His software made him millions, but John McAfee was also a paranoid eccentric convinced the FBI was on his trail. Last year, he was found dead in prison. A new Netflix film, Running with the Devil, investigates this controversial figure.
At the start of 2019, Robert King found himself cruising the Caribbean in a 75ft, four-storey motor yacht named the Great Mystery. King, an experienced war photographer from Memphis, Tennessee, was on board at the invitation of the boat's owner and skipper, a tech mogul named John McAfee. A tall, tanned 73-year-old with a goatee beard and commanding baritone voice, McAfee was a computer programmer who, during the Eighties, had made a US$100 million ($180 million) fortune through the development of the world's first commercially available antivirus software.
But he was also a paranoid eccentric who had spent much of the decade steeped in controversy. He twice attempted to run for the US presidency on a libertarian ticket. He would tweet conspiracy theories to his million-plus Twitter followers and post videos extolling the joys of "bath salts", a synthetic street drug with intense psychoactive properties and which he had taken for years. In 2012, while living in a compound in Belize, he had been named as a person of interest in a murder investigation after his neighbour had been found shot dead, but he had fled the country before he could be questioned. He was heavily involved with cryptocurrency and was obsessed with guns. "He would shoot up his home and his cars," remembers King, who has a neighbourly manner and speaks with a Southern drawl. "There were bullet holes in everything he owned."
McAfee was not crisscrossing the Caribbean on the Great Mystery for the pleasure of it. Rather, he was on the run. He had fled the United States before making for international waters in the belief that various agencies, including the CIA and FBI, were trying to apprehend him. He also believed he was in the crosshairs of a powerful Mexican drug cartel. He had asked King if he would like to come along for the ride and document everything on video, and King had agreed. But it wasn't just the two of them. Also on board were half a dozen mercenaries armed with military-grade automatic weapons, who served as McAfee's personal security detail. There was McAfee's wife, Janice, whom he had met in Miami a few years earlier while she was working as a prostitute. There were also a large number of McAfee's dogs – German shepherds, pit bulls – who had the run of the yacht. "I mean, there was dog shit everywhere," says King. "It was pretty nasty."
The weeks at sea slowly turned into months. McAfee would drink tequila, take drugs and spend hours online. He claimed that, thanks to a secret "backdoor" in his antivirus software, he possessed the means to spy on the computers of countless individuals and institutions. And because of his huge online profile – in which he presented himself as a swashbuckling keeper of forbidden knowledge – his many fans and followers would contact him with their own titbits of stolen data, almost as offerings. "Hackers would send him compromising information on very sensitive subjects all the time," says King. McAfee saw himself as a man who simply knew too much about too many important people ever truly to be safe. And over time, King began to believe him. McAfee was in the habit of telling people that if he were ever captured and then later found dead in his cell, it would categorically not have been a suicide.
Gradually, against this backdrop and within the claustrophobic confinement of the yacht, an atmosphere of intense paranoia began to pervade. McAfee and Janice became convinced there were spies hiding in the walls and beneath the floors and took to stalking the boat "with guns drawn", says King, shaking his head. McAfee would fire his weapons on board without warning. The security guards, increasingly twitchy and afraid, would doze with loaded shotguns on their laps. "Nobody trusted anyone," says King. The supply of fresh water ran out. The dogs continued to foul the floors. Over the course of his career, King had spent years embedded in areas of intense conflict. "I've been in places like Sarajevo, Rwanda, Afghanistan, Iraq," he lists. This felt no different. "It was like a war zone."
Finally, in July 2019, after six months at sea, the Great Mystery sailed to the Dominican Republic, where McAfee and several of his staff were promptly detained after the port authorities discovered a cache of high-calibre weapons on board. After four days in jail, McAfee was released and travelled to London. The following year, in October 2020, he was arrested in Spain at the request of the United States Department of Justice on charges of tax evasion. After eight months in a Barcelona prison, his extradition to the US was approved. Within a few hours of the ruling, McAfee's body was found in his cell. An official autopsy confirmed he'd taken his own life.
