Say the name John McAfee and to most British readers, all that will conjure up is the computer pop-up of the “McAfee antivirus” program that he invented back in the ‘80s. So far, so Silicon Valley.
But, as covered in a new Netflix documentary, Running With The Devil: The Wild World Of John McAfee, there was much, much more to McAfee than a desire to rid your long-suffering computer of some pesky malware. From being a fugitive wanted for the murder of his next door neighbour in Belize, all the way to his extradition for tax evasion, his drug-fuelled benders on super yachts and the belief he held that he was being hunted by national armies and drug cartels, the whole story is complex, messy and almost unbelievable – much like McAfee himself. “You really don’t know what’s truth and what’s fiction,” says McAfee’s ghostwriter in the documentary, and that’s one of the many problems in telling his tale. But who was the real John McAfee, and where did it all start to go so terribly wrong?
First, some background. McAfee was born on an American airforce base in Gloucestershire in 1945, and his father was reportedly an abusive drunk who died by suicide when McAfee was 17. After getting a degree in maths in 1967, he went on to be picked to work at NASA on the Apollo program. He then moved into the tech world with jobs at Univac, Xerox and Computer Science Corporation.
While at Lockheed in the early ‘80s, he started to pick up on the rise in computer viruses, and how they had the potential to destroy the industry. He created an antivirus software that could detect a computer virus and remove it automatically, which he named VirusScan. As it was one of the first anti-virus programs on the market, he launched his company McAfee Associates off the back of it. By the start of the ‘90s, he was making an estimated $5 million a year.
Mergers with Intel followed, but McAfee started to show his impulsive, reckless side when he bad-mouthed the company for changing the name to Intel Security, and the companies de-merged as a result. He became the original Silicon Valley dude, attaching his name and money to many start-ups: Tribal Voice (which included the first ever instant messaging site, PowWow), Zone Labs, QuorumEx, Future Tense Central and Cognizant, to name just a few. He eventually joined the cryptocurrency gold rush, becoming CEO of MGT Capital Investments. In July 2017, McAfee predicted on Twitter that the price of one bitcoin would jump to $500,000 within three years, adding: “If not, I will eat my own dick on national television.”
But all the big money deals he was making masked his increasingly erratic behaviour outside of the boardroom.
His outspoken behaviour started to catch up with him. After claiming to Fox News in 2019 he had paid no tax since 2010, other charges in the US against him started to build up: a civil lawsuit after two deaths related to his involvement in a aerotrekking accident (aerotrekking, FYI, is a sport in which kite-winged tricycles are flown at low altitudes, sometimes just a few feet off the ground) as well as a DUI and possession of a firearm charge in Tennessee.
He spent a lot of time in Belize in a mansion he owned on Ambergris Caye beach, but he claimed to have been targeted by the police, especially when he was arrested for unlicensed drug manufacturing and possession of an unlicensed weapon, again.
But it was the murder of McAfee’s neighbour in Belize, Greg Faull, that turned him into a fugitive. According to a local in the Running With The Devil documentary, McAfee and Faull had fallen out in 2012 over the behaviour of McAfee’s four dogs, which were harassing Faull’s parrot. McAfee’s dogs were poisoned and killed, and a day later, Faull was found dead, with one gunshot through his head.
As reported by Reuters, McAfee believed authorities in Belize would kill him if he turned himself in for questioning. Belize’s prime minister reacted by denying his claims, calling him paranoid and ‘bonkers.’”
This is the point in the film where two VICE journalists inexplicably join McAfee on the run with his then-girlfriend Sam. After the website inadvertently revealed his hiding place by publishing a geo-tagged photo in an article titled “We’re with John McAfee right now, suckers!”, they travelled with him to Guatemala, where an increasingly paranoid McAfee believed he was being targeted by the national army, and anyone else who happens to be walking past.
He was arrested for illegally entering Guatemala and was due to be deported back to Belize. That's when he faked a heart attack, and he flew back to America after being released, where he jumped straight back into the party lifestyle in South Beach, Miami.
With two failed runs for president in 2016 and 2020 - hey, if Donald Trump can do it - he named himself as a libertarian, advocating amongst other things, the decriminalisation of cannabis, an end to the war on drugs and a free market economy which does not redistribute wealth.
The film covers McAfee’s descent into a mental health meltdown. Had he installed key-stroke technology onto authorities’ computers so knew they were after him? Was a drug cartel out to get him? And did he really kill his father and fake his suicide, as he’s on tape suggesting? It only gets murkier and murkier.
His death
In 2019 McAfee was on the run again, this time from the US government. On October 5, 2020, he was arrested in Spain on behalf of the US Department of Justice for tax evasion and a fraudulent crypto “pump and dump” scheme. He resided in a prison in Barcelona until 23 June, 2021, when the Spanish National Court agreed to extradite him to face charges in Tennessee. Just a few hours later, McAfee took his own life in prison.
However, this was not the end of the story. McAfee’s ex-wife, Janice McAfee, believes it was not suicide. She also points to the tattoo that McAfee got two years before his death and of which he tweeted: “I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd. Check my right arm.”
He had also made comments that he had information on “those in power” and threatened to finally expose “the truth” if he was jailed or died.
As it stands, as of August 2022, according to Reuters, his body remains in a Spanish morgue a year after his death, and a legal case by his ex-wife to demand further checks is yet to be resolved.
We asked the director of the documentary, Charlie Russell, about what he wants people to take from the wild story. His response? "I think that John is someone who is difficult not to like and he lived his life in a way that’s quite intoxicating. I think we’d all like the idea of jumping on a speed boat and evading the authorities, sailing off into the sunset," he explained. "Ultimately, I think John teaches us to accept humanity in all its flaws."
Running With The Devil: The Wild World Of John McAfee streams on Netflix from 24 August.
