http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/12/ff-john-mcafees-last-stand/all/
John McAfee’s Last Stand
“Maybe what happened didn’t actually happen,” John McAfee told Wired contributing editor Joshua Davis in Belize.
Photo: Brian Finke
On November 12, 2012, Belizean police announced that
they were seeking John McAfee for questioning in connection with the
murder of his neighbor. Six months earlier, I began an in-depth
investigation into McAfee’s life. This is the chronicle of that
investigation.
Twelve weeks before the murder, John McAfee flicks open the cylinder
of his Smith & Wesson revolver and empties the bullets, letting them
clatter onto the table between us. A few tumble to the floor. McAfee is
66, lean and fit, with veins bulging out of his forearms. His hair is
bleached blond in patches, like a cheetah, and tattoos wrap around his
arms and shoulders.
More than 25 years ago, he formed McAfee Associates, a maker of
antivirus software that went on to become immensely popular and was
acquired by Intel in 2010 for $7.68 billion. Now he’s holed up in a
bungalow on his island estate, about 15 miles off the coast of mainland
Belize. The shades are drawn so I can see only a sliver of the white
sand beach and turquoise water outside. The table is piled with boxes of
ammunition, fake IDs bearing his photo, Frontiersman bear deterrent,
and a single blue baby pacifier.
McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed,
manic intensity. “This is a bullet, right?” he says in the congenial
Southern accent that has stuck with him since his boyhood in Virginia.
“Let’s put the gun back,” I tell him. I’d come here to try to
understand why the government of Belize was accusing him of assembling a
private army and entering the drug trade. It seemed implausible that a
wildly successful tech entrepreneur would disappear into the Central
American jungle and become a narco-trafficker. Now I’m not so sure.
But he explains that the accusations are a fabrication. “Maybe what
happened didn’t actually happen,” he says, staring hard at me. “Can I do
a demonstration?”
He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver, spins the cylinder.
“This scares you, right?” he says. Then he puts the gun to his head.
My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. “Yeah, I’m scared,” I admit. “We don’t have to do this.”
“I know we don’t,” he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple.
And then he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He pulls it three more
times in rapid succession. There are only five chambers.
“Reholster the gun,” I demand.
He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time.
Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the
trigger incessantly. “I can do this all day long,” he says to the sound
of the hammer clicking. “I can do this a thousand times. Ten thousand
times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something.
You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong.”
It’s the same thing, he argues, with the government’s accusations.
They were a smoke screen—an attempt to distort reality—but there’s one
thing everybody agrees on: The trouble really got rolling in the humid
predawn murk of April 30, 2012.
It was a Monday, about 4:50 am. A television
flickered in the guard station of McAfee’s newly built, 2.5-acre jungle
outpost on the Belizean mainland. At the far end of the property, a
muddy river flowed slowly past. Crocodiles lurked on the opposite bank,
and howler monkeys screeched. In the guard station, a drunk night
watchman gaped at
Blond Ambition, a Madonna concert DVD.
The guard heard the trucks first. Then boots hitting the ground and
the gate rattling as the lock was snapped with bolt cutters. He stood up
and looked outside. Dozens of men in green camouflage were streaming
into the compound. Many were members of Belize’s Gang Suppression Unit,
an elite force trained in part by the FBI and armed with Taurus MT-9
submachine guns. Formed in 2010, their mission was to dismantle criminal
organizations.
The guard observed the scene silently for a moment and then sat back
down. After all, the Madonna concert wasn’t over yet. Outside,
flashlight beams streaked across the property. “This is the police,” a
voice blared over a bullhorn. “Everyone out!”
Deep in the compound, McAfee burst out of a thatched-roof bungalow
that stood on stilts 20 feet off the ground. He was naked and held a
revolver. Things had changed since his days as a high-flying software
tycoon. By 2009 he had sold almost everything he owned—estates in
Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas as well as his 10-passenger
plane—and moved into the jungle. He announced that he was searching for
natural antibiotics in the rain forest and constructed a mysterious
laboratory on his property. Now his jungle stronghold was under attack.
The commandos were converging on him. There were 31 of them; he was
outgunned and outmanned.
McAfee walked back inside to the 17-year-old in his bed. She was
sitting up, naked, her long frizzy hair falling around her shoulders and
framing the stars tattooed on her chest. She was terrified.
As the GSU stormed up the stairs, he put on some shorts, laid down
his gun, and walked out with his hands up. The commandos collided with
McAfee at the top of the stairs, slammed him against the wall, and
handcuffed him.
“You’re being detained on suspicion of producing methamphetamine,” one of the cops said.
McAfee twisted to look at his accuser. “That’s a startling
hypothesis, sir,” he responded. “Because I haven’t sold drugs since
1983.”
During his time in Belize, McAfee has collected a retinue of bodyguards, dogs, and young women.
Photo: Brian Finke
Nineteen eighty-three was a pivotal year for McAfee.
He was 38 and director of engineering at Omex, a company that built
information storage systems in Santa Clara, California. He was also
selling cocaine to his subordinates and snorting massive amounts
himself. When he got too high to focus, he’d take a quaalude. If he
started to fall asleep at his desk, he’d snort some more coke to wake
up. McAfee had trouble making it through the day and spent his
afternoons drinking scotch to even out the tumult in his head.
He’d been a mess for a long time. He grew up in Roanoke, Virginia,
where his father was a road surveyor and his mother a bank teller. His
father, McAfee recalls, was a heavy drinker and “a very unhappy man” who
McAfee says beat him and his mother severely. When McAfee was 15, his
father shot himself. “Every day I wake up with him,” McAfee says. “Every
relationship I have, he’s by my side; every mistrust, he is the
negotiator of that mistrust. So my life is fucked.”
