On November eleven, twenty twelve, a housekeeper in Belize entered the beachside residence of a man named Gregory Fall. According to court documents, she found him lying face up in the living room in the pool of blood. The television was still on and there were no signs of struggle. Once police arrived on the scene, it became clear the man was first tasted and then shot in the back of the head with a single bullet. The police found a nine millimeter shell next to the body. They told a local paper that there was no evidence that anything was missing, leading them to dismiss robbery as a motive for the murder. Following the murder for American national Gregory Fall, police in San Pedro have detained one man for his murder. They're also seeking American national John McAfee for questioning. McAfee is well known because he's the founder of the anti virus that bears his name. McAfee, who has a house in the area, has not been seen since this incident. Greg Fall and John McAfee lift two houses down from one another. Before greg was killed, they'd been arguing over McAfee's guard dogs. Now the police wanted to talk to McAfee, but he was nowhere to be found. He went on the lamb. Did you get away with murda? No? I did not do murder. This is you know. I think this is perfectly clear. I had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Gregory Paul. But McAfee didn't hang around to answer any questions. Do you know who this is? He fled, claiming he'd been framed, and though he was avoiding the police, he was in constant contact with the media. Are you afraid? Wouldn't you be? So? How is this going to end? How do you see this coming to an end? I don't have a crystal ball. I'm going to continue to fight until something changes up. You won't turn yourself in. I will not. So it will either be that some how you get away or the authorities come and get you one of those two on the run under suspicion with the world watching. You're listening to Foundering, I'm your host, Jamie Tarabay. Belize is where everything changes from McAfee. It's sometimes referred to as his Heart of Darkness era. He's no longer the spiritually enlightened Yogi or the adrenaline seeking aircraft enthusiast, his flaunting guns, bodyguards, teenage girlfriends, and drugs. He's accused of orchestrating a murder. This image of a genius madman is one that will follow him for the remaining years of his life. A slew of negative news coverage comes out that documents disturbing allegations against him, and rather than running away from the bad press, McAfee embraces the media, introduces reporters to his homes, his science laboratory, and his entourage, and after his neighbor turns up dead, perversely, McAfee's famed skyrockets to an all time high, making him even more famous than during his heyday as CEO of McAfee and Associates. McAfee's life in Belize was marked by high drama and chaos, much of his own making. The reports being broadcast to viewers at home at the time were full of contradictions, accusations, and misinformation, and faithfully, two journalists from Bias News even go on the run with McAfee as he evades Belizean authorities. This is when events spiral out of his control and his antics seemed to lead to his undoing. I'll tell you more after a break. John McAfee arrived in Belize in two thousand and eight. He wanted it to be a new beginning. He was running away from an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit from his error trekking business. In Belize, McAfee lived like a rich man far outside the bound of US jurisdiction. Here's Jeff Weiss, a journalist who has covered McAfee since two thousand and seven and is also a contributor to Bloomberg Business Week. He says him now, Belize says all things having so much fun. He's got his ultra lights down there. He's like exploring these jungle rivers and there's like all these abandoned man in ruins. It's like a tourist brochure. Belize is a small country hugging the Caribbean coast of Central America, wedged between Mexico to its north and Guatemala to its south and west. Its population is tiny, just four hundred thousand people. Many American retirees flocked to the town of Saint Pedro. That's the version of Belize that gets promoted on travel sites. White sandy beaches, sparkling turquoise water, scuba diving in coral reefs. But McAfee being McAfee, decided to make his base of operations for his first years in Belize in a town called orange Walk, which was something else altogether. Here's Jules Vasquez, the news director of Channel seven News, a TV station in Belize. I would see the difference is it's a rural, agrarian community as opposed to tourist tone. There are no white men living in that area of orange Walk where you was. Orange Walk is on the mainland. It's a poorer community. The only other so called white men in orange Walk were a group of Mennonites. So it was here that McAfee decided to build the laboratory. He said he was developing a new sort of antibiotic derived from rare plants that grow wild in the Belizian rainforest. This research would build upon a real emerging area of medicine called quorum sensing, which studies how bacteria communicate. The basis for McAfee's research sounds pretty technical. Here's Jeff Weiss again. So the bio drug thing he was looking for, he had this whole backstory that was largely based in reality. There's this thing called quorum sensing, where organisms that team up, like slime molds and things, organisms that