The controversial life of John McAfee that ended with a mysterious death

The 75-year-old British-American businessman and founder of the antivirus company that bears his name, John McAfee, was found dead last Wednesday in a Spanish prison, shortly after the National Court of Spain approved his extradition to the United States.

His mysterious death has renewed interest in his controversial life, which included the escape from a murder investigation in Belize, the poisoning of his dogs, the game of Russian roulette and two presidential campaigns, among other controversial episodes, highlights RT.

McAfee, one of Silicon Valley’s best-known pioneers and a driving force behind the now ubiquitous antivirus technology, was born on an American military base in the UK in 1945 to a British mother and an American father, and moved to the United States. when he was just a child. When he was 15 years old, his father – whom he described at the time as an alcoholic who beat him «mercilessly» – used the teenager’s shotgun to commit suicide.

After graduating in mathematics and working for NASA and several private companies, he became famous in the late 1980s with the software company McAfee Associates, to which he resigned in 1994. The antivirus software that bears his name still has 500 million users. all over the world, although the tycoon himself called it the «worst software on the planet» and boasted of not using antivirus in general.

In 2008, after undertaking a series of projects and losing a large part of his fortune in the financial crisis, McAfee’s attention shifted from computer viruses to real viruses. He moved to the Central American country of Belize to create herbal antibiotics. His laboratory was raided in 2012 by the police under the pretext that it was a methamphetamine laboratory; his dog was shot and his passport and weapons were seized. After a brief detention, the businessman himself was released without charge.

What did McAfee have to do with the murder of his neighbor in Belize?

Later that year, McAfee was declared a «person of interest» in the murder of his neighbor Gregory Viant Faull, who was found dead with a bullet in the head. Faull had previously filed a complaint with local authorities about McAfee’s scandalous lifestyle and about McAfee’s dogs, claiming they were «aggressive» and attacked people.

Four of the dogs were found poisoned the day before Faull was shot to death, though McAfee later told The Telegraph that he did not blame his neighbor for the deaths of his pets and he accused the Belizean authorities of killing them.

Although he maintained his innocence, McAfee fled, insisting that he was being tracked down by a paramilitary squad and that the country’s authorities wanted to assassinate him. During his escape, McAfee allegedly played Russian roulette, an episode described by Joshua Davis, a reporter for Wired magazine who spent six months investigating the programmer’s strange life.

McAfee fled Belize to neighboring Guatemala, where he was detained by the authorities, but suffered two heart attacks (faked, as he later revealed), so instead of sending him to Belize, he was transferred back to Miami in December 2012.

His turbulent life, at that time, also included drugs and relationships with numerous young prostitutes, one of whom shot him, causing him to lose his hearing in one ear, and another ended up being his wife and current widow.

McAfee a political detainee?

In the years after his return to the US, McAfee became a leading tech expert, cryptocurrency advocate, and vocal opponent of taxes, as well as running for president in 2016 and 2020.

Although he was never formally suspected in the death of his neighbor, in 2019, a Florida court ordered him to pay $ 25 million to Faull’s heirs, which he refused to do. The same year, he was arrested in the Dominican Republic on suspicion that he and five other people were traveling on a yacht with high-caliber weapons, ammunition, and military-style equipment. Then, he left the US and lived on a megayacht with four dogs and a security team.

In October 2020, the mogul was charged in the US with evading more than $ 4 million in taxes and a cryptocurrency fraud case. McAfee claimed that he had not paid taxes for ideological reasons.

That same month McAfee was arrested at the El Prat airport in Barcelona, when he was trying to travel to Turkey. Since then, he has been in provisional prison in the Sant Esteve Sesrovires prison awaiting the final decision on his extradition to the United States.

The tycoon himself claimed to be a US politician persecuted for his complaints against the «corruption» of the US tax agency. On June 15, during a court hearing, he pointed out that if extradited he was almost certain that he would spend the rest of his life in prison, because the US, he added, wanted to use him as «an example».

Mysterious death

After the death of the businessman in the Catalan prison of Brians 2, in Sant Esteve Sesrovires (Barcelona), the Department of Justice of the Government of Catalonia indicated through a statement that «everything indicates that it could be a death by suicide».

However, many of his followers brought up old tweets from the antivirus company’s founder suggesting some conspiracy theories behind his death.

Thus, Internet users have shared a message that the technology mogul wrote on June 15, 2020 on Twitter after his arrest and imprisonment in Barcelona. «I am happy here. I have friends. The food is good. Everything is fine. Know that if I ‘hang myself’, Epstein style, it will not be my fault», reads the tweet.

In another McAfee tweet, posted on November 30, 2019, he warned that he was receiving «subtle messages» from US government officials that they were going to assassinate him. «If I commit suicide, I did not do it», he wrote next to a photograph of a tattoo that was made on his arm.

Although the authorities anticipate that it could be a suicide, a judicial delegation has traveled to the prison and is investigating the causes of McAfee’s death.