McAfee started drinking heavily his first year at Roanoke College and
supported himself by selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. He
would knock and announce that the lucky resident had won an absolutely
free subscription; all they had to do was pay a small shipping and
handling fee. “So, in fact, I am explaining to them why it’s not free
and why they are going to pay for it. But the ruse worked,” McAfee
recalls. He learned that confidence was all that mattered. He smiled,
fixed them with his penetrating blue-eyed gaze, and hit them with a
nonstop stream of patter. “I made a fortune,” he says.
He spent his money on booze but managed to graduate and start a PhD
in mathematics at Northeast Louisiana State College in 1968. He got
kicked out for sleeping with one of his undergraduate students (whom he
later married) and ended up coding old-school punch-card programs for
Univac in Bristol, Tennessee. That didn’t last long, either. He was
arrested for buying marijuana, and though his lawyer got him off without
a conviction, he was summarily fired.
Still, he had learned enough to gin up an impressive, totally fake
résumé and used it to get a job at Missouri Pacific Railroad in St.
Louis. It was 1969 and the company was attempting to use an IBM computer
to schedule trains. After six months, McAfee’s system began to churn
out optimized train-routing patterns. Unfortunately, he had also
discovered LSD. He would drop acid in the morning, go to work, and route
trains all day. One morning he decided to experiment with another
psychedelic called DMT. He did a line, felt nothing, and decided to
snort a whole bag of the orangish powder. “Within an hour my mind was
shattered,” McAfee says.
People asked him questions, but he didn’t understand what they were
saying. The computer was spitting out train schedules to the moon; he
couldn’t make sense of it. He ended up behind a garbage can in downtown
St. Louis, hearing voices and desperately hoping that nobody would look
at him. He never went back to Missouri Pacific. Part of him believes
he’s still on that trip, that everything since has been one giant
hallucination and that one day he’ll snap out of it and find himself
back on his couch in St. Louis, listening to Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon.
From then on he felt like he was always one step away from a total
breakdown, which finally came at Omex in 1983. He was snorting lines of
coke off his desk most mornings, polishing off a bottle of scotch every
day, and living in constant fear that he would run out of drugs. His
wife had left him, he’d given away his dog, and in the wake of what he
calls a mutual agreement, he left Omex. He ended up shuttered in his
house, with no friends, doing drugs alone for days on end and wondering
whether he should kill himself just as his father had. “My life was
total hell,” he says.
Finally he went to a therapist, who suggested he go to Alcoholics
Anonymous. He attended a meeting and started sobbing. Someone gave him a
hug and told him he wasn’t alone.
“That’s when life really began for me,” he says.
He says he’s been sober ever since.
When the Madonna concert ended, McAfee’s drunken
guard finally emerged from his station and strolled over to find out
what was going on. The police quickly surrounded him. They knew who he
was: Austin “Tino” Allen had been convicted 28 times for crimes ranging
from robbery to assault, and he had spent most of his life in and out of
prison.
The police lined everybody up against a rock wall as the sun rose. A
low, heavy heat filled the jungle. Everybody began to sweat when the
police fanned out to search the property. As an officer headed toward an
outlying building, one of McAfee’s dogs cut him off, growled, and,
according to police, went in for an attack. The cop immediately shot the
dog through the rib cage.
“What the fuck!” McAfee screamed. “That’s my dog.”
The police ignored him. They left the dead dog in the dirt while they
rummaged through the compound. They found shotguns, pistols, a huge
cache of ammunition, and hundreds of bottles of chemicals they couldn’t
identify. McAfee and the others were left in the sun for hours. (GSU
commander Marco Vidal claims they were under the shade of a large tree.)
By the time the police announced that they were taking several of them
to jail, McAfee says his face was turning pink with sunburn. He and
Allen were loaded into the back of a pickup. The truck tore off, heading
southeast toward Belize City at 80 miles per hour.
McAfee tried to stay calm, but he had to admit that this was a bad
situation. He had walked away from a luxurious life—mansions on multiple
continents, sports cars, a private plane—only to end up in the back of a
pickup cuffed to a notoriously violent man. Allen pulled McAfee close
so he could be heard over the roar of the wind. McAfee tensed. “Boss, I
just want to say that it’s an honor to be here with you,” Allen shouted.
“You must be a really important person for them to send all these men
to get you.”
McAfee’s girlfriend Amy Emshwiller, now 18.
Photo: Brian Finke
In 1986 two brothers in Pakistan coded the first
known computer virus aimed at PCs. They weren’t trying to destroy
anything; it was simple curiosity. They wanted to see how far their
creation would travel, so they included their names, addresses, and
telephone numbers in the code of the virus. They named it Brain after
their computer services shop in Lahore.
Within a year the phone at the shop was ringing: Brain had infected
computers around the world. At the time, McAfee had been sober for four
years and gotten a security clearance to work on a classified
voice-recognition program at Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California. But then
he came across an article in the
San Jose Mercury News about the spread of the Pakistani Brain virus in the US.
He found the idea terrifying. Nobody knew for sure at the time why
these intrusions were occurring. It reminded him of his childhood, when
his father would hit him for no reason. “I didn’t know why he did it,”
McAfee says. “I just knew a beating could happen any time.” As a boy, he
wasn’t able to fight back. Now, faced with a new form of attack that
was hard to rationalize, he decided to do something.
He started McAfee Associates out of his 700-square-foot home in Santa
Clara. His business plan: Create an antivirus program and give it away
on electronic bulletin boards. McAfee didn’t expect users to pay. His
real aim was to get them to think the software was so necessary that
they would install it on their computers at work. They did. Within five
years, half of the Fortune 100 companies were running it, and they felt
compelled to pay a license fee. By 1990, McAfee was making $5 million a
year with very little overhead or investment.
