Jim Goal is an auctioneer based in Miami. He says that one day in two thousand and nine, his phone rang. The office called me and they said, John McAfee, don't call him mccafee. He has called and has properties and wants to speak with you. Well, I know who he is because everyone was talking about anti virus. So I was honored and humbled. Only months earlier, the stock market had crashed and the American economy sank into a deep recession. Unemployment hit ten percent. People who'd taken out loans on homes they couldn't afford lost them. It was a manic Monday in the financial markets. The now tumbled more than five hundred points. We're in the midst of a serious financial crisis. Lehman Brothers, a one hundred and fifty eight year old firm, filed for bankruptcy, brought down by bad mortgage investments. Lehman, which has twenty five thousand employees, will be liquidated. Against this backdrop of banks or closing properties and people being forced from their homes. John McAfee wanted to offload two if he's vacation houses. They were in obscure, hard to reach places. One of them in Hawaii had been a leper colony in the eighteen hundreds. So that's not a place where the cruise ships go. They have like one flight in and Outamolakai. It's not like going to Honolulu. And his properties in Rodeo were just north of the Mexican border, and there would be mules going through that area. He had guns in every corner of his house. The border patrol was everywhere. You had to travel far out of your way to reach those kinds of places, and Jim says this was deliberate on McAfee's part. So he was kind of reclusive, and he liked to live well. He traveled the world, and he just wanted to get out of the rat race of life. He just wanted to get away from it all. McAfee was so keen to get rid of his properties and quickly that he handed over all responsibilities to Jim, no questions asked. He says, I don't really want to be at any of the auctions. So I said, well, I'll need powers of attorney. He gave me either seven or eight powers of attorney. And so when I went to Hawaii, I sold his home there in Molokai and they would look at me like, you have the right to sign this. I said, here's the power of attorney. This is an original copy. Once the houses were gone, McAfee wanted Jim to offload other assets. He would say, can you sell these? And he dumped like three or four hundred thousand dollars worth of watches in my lap, Harry Winston eighteen carrot white gold, full of diamonds, Patek Philippe, Rolex. He had the best of the best. Why was McAfee trying to get rid of everything at once? Jim says that McAfee didn't even try to hide his reason. He told me, you know, people were suing him right and left, so now he had an unlawful death suit, so he was he was just fed up. He said, you know, I've got a blazon belize. You know I'm selling everything. And I remember he said to me, there's no process servers where I'm gone. Well delt into this wrongful death lawsuit. Later in this episode, it involved an extravagant and dangerous hobby flying ultralight aircraft at low altitudes, and Jim says that to get away from that lawsuit, McAfee wanted to not only offload all his properties, he also wanted to appear to have squandered all of his money, like he was just another person who had lost everything in the recession. And so Jim found himself providing another service from McAfee. I got a call from the New York Times. She was a business writer. Her name was Jerry Fabricant, and she said, Jim, I'm looking to do a story on people that had a lot of money and then they cannot blew up. Jim has an idea, So I called up John. I said, John, I know you've had a ton of money, and you still love a ton of money, but you know you've had, you know, some pitfalls along the way, and would you be willing to talk to someone with the New York Times? And he says yes, Oh my goodness, he was jumping for joy. In August two thousand and nine, The New York Times publishes a story headlined Rise of the super Rich hits a sobering wall. Geraldine Fabricat reports that he's one hundred million dollar fortune had dwindled to four million. She writes an additional article, once the property is sold, there is no mention of the wrongful dead lawsuit in either of the stories. Instead, McAfee is said to be selling because he wanted to spend more time in Beliefs because of its favorable taxes. Jim says that McAfee didn't tell the reporter the whole truth. He was certainly not in distress, and you know, it was like, you know, a wink, and like I'm gonna be just fine, meaning money wise, okay, with all these lawsuits, the wrongful death and everything else. He liked the appearance of losing a lot of money to kind of keep people away from these lawsuits. You know that we're probably asking for financial statements, asking for this, asking for that. I think it was a little bit of a facade that John liked. He knew how to play every opportunity. McAfee actually wrote a letter to The Times, which was published. Thank you, Geraldine for the publicity for my new Mexico auction. You've done a good job. I spoke to the reporter Geraldine Fabrican on the phone when I told her about Jim Gold's suggestion that McAfee miss led her so she could report that he had lost nearly all his money to ward off lawsuits. She said she didn't know he was being sued at the time. You're listening to Foundering. I'm your host, Jamie Tarabay. In the previous episode, we discussed John McAfee's invention of an anti virus software that dominated the computer market and made a name for him in the process, and two years later John sold most of his shares and walked away with reportedly a hundred million dollars in hand. He would spend the next two decades largely out of the public eye, and his vast riches make him even more unaccountable for his behavior than he was in his early life. McAfee builds massive estates in remote, far flung places throughout the country. He's physically isolated, he's insulated by his money, and he begins to embrace increasingly indulgent, reckless rule breaking that eventually costs lives. We'll tell you more about McAfee's descent into lawlessness after this quick break. John McAfee had exhibited impulsive behavior throughout his adult life, but he was emboldened by his increasing wealth and position to push boundaries even further. When we were interviewing computer programmers who knew McAfee in the nineteen eighties. They talked about his early interest in computer viruses, but several of them also wanted to highlight that there was another thing he was just as obsessed with at the same time. You know, probably the biggest thing was when he wanted me to start putting together sex parties. But one day out of the blue he called up. I still remember this day. My wife said, Hey, you know this guy John McAfee's on the phone that Roger Grimes. Roger was one of the analysts helping John McAfee crack computer viruses. The two of them had a professional relationship. McAfee would send Roger a virus. Roger would disassemble the virus, analyze it, write a report, and send that back to John. Roger said he looked up to McAfee. He was only twenty two years old and starting out in the industry, and he was so excited to get the call. He was hoping for a permanent job in McAfee's company, but he never expected to be asked to help with this, And so John was calling to tell me that he had this great idea and that he wanted he wanted to get people tested for AIDS and you'd get like a driver's license looking thing that would talk about whether or not you had AIDS or not. And if you didn't have AIDS you could go to these club parties he put together that were really swinger sex parties, and he said, Hey, I'm starting one in California. I would like you to start one in New York City. Roger says this was in nineteen eighty eight or eighty nine. There was an epidemic of AIDS at the time. Up to ninety percent of people who contracted the disease died. Scientists were trying to understand how it was transmitted or how it affected people, and fear of AIDS was rampant. I remember as soon as he said the idea to me that I was kind of put off. I'm like, is it even legal? And you know, if you get a test that you don't