are only sometimes dangerous, like if they infect your wound, they can send a signal, and if you can interrupt that signal, you can maybe prevent them from becoming dangerous. In an article Jeff wrote for Fast Company, he posed the question could McAfee do for human health what he'd done for computers. It was a tantalizing prospect. And he also employed a biologist and she had actually done some work. She actually was we talked about Charles earlier. She was actually a researcher at Harvard, as I understand it, so she was working in some Harvard lab there really was working on this kind of thing. The biologist is a woman named Alison at Anisio. She was relatively young when she was working for McAfee, just thirty one years old. Alison had quit her job at Harvard and abandoned the grant for a three year research program to go to work for McAfee. They co founded a company to cultivate natural antibiotics and topical medicine to treat wounds. But once Jeff is on site, he has trouble understanding McAfee's explanation of how he would actually develop the new drugs. They're supposed to be based on rare plants only available in the jungle in Belize. So McAfee walks Jeff to an area on his property where he says these plants were going to spring up. So he was claiming that, like he was, he had a plot of land where this stuff was growing and he was going to clear it so that it was going to grow better. But he wasn't going to plant it. It was just going to grow. And I and I made him walk me through this several times because it didn't make any sense to me. I've never heard of like growing a crop but not planting the crop, just like hoping it'll grow. I'm like, how do you know so much about this plant that it's just going to grow? He just he said at one point he said to me, like, I'm a very smart man, and so you have to take my word for it. A seed of doubt is planted in Jeff's mind. One he never really shakes. It's all a bit handwavy, frankly, But this was the kind of spiel that he would fold for people who were This was this was the claim that he was making the natural antibiotics never come to fruition. Jeff says that McAfee puts Allison onto another project he's interested in. John McAfee had a very long standing interest in female libido enhancing drugs, so he wanted to find a real life Spanish fly. He like, experimented with like testosterone, and he experimented with various stimulants. At one point he had Alison Adanitzio, his biological researcher, working on a libido drug that he wanted her to take, and I guess she did um. But so it got it got it. You know, you sort of peel one layer away and it gets pretty. It gets skibe frankly, and the partnership between McAfee and Alison Adernethia doesn't last very long. She leaves John McAfee's lab in Orange Walk and returns to the US. She later alleges that McAfee drugged and assaulted her when she said she wanted out of the business. In an interview with ABC News, McAfee called Allison a madwoman and rejected her allegations. We haven't been able to reach Allison and haven't been able to verify what she said McAfee did to her, whatever you believe. Her story highlights an aspect of McAfee's personality that seemed to intensify with age. This obsession with sex and younger women, and the use of his money and power to allegedly exploit them. It got more and more egregious over the years. In addition to his medical research project, McAfee also seemed to be using his money to buy influence. The Saint Pedro soun quotes him as saying that he donated over two million dollars worth of goods to various police departments while he was in Belize. He spent on housing police officers, brought them m sixteens, tasers, handcuffs, pepper spray, and metal detectors. He gave the Coastguard a million dollar boat, and he seemed especially focused on crime in the town of Carmelita, near his Orange Walk home. A twenty twelve profile in Wired magazine says McAfee paid officers to patrol the streets when they were supposed to be off duty. He apparently told them to sniff out drug dealers. Here's a clip from the documentary Gringo, on which Jeff Wise was an executive producer. But I moved to the village of Carmelito. I decided I would try to clean it up friend to do it legally. For on, it makes sense to hire off duty officers to collect information and farm that information. Maybe they can do or do something, and they did. I have an officer living on my compound. It makes me feel safe, makes me feel safer to know that all the criminals that might want to rob me, no, there's a policeman living there, and they think there's something wrong with that. Now, Belize does have one of the highest murder rates in the world, but when we looked at government issued crime maps, we saw that Orange Walk is not an especially dangerous area. Jules Vasquez told us that the town had a history of drug violence in the nineteen eighties, but it's not seriously violent anymore. The sense of danger appeared to be mostly in McAfee's own mind. McAfee built a sprawling property there. This is Tamara Sniffin, the editor of The Sampedro sum. It was a compound. It was like a several freestanding buildings that were enclosed, but it was surrounded by jungle that was very tucked away and looked lovely, all wood structures and comfortable and cool. McAfee's Orange Walk home reminded me of his previous setups in Colorado with his yoga retreat and New Mexico with his ultralight aircraft operation. It was