His success was due in part to his ability to spread his own
paranoia, the fear that there was always somebody about to attack. Soon
after launching his company, he bought a 27-foot Winnebago, loaded it
with computers, and announced that he had formed the first “antivirus
paramedic unit.” When he got a call from someone experiencing computer
problems in the San Jose area, he drove to the site and searched for
“virus residue.” Like a good door-to-door salesman, there was a kernel
of truth to his pitch, but he amplified and embellished the facts to
sell his product. The RV therefore was not just an RV; it was “the first
specially customized unit to wage effective, on-the-spot counterattacks
in the virus war.”
It was great publicity, executed with drama and sly wit. By the end of 1988, he was on
The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour
telling the country that viruses were causing so much damage, some
companies were “near collapse from financial loss.” He underscored the
danger with his 1989 book,
Computer Viruses, Worms, Data Diddlers, Killer Programs, and Other Threats to Your System.
“The reality is so alarming that it would be very difficult to
exaggerate,” he wrote. “Even if no new viruses are ever created, there
are already enough circulating to cause a growing problem as they
reproduce. A major disaster seems inevitable.”
In 1992 McAfee told almost every major news network and newspaper
that the recently discovered Michelangelo virus was a huge threat; he
believed it could destroy as many as 5 million computers around the
world. Sales of his software spiked, but in the end only tens of
thousands of infections were reported. Though McAfee was roundly
criticized for his proclamation, the criticism worked in his favor, as
he explained in an email in 2000 to a computer-security blogger: “My
business increased tenfold in the two months following the stories and
six months later our revenues were 50 times greater and we had captured
the lion’s share of the anti-virus market.”
This ability to infect others with his own paranoia made McAfee a
wealthy man. In October 1992 his company debuted on Nasdaq, and his
shares were suddenly worth $80 million.
The jail cell was about 10 feet by 10 feet. The
concrete floor was bare and cold, the smell of urine overpowering. A
plastic milk container in the corner had been hacked open and was
serving as a toilet. The detention center was located in the Queen
Street police station, but everybody in Belize City called it the
Pisshouse. In the shadows of his cell, McAfee could see the other
inmates staring at him.
No charges had been filed yet, though the police had confiscated what
they said were two unlicensed firearms on McAfee’s property; they still
couldn’t identify the chemicals they had found. McAfee said he had
licenses for all his firearms and explained that the chemicals were part
of his antibiotic research. The police weren’t buying it.
McAfee pulled 20 Belizean dollars out of his shoe and passed it through the bars to a guard. “You got a cigarette?” he asked.
McAfee hadn’t smoked for 10 years, but this seemed like a good time
to start again. The guard handed him a book of matches and a pack of
Benson & Hedges. McAfee lit one and took a deep drag. He was
supposed to be living out a peaceful retirement in a tropical paradise.
Now he was standing in jail, holding up his pants with one hand because
the police had confiscated his belt. “Use this,” Allen said, offering
him a dirty plastic bag.
McAfee looked confused. “You tie your pants,” Allen explained.
McAfee fed the bag through two of his belt loops, cinched it tight, and tied a knot. It worked.
“Welcome to the Pisshouse,” Allen said, smiling.
McAfee lived in Silicon Valley for nearly 20 years.
Outwardly he seemed to lead a traditional life with his second wife,
Judy. He was a seasoned businessman whom startups turned to for advice.
Stanford Graduate School of Business wrote two case studies highlighting
his strategies. He was regularly invited to lecture at the school, and
he was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Roanoke
College. In 2000 he started a yoga institute near his 10,000-square-foot
mansion in the Colorado Rockies and wrote four books about
spirituality. Even after his marriage fell apart in 2002, he was a
respectable citizen who donated computers to schools and took out
newspaper ads discouraging drug use.
But as he neared retirement age in the late 2000s, he started to feel
like he was deluding himself. His properties, cars, and planes had
become a burden, and he realized that he didn’t want the traditional
rich man’s life anymore. Maintaining so many possessions was a constant
distraction; it was time, he felt, to try to live more rustically. “John
has always been searching for something,” says Jennifer Irwin, McAfee’s
girlfriend at the time. She remembers him telling her once that he was
trying to reach “the expansive horizon.”
He was also hurting financially. The economic collapse in 2008 hit
him hard, and he couldn’t afford to maintain his lifestyle. By 2009 he’d
auctioned off almost everything he owned, including more than 1,000
acres of land in Hawaii and the private airport he’d built in New
Mexico. He was trying in part to deter people from suing him on the
assumption that he had deep pockets. He was already facing a suit from a
man who had tripped on his property in New Mexico. Another suit alleged
that he was responsible for the death of someone who crashed during a
lesson at a flight school McAfee had founded. He figured that if he were
out of the country, he’d be less of a target. And he knew that, should
he lose a case, it would be harder for the plaintiffs to collect money
if he lived overseas.
In early 2008 McAfee started searching for property in the Caribbean.
His criteria were pretty basic: He was looking for an English-speaking
country near the US with beautiful beaches. He quickly came across a
villa on Ambergris Caye in Belize. In the early ’90s he had visited the
nation of 189,000 people and loved it. (Today the population is around
356,000.) He looked at the property on Google Earth, decided it was
perfect, and bought it. The first time he saw it in person was in April
2008, when he moved in.