have AIDS, you know, does that mean you don't have AIDS when you're at the party later on? And how? And I don't think the tests were very accurate at the time, and I just you know, it was just seemed kind of slimy, weird. So as he was super excited, he was like, Okay, I need you to follow up on this. I just completely blew it off. Roger says McAfee was single minded about this and chased him relentlessly. I mean for months, he is just calling me on stop about how far along I'm getting in, you know, trying to open these swinger sex club things, and I'm doing nothing. So I'm ghosting him. And eventually, you know, remember, you know, one time he had called, my wife had picked up the phone and she it is John McAfee, and I'm like, I don't want to talk to him. Just don't you know, I don't want to talk to him. Like so it definitely turned and from that, you know, he stopped sending me work, stopped talking me. In the years since, McAfee bragged on social media about his sexual conquests, about having multiple partners, and about seeing sex workers. But Roger says that this business idea was off putting an offensive to many of the people who knew about it. I think John McAfee and his sexual proclivities are fairly well known, and I think that he just saw this. He was being an entrepreneur and he saw a need and he was putting together a new business, and you know, but every single person, at least that I know, when we talked about it. It was just kind of like wiged Ow. If starting a swinger sex club is one sign of how McAfee defied social norms, another was his relationship with women. To tell that story, we have to go back in time to the mid seventies. When John McAfee was working as a programmer. His employer reassigned him from California to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he met a teenage girl named Barbara dep Key, and both of us took the bus downtown, and so I met him on the bus and he just came up to me and asked me out. I guess I don't remember exactly, but I was young, you know, I was like seventeen or eighteen. Barbara dated John from nineteen seventy four to seventy seven. She said he was around thirty years old when they got together, fresh over his breakup from his first wife. Friend. Yeah, he was eleven years older, and so I did go to his house with him. You know, we went out, and we actually got on very well right away, and I ended up moving in with him. She remembers what drew her to him. He had beautiful green eyes, and he had this voice that was just mesmerizing, and he was very handsome. Women just felt I don't know what it was, some magnetism that he had. It was just very strange. They soon began traveling together. They went to Mexico, Belize, and then McAfee got a job with Siemens in Germany and she went with him. She said she posed as his wife, although they weren't married at the time. They had a calm, domestic life with one constant, nagging interruption. It was so normal, you know. My life with him was just so normal. And we had lunch, and you know, I would make dinner for him. He went to work and then he would come home. But the whole time he has gone at work, I would worry, like, okay, he was he fucking down, you know? Or it is he affecting a secretary or whatever. This was something that Barbara slipped into conversation so casually. I was shocked. She said that John was constantly cheating on her. He was always in teresting other women. So I never trusted him ever. And so like if we'd go to a restaurant, he could be in the back hall with the waitress fucking her in the bathroom. He's awful. He was awful about that kind of stuff. But I wasn't willing to give up the other thing for that at that point. And I you know, we would talk about it, but he would, I believe, Yeah, that was our worst that was the worst thing. He really would cheat on me all the time. I couldn't even have a friend. Actually, if I had a friend, he would be in bed with her the next day. It's amazing how when we were together that women would just like fallen his spell and sleep with him or go away with him or you know. It was just amazing. This experience changed Barbara. It made her neurotic, suspicious. Well, he tried to hide it, but I would spy on him, Like he'd leave the house with his underwear on right and come back with him on backwards or inside out, or the bed was messed up if I was gone or i'd come home, I'd find things that I knew, you know, underwear and whatever. Eventually, she said she was fed up with the cheating and she broke up with McAfee. When I finally left him, I was like so upset about the whole thing, and torn up. You would not believe how much I'd loved him. I actually I really really loved John a lot, and I still do because he wasn't anything to me, like he wasn't anybody else. Decades later, in conversation, Boba still gets emotional when she talks about John. She said their relationship was singular, and she also stressed how young she was and how inexperienced she was when she first met him. I was young and sweet and innocent, and he treat me. He just treat me like a little princess. I can't. He was my protector, He was my best friend. He was my lover. John's first wife, Fran, was also eighteen when she met him. She also mentioned their age difference and her own relative inexperience. And he just slowly like a spider throwing a web around its prey. My family never liked him, and it's because they could see. They could sense something that I could not see at my age, and I was I was the definition of naiblity. It struck me that, like Barbara, Fran believes that her relationship with McAfee was unique, that though he went on to be with many other women, there was something about their particular love that was irreplaceable. There are things about John Bett you know, special to me. For example, it's like I always knew he loved me. He used to tell me, you're the thing that grounds me. There's nobody else in my life that grounds me. Even now, decades later, in some ways, he's still a good person in their eyes. Yet in conversation with us, both Fran and Barbara said that they felt controlled and manipulated by John. I think this goes back to how young and impressionable they were when they were his partners. We're highlighting mac of his treatment of women because it speaks to from very early on in his life, his sense of entitlement, of doing whatever he wanted, with whoever he wanted, with little to no regard for the consequences or the feelings of others. He displayed the sort of behavior that would be considered toxic, and yet he was revered even by the very women he was cheating on. As we've heard constantly in our reporting, when people think you're a genius, you can get away with anything. We'll be right back. In nineteen ninety four, John McAfee made a call to a tax consultant my name is David les Bronze. I am a Canadian who deals with immigration, tax, family law solutions for wealthy individuals and families globally, including Americans who are looking to give themselves some options with regards to international movement and potentially leaving permanently the US tax system. David Lesperance said John mccofee contacted him after seeing an article in Forbes magazine about super rich Americans abandoning their citizenship to avoid paying US taxes. So he said, I want to pay as little tax as possible. Said, okay, but I want to have a certain type of lifestyle. So you know, clients, I occasionally will get a client to say, well, you know, move me somewhere where there's no tax and no divorce courts or no no litigation warriors. I said, no problem, will moving to a rock in the middle of the ocean. But you know, pack a gun because within six months, either you're going to want to kill yourself or your family is going to want to kill you, like oh no, no, no, I want you know this lifestyle, etc. Etc. So it's coming up with a plan that is actually livable. It was striking to me that as soon as nineteen ninety four, McAfee was already laying the groundwork to leave the US for good, even at a time when things were going well for him. In fact, free of his first company, he set about launching more businesses. He created an instant messaging platform that looked a lot like AOL Instant