as if he wanted to leave civilization as he knew it behind and built something new, something out of reach, where he could assert his own authority. There were also several teenaged girls living in McAfee's compound. He boasts about them in the documentary film Gringo. I live a lifestyle which might be over the line of normal behavior. It's a lot of fun. I get to hang out with cute girls who are scantilly clad. I do have teenage girlfriends, and many at a time. Nothing illegal. They're well beyond the aged consent and I've seen nothing wrong with it. And if you do, then that's okay. He was sixty seven years old at this point. The age of consent in Belize is sixteen. Journalist Jeff Wise said that he met a number of the girls living on macafee's compound, and you'd have five at a time. It was in Belize where because he could just like, you know, everyone was so poor and he has so much money, and like he seems relatively more glamorous there. He could have five. He would have multiple buildings on his property, and he would house different women, and each one of them, as you say, each one, we think they were the special one. In addition to flaunting his girlfriends, he stood out in still another way. He would travel around town with an armed entourage, big scary people, you know, a lot of times wearing fatigues, big guys. They always had a rifle slung over their shoulder, and they were always on the aware, you know, always kind of scoping things out, like he was in danger or something. It was very bizarre. According to local news reports, including the Saint Pedro Son and Belize Channel seven News, several of the men in McAfee's employ weren't registered to carry weapons and weren't licensed to work as security guards. All of this behavior, the armed protection, the new properties, the money he's splashing around in this underdeveloped area, begins to attract the attention of law enforcement. The police thought it was suspicious that he had bought this property kind of in the middle of nowhere, not a scenic location, easily accessed by road that sits on a river that goes to Mexico. So if you want to move something in or out without attracting attention of customs, that would be a good place to do it. In April twenty twelve, at six in the morning, Belize's Gang Suppression Unit stormed McAfee's Orange Walk compound. Jules Vasquez says, the Gang Suppression Unit officers are in a different league to the local police forces. They are a paramilitary, specialized police unit that should should primarily deal with the suppression of guns. But they're commander at the time, Marco Videal, you wished for them to have a much broader footprint in law enforcement, so he would have them pursue pretty much anything that it was felt that other units were too corrupt or compromised to pursue. Remember McAfee had donated significant money to the local police, but the leader of the Gang Suppression Unit, Marco Video, felt that his team was outside that kind of influence. However, it was his feeling. I believe that many times these local police had already been compromised by the thick wallets of US investors, and the Gang Suppression Unit was the only one that could act with the necessary discretion and the professionalism to conduct the read properly. The Gang Suppression Unit, also known as the GSU, told local media they rated the property based on reports of illegal activity occurring at the compound and they were there to search for drugs and illegal firearms. Here's a clip from SBS Stateline, a current affairs show in Australia. If I came out naked with a handgun, I laid mine downs and as I saw the souldiers marching information down my driveway, I put my pants on went back outside. Before I could even get outside the door, I was grabbed, thrown up against the wall, A piece of paper was shoved in my face. You know. This is the warrant and the day it was pretty much a nightmare. McAfee says he was lying in bed naked with a seventeen year old girl when the Gang Suppression Unit charged to his property. He had barely gotten dressed when the police handcuffed him and four of his security guards. He says he was left in the sun for fourteen hours and that one of his guard dogs was shot and killed. The officers ransacked nine houses on the compound. They found a significant cache of weapons. The red conducted by the Gang Suppression Unit resulting in the discovery of ten fire arms, seven twelve gage pump action shotguns, one twelve gage single action shotgun, one tourist nine millimeter pistol. McAfee was released early the next morning. He told reporters the raid was in retaliation for his refusal to pay a bribe to a local politician. ABC News quoted a Belizian reporter who said the gang Suppression unit raided McAfee's lab because they suspected that he was manufacturing meth. They tested samples they collected from the scene. In the end, they didn't file a single drug charge, ends him. Jeff suggests that this may have had less to do with the absence of drugs and what to do with the nature of the drugs. At this time, McAfee was in the early stages of a very strong interest in let's call them bath salts. It's kind of a catch all term, but it's basically a kind of pharmacologically psychoactive drug that is not illegal because it's different. It has its chemical structure, is somewhat different from the stuff that's actually scheduled by the us DA, so you can have it and technically it's there's nothing they