Who was John McAfee? How did a septuagenarian software multimillionaire – a gifted programmer who had begun his career working for Nasa on the Apollo systems – end up living a delirious existence of notoriety, danger and excess? Was he a fantasist or did his fears contain elements of truth? These are some of the questions with which the Netflix documentary Running with the Devil: the Wild World of John McAfee attempts to grapple. King is a key contributor to the film, having not only spent months filming McAfee aboard the Great Mystery, but also having previously gone on the run with him some years earlier. In November 2012, McAfee was living in Belize when his neighbour, an American expat named Gregory Faull, was found dead with a gunshot wound. Rather than cooperate with the police investigation, however, McAfee went to ground, prompting a media furore that became known as the "McAfee Manhunt".
During the manhunt – a period that saw the prime minister of Belize go on television and describe him as "extremely paranoid, even bonkers" – McAfee contacted the Vice news website and invited them to send a small crew to join him as he attempted to evade capture. King, who had just cycled out of Syria, was offered the gig as cameraman. "I got a call last minute," he says. And so, very soon after, he found himself flying into Belize along with a reporter for a secret rendezvous with McAfee.
What followed was, at times, farcical. McAfee was accompanied by a Belizean girlfriend barely out of her teens, wore bad disguises and would sometimes feign physical or mental handicap in order, he reasoned, to hide his true identity. He explained to King that the reason he would not cooperate with the police is because he had hacked huge amounts of incriminating information about corruption within the government of Belize and feared that he would be killed if captured. The plan was to make for neighbouring Guatemala and then claim political asylum.
Despite the gonzo, pantomime-like nature of those furtive days, King remembers finding McAfee a man of deep charisma and intelligence. "He was always engaging and extremely approachable. And he had such a brilliant mind. You noticed it from the get-go. You knew that this was a man that could solve problems," says King. "He could see the mathematical equation. He could take an idea or a concept and turn it into code."
Eventually they made it to Guatemala City, where McAfee's request for asylum was denied. Instead, he was deported to Miami and allowed to carry on with his life. As far as King was concerned, the story was over. And for the time being it was. Over the next few years, McAfee threw himself into libertarian politics, leaning into the notoriety he had achieved via the "McAfee Manhunt" while also operating as an early, high-profile evangelist for cryptocurrency. He attracted the attention of a young American ghostwriter called Alex Cody Foster, who had been fascinated by McAfee for years. Like King, Cody Foster would go on to spend months in McAfee's presence and is also a central contributor to Running with the Devil.
After months of trying, he was able to arrange a meeting with McAfee with a view to persuading him to collaborate on an autobiography. By this time, McAfee had moved to a mansion in Lexington, Tennessee, – coincidentally making him a near-neighbour of King – and so Cody Foster travelled there to meet him and attempt to get a sense of who this man really was. "Fifty per cent of the media was calling him a madman and a murderer. And the other 50 per cent worshipped him. So he needed someone like me to come in and get the full story, download it from his brain and release it to the world."
Cody Foster remembers arriving at his mansion, which seemed to be teeming with armed guards. He was told to sit in the corner of a large drawing room, given a glass of whiskey, and then waited hours for his host to arrive. Finally, sometime after midnight, the tall figure of McAfee entered the darkened room and introduced himself. "I've worked with many powerful people in my profession," explains Cody Foster. "And I was never shy around anybody. But with John? I was kind of scared shitless. It was like he was examining my very soul. Judging me. It was very intimidating."
Like King before him, Cody Foster felt himself to be in the presence of someone with a prodigious force of personality. He smiles, almost a little embarrassed. "This may seem a strange comparison, but it was kind of like that feeling you get when you fall in love. When you meet someone for the first time and they just kind of shake your very world by the foundations," he says. "I had that same powerful sense."
Cody Foster began recording hours of conversation between them and spending days at his Tennessee mansion. He began to observe how the people around McAfee – his staff, his armed guards – treated him with a sort of reverence. "He had that effect on everybody. This power and mystique. I was surrounded by his worshippers," he explains. "It was like I was in a cult or something."