Messenger. Actually, he lifted so many features that AOL sued his company for copying one chronic component, the Buddy List. This week on the Computer Chronicles video to lephony on the Internet, we'll show you the hardest thing in online chat. Pow Wow. Yes, it was called pow Wow, made by McAfee's company, Tribal Voice. Here it is featured on the PBS show Computer Chronicles in nineteen ninety nine. Million free download, free download. This is sort of the text version of powell that's correct. On the left hand side, here you see what we'll call a traditional chat, AOL type chat room where people are talking to the keyboard. Pow Wow was panned by critics. The interface was clunky and unattractive, Yet McAfee reportedly managed to sell the company for seventeen million dollars. Those days, he was investing money in small tech firms and more property. He bought a house in Santa Cruz. He purchased several acres on Molokai Island in Hawaii, homebase for most of those early years. After he left McAfee and associates was Colorado. McAfee bought two hundred and eighty acres. He turned the estate into a yoga retreat, reportedly pouring over twenty million dollars into it. It was a beautiful, beautiful property. It was in the shadow of Pike's Peak. It was at nine thousand feet high altitude. You drove up to the property and he had his main home. It was a little lake, and right in the edge of it was a wood burning sauna that was quite large, which I had been in. And then there was a like a barn, a couple of guest houses, and a beautiful yoga studio. Robbie Raman is an executive coach who lives in Minneapolis. In the early two thousands, he found ads from McAfee's Colorado Yoga center and visited several times. He says people could come and go. That was very open the times I was there, I mean people were just there, some other sort of yogis or students who were studying or caretakers, yoga teachers just being there cooking meals and seemed to be you can just sort of go wherever you wanted. As far as Rabie could tell, the entire operation was funded personally by John McAfee. I never paid for any of my trips out there. For the initial yoga workshop, I paid, but I just paid my studio. I never paid John anything, and then I made two other trips out to his property. I never paid. I made a donation to the teachers who supported me. They never asked for a dime, and I just paid as an offering. I just assumed he had had a career and made some money, and it was looking to deepen his understanding and share what he knew. McAfee taught yoga and meditation. When Rabbie went to the yoga retreat for the first time in two thousand and three, he was personally instructed by McAfee. He would join us for breakfast and swing by, and I got to do with the breathing classes that he would lead, and I actually learned med meditation technique from him. Nothing struck me as weird or odd or so fit into other practices I had but he just had a very specific approach for me, given where I was in that moment. I never got the sense he was any kind of enlightened being or anything like that. I was never I have never looked at human beings in that way. John went on to put out several books about yoga that list him as the author. Robbie said he had a few copies, which again he never paid for. He ended up giving them away to friends. Two people who were close to McAfee told us he didn't write these books. Here's Barbara again. He was a bullshitter and he made up things, and people just fell for because he was like, you know, mesmerizing, and the way he talked and looked at you. I think people just wished him. And so then it turned out there he had these books that he wrote. He didn't even write them. They were all like, you know, yoga books and spiritual things. And I had one of them signed by him. I even called him on that one time. I said, that is such bullshit, John, that is not your words. The books are still for sale on Amazon and some of the reviews of Pretty Brutal. One reviewer wrote, wow, he just copied and pasted this whole book from other yoga books. McAfee would later dismiss the books as garbage and said he was embarrassed by them. Over the course of these years in relative isolation, McAfee's eccentricities began to deepen. With the yoga retreat, he set himself up as a spiritual leader, as a guru, even though his qualifications were sketchy at best, and he succeeded in recruiting people. He drew so many to join him in the mountaintop retreat where they lived under his generosity. It didn't matter who they were or why they were there. There were always other people there and hanging around, and he allowed people to stay there and just very generous in that respect. I would characterize it as strays. There were strays all the time. That's Joy Athanasiu, an attorney who represents McAfee's daughter. Joy is also McAfee's daughter's childhood friend. She first met John McAfee when she was still a teenager, and she remembers visiting the Colorado property. I think that John had some you know, he had some narcissistic qualities quite frankly, and I always had like an entourage around him. And people really elevated to him to this cult like status. The Colorado used was significant because they were the beginning of a pattern. This was the first time John McAfee would create his own world where he made the rules. He began to see what his money could buy, his own mountaintop kingdom. He had a desire to go to out of the way places where his charisma and personality could dominate. As far as we can tell, Woodland Park, Colorado, is the only place with its formula didn't end in tragedy. We'll be right back. In two thousand and six, McAfee got bored doing yoga and he picks up a new hobby he called aerotrekking. Here's Javier Prato, a videographer who worked with McAfee. No. Aerotreking is like it's a mix of a motorcycle and a hang layer. There's speed there so you can because there's an engine in the back, adrenaline, you know it. He's like a sport. Aerotreking on the face of it looks almost absurdly dangerous. It's the art of flying an ultralight aircraft really low to the ground. The planes they use for aerotreking have an engine run on fuel and often have fabric wings, and there's no cockpit. You're entirely exposed. The aircraft are small, light and nimble, so you can skim along canyon walls, the mountain side and the tops of trees. McAfee wanted Javier to make a series of ads, and he flew Javier out to New Mexico to see error trekking up close. On his way there, aboard McAfee's private plane, Javier had a conversation with the pilot. The pilot confirmed to me when I was flying there, like this year, you know he's in terror treking, you know, last year maybe getting you know boats, you know, so who knows what's going to be next. So he used to get bored too easily. There are a number of videos online featuring the sky Gypsies. This was the club that McAfee formed with his friends to fly these aircraft. These are amateur videos, not shot by Javier. In one, a young woman is landing the ultra light and steering toward a hangar. She's wearing a helmet, she has a seatbelt strapped around her waist. There's no safety harness and there's no parachute. At her back is a gallon of very flammable fuel. You can see the liquid slashing around, but she's pulling in in one piece and she's ecstatic. All right, Goldie, I love life, I love me alive. Welcome to Wow. Scream like a fucking wait a day. Oh, I didn't want to come down. This was filmed on macafee's property in Rodeo, New Mexico. The site that the auctioneer, Jim Gold said was kind of scary. Guns everywhere, Border patrol agents nearby. Anyway, This was a one hundred and fifty seven acre spread. McAfee spent about eleven million dollars building a complex for him, Andy's friends to fly ultralight aircraft. Amcafee created a business called Southwest Air Trekking Academy, and sky Gypsy's released ads enticing people to come out and go for a ride. He built a general store and a movie theater and a cafe, and bought vintage cars for guests to check out. For a time, it seemed like a fantastical desert oasis for McAfee and his fellow adrenaline junkies. But then one morning in November two thousand and six, two