can do to you. Although McAfee walked away a freeman, the raid changed him. He became obsessed with the idea that there were people out to get him. His bouts of paranoia intensify in his later years. Many of these actions seemed driven by the idea that the govern was hunting for him, the cartel was after him, assassins were hidden in the dark, and this paranoia was reinforced in reality by the violent raid McAfee endured. After that, he moved out of Orange Walk and settled into his beach house in Saint Pedro, bringing his entourage with him. McAfee took up permanent residence in the tourist town, living near another American retiree, a Florida man named Gregory Fall We'll be right back. After John McAfee's compound on the mainland of Belize was raided by the gang Suppression Unit, he moved his life to Saint Pedro on the island of Amber, Greece Key. His beach house over look the white sands and crystal blue waters of the Caribbean. Saint Pedre was a community largely composed of retirees from the US and Canada. Here's Jules Vasquez. They have a certain Margharitaville lifestyle, right, like they're all straight out of that Jim A. Buffett song. And he comes in and he has quotery of dangerous, huge quotes dangerous black people around him, right Like he has an entourage, right of these people around him. So he really doesn't fit in with that community, which is really more retirement gringos, right, and then he comes in with all this alacrity, all this m combustion. McAfee is suspicious with people he doesn't know. He tells Wired Magazine that he keeps mainly to his beach house and his women. He's having erratically and he's convinced he's a target, says Tamara Sniffin. He just thought they were out together because he stepped on the wrong toes. Of course, he would never be forthcoming on exactly like why he was being picked on, just very vaguely that he was the white man coming in and stepping on toes or whatever. McAfee's presence in Saint Pedro was disrupting everyday life for many locals, says Jeff Weiss. He's kind of terrorizing the neighborhood. Everyone's freaked out. He's scared of this guy Dodgs. You're biting people, the guards, you're staring at people, and it's about six months of high tension on this stretch of beach. There was one neighbor in particular who took McAfee to task about the dogs, Gregory Fall, a fifty two year old former contractor and restaurateur from Florida. Here's Tamara. I did know that Greg was really unhappy with the dog situation. I had heard that he was trying to talk to the mayor about it and anybody he could to try and get this dog situation remedied. I've been to that area and they were really scary dogs, very very intimidating when you walked on the beach. I mean they were running free and they would run right up patchen. Pretty ferocious. So all I know is that Greg and McAfee thought about that quite a bit. Gregfull didn't have much tolerance for McAfee's behavior. McAfee is pretty good at intimidating people. He's pretty good at manipulating people. But I sensed that, you know, Greg Fall just like had been around the block a few times himself and was just it was having none of it, and so when McAfee pushed, he pushed back, And these guys get into a dispute and complaints are filed, threats are made. Fall allegedly says, if you know, if your dogs keep offing me, I will poison them. The dogs are poisoned, and then soon thereafter, Greg Fall's housekeeper comes in one morning to find Fall shot dead. Here's the police press conference about the murder. She arrived at mister Fall's home where she saw him in a motionless state, lying in a pool of blood. The police were called and the scene was processed. The buddy had an apparent gunshot wound to the back of the heaven Tamara says that the killing shocked the North American retirees who were living in Belize. I mean, Greg was well liked. He was horribly executed, you know, so there was a lot of sadness and then anger. You know, a lot of people immediately assumed that McAfee had some liability in it, and they were upset. You know, we don't have many murders on the island, and we specially don't have expat to expat kind of murder. I mean, that's just unheard of. I think that's the only one I've ever heard of on this island. So yeah, then it was number one conversation at every local watering hole even that, and the watering hole gossip speculated that McAfee had ordered full be killed. I don't necessarily believe that it was McAfee who pulled the trigger, but like I said, he is always surrounded by armed guys and some very faithful people, and all I think he had to say was I want that soob dead, you know, and somebody said note taken. You know, in my mind, I think that's a likely scenario. And on the very day that Greg Fulls body was found, McAfee disappeared. He wasn't in his beach house, and though he was hiding from the police, he was basically talking to everyone else. Police say he is a person of interest, but have not called him a suspect or charged him. Despite that, McAfee says he's now in hiding fearful of what he calls a corrupt government. Belize's Prime minister publicly taunting McAfee Wednesday. It strikes me that he's extremely paranoid and in fact that it also far as to see bonkers. International and US television networks descend on Belize. McAfee gives several of them what they call exclusive interviews. He's on the crackly phone line here with ABC. I have had an adventure. I want to say