Soon after his arrival, McAfee began to explore the country. He was
particularly fascinated by stories of a majestic Mayan city in the
jungle and hired a guide to go see it. Boating up a river that snaked
into the northern jungle, they stopped at a makeshift dock that jutted
from the dense vegetation. McAfee jumped ashore, pushed through the
vines, and caught sight of a towering, crumbling temple. Trees had grown
up through the ancient buildings, encasing them in roots. Giant stone
faces glared out through the foliage, mouths agape. As the men walked up
the steps of the temple, the guide described how the Mayans sacrificed
their prisoners, sending torrents of blood down the very stairs he and
McAfee were now climbing.
McAfee was spellbound. “Belize is so raw and so clear and so
in-your-face. There’s an opportunity to see something about human nature
that you can’t really see in a politer society, because the purpose of
society is to mask ourselves from each other,” McAfee says. The jungle,
in other words, would give him the chance to find out exactly who he
was, and that opportunity was irresistible.
So in February 2010 he bought two and a half acres of swampy land
along the New River, 10 miles upriver from the Mayan ruins. Over the
next year, he spent more than a million dollars filling in the swamp and
constructing an array of thatched-roofed bungalows. While his
girlfriend, Irwin, stayed on Ambergris Caye, McAfee outfitted the place
like Kublai Khan’s sumptuous house of pleasure. He imported ancient
Tibetan art and shipped in a baby grand piano even though he had never
taken lessons. There was no Internet. At night, when the construction
stopped, there was just the sound of the river flowing quietly past. He
sat at the piano and played exuberant odes of his own creation. “It was
magical,” he says.
He didn’t like the idea of getting old, though, so he injected
testosterone into his buttocks every other week. He felt that it gave
him youthful energy and kept him lean. Plus, he wasn’t looking for a
quiet retirement. He started a cigar manufacturing business, a coffee
distribution company, and a water taxi service that connected parts of
Ambergris Caye. He continued to build more bungalows on his property
even though he had no pressing need for them.
McAfee and another girlfriend, 20-year-old Samantha Vanegas.
Photo: Brian Finke
In 2010 McAfee visited a beachfront resort for lunch and met Allison
Adonizio, a 31-year-old microbiologist who was on vacation. In the
resort’s dining room, Adonizio explained that she was doing postgrad
research at Harvard on how plants combat bacteria. She was particularly
interested in plant compounds that appeared to prevent bacteria from
causing infections by interfering with the way the microbes
communicated. Eventually, Adonizio explained, the work might also lead
to an entire new class of antibiotics.
McAfee was thrilled by the idea. He had fought off digital contagions, and now he could fight organic ones. It was perfect.
He immediately proposed they start a business to commercialize her
research. Within minutes McAfee was talking in rapid-fire bursts about
how this would transform the pharmaceutical industry and the entire
world. They would save millions of lives and reinvent whole industries.
Adonizio was astounded. “He offered me my dream job,” she says. “My own
lab, assistants. It was incredible.”
Adonizio said yes on the spot, quit her research position in Boston,
sold the house she had just bought, and moved to Belize. McAfee soon
built a laboratory on his property and stocked it with tens of thousands
of dollars’ worth of equipment. Adonizio went to work trying to isolate
new plant compounds that might be effective medicines, while McAfee
touted the business to the international press.
But the methodical pace of Adonizio’s scientific research couldn’t
keep up with McAfee’s enthusiasm, and his attention seemed to wander. He
began spending more time in Orange Walk, a town of about 13,000 people
that was 5 miles from his compound. McAfee described it in an email to
friends as “the asshole of the world—dirty, hot, gray, dilapidated.” He
liked to walk the town’s poorly paved streets and take pictures of the
residents. “I gravitate to the world’s outcasts,” he explained in
another email. “Prostitutes, thieves, the handicapped … For some reason I
have always been fascinated by these subcultures.”
Though he says he never drank alcohol, he became a regular at a
saloon called Lover’s Bar. The proprietor, McAfee wrote to his friends,
was partial to “shatteringly bad Mexican karaoke music to which voices
beyond description add a disharmony that reaches diabolic proportions.”
McAfee quickly noticed that the place doubled as a whorehouse,
servicing, as he put it, “cane field workers, street vendors, fishermen,
farmers—anyone who has managed to save up $15 for a good time.”
This was the real world he was looking for, in all its horror. The
bar girls were given one Belize dollar for every beer a patron bought
them. To increase their earnings, some of the women would chug beers,
vomit in the restroom, and return to chug more. One reported drinking 50
beers in one day. “Ninety-nine percent of people would run because
they’d fear for their safety or sanity,” McAfee says. “I couldn’t do
that. I couldn’t walk away.”
McAfee started spending most mornings at Lover’s. After six months,
he sent out another update to his friends: “My fragile connection with
the world of polite society has, without a doubt, been severed,” he
wrote. “My attire would rank me among the worst-dressed Tijuana
panhandlers. My hygiene is no better. Yesterday, for the first time, I
urinated in public, in broad daylight.”
McAfee knew he had entered a dangerous world. “I have no illusions,”
he noted in another dispatch. “We are tainted by everything we touch.”
Evaristo “Paz” Novelo, the obese Belizean proprietor
of Lover’s, liked to sit at a corner table and squint at his customers
through perpetually puffy eyes. He admits to a long history of operating
brothels and prides himself on his ability to figure out exactly what
will please his patrons. Early on, he asked whether McAfee was looking
for a woman. When McAfee said no, Novelo asked whether he wanted a boy.
McAfee declined again. Then Novelo showed up at McAfee’s compound with a
16-year-old girl named Amy Emshwiller.
Emshwiller had a brassy toughness that belied her girlishness. In a
matter-of-fact tone, she told McAfee that she had been abused as a child
and said that her mother had forced her to sleep with dozens of men for
money. “I don’t fall in love,” she told him. “That’s not my job.” She
carried a gun, wore aviator sunglasses, and had on a low-cut shirt that
framed her ample cleavage.