people went for a ride in one of the aircraft. They crashed into a canyon and died. One of those killed was McAfee's nephew, Joel Beato, who was working as an instructor at the academy. Then I hear I get the call that one of the instructors they got killed in an accident. After that we basically lost that he was. He was very depressed and shocked about what happened. Joel Beato was twenty two years old. The other person flying with Joel was Robert Gilton, a retired pipe fitter from New Hampshire. Here's Gilson's family lawyer, Frank Fleming. He read about error Trekking in a magazine, responded to the article by getting in touch with McAfee's school and signed up and went out and took a took a ride. I think he took one or two rides before the fatal crash, but on the third or fourth hop with mister Boteaux, they flew into the mountain. Frank is an aviation lawyer for decades. He has represented families in plane crashes, helicopter crashes and military crashes. It's clearly a consequence of an undertrained and ill equipped pilot who had no business flying with passengers or students. The pilot, Joel but Toe, obviously flew into a box canyon where he was surrounded on several sides by terrain, and then he tried to turn and didn't allow enough room for the aircraft to complete the turn and flew into the side of a mountain. And that's an unforgiving situation. I mean, most pilots don't want to go into box canyons under any circumstances. But that's the feeling that they're trying to generate. We got a copy of the police report from the Coaches County Sheriff's Department in Arizona. It says that a small plane crashed in the place called Starvation Canyon. Fire enveloped the aircraft, leaving only the metal framework and engine behind. One body was burned beyond recognition. A second was thrown over one hundred feet away. Joel Beto's parents provide aided his dental records to help identify the remains, and the sheriff's report contained one other alarming detail that the pilot had been in a previous accident just four months prior to the fatal crash. In that incident, the engine died on his ultralight aircraft midflight, and he tried to do an emergency landing in the best place he could find. The plane hit several rocks and flipped over. The ultralight was totaled, and Joel sustained injuries to his left arm. He told police that the plane belonged to his uncle, John McAfee. Frank Fleming said that once the crash was reconstructed, they filed a claim against McAfee, Southwest Aerotrekking Academy, and Joel Beato's father, John Beato. The lawsuit was filed in two thousand and eight. Just one year later, McAfee was selling off his properties to leave for Belize, where he declared that he would be out of the court's reach. He took off, leaving behind the grieving families, including his ex wife's relatives. For years, McAfee had been living by his own rules, defying in convention, but now he was disregarding court orders. He ignored requests to produce financial documents. He left to build yet another new life, this time on the shores of the Caribbean. While thumbing his nose at the American justice system. We will talk about Belize a lot in a different episode. We know that in three short years after moving there, McAfee would be forced to come back home, and during this time Frank Fleming kept pushing on the wrongful death lawsuit, and he was also trying to compel McAfee to testify. He eventually succeeded. When McAfee returned to the US, he was deposed. Here's Fleming. I did not think he was a good witness. I did not think he was credible. He very arrogant and contemptuous of the process. Fleming says he also didn't look too good. I remember him as a chain smoker. He was not a very healthy person. He coughed regularly, I mean incessantly. He was very high strung. I might have used the term uptight in my personal experience. I would have suspected that he was on some kind of medication. Fleming said. McAfee tried to blame the accident on the passenger who died, Robert Gilson. He claimed Gilson shifted his weight in the aircraft, making it impossible for the pilot to maintain control. Also, Gilson had had heart problems months before he turned up in New Mexico, and McAfee said tried to suggest that he'd had a heart attack and that caused the crash, But Fleming says there's no evidence of McAfee's claims. McAfee wasn't just antagonistic towards the people suing him. He made things difficult for his own lawyers too. He fired at least one of them. I contacted one of McAfee's lawyers, Ralph Ellenwood, and asked him several times for an interview. He agreed at first, and then emailed me later to say that he changed his mind that talking to me quote would be an ethical minefield. Several people who were named as defendant in the trial, including John Beeto, the pilot's father, did not respond to our requests for interviews. Fleming said McAfee was to post several times because he kept refusing to produce financial documents. When the judge forced McAfee to turn over the documents, they showed that McAfee paid for the aircraft, for the flight complex, for pretty much everything there. McAfee's financial documents also showed where some of his money was kept. Here's Fleming, I should also point out that he had some sort of a trust set up organized in the Cook Islands. It tells you a lot about the purpose of the trust. The Cook Islands in the Pacific are outside of US jurisdiction. They serve as a notorious tax haven for the wealthy. They can also be used by Americans who want to protect their assets from lawsuits. We scoured SEC filings and court documents to see what we could find out about McAfee's trust. It was originally set up in John and his ex wife, Judy's name in nineteen ninety three. That year, he transferred at least half of his shares in McAfee's associates to the trust. Judy took control of it after they divorced in two thousand and six, and by that point its assets were worth about seven million dollars, Which brings me to the kicker in the error Trekking lawsuit. McAfee could have avoided a lot of this trouble because the family of the crash victim, Robert Gilson, began proceedings by offering to settle without trial. If McAfee agreed to pay half a million dollars, that would make it all go away. McAfee turned it down. Instead, he spent years ignoring court orders, dodging people trying to serve him papers at tech conferences, and ultimately being forced into a lengthy, invasive lawsuit. McAfee could have prevented that by accepting the offer. Now, let me say, at the end of the day, if you will, he succeeded because he hasn't paid the judgment. When the judgment came down, the court ruled that McAfee, Southwest Aerotrekking Academy, and the Beto estate had to pay over two million dollars in damages, penalties and interest. Well, it's higher than that now because it continues to earn interests. But he has not paid the judgment. That's correct, After all that McAfee died without paying. Now there may be something Fleming can do after McAfee's estate lawyers go through what remains of his assets, But he acknowledges that even that day will be a long time coming. It is a testament to McAfee's determination to avoid accountability. John Coffee spent the first fifteen years after he left his company largely out of the public eye, under the cloak of obscurity. He descended further and further into lawlessness. He went from breaking social conventions to outright defying the legal system. He takes off for Belize, a tropical paradise where it looked like McAfee could yet again start over on his own terms. But soon things there would get even darker, and John mccafee would have more than one death blamed on him. That's next time on Foundering, The John mccafee Story. Foundering is hosted by me Jamie Tarabay. Sean Wen is our executive producer, Matthew Bramner, Andrew's Malin, Eileena Pang and Joe Williams contributed reporting to this episode special thanks to Press on the Prakash. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Sharif Yusef is our audio engineer, Mark Million and Vandermay, Andy Martin and Molly Shutz are our story editors. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends see you next time.