that right now, sir, flying in the bottom of cavs Burt did for almost efeteen hours. I have buried myself in sand. I have slept on roofs ide have I will do whatever takes in case he didn't catch that, he said he buried himself in sand. By his account, he's the one being persecuted here running from the police. He started spreading a story that he wasn't wanted for murder at all, that he was wanted for hacking into the Belizian government. Here's McAfee talking to Australia's Channel seven News. I hacked the Polician government for five months and I have all that data, tens of thousands of hours, recordings and videos of the Prime Minister of ordering the murder of his competitors. McAfee made these claims with zero evidence, Though fears of the cartel became a running theme in the remaining years of McAfee's life. ABC also interviewed police spokesperson Raphael Martinez. He sounded almost puzzled by McAfee's flight. I did not know the reason why he should be well, not coming and forward to speak with the police. I mean, not coming forward knowing that you are wanted for questioning. I mean it begs the question exactly a state of mind. Of course, it was incredibly difficult for the murder victim's family to watch. Here's his father, Arthur Fall, speaking to SPS state Line from Australia. Do you believe that McAfee was involved. You're convinced that McAfee was involved, not entirely, but but but why would he run? Why did he not answer the questions? And if he has nothing to hide, why doesn't he speak. It's very frustrating to find that that that he gets all the attention and my son's kind of a prop for his infamy. The whole time. McAfee's playing the police and the media, trying to drum up sympathy while evading having to so questions about the murder. Here's Jeff again, I mean it was it was McAfee's fleeing that created the whole hullabaloo. He it was, it was it was his disappearance. It wasn't the discovery of Greg Fall's body that set the whole thing in motion. It was McAfee running away. McAfee's calling up American national news organizations and like ultimately flying down journalist, he actually winds up hanging out with a film crew. That's but again, it's like what he is mother's milk to a journalist. A great narrative, protagonist antagonist, high stakes. McAfee creates a compelling narrative, one that overshadows the news of Greg Fall's killing. This is a news story about McAfee running for cover, fleeing from corrupt Belizean officials. John McAfee had long ago recognized the power a news story could have. Remember that, even during his anti virus days, he was harnessing the media to drive sales of his product. Jules Vasquez watched as McAfee dominated the news cycle with his bizarre theatrics, and then McAfee went full crazy because you know, he really is a white man dancing at that point, right like he really is living out this fantasy. It just becomes this galloping circus of stupidity that he finds so cute. A man is dead, right, But yeah, so you know, he comes across as justice, this wild and crazy guy, and then he's the wanted person, and so he takes on that role completely and goes into full gringo fugitive mode, making a mockery of the police along the way, paints himself as the victim of judicial or a law enforcement system that wants entrup incarcerit and kill him. We'll be right back. Francois Garcia is a filmmaker based in Canada. He met John mccafee years before Greg Fall's death when he and his wife were on vacation in Belize. So fast forward to twenty twelve watching CNA, and I see the news reports about John McAfee on on their own one ponful questioning for the murder of his neighbor. I'm a filmmaker, I'm always hunting for a good story. I gotta jump on it. So this Canadian filmmaker calls McAfee. He says they make a verbal agreement to work together with Francois acting as a kind of pr agent free of charge. Francois offers to take over who is McAfee dot com, a website controlled by McAfee himself that posts updates on his whereabouts, and Francois also offers to help reach out to the media on McAfee's behalf. At this point, he has no opinion on whether McAfee killed fall. I immediately understood no matter what his claims were, either way was a good story. If he's innocent based on his claims, so it's a great story. If he's guilty of what he's accused of, it's still a great story. So it was a win win. Francois was picturing all the ways he could package and sell McAfee story. I'm thinking of feature film down the road, I'm thinking of a book. My money focus was on documentaries. Francois also says he made an offer to get McAfee out of Belize. He said he had a friend who could fly a plane to Mexico and land near the border. That McAfee would need to the border on foot, but that he could get him out of the country. He says McAfee didn't want to leave the media circus he created. He wanted to to stay. He wanted to continue. I mean he was saying that he was hiding in a sailboat. He was hiding in a cardboard box. He kept moving locations on the hour. In reality, he was sitting in a small apartment complex about twenty minutes from Belize, a city. As a filmmaker, Francois also wanted to get footage of McAfee on the ground in Belize, but he didn't have a team on Cole to send out to shoot McAfee. So he has a new idea, get the press involved to basically document McAfee for him, and Francois could always license this footage after he makes a call to Vice News as then