McAfee felt a swirl of emotions: lust, compassion, pity. “I am the
male version of Amy,” he says. “I resonated with her story because I
lived it.”
Emshwiller, however, felt nothing for him. “I know how to control
men,” she says. “I told him my story because I wanted him to feel sorry
for me, and it worked.” All Emshwiller saw was an easy mark. “A
millionaire in freaking Belize, where people work all day just to make a
dime?” she says. “Who wouldn’t want to rob him?”
McAfee soon realized that Emshwiller was dangerous and unstable, but
that was part of her attractiveness. “She can pretend sanity better than
any woman I have ever known,” he says. “And she can be alluring, she
can be very beautiful, she can be butchlike. She’s a chameleon.” Within a
month they were sleeping together, and McAfee started building a new
bungalow on his property for her.
Visiting from Ambergris Caye, McAfee’s girlfriend, Jennifer Irwin,
was flabbergasted. She asked him to tell the girl to leave, and when
McAfee refused, Irwin left the country. McAfee hardly blames her. “What I
basically did was can a solid 12-year relationship for a stark-raving
madwoman,” he says. “But I honestly fell in love.”
One night Emshwiller decided to make her move. She slipped out of bed
and pulled McAfee’s Smith & Wesson out of a holster hanging from an
ancient Tibetan gong in his bedroom. Her plan, if it could be called
that, was to kill him and make off with as much cash as she could
scrounge up. She crept to the foot of the bed, aimed, and started to
pull the trigger. But at the last moment she closed her eyes, and the
bullet went wide, ripping through a pillow. “I guess I didn’t want to
kill the bastard,” she admits.
McAfee leaped out of bed and grabbed the gun before she could fire
again. She ran to the bathroom, locked herself in, and asked if he was
going to shoot her. He couldn’t hear out of his left ear and was trying
to get his bearings. Finally he told her he was going to take away her
phone and TV for a month. She was furious.
“I basically canned a solid 12-year relationship for a stark-raving madwoman,” McAfee says. “But I fell in love.”
“But I didn’t even kill you!” she shouted.
McAfee decided it was better for Emshwiller to have
her own place about a mile down the road in the village of Carmelita. So
in early 2011 he built her a house in the village. Many of the homes
are made of stripped tree trunks and topped with sheets of corrugated
iron; 10 percent have no electricity. The village has a handful of dirt
roads populated with colonies of biting ants and a grassy soccer field
surrounded by palm trees and stray dogs. The town’s biggest source of
income: sand from a pit by the river that locals sell to construction
companies.
Emshwiller, who had grown up in the area, warned McAfee that the
village was not what it appeared to be. She told him that the tiny,
impoverished town of 1,600 was in fact a major shipment site for drugs
moving overland into Mexico, 35 miles to the north. As Emshwiller
described it, this village in McAfee’s backyard was crawling with
narco-traffickers.
It was a revelation perfectly tailored to feed into McAfee’s latent
paranoia. “I was massively disturbed,” he says. “I fell in love with the
river, but then I discovered the horrors of Carmelita.”
He asked Emshwiller what he should do. “She wanted me to shoot all
the men in the town,” McAfee says. It occurred to him that she might be
using him to exact revenge on people who had wronged her, so he asked
the denizens of Lover’s for more information. They told him stories of
killings, torture, and gang wars in the area. For McAfee, the town began
to take on mythic proportions. “Carmelita was literally the Wild West,”
he says. “I didn’t realize that 2 miles away was the most corrupt
village on the planet.”
He decided to go on the offensive. After all, he was a smart Silicon
Valley entrepreneur who had launched a multibillion-dollar company. Even
though he had lost a lot of money in the financial crisis, he was still
wealthy. Maybe he couldn’t maintain multiple estates around the world,
but surely he could clean up one village.
He started by solving some obvious problems. Carmelita had no police
station, so McAfee bought a small cement house and hired workers to
install floor-to-ceiling iron bars. Then he told the national cops
responsible for the area to start arresting people. The police protested
that they were ill-equipped for the job, so McAfee furnished them with
imported M16s, boots, pepper spray, stun guns, and batons. Eventually he
started paying officers to patrol during their off-hours. The police,
in essence, became McAfee’s private army, and he began issuing orders.
“What I’d like you to do is go into Carmelita and start getting
information for me,” he told the officers on his payroll. “Who’s dealing
drugs, and where are the drugs coming from?”
When a 22-year-old villager nicknamed Burger fired a gun outside
Emshwiller’s house in November 2011, McAfee decided he couldn’t rely on
others to get the work done; he needed to take action himself. An
eyewitness told him that Burger had shot at a motorcycle—it looked like a
drug deal gone bad. Burger’s sister said that he was firing at stray
dogs that attacked him. Either way, McAfee was incensed. He drove his
gray Dodge pickup to the family’s wooden shack near the river and strode
into the muddy yard with Emshwiller as his backup (she was carrying a
matte-black air rifle with a large scope). Burger wasn’t there, but his
mother, sister, and brother-in-law were. “I’m giving you a last chance
here,” McAfee said, holding his Smith & Wesson. “Your brother will
be a dead man if he doesn’t turn in that gun. It doesn’t matter where he
goes.”
“It was like he thought he was in a movie,” says Amelia Allen, the
shooter’s sister. But she wasn’t going to argue with McAfee. Her mother
pulled the gun out of a bush and handed it to him.
Soon, McAfee was everywhere. He pulled over a suspicious car on the
road only to discover that it was filled with elderly people and
children. He offered a new flatscreen TV to a small-time marijuana
peddler on the condition that the man stop dealing (the guy accepted,
though the TV soon broke). “It was like John Wayne came to town,” says
Elvis Reynolds, former chair of the village council.