Jim Goal is an auctioneer based in Miami. He says that one day in two thousand and nine, his phone rang. The office called me and they said, John McAfee, don't call him mccafee. He has called and has properties and wants to speak with you. Well, I know who he is because everyone was talking about anti virus. So I was honored and humbled. Only months earlier, the stock market had crashed and the American economy sank into a deep recession. Unemployment hit ten percent. People who'd taken out loans on homes they couldn't afford lost them. It was a manic Monday in the financial markets. The now tumbled more than five hundred points. We're in the midst of a serious financial crisis. Lehman Brothers, a one hundred and fifty eight year old firm, filed for bankruptcy, brought down by bad mortgage investments. Lehman, which has twenty five thousand employees, will be liquidated. Against this backdrop of banks or closing properties and people being forced from their homes. John McAfee wanted to offload two if he's vacation houses. They were in obscure, hard to reach places. One of them in Hawaii had been a leper colony in the eighteen hundreds. So that's not a place where the cruise ships go. They have like one flight in and Outamolakai. It's not like going to Honolulu. And his properties in Rodeo were just north of the Mexican border, and there would be mules going through that area. He had guns in every corner of his house. The border patrol was everywhere. You had to travel far out of your way to reach those kinds of places, and Jim says this was deliberate on McAfee's part. So he was kind of reclusive, and he liked to live well. He traveled the world, and he just wanted to get out of the rat race of life. He just wanted to get away from it all. McAfee was so keen to get rid of his properties and quickly that he handed over all responsibilities to Jim, no questions asked. He says, I don't really want to be at any of the auctions. So I said, well, I'll need powers of attorney. He gave me either seven or eight powers of attorney. And so when I went to Hawaii, I sold his home there in Molokai and they would look at me like, you have the right to sign this. I said, here's the power of attorney. This is an original copy. Once the houses were gone, McAfee wanted Jim to offload other assets. He would say, can you sell these? And he dumped like three or four hundred thousand dollars worth of watches in my lap, Harry Winston eighteen carrot white gold, full of diamonds, Patek Philippe, Rolex. He had the best of the best. Why was McAfee trying to get rid of everything at once? Jim says that McAfee didn't even try to hide his reason. He told me, you know, people were suing him right and left, so now he had an unlawful death suit, so he was he was just fed up. He said, you know, I've got a blazon belize. You know I'm selling everything. And I remember he said to me, there's no process servers where I'm gone. Well delt into this wrongful death lawsuit. Later in this episode, it involved an extravagant and dangerous hobby flying ultralight aircraft at low altitudes, and Jim says that to get away from that lawsuit, McAfee wanted to not only offload all his properties, he also wanted to appear to have squandered all of his money, like he was just another person who had lost everything in the recession. And so Jim found himself providing another service from McAfee. I got a call from the New York Times. She was a business writer. Her name was Jerry Fabricant, and she said, Jim, I'm looking to do a story on people that had a lot of money and then they cannot blew up. Jim has an idea, So I called up John. I said, John, I know you've had a ton of money, and you still love a ton of money, but you know you've had, you know, some pitfalls along the way, and would you be willing to talk to someone with the New York Times? And he says yes, Oh my goodness, he was jumping for joy. In August two thousand and nine, The New York Times publishes a story headlined Rise of the super Rich hits a sobering wall. Geraldine Fabricat reports that he's one hundred million dollar fortune had dwindled to four million. She writes an additional article, once the property is sold, there is no mention of the wrongful dead lawsuit in either of the stories. Instead, McAfee is said to be selling because he wanted to spend more time in Beliefs because of its favorable taxes. Jim says that McAfee didn't tell the reporter the whole truth. He was certainly not in distress, and you know, it was like, you know, a wink, and like I'm gonna be just fine, meaning money wise, okay, with all these lawsuits, the wrongful death and everything else. He liked the appearance of losing a lot of money to kind of keep people away from these lawsuits. You know that we're probably asking for financial statements, asking for this, asking for that. I think it was a little bit of a facade that John liked. He knew how to play every opportunity. McAfee actually wrote a letter to The Times, which was published. Thank you, Geraldine for the publicity for my new Mexico auction. You've done a good job. I spoke to the reporter Geraldine Fabrican on the phone when I told her about Jim Gold's suggestion that McAfee miss led her so she could report that he had lost nearly all his money to ward off lawsuits. She said she didn't know he was being sued at the time. You're listening to Foundering. I'm your host, Jamie Tarabay. In the previous episode, we discussed John McAfee's invention of an anti virus software that dominated the computer market and made a name for him in the process, and two years later John sold most of his shares and walked away with reportedly a hundred million dollars in hand. He would spend the next two decades largely out of the public eye, and his vast riches make him even more unaccountable for his behavior than he was in his early life. McAfee builds massive estates in remote, far flung places throughout the country. He's physically isolated, he's insulated by his money, and he begins to embrace increasingly indulgent, reckless rule breaking that eventually costs lives. We'll tell you more about McAfee's descent into lawlessness after this quick break. John McAfee had exhibited impulsive behavior throughout his adult life, but he was emboldened by his increasing wealth and position to push boundaries even further. When we were interviewing computer programmers who knew McAfee in the nineteen eighties. They talked about his early interest in computer viruses, but several of them also wanted to highlight that there was another thing he was just as obsessed with at the same time. You know, probably the biggest thing was when he wanted me to start putting together sex parties. But one day out of the blue he called up. I still remember this day. My wife said, Hey, you know this guy John McAfee's on the phone that Roger Grimes. Roger was one of the analysts helping John McAfee crack computer viruses. The two of them had a professional relationship. McAfee would send Roger a virus. Roger would disassemble the virus, analyze it, write a report, and send that back to John. Roger said he looked up to McAfee. He was only twenty two years old and starting out in the industry, and he was so excited to get the call. He was hoping for a permanent job in McAfee's company, but he never expected to be asked to help with this, And so John was calling to tell me that he had this great idea and that he wanted he wanted to get people tested for AIDS and you'd get like a driver's license looking thing that would talk about whether or not you had AIDS or not. And if you didn't have AIDS you could go to these club parties he put together that were really swinger sex parties, and he said, Hey, I'm starting one in California. I would like you to start one in New York City. Roger says this was in nineteen eighty eight or eighty nine. There was an epidemic of AIDS at the time. Up to ninety percent of people who contracted the disease died. Scientists were trying to understand how it was transmitted or how it affected people, and fear of AIDS was rampant. I remember as soon as he said the idea to me that I was kind of put off. I'm like, is it even legal? And you know, if you get a test that you don't