McAfee, he began to understand, "collected broken people". His armed guards all had troubling backstories. "They were ex-cons. People who had gone to Afghanistan and seen terrible atrocities. Former Blackwater [the private US military company] mercenaries who had killed hundreds of people. He surrounded himself with really dark individuals who had seen crazy shit."
Cody Foster says that McAfee only agreed to meet him in the first place when he learnt that, as a teenager, he had spent time living on the streets of Los Angeles. Similarly, King says that his own childhood had been fraught. "I grew up in a home of alcoholics," he explains. "I was a wayward youth. I had a hard time growing up and getting out of high school." Perhaps it is not a coincidence that McAfee was willing to let these two men into his world for so long. And perhaps it is not a coincidence that King, at least, retains a clear admiration of and affection towards him, and was so willing to rejoin him on his Caribbean escapade seven years after their first encounter. "I'm not here to judge him," he says firmly at one point. "I didn't see him betray anyone. I didn't see him hurt anyone."
McAfee was, both King and Cody Foster agree, compulsive in his behaviour. "He made very impulsive buys," says King, who describes how he might offer a stranger $500 for the shirt off his back "just because he likes it". Cody Foster says he was prone to tunnel vision and obsession. "He didn't really think things through a lot of the time. He would just get on a path and see nothing else. He would relentlessly pursue it." After making his fortune in the Eighties by selling his stake in the company that still bears his name, he seemed to veer from one plan to another: he set himself up as a yoga guru; he founded an engine-powered hang-glider company; he created an instant messaging system. But nothing stuck. And in 2008, at the age of 62, he moved to Belize.
McAfee told Cody Foster that he did not kill Gregory Faull, his neighbour there. The two men had fallen into an ongoing dispute about the fact McAfee would allow his pack of dogs to run freely along a shared stretch of beach. Faull told McAfee that if this did not stop, then he would poison the dogs. Soon after receiving this threat, McAfee found that his dogs had indeed been poisoned, forcing him to put them down to end their suffering. "And then his neighbour ended up dead," admits King.
But if he was not the killer, who was? Cody Foster describes how McAfee told him that a girlfriend of his had loved the dogs almost as much as he had, and that she may have sought revenge herself. "But I think that was a cover story," he says, shaking his head. When McAfee first moved to Belize he had made a concerted effort to use his wealth to buy influence and insulate him from consequences. He bought the local police department expensive computer equipment and invested money in sanitation projects. But he also kept a platoon of armed guards and moved an entire brothel's worth of prostitutes into his compound and generally acted as though he were lord of his own private fiefdom. "He was able to act like Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now. And he revelled in it. And so I think when the dogs died he thought, 'I'm going to shoot that guy. I don't care about the consequences, I'm going to shoot him. And we'll figure it out from there,' " says Cody Foster with a shrug. "I think that's what happened."
A little later, though, he admits that the feverish loyalty McAfee inspired in his armed guards created a dangerous dynamic. "They would do anything for him. I asked one of the guys, 'Would you kill for him?' And the guy said yes. So I asked, 'What if they were innocent?' They said, 'Well, if the boss wants them killed, they're not innocent.' " King too remembers this. "He attracted a criminal element," he says. "I saw a lot of dangerous people wanting to do free favours in the anticipation of reward."
Both men, during their time with McAfee, tried to ask him about his past and personal life. But both found him resistant, often hostile. He had been married before – Janice was his third wife – and claimed to have fathered 47 children. "But half of the things that came out of John's mouth were lies," says Cody Foster with a patient smile. "I realised that I actually had two jobs: telling his story and finding the truth."
McAfee was born in Gloucestershire on a US army base to a GI father and English mother. The three of them later moved to Virginia. His father was a violent alcoholic, and the adolescent McAfee invested any money he or his mother came across in a collection of rare coins, which his father assumed to be worthless. King once asked him whether his interest in cryptocurrency may be linked to this. "And he got pissed off and ripped off the microphone. He got really upset. He didn't want me to psychoanalyse his life."