When I visited the village, Reynolds and others admitted that there
were fights and petty theft but insisted that Carmelita was simply an
impoverished little village, not a major transit point for international
narco-traffickers, as McAfee alleges. The village leaders, for their
part, were dumbfounded. Many were unfamiliar with antivirus software and
had never heard of John McAfee. “I thought he would come by, introduce
himself, and explain what he was doing here, but he never did,” says
Feliciano Salam, a soft-spoken resident who has served on the village
council for two years. “He just showed up and started telling us what to
do.”
The fact that he was running a laboratory on his property only added
to the mystery. Adonizio was continuing to research botanical compounds,
but McAfee didn’t want to tell the locals anything about it. In part he
was worried about corporate espionage. He had seen white men in suits
standing beside their cars on the heavily trafficked toll bridge near
his property and was sure they were spies. “Do you realize that Glaxo,
Bayer, every single drug company in the world sent people out there?”
McAfee says. “I was working on a project that had some paradigm-shifting
impact on the drug world. It would be insanity to talk about it.”
McAfee became convinced that he was being watched at all hours.
Across the river, he saw people lurking in the forest and would surveil
them with binoculars. When Emshwiller visited, she never noticed anybody
but repeatedly told McAfee to be careful. She heard rumors that gang
members were out to “jack” him—rob and kill him. On one occasion, she
recorded a village councilman discussing how to dispatch McAfee with a
grenade. McAfee was wowed by her street smarts—”She is brilliant beyond
description,” he says—and relished the fact that she had come full
circle and was now defending him. “He got himself into a very entangled,
dysfunctional situation,” says Katrina Ancona, the wife of McAfee’s
partner in the water taxi business. “We kept telling him to get out.”
Adonizio was also worried about McAfee’s behavior. He had initially
told her that the area was perfectly safe, but now she was surrounded by
armed men. When she went to talk to McAfee in his bungalow, she noticed
garbage bags filled with cash and blister packs of pharmaceuticals,
including Viagra. She lived just outside of Carmelita and had never had
any problems. If there was any danger, she felt that it was coming from
McAfee. “He turned into a very scary person,” she says. She wasn’t
comfortable living there anymore and left the country.
George Lovell, CEO of the Ministry of National Security, was also
concerned that McAfee was buying guns and hiring guards. “When I see
people doing this, my question is, what are you trying to protect?”
Lovell says. Marco Vidal, head of the Gang Suppression Unit, concurred.
“We got information to suggest that there may have been a meth
laboratory at his location,” he wrote in an email. “Given the
intelligence on McAfee, there was no scope for making efforts to resolve
the matter.” He proposed a raid, and his superiors approved it.
When members of the GSU swept into McAfee’s compound on April 30,
2012, they found no meth. They found no illegal drugs of any kind. They
did confiscate 10 weapons and 320 rounds of ammunition. Three of
McAfee’s security guards were operating without a security guard
license, and charges were filed against them. McAfee was accused of
possessing an unlicensed firearm and spent a night in the Queen Street
jail, aka the Pisshouse.
But the next morning, the charges were dropped and McAfee was
released. He was convinced, however, that his war on drugs had made him
some powerful enemies.
He had reason to worry. According to Vidal, McAfee was still a
“person of interest,” primarily because the authorities still couldn’t
explain what he was up to. “The GSU makes no apologies for deeming a
person in control of a laboratory, with no approval for manufacturing
any substance, having gang connections and heavily armed security
guards, as a person of interest,” Vidal wrote.
Vidal’s suspicions may not have been far off. Two years after moving
to Belize, McAfee began posting dozens of queries on Bluelight.ru, a
drug discussion forum. He explained that he had started to experiment
with MDPV, a psychoactive stimulant found in bath salts, a class of
designer drugs that have effects similar to amphetamines and cocaine.
“When I first started doing this I accidently got a few drops on my
fingers while handling a used flask and didn’t sleep for four days,”
McAfee posted. “I had visual and auditory hallucinations and the worst
paranoia of my life.”
McAfee indicated, though, that the heightened sexuality justified the
drug’s risks and claimed to have produced 50 pounds of MDPV in 2010. “I
have distributed over 3,000 doses exclusively in this country,” he
wrote. But neither Emshwiller, Adonizio, nor anyone else I spoke with
observed him making the stuff. So how could he have produced 50 pounds
without anyone noticing?
McAfee has a simple explanation: The whole thing was an elaborate
prank aimed at tricking drug users into trying a notoriously noxious
drug. “It was the most tongue-in-cheek thing in the fucking world,” he
says, and denies ever taking the substance. “If I’m gonna do drugs, I’m
gonna do something that I know is good,” he says. “I’m gonna grab some
mushrooms, number one, and maybe get some really fine cocaine.
“But anybody who knows me knows I would never do drugs,” he says.
In August, McAfee and I meet for a final in-person
interview at his villa on Ambergris Caye. He greets me wearing a pistol
strapped across his bare chest. Guards patrol the beach in front of us.
He tells me that he’s now living with five women who appear to be
between the ages of 17 and 20; each has her own bungalow on the
property. Emshwiller is here, though McAfee’s attention is focused on
the other women.
He has barely left the property since he came out of hiding in April.
He says he spends his days shuttling from bungalow to bungalow, trying
to mediate among the women. I ask why he doesn’t leave the country,
given that the Belizean government has returned his passport. “I would
be perceived as running away,” McAfee says. “Within three days, all of
Carmelita would return to no-man’s-land, and it would be the staging
post for every illegal activity in northern Belize.”