editor in chief Rocco Castoro. I reached out to to Rocco and there there were in a plane hours leader. These vice reporters, Rocker Costoro and photographer Robert King, would get closer to McAfee than any of the other journalists in the wake of Gregfall's murder. They actually travel with him for weeks and they alter the trajectory of McAfee's Central American exploits. They meet up in Belize and make their way out of the country all together. The Vice reporters start rolling tape on McAfee. The Prime Minister has one hundred and fifty thousand dollars bounty. Im sholl if you are Sholl, yes kill. There was no one hundred and fifty thousand dollars on McAfee's head. But McAfee is building his own mythology here. He's the anti hero, the outlaw, escaping the corrupt Belizian government. They head for the border. On the phone, McAfee is giving instructions to Frontois team on what a post on who is McAfee dot com. So an unconfirmed, unnamed sources has contacted has contacted the blog with the information that mister McAfee has been has been arrested just across the border of police in the country, in the country of Mexico. Write that down. It's so funny to me that he's on the phone dictating misinformation. This story actually got picked up. A handful of news outlets published that McAfee was arrested in Mexico and then had to issue corrections. In fact, McAfee did make a successful border crossing. Michael McDonald is a reporter for Bloomberg News. In twenty twelve, he was reporting for Reuters out of Guatemala. Like so many others, he was assigned to cover the software entrepreneurs Saga. He snuck into Guanama from Belize. I mean, there are official checkpoints at the border, but it is a very porous border, so if you want to sneak in, it's it's not that difficult. Um. You know, there's a river separating both countries, so it's it's pretty easy to cross that at night if you want to. And McAfee's entry into Guatemala was actually illegal and obviously if you don't go through an official checkpoint, you have no stamp in your passport, and he had no Guatemala stamp in his passport, so he had essentially entered the country illegally. Remember McAfee crossing the border with two reporters from Vice is a situation engineered by Francois Garcia, who's watching this all unfold from Canada. I'm watching the madness from from Afar. But they want with John to guatemalaf did it crossed the first by car and then by by boat. Photo journalists Robert King took the famous Vice picture of John and Rocco and the headline we are with McAfee suckers. Vice published the picture of the image without removing ge location, and they just went viral. Robert King, the photographer who took the photo with geolocation data on it, later posted this video online of the moment they realized the data had leaked. Our good friends friends in New York published the XFT. Okay, here's the spin on this. You guys are fucked here. You realize that if we got right, you know that you're you're fighting for your life. Here. McAfee's voice sounds calm, but he's saying dire things to the reporters. That they'll likely be tortured because they're with him, that he may lose fingers and toes if he's found, and that there'd be a massive reward for his capture. McAfee's heard telling them that the story now is about how two journalists get out of a tight situation. If you get arrested with me, there is the chance that you might suffer some gil treatment. The way you spend this is that Jesus, they were coming to get us. We were on the line. Now we became part, we became part of a different story. At that point, the Vice reporters who were traveling with McAfee were widely blamed for the GEO data leak. We asked Rocco for a statement. He sent us this recording, which we've edited for length and clarity. He starts by saying, the data leak wasn't his fault. Yes, I instructed Vice staff multiple times to scrub the metadata from the image. I was never given a clear, specific reason for why the photo was published with the metadata intact. Rocco says that he was in the field with McAfee when the leak happened. I started receiving panic calls and messages from colleagues, friends and family regarding the exposure of the metadata and our exact coordinates. When King and I returned from Guatemala to the VICE office in Brooklyn, people looked at It's like we were ghosts that has just walked into the office. Roca Castoro and Robert King did suffer significant reputational damage. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Vice released a statement. Here's an exit quote. We have always been transparent in our filmmaking and will continue that practice. This will be no exception. The story as a whole has engaged people around the world precisely because it is so freaky, and even if it shows that we made mistakes on the ground during a very hectic and dangerous week of reporting on McAfee's mistakes, we are sure it's going to make one hell of a documentary end quote. But McAfee's other warnings that the revelations of his location would lead to arrests, torture, and interrogation did not come true. Here's Jeff Weiss again, to be clear, do the cops then come rolling down the street? No, they don't. That's not how it works. So so McAfee's like, oh shit, and like apparently he freaks out. I think it's on They have it on film of Macie what you got, so they run, they won't have In Guatemala City, reporter Michael McDonald is in Guatemala City covering