When McAfee was a teenager, his father shot himself. Or at least, that is what the story had always been. But in one of Running with the Devil's most striking moments, Cody Foster is on camera, listening back to an interview he had recorded late one night. McAfee is describing the physical abuse his father would visit on his mother, and then mutters, almost offhand, "to the point where I did something about it". Cody Foster, on hearing this, looks startled. He had simply missed it at the time. "But that one little nugget caught me off-guard. Was it an admission of guilt about his father?" He began to ask around, to approach people who had been in McAfee's inner circle with his theory: did a teenage McAfee shoot and kill his abusive father? The responses he got left him in little doubt. "I think he did," he says. "And I think that's what opened him up to darkness. I think that's what invited it into his life and made him the way he was."
And although his paranoia was often cranked up to 11 – he would not even take a shower, he said, without having a gun to hand – this paranoia was not completely unfounded. Because for all McAfee's bluster, he was a man who had indeed amassed silos of hacked data about governments, agencies and individuals, maintains Cody Foster. "It was like this weird tightrope walk," he says. "There were times I would doubt his credibility. But then, I had seen things and I had met people who divulged information to me, and I had done my own research. And some of this really crazy, terrifying stuff is true."
A few years before McAfee's arrest in Spain, Cody Foster describes how he was approached by a powerful figure from the world of hacking and cryptocurrency about the possibility of producing a book about this man's life. "He flew into New York on a private jet and told me some of the most remarkable stories I have ever heard. He was telling me things I didn't exactly want to hear," he says, meaning that the very information itself as either dangerous or disturbing. Their conversation turned to McAfee. "He asked me what I thought would become of John. And I told him I thought he'd die a very old, lonely man." But the figure shook his head. "He said, 'He's going to commit suicide in prison.' And he just said it so factually. I told him that John would never commit suicide because he was way too proud and narcissistic. And also, why would he go to prison? He just said, 'Alex, I'm in a position to know. And John is going to commit suicide in prison.' "
Cody Foster has written a book about his time with McAfee, The Man Who Hacked the World. And when, last June, the news broke that McAfee had indeed killed himself in prison, his thoughts immediately returned to the eerie conversation he'd had some years earlier and the hacker's calm premonition. It is possible, he reasoned, that McAfee had tried to stage an attempted suicide to get himself moved to a hospital and avoid extradition to the US, only inadvertently to kill himself in the process. Maybe he "wanted to go out with a bang". Or perhaps someone had passed him a note with a photograph of his wife and her address on it, and a promise that if McAfee was not dead in 24 hours, then she would be. "When you work in these dark networks with very dangerous people, these are the kinds of messages you receive."
King describes his grief on learning of McAfee's death. "It was a sad day," he says quietly. "It hurt, man. It hurt." Over the past year, online conspiracists have claimed that McAfee was murdered. Some people believe he is still alive. His body, at the time of writing, remains in a Spanish morgue. One of his ex-girlfriends claims that he contacted her after his supposed death and asked her to run away with him. Even Cody Foster admits that, recently, he received a notification on his phone telling him that McAfee had joined a secure messaging app that he used for communicating with sources. He checked, and it was indeed the phone number he had on file for McAfee. So he typed out a message. "I said, 'Hi John, is this you?' " He saw that his message was read by whoever was on the other end. "But they never responded. I was very tempted to call. But I didn't want to mess with that sort of thing."
King accepts that many people will be tempted to dismiss McAfee as a dangerous crank. "But I would say to keep an open mind. Don't write him off as a crazy old man," he says. He hopes that the documentary will help in this. He sighs. "It's a great film and I'm proud of it. I just wish it had been a different story."
Running with the Devil: the Wild World of John McAfee is streaming on Netflix now. Alex Cody Foster's The Man Who Hacked the World will be available later this year.
Written by: Ben Machell
© The Times of London