have AIDS, you know, does that mean you don't have AIDS when you're at the party later on? And how? And I don't think the tests were very accurate at the time, and I just you know, it was just seemed kind of slimy, weird. So as he was super excited, he was like, Okay, I need you to follow up on this. I just completely blew it off. Roger says McAfee was single minded about this and chased him relentlessly. I mean for months, he is just calling me on stop about how far along I'm getting in, you know, trying to open these swinger sex club things, and I'm doing nothing. So I'm ghosting him. And eventually, you know, remember, you know, one time he had called, my wife had picked up the phone and she it is John McAfee, and I'm like, I don't want to talk to him. Just don't you know, I don't want to talk to him. Like so it definitely turned and from that, you know, he stopped sending me work, stopped talking me. In the years since, McAfee bragged on social media about his sexual conquests, about having multiple partners, and about seeing sex workers. But Roger says that this business idea was off putting an offensive to many of the people who knew about it. I think John McAfee and his sexual proclivities are fairly well known, and I think that he just saw this. He was being an entrepreneur and he saw a need and he was putting together a new business, and you know, but every single person, at least that I know, when we talked about it. It was just kind of like wiged Ow. If starting a swinger sex club is one sign of how McAfee defied social norms, another was his relationship with women. To tell that story, we have to go back in time to the mid seventies. When John McAfee was working as a programmer. His employer reassigned him from California to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he met a teenage girl named Barbara dep Key, and both of us took the bus downtown, and so I met him on the bus and he just came up to me and asked me out. I guess I don't remember exactly, but I was young, you know, I was like seventeen or eighteen. Barbara dated John from nineteen seventy four to seventy seven. She said he was around thirty years old when they got together, fresh over his breakup from his first wife. Friend. Yeah, he was eleven years older, and so I did go to his house with him. You know, we went out, and we actually got on very well right away, and I ended up moving in with him. She remembers what drew her to him. He had beautiful green eyes, and he had this voice that was just mesmerizing, and he was very handsome. Women just felt I don't know what it was, some magnetism that he had. It was just very strange. They soon began traveling together. They went to Mexico, Belize, and then McAfee got a job with Siemens in Germany and she went with him. She said she posed as his wife, although they weren't married at the time. They had a calm, domestic life with one constant, nagging interruption. It was so normal, you know. My life with him was just so normal. And we had lunch, and you know, I would make dinner for him. He went to work and then he would come home. But the whole time he has gone at work, I would worry, like, okay, he was he fucking down, you know? Or it is he affecting a secretary or whatever. This was something that Barbara slipped into conversation so casually. I was shocked. She said that John was constantly cheating on her. He was always in teresting other women. So I never trusted him ever. And so like if we'd go to a restaurant, he could be in the back hall with the waitress fucking her in the bathroom. He's awful. He was awful about that kind of stuff. But I wasn't willing to give up the other thing for that at that point. And I you know, we would talk about it, but he would, I believe, Yeah, that was our worst that was the worst thing. He really would cheat on me all the time. I couldn't even have a friend. Actually, if I had a friend, he would be in bed with her the next day. It's amazing how when we were together that women would just like fallen his spell and sleep with him or go away with him or you know. It was just amazing. This experience changed Barbara. It made her neurotic, suspicious. Well, he tried to hide it, but I would spy on him, Like he'd leave the house with his underwear on right and come back with him on backwards or inside out, or the bed was messed up if I was gone or i'd come home, I'd find things that I knew, you know, underwear and whatever. Eventually, she said she was fed up with the cheating and she broke up with McAfee. When I finally left him, I was like so upset about the whole thing, and torn up. You would not believe how much I'd loved him. I actually I really really loved John a lot, and I still do because he wasn't anything to me, like he wasn't anybody else. Decades later, in conversation, Boba still gets emotional when she talks about John. She said their relationship was singular, and she also stressed how young she was and how inexperienced she was when she first met him. I was young and sweet and innocent, and he treat me. He just treat me like a little princess. I can't. He was my protector, He was my best friend. He was my lover. John's first wife, Fran, was also eighteen when she met him. She also mentioned their age difference and her own relative inexperience. And he just slowly like a spider throwing a web around its prey. My family never liked him, and it's because they could see. They could sense something that I could not see at my age, and I was I was the definition of naiblity. It struck me that, like Barbara, Fran believes that her relationship with McAfee was unique, that though he went on to be with many other women, there was something about their particular love that was irreplaceable. There are things about John Bett you know, special to me. For example, it's like I always knew he loved me. He used to tell me, you're the thing that grounds me. There's nobody else in my life that grounds me. Even now, decades later, in some ways, he's still a good person in their eyes. Yet in conversation with us, both Fran and Barbara said that they felt controlled and manipulated by John. I think this goes back to how young and impressionable they were when they were his partners. We're highlighting mac of his treatment of women because it speaks to from very early on in his life, his sense of entitlement, of doing whatever he wanted, with whoever he wanted, with little to no regard for the consequences or the feelings of others. He displayed the sort of behavior that would be considered toxic, and yet he was revered even by the very women he was cheating on. As we've heard constantly in our reporting, when people think you're a genius, you can get away with anything. We'll be right back. In nineteen ninety four, John McAfee made a call to a tax consultant my name is David les Bronze. I am a Canadian who deals with immigration, tax, family law solutions for wealthy individuals and families globally, including Americans who are looking to give themselves some options with regards to international movement and potentially leaving permanently the US tax system. David Lesperance said John mccofee contacted him after seeing an article in Forbes magazine about super rich Americans abandoning their citizenship to avoid paying US taxes. So he said, I want to pay as little tax as possible. Said, okay, but I want to have a certain type of lifestyle. So you know, clients, I occasionally will get a client to say, well, you know, move me somewhere where there's no tax and no divorce courts or no no litigation warriors. I said, no problem, will moving to a rock in the middle of the ocean. But you know, pack a gun because within six months, either you're going to want to kill yourself or your family is going to want to kill you, like oh no, no, no, I want you know this lifestyle, etc. Etc. So it's coming up with a plan that is actually livable. It was striking to me that as soon as nineteen ninety four, McAfee was already laying the groundwork to leave the US for good, even at a time when things were going well for him. In fact, free of his first company, he set about launching more businesses. He created an instant messaging platform that looked a lot like AOL Instant