McAfee's escapades. He recognizes the former Attorney General of Guatemala in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel. He had this lawyer named t les Fro Guera, and TLEs Farro was sort of this this powerful lawyer that you would contact in Guatemala that the elites would use when they were in trouble. Ex presidents would hire him when they were in trouble, so he was sort of the go to lawyer for big cases. The lawyer tells Mike that the goal is to keep McAfee from being extradited. In this clip from Vice you can hear McAfee asking for reassurances that he won't get sent back to Belize to because I'm not worried. Of course they want. While McAfee was in limbo in Guatemala, Mike interviewed him in his hotel room. He said that at times McAfee seemed like he wasn't all there. He did come across as deranged at some points, um I like he did. He did appear to be on drugs. He always insisted that he wasn't. You know, some of the things he does and some of the things he says to you make you wonder are you on drugs now? In the end, McAfee was arrested for entering Guatemala illegally. Vice News shot footage of him being shoved into a police fan and cut it off to prison again, he seems composed. Where are they taking you, John John? Where are you going to jail? Even from jail mac. If he couldn't stay away from the media, he would call reporters, including Mike, at all hours. The first time he called it was probably three in the morning. Actually, he told me his jail cell was lacking color and he wanted me to figure out how to get plants into his jail cell in order to spruce it up. A couple days later he called me from the jail again, and he said he was bored, and he wanted me to bring a chess set to his jail cell, so he would call me. He probably called me three or four times from the jail cell. In jail, he's vulnerable. His fate seemed to be in the hand of the Guatemalan authorities. As much as he tries to influence things from inside prison, he's powerless. I don't think he anticipated ending up in a jail in Guatemala. I think he probably figured he could work his way around that and get out of that. So he, you know, he created this whole scene, and he faked a heart attack and they took him to the hospital, that's right. Fearing that he might be deported back to Belize, McAfee tried to retake control by faking a heart attack. He was treated for chest pains and then went back into detention. Ironically, despite all of his fears, Belizian authorities never took concrete steps to bring him back. I remember speaking with the police spokesman and Belize and he kept telling me, well, he's a you know, John's a person of interest and we would like him back. But he told me they weren't going to file an official extradition request. I always wondered, well why not, And so I was always suspicious that maybe they maybe they don't want him back, and they just kind of want to get rid of him, and they don't really care what his future held. The Belizian police didn't respond to numerous requests for comments, and Guatemala found a way to get rid of McAfee as well. Within the week, Mike gets word that McAfee's going to be deported back to the US for entering Guatemala illegally. A crowd of journalists rushed to see him off before he leaves. So we were at the airport in about ten minutes, and we were all there waiting for him. I mean, the entire press crew was there waiting for him. Immigration officers were there, the police were there, and the pickup showed up, and it was just sort of this mad scramble to get the last quote from John McAfee before he was driven through this gate at this side gate at the airport and onto the tarmac. Mike doesn't remember what McAfee said, only that his demeanor was calm. The truck went through the gates and onto the tarmac, and Mike returned to his office to file a story that John mccafee had been deported. My editors were in Mexico at the time, and they wanted to he absolutely certain that he was on the plane, and so I was like, well, how do I figure this out? And then I remembered it, Well, I wonder if his Guatemala's cell phone is still working. So I called the Guatemala cell phone and he picked up, and he was on the plane, and you could hear the dinging of the seat belt signs and you could hear the captain speaking in the PA system, and he said, yeah, I'm on my way to Florida. And that was just the first flight that they could get me on back to the US. And so we're about to take off and I have to go. And with that the wild ride was over, McAfee is flown back to the United States, away from Belize, where he would have had to face questioning over Greg folds murder. The victim's family never saw justice. They filed a civil suit in the Middle District Court in Florida. The judge granted fourth daughter five million dollars to compensate for the harm caused by her father's death. The court added another twenty million dollars to quote punish McAfee for his misconduct and deter further such action in the future end quote. When the judgment came down, McAfee refused to respond to requests from the court and never appeared to answer for the complaint. He tweeted, I was never charged with murder by Belizing authorities or any other authority. It was a suit based entirely on media reporting. McAfee was at least partially right. He was never charged. Many in the expact community in Belize, as well as journalists who closely reported on McAfee's time there, blame him for