As McAfee tells it, he is all that stands between Carmelita and
rampant criminality. The police raided him, he says, because he had run
the local drug dealers out of town. These dealers had political
connections and had successfully lobbied to have the police attack him.
They wanted him gone. He says he also refused to make political
contributions to a local politician, further antagonizing the ruling
party. If he gives in, he argues, it will send a message that Belize’s
corrupt government can control anybody, even a rich American.
As McAfee talks, we walk across the white sand beach and into his
bungalow. In many ways, his life has devolved into a complex web of
contradictions. He says he’s battling drugs in Carmelita, but at the
same time he’s trying to trick people online into taking drugs. He
professes to care about laws—and castigates the police for violating his
rights—but he moved to Belize in part to subvert the US legal system in
the event he lost a civil case. The police suggest he’s a drug kingpin;
I can’t help but wonder if he has lost track of reality. Maybe he
imagines that he can fix himself by fixing Carmelita.
His bungalow is sparsely furnished. The small open kitchen is strewn
with dishes, rotting vegetables, half-drunk bottles of Coke, and boxes
of Rice Krispies and Cheerios. A dog is licking a stick of butter off
the counter. A bandolier of shotgun shells hangs from a chair. He pops
open a plastic bottle of Lucas Pelucas, a tamarind-flavored Mexican
candy, and depresses the plunger, extruding the gooey liquid through
small holes in the top. “I fucking love these things,” he says.
I tell him that while I was in Carmelita, the villagers described the
place as quiet and slow-moving. There is crime, most admitted, but it
is limited to stolen bicycles and drunken fights. It did not seem like a
particularly dangerous place to me.
“Ninety-nine percent of all crimes are never, ever reported to the
police,” he says. “Because if the gang kills your sister and you report
it, the gang will come back and kill you. Nobody says anything.”
When I tell him that the locals I spoke with can remember only two
murders in the past three years, he argues that I’m not asking the right
questions. To illustrate his point, he takes out his pistol.
“Let’s do this one more time,” he says, and puts it to his head.
Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger
repeatedly, the cylinder rotates, the hammer comes down, and nothing
happens. “It is a real gun. It has a real bullet in one chamber,” he
says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have somehow proven faulty.
I’m missing something.
The same is true, he argues, with Carmelita. I’m not seeing the world
as he sees it. He opens the door to the bungalow, aims the gun at the
sand outside, and pulls the trigger. This time, a gunshot punctures the
sound of the wind and waves. “You thought you were creating your
reality,” he says. “You were not. I was.”
He pulls the spent cartridge out of the chamber and hands it to me. It’s still warm.
Eight weeks later, my phone rings at 4:30 in the
morning. I’m back in the US and groggily pick up. “I’m sorry to wake you
up at this hour, sir, but the GSU had me surrounded all night,” McAfee
says in a breathless rush. He explains that he’s staying at Captain
Morgan’s Retreat, a resort on Ambergris Caye, and he decided to go for a
walk at dusk. As he strolled along the beach, he heard the sound of
approaching gas-powered golf carts. “You can tell the GSU vehicles
because they have this low roar,” he says, a hint of panic creeping into
his voice. “I think they put special mufflers on them to scare people.”
He dashed onto the porch of a nearby hotel room and hid behind the
bushes. Then he heard someone cough on the balcony above him. “As soon
as I heard that, my heart sank,” he says. “They were fucking
everywhere.”
McAfee spends the next 25 minutes describing to me how the GSU
silently surrounded him in the darkness. “Two of them were less than 3
feet away,” he says “They stood unmoving. No one said a word all night
long. They just surround you and stand still. Think about it. It’s
freaky shit, sir.”
He sat there all night, he tells me, terrified that the shadowy
figures he was seeing would kill him if he moved. Around 4 o’clock in
the morning, he says, they retreated quietly and disappeared.
McAfee then walked onto the darkened beach. He thought he could see
Marco Vidal, head of the GSU, motoring away in a boat. He screamed
Vidal’s name. (Vidal denies any GSU encounters with McAfee after the
April 30 raid.)
A security guard approached and asked if he was OK. “After a while my
heart was beating so fast it was like one big hum,” he says. “I was
bursting with perspiration.”
I suggest he get some rest. He sounds frantic and scared.
“They’re coming back,” he says suddenly. “This is too fucking much. I’m hanging up. I’m going.”
The line goes dead.
A week later, McAfee calls me from the Belizean-Mexican border. He
tells me he’s had enough of Belize. A day ago, he was walking down the
beach on Ambergris Caye when several GSU “frogmen” walked out of the
water. Later, he says, a troop of GSU officers crowded into his room but
didn’t say or do anything. “I have just escaped from hell,” he says.
The next day he’s in an $800-a-night suite at the Royal in Playa Del
Carmen, Mexico. “It has a sushi restaurant,” he says. “Do you realize I
haven’t had sushi in years?” He sounds refreshed and says he’s feeling
better.
Six days pass, and McAfee calls again. “Good morning, John,” I say.
“Good evening, I think it is,” McAfee says.
I explain that it’s 9:41 am.
“You’re kidding me,” he says. “I haven’t slept for a couple nights. It felt like evening to me.”
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“I am back from Mexico, thank God,” he says, explaining that he was
robbed and beaten outside of Cancun. Now he’s on Ambergris Caye. “Here
it’s clear that they’re not going to harm me, they’re just trying to
scare me,” he says. “They have to up the ante if they’re going to
continue scaring me.”
I talk to him repeatedly over the next week. He fires all of his
bodyguards because he thinks they are informing on him. He hires William
Mulligan, a British national, to take their place. McAfee figures
Mulligan will have fewer connections to the authorities, despite the
fact that he’s married to a Belizean woman.
On Friday, November 9, 2012, I receive an email from McAfee telling
me that “a contingent of black-suited thugs” disembarked on the dock
next to his property at 10:30 pm. The men dispersed on the beach. “A
half hour later all of my dogs had been poisoned,” he writes. “Mellow,
Lucky, Dipsy, and Guerrero have already died. I had to call Amy and tell
her about Mellow. She is hysterical.”
The next morning, November 10, 2012, McAfee calls to tell me that his
dogs died horrific deaths. They were vomiting blood and convulsing on
the ground. McAfee shot them to end their suffering. “It was an ugly
thing,” he says.
“How is Amy doing?” I ask.
“I’ve tried calling her twice,” he says. “She’s not answering. She’s not doing well.”
I suddenly recall a conversation I had with Emshwiller in August. She
was describing someone in Carmelita who tortured dogs and, with a
chill, I remember her reaction: “Mess with my dog, you’re gonna get it,
man,” she’d said.
In another conversation, she also said she had become profoundly
committed to McAfee. “If he asked me to blow someone’s fucking brains
out, I would,” she said.
Still on the phone with me, McAfee is searching for clues to explain
the dead dogs and has noticed that the fence around his property is
surrounded by boot prints—”military-style boot prints,” he says—and
cites this as evidence that the police were involved. “I’m a paranoid
person,” he says. “I really am. But the whole thing is looking really
weird to me.”
I point out that his neighbors had been complaining about the
barking. In August, Vivian Yu, operator of a bar and restaurant up the
beach, asked one of McAfee’s guards to do something to control the 11
dogs that roamed his property. McAfee hired a carpenter to build a fence
to corral them.
Greg Faull, a neighbor two houses to the south on Ambergris Caye, was
particularly incensed by the racket and aggression of McAfee’s mutts.
Faull was a big man—5’11″, around 220 pounds—who owned a sports bars in
Orlando, Florida, and spent part of the year in Belize. It was a
tropical paradise to him, except for the nuisance McAfee’s dogs created.
They growled and barked incessantly at anybody who walked by on the
beach.
Faull had confronted McAfee about the animals in the past. According
to McAfee, Faull once threatened to shoot them, but McAfee didn’t
believe he’d do it. Allison Adonizio, who had stayed at Greg Faull’s
house when she first moved to Belize in 2010, says there was bad blood
between the two men back then. “McAfee hated his guts,” she wrote in an
email to me.
Earlier in the week, Faull had filed a formal complaint about the
dogs with the mayor’s office in the nearby town of San Pedro. Now, as I
try to catch up on the latest details, McAfee dismisses the suggestion
that any of his neighbors could have been involved in the apparent
poisoning of the animals. “They’re still dog lovers,” he says. “And I
talked to them this morning. No one here would ever poison the dogs.”
He speaks specifically about Faull. “This is not something he would
ever do,” McAfee says. “I mean, he’s an angry sort of guy, but he would
never hurt a dog.”
On Sunday morning, Faull is found lying faceup in a pool of blood.
He’s been shot once through the back of the head, execution-style. A
9-mm Luger casing lies on the ground nearby. There are no signs of
forced entry. A laptop and an iPhone are missing, police say.
That afternoon, Belizean police arrive at McAfee’s property to
question him about Faull’s death. McAfee sees them coming and is sure
the authorities are intent on tormenting him again. He quickly digs a
shallow trench in the sand and buries himself, pulling a cardboard box
over his head. He stays there for hours.
“It was extraordinarily uncomfortable,” he says.
The police confiscate all the weapons on the property and take
Mulligan in for questioning. When they leave, Cassian Chavarria,
McAfee’s groundskeeper, tells him that Faull has been killed. According
to McAfee, that was the first he heard of the murder. His initial
reaction, he says, is that it was the GSU trying to kill McAfee himself.
“I thought maybe they were coming for me,” he says. “They mistook him
for me. They got the wrong house. He’s dead. They killed him. It spooked
me out.”
McAfee decides to go on the run and begins calling me at all hours. I
ask him if he shot Faull. “No sir, no sir,” he says. “That’s not even
funny.” (Emshwiller also denies any involvement in Faull’s death.)
All McAfee knew about the murder, he says, was that the police were
after him, and he believed that if they caught him, he would be tortured
or killed. “Once they collect me, it’s the end of me,” he says.
Over the next 48 hours, McAfee bounces from place to place around
Belize, aided by a network of “people who can’t be followed,” he tells
me. “It’s complicated, and there are a lot of risks, and people could
turn south at any minute.” Samantha Vanegas, one of his girlfriends, is
with him, and he says that they’ve been subsisting on Oreo Cakester
cookies and cigarettes. On Tuesday morning, he says, the police raided
the house next door, but they evaded capture, eventually landing in a
house with no hot water and a broken toilet. There is, however, a
working TV.
“We watched
Swiss Family Robinson,” he says. “It’s about
castaways. That’s why we got into it. It was like, wow, we could do
that. We could get bamboo and build something like that.”
The movie had a happy ending. McAfee liked that.
When this article was published, John McAfee was still in hiding
and in communication with the author. For updates on his case, visit Wired.com.
Contributing editor Joshua Davis (
@JoshuaDavisNow)
has traveled the world reporting for Wired
—Colombia, China, Nepal, South Korea, Iraq, Israel, Russia. His writing is anthologized in the 2012 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing,
and he is the author of The Underdog,
an account of his adventures as a sumo wrestler, matador, and backward runner.
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The U.S. military is already using, or fast developing, a wide range
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University researcher Patrick Lin calls “mutant powers.” Greater strength and endurance. Superior cognition. Better teamwork. Fearlessness.