Messenger. Actually, he lifted so many features that AOL sued his company for copying one chronic component, the Buddy List. This week on the Computer Chronicles video to lephony on the Internet, we'll show you the hardest thing in online chat. Pow Wow. Yes, it was called pow Wow, made by McAfee's company, Tribal Voice. Here it is featured on the PBS show Computer Chronicles in nineteen ninety nine. Million free download, free download. This is sort of the text version of powell that's correct. On the left hand side, here you see what we'll call a traditional chat, AOL type chat room where people are talking to the keyboard. Pow Wow was panned by critics. The interface was clunky and unattractive, Yet McAfee reportedly managed to sell the company for seventeen million dollars. Those days, he was investing money in small tech firms and more property. He bought a house in Santa Cruz. He purchased several acres on Molokai Island in Hawaii, homebase for most of those early years. After he left McAfee and associates was Colorado. McAfee bought two hundred and eighty acres. He turned the estate into a yoga retreat, reportedly pouring over twenty million dollars into it. It was a beautiful, beautiful property. It was in the shadow of Pike's Peak. It was at nine thousand feet high altitude. You drove up to the property and he had his main home. It was a little lake, and right in the edge of it was a wood burning sauna that was quite large, which I had been in. And then there was a like a barn, a couple of guest houses, and a beautiful yoga studio. Robbie Raman is an executive coach who lives in Minneapolis. In the early two thousands, he found ads from McAfee's Colorado Yoga center and visited several times. He says people could come and go. That was very open the times I was there, I mean people were just there, some other sort of yogis or students who were studying or caretakers, yoga teachers just being there cooking meals and seemed to be you can just sort of go wherever you wanted. As far as Rabie could tell, the entire operation was funded personally by John McAfee. I never paid for any of my trips out there. For the initial yoga workshop, I paid, but I just paid my studio. I never paid John anything, and then I made two other trips out to his property. I never paid. I made a donation to the teachers who supported me. They never asked for a dime, and I just paid as an offering. I just assumed he had had a career and made some money, and it was looking to deepen his understanding and share what he knew. McAfee taught yoga and meditation. When Rabbie went to the yoga retreat for the first time in two thousand and three, he was personally instructed by McAfee. He would join us for breakfast and swing by, and I got to do with the breathing classes that he would lead, and I actually learned med meditation technique from him. Nothing struck me as weird or odd or so fit into other practices I had but he just had a very specific approach for me, given where I was in that moment. I never got the sense he was any kind of enlightened being or anything like that. I was never I have never looked at human beings in that way. John went on to put out several books about yoga that list him as the author. Robbie said he had a few copies, which again he never paid for. He ended up giving them away to friends. Two people who were close to McAfee told us he didn't write these books. Here's Barbara again. He was a bullshitter and he made up things, and people just fell for because he was like, you know, mesmerizing, and the way he talked and looked at you. I think people just wished him. And so then it turned out there he had these books that he wrote. He didn't even write them. They were all like, you know, yoga books and spiritual things. And I had one of them signed by him. I even called him on that one time. I said, that is such bullshit, John, that is not your words. The books are still for sale on Amazon and some of the reviews of Pretty Brutal. One reviewer wrote, wow, he just copied and pasted this whole book from other yoga books. McAfee would later dismiss the books as garbage and said he was embarrassed by them. Over the course of these years in relative isolation, McAfee's eccentricities began to deepen. With the yoga retreat, he set himself up as a spiritual leader, as a guru, even though his qualifications were sketchy at best, and he succeeded in recruiting people. He drew so many to join him in the mountaintop retreat where they lived under his generosity. It didn't matter who they were or why they were there. There were always other people there and hanging around, and he allowed people to stay there and just very generous in that respect. I would characterize it as strays. There were strays all the time. That's Joy Athanasiu, an attorney who represents McAfee's daughter. Joy is also McAfee's daughter's childhood friend. She first met John McAfee when she was still a teenager, and she remembers visiting the Colorado property. I think that John had some you know, he had some narcissistic qualities quite frankly, and I always had like an entourage around him. And people really elevated to him to this cult like status. The Colorado used was significant because they were the beginning of a pattern. This was the first time John McAfee would create his own world where he made the rules. He began to see what his money could buy, his own mountaintop kingdom. He had a desire to go to out of the way places where his charisma and personality could dominate. As far as we can tell, Woodland Park, Colorado, is the only place with its formula didn't end in tragedy. We'll be right back. In two thousand and six, McAfee got bored doing yoga and he picks up a new hobby he called aerotrekking. Here's Javier Prato, a videographer who worked with McAfee. No. Aerotreking is like it's a mix of a motorcycle and a hang layer. There's speed there so you can because there's an engine in the back, adrenaline, you know it. He's like a sport. Aerotreking on the face of it looks almost absurdly dangerous. It's the art of flying an ultralight aircraft really low to the ground. The planes they use for aerotreking have an engine run on fuel and often have fabric wings, and there's no cockpit. You're entirely exposed. The aircraft are small, light and nimble, so you can skim along canyon walls, the mountain side and the tops of trees. McAfee wanted Javier to make a series of ads, and he flew Javier out to New Mexico to see error trekking up close. On his way there, aboard McAfee's private plane, Javier had a conversation with the pilot. The pilot confirmed to me when I was flying there, like this year, you know he's in terror treking, you know, last year maybe getting you know boats, you know, so who knows what's going to be next. So he used to get bored too easily. There are a number of videos online featuring the sky Gypsies. This was the club that McAfee formed with his friends to fly these aircraft. These are amateur videos, not shot by Javier. In one, a young woman is landing the ultra light and steering toward a hangar. She's wearing a helmet, she has a seatbelt strapped around her waist. There's no safety harness and there's no parachute. At her back is a gallon of very flammable fuel. You can see the liquid slashing around, but she's pulling in in one piece and she's ecstatic. All right, Goldie, I love life, I love me alive. Welcome to Wow. Scream like a fucking wait a day. Oh, I didn't want to come down. This was filmed on macafee's property in Rodeo, New Mexico. The site that the auctioneer, Jim Gold said was kind of scary. Guns everywhere, Border patrol agents nearby. Anyway, This was a one hundred and fifty seven acre spread. McAfee spent about eleven million dollars building a complex for him, Andy's friends to fly ultralight aircraft. Amcafee created a business called Southwest Air Trekking Academy, and sky Gypsy's released ads enticing people to come out and go for a ride. He built a general store and a movie theater and a cafe, and bought vintage cars for guests to check out. For a time, it seemed like a fantastical desert oasis for McAfee and his fellow adrenaline junkies. But then one morning in November two thousand and six, two