the use of his name. They eventually came to a settlement, and part of the agreement was that John was not allowed to use his own name in the name of his new company. This just begs the question of why Intel was so desperate to maintain ownership over the name of one of the most reviled pieces of software to ever plague the market. Key Takeaways John McAfee, the founder of McAfee Antivirus, was known for his controversial lifestyle and legal troubles. McAfee’s life included a series of questionable activities, such as drug dealing, alleged murder, and tax evasion. He was found dead in a Spanish prison in 2021, with many speculating about foul play due to his claims of government threats. McAfee’s death was officially ruled a suicide, but his widow and others raised suspicions due to the lack of transparency in the investigation. Despite the controversies, McAfee was a brilliant software developer who created one of the first antivirus programs. Frequently Asked Questions What is McAfee Antivirus known for?McAfee Antivirus is widely known across the internet as being a horrific combination of spyware, malware, and bloatware that is far worse than any of the viruses it alleges to protect users from. What was John McAfee’s second most influential internet upload?John McAfee’s second most influential internet upload was a video titled ‘How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus,’ where he shot a laptop as a means of uninstalling the antivirus program. What was John McAfee’s early life like?John McAfee was born on an army base in Gloucestershire, England, to an abusive alcoholic father. His childhood was marked by domestic violence, and his father allegedly committed suicide when John was 15. What was John McAfee’s first job?John McAfee’s first job was a scam where he sold magazine subscriptions for free, charging more for shipping and handling than it cost him to buy the magazines. What was the Brain virus?The Brain virus was the world’s first PC virus, created by Amjad Farooq Alvi and Basit Farooq Alvi in Lahore, Pakistan. It was designed to infect floppy disks and slow down computers, with a message encouraging users to contact the creators for ‘vaccination.’ How did John McAfee create McAfee Antivirus?John McAfee created McAfee Antivirus after reading about the Brain virus. He wrote the original VirusScan program in a day and a half and uploaded it to his Bulletin Board Service (BBS) as shareware. What was the Michelangelo virus?The Michelangelo virus was designed to spread widely but only activate on March 6th, erasing the computer’s boot sector and file allocation table, effectively bricking the machine. Why did John McAfee sell his stake in McAfee Associates?John McAfee sold his stake in McAfee Associates because he hated the vibe of the company after it went public and he had to answer to stakeholders, the SEC, and the FTC. What was John McAfee’s involvement in Belize?John McAfee moved to Belize, where he built a harem, a private military, and a lab for antibiotic research. He also had multiple run-ins with the law, including a murder charge and allegations of operating an illegal drug lab. What was John McAfee’s cause of death?John McAfee was found dead in his cell in a Spanish prison from an apparent suicide, hours after the court authorized his extradition to the United States to face trial for financial crimes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is McAfee Antivirus known for?

McAfee Antivirus is widely known across the internet as being a horrific combination of spyware, malware, and bloatware that is far worse than any of the viruses it alleges to protect users from.

What was John McAfee’s second most influential internet upload?

John McAfee’s second most influential internet upload was a video titled ‘How to Uninstall McAfee Antivirus,’ where he shot a laptop as a means of uninstalling the antivirus program.

What was John McAfee’s early life like?

John McAfee was born on an army base in Gloucestershire, England, to an abusive alcoholic father. His childhood was marked by domestic violence, and his father allegedly committed suicide when John was 15.

What was John McAfee’s first job?

John McAfee’s first job was a scam where he sold magazine subscriptions for free, charging more for shipping and handling than it cost him to buy the magazines.

What was the Brain virus?

The Brain virus was the world’s first PC virus, created by Amjad Farooq Alvi and Basit Farooq Alvi in Lahore, Pakistan. It was designed to infect floppy disks and slow down computers, with a message encouraging users to contact the creators for ‘vaccination.‘

How did John McAfee create McAfee Antivirus?

John McAfee created McAfee Antivirus after reading about the Brain virus. He wrote the original VirusScan program in a day and a half and uploaded it to his Bulletin Board Service (BBS) as shareware.

What was the Michelangelo virus?

The Michelangelo virus was designed to spread widely but only activate on March 6th, erasing the computer’s boot sector and file allocation table, effectively bricking the machine.

Why did John McAfee sell his stake in McAfee Associates?

John McAfee sold his stake in McAfee Associates because he hated the vibe of the company after it went public and he had to answer to stakeholders, the SEC, and the FTC.

What was John McAfee’s involvement in Belize?

John McAfee moved to Belize, where he built a harem, a private military, and a lab for antibiotic research. He also had multiple run-ins with the law, including a murder charge and allegations of operating an illegal drug lab.

What was John McAfee’s cause of death?

John McAfee was found dead in his cell in a Spanish prison from an apparent suicide, hours after the court authorized his extradition to the United States to face trial for financial crimes.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Strange Life and Suspicious Death of John McAfee
• Hero image source by thegetty / openverse, cc0.