As the inventor of the antivirus program, John McAfee got rich, his later antics and a suspicion of murder made him famous. His death in a Spanish prison marks the end of a very eventful life.
The news came last night: John McAfee was found dead in his cell in a prison in Barcelona, the Spanish judiciary names suicide as the cause of death. It is the end of an adventurous life story full of money, guns and drugs that drove him from the tip of Silicon Valley to the South American jungle and finally on a year-long escape from the authorities.
Because what McAfee is almost more famous for than its software is its excessive lifestyle, which is often more reminiscent of drug lords than software developers. The climax is a murder charge. After several arguments with his neighbor, who was also from the USA, in Belize, McAfee’s adopted home at the time, he was found in his own pool of blood with a head shot. And McAfee was quickly identified as the prime suspect by local law enforcement agencies.
Spectacular escape
There were several indications of this. The murder victim had complained several times to McAfee about his six dogs, shortly before the murder they had been poisoned. In addition, the pistol used in the crime matched one that had been found in a previous search of McAfee’s property on suspicion of drugs. The fact that the suspect fled immediately also had little relief.
McAfee himself saw the situation very differently. Afraid to death, he buried himself in the sand when the police came, he later said, using a cardboard box over his head to prevent suffocation, and then left the country by boat. “If they had got me, I would have been dead,” he said with conviction. The local police would have targeted him because he had refused to make a “donation” to the law enforcement officers, he was sure. The murder, the killed dogs and the charges were only intended to drive him out of the country. The authorities always denied this, the then president of the country even described McAfee as “paranoid, even crazy”.
Eternal escape
But there was never any indictment. After McAfee went into hiding in Guatemala and even applied for asylum, he was arrested there a few weeks later and deported to the United States. His urge to self-portrayal was his undoing: In an interview with the magazine “Vice” he wanted to document his escape and present his own point of view. But one of the iPhones used for the photos switched on the function of saving the location with the picture – and ultimately led the authorities to McAfee. Because he had entered illegally, he was expelled from the country.
The wild ride was far from over. McAfee lived for years on his yacht in the Caribbean with his wife Janice, whom he had booked as a prostitute shortly after his return and married soon afterwards. In 2019 he was arrested there too, the Dominican police suspected – again – weapons and drugs in his mobile home. The suspicion should not have come out of nowhere. McAfee had posted a picture on his Twitter account, which was always well-kept, showing him and his wife standing armed with guns on deck. “The CIA wants to collect us soon,” wrote McAfee, saying he would “go underground” for the next few days.
The alleged hunt by the CIA did not stop McAfee from applying for the highest offices in the United States. He ran for the Libertarian Party in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. He was well aware that there was no chance. He led his election campaign “from exile” in 2019 under the motto “Don’t vote for me”.
From the Silicon Valley giant to the sidelines
The adventurous course of McAfee’s life could not be foreseen at the beginning of his thoroughly successful career. The studied mathematician had started his career as a programmer at NASA, worked for the Apollo program when it won the race to the moon. After he got his hands on the first computer virus, Brain, a few stations later at the aviation company Lockheed, he was able to develop successful countermeasures against it. His company named after him then launched the very first anti-virus software on the market. And made John McAfee a multimillionaire.
But although the company still bore his name decades later, McAfee himself had long since said goodbye. Just a few years after the start, in 1994 he sold all shares in the company and invested in other software projects and start-ups. How little he wanted to have to do with the company is shown by his reaction when Intel renamed the program after taking over the company. “I will be eternally grateful to Intel that my name was stripped of its association with the worst software on the planet,” he etched into the microphone. Intel should have been just as happy to finally get rid of the name of the founder.
McAfee always seems to have worried how bad his reputation was. A video from 2013 sums up his relationship with his name and the media very well. “How to uninstall McAfee Antivirus” he explains in the YouTube clip, while surrounded by scantily clad women sniffing white powder and eagerly cursing the camera. It was satire, he told Reuters at the time. “I was tired of getting death threats from people because my name stands for the worst antivirus in the world.” The hostility had nothing to do with his escapades.
McAfee was threatened with life in prison
The fact that McAfee ended up in prison in Spain had to do with his business in recent years. After several failed investments, the financial crisis in 2008 cost him almost all of his fortune, and of the nearly one hundred million dollars, he is said to have had about four left in the end, reported the New York Times. McAfee has improved the cash register in recent years by investing in cryptocurrencies.
The US authorities believe that he should not have adhered to the rules. They accuse him of having illegally enriched himself by making cheap purchases and then using Twitter to drive up prices. In addition, he had not submitted a tax return for the years since 2010, with which he had also stated himself because he regarded taxes as “illegal”. At least 30 years in prison threatened the 75-year-old, it would have resulted in life imprisonment.
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