people went for a ride in one of the aircraft. They crashed into a canyon and died. One of those killed was McAfee's nephew, Joel Beato, who was working as an instructor at the academy. Then I hear I get the call that one of the instructors they got killed in an accident. After that we basically lost that he was. He was very depressed and shocked about what happened. Joel Beato was twenty two years old. The other person flying with Joel was Robert Gilton, a retired pipe fitter from New Hampshire. Here's Gilson's family lawyer, Frank Fleming. He read about error Trekking in a magazine, responded to the article by getting in touch with McAfee's school and signed up and went out and took a took a ride. I think he took one or two rides before the fatal crash, but on the third or fourth hop with mister Boteaux, they flew into the mountain. Frank is an aviation lawyer for decades. He has represented families in plane crashes, helicopter crashes and military crashes. It's clearly a consequence of an undertrained and ill equipped pilot who had no business flying with passengers or students. The pilot, Joel but Toe, obviously flew into a box canyon where he was surrounded on several sides by terrain, and then he tried to turn and didn't allow enough room for the aircraft to complete the turn and flew into the side of a mountain. And that's an unforgiving situation. I mean, most pilots don't want to go into box canyons under any circumstances. But that's the feeling that they're trying to generate. We got a copy of the police report from the Coaches County Sheriff's Department in Arizona. It says that a small plane crashed in the place called Starvation Canyon. Fire enveloped the aircraft, leaving only the metal framework and engine behind. One body was burned beyond recognition. A second was thrown over one hundred feet away. Joel Beto's parents provide aided his dental records to help identify the remains, and the sheriff's report contained one other alarming detail that the pilot had been in a previous accident just four months prior to the fatal crash. In that incident, the engine died on his ultralight aircraft midflight, and he tried to do an emergency landing in the best place he could find. The plane hit several rocks and flipped over. The ultralight was totaled, and Joel sustained injuries to his left arm. He told police that the plane belonged to his uncle, John McAfee. Frank Fleming said that once the crash was reconstructed, they filed a claim against McAfee, Southwest Aerotrekking Academy, and Joel Beato's father, John Beato. The lawsuit was filed in two thousand and eight. Just one year later, McAfee was selling off his properties to leave for Belize, where he declared that he would be out of the court's reach. He took off, leaving behind the grieving families, including his ex wife's relatives. For years, McAfee had been living by his own rules, defying in convention, but now he was disregarding court orders. He ignored requests to produce financial documents. He left to build yet another new life, this time on the shores of the Caribbean. While thumbing his nose at the American justice system. We will talk about Belize a lot in a different episode. We know that in three short years after moving there, McAfee would be forced to come back home, and during this time Frank Fleming kept pushing on the wrongful death lawsuit, and he was also trying to compel McAfee to testify. He eventually succeeded. When McAfee returned to the US, he was deposed. Here's Fleming. I did not think he was a good witness. I did not think he was credible. He very arrogant and contemptuous of the process. Fleming says he also didn't look too good. I remember him as a chain smoker. He was not a very healthy person. He coughed regularly, I mean incessantly. He was very high strung. I might have used the term uptight in my personal experience. I would have suspected that he was on some kind of medication. Fleming said. McAfee tried to blame the accident on the passenger who died, Robert Gilson. He claimed Gilson shifted his weight in the aircraft, making it impossible for the pilot to maintain control. Also, Gilson had had heart problems months before he turned up in New Mexico, and McAfee said tried to suggest that he'd had a heart attack and that caused the crash, But Fleming says there's no evidence of McAfee's claims. McAfee wasn't just antagonistic towards the people suing him. He made things difficult for his own lawyers too. He fired at least one of them. I contacted one of McAfee's lawyers, Ralph Ellenwood, and asked him several times for an interview. He agreed at first, and then emailed me later to say that he changed his mind that talking to me quote would be an ethical minefield. Several people who were named as defendant in the trial, including John Beeto, the pilot's father, did not respond to our requests for interviews. Fleming said McAfee was to post several times because he kept refusing to produce financial documents. When the judge forced McAfee to turn over the documents, they showed that McAfee paid for the aircraft, for the flight complex, for pretty much everything there. McAfee's financial documents also showed where some of his money was kept. Here's Fleming, I should also point out that he had some sort of a trust set up organized in the Cook Islands. It tells you a lot about the purpose of the trust. The Cook Islands in the Pacific are outside of US jurisdiction. They serve as a notorious tax haven for the wealthy. They can also be used by Americans who want to protect their assets from lawsuits. We scoured SEC filings and court documents to see what we could find out about McAfee's trust. It was originally set up in John and his ex wife, Judy's name in nineteen ninety three. That year, he transferred at least half of his shares in McAfee's associates to the trust. Judy took control of it after they divorced in two thousand and six, and by that point its assets were worth about seven million dollars, Which brings me to the kicker in the error Trekking lawsuit. McAfee could have avoided a lot of this trouble because the family of the crash victim, Robert Gilson, began proceedings by offering to settle without trial. If McAfee agreed to pay half a million dollars, that would make it all go away. McAfee turned it down. Instead, he spent years ignoring court orders, dodging people trying to serve him papers at tech conferences, and ultimately being forced into a lengthy, invasive lawsuit. McAfee could have prevented that by accepting the offer. Now, let me say, at the end of the day, if you will, he succeeded because he hasn't paid the judgment. When the judgment came down, the court ruled that McAfee, Southwest Aerotrekking Academy, and the Beto estate had to pay over two million dollars in damages, penalties and interest. Well, it's higher than that now because it continues to earn interests. But he has not paid the judgment. That's correct, After all that McAfee died without paying. Now there may be something Fleming can do after McAfee's estate lawyers go through what remains of his assets, But he acknowledges that even that day will be a long time coming. It is a testament to McAfee's determination to avoid accountability. John Coffee spent the first fifteen years after he left his company largely out of the public eye, under the cloak of obscurity. He descended further and further into lawlessness. He went from breaking social conventions to outright defying the legal system. He takes off for Belize, a tropical paradise where it looked like McAfee could yet again start over on his own terms. But soon things there would get even darker, and John mccafee would have more than one death blamed on him. That's next time on Foundering, The John mccafee Story. Foundering is hosted by me Jamie Tarabay. Sean Wen is our executive producer, Matthew Bramner, Andrew's Malin, Eileena Pang and Joe Williams contributed reporting to this episode special thanks to Press on the Prakash. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Sharif Yusef is our audio engineer, Mark Million and Vandermay, Andy Martin and Molly Shutz are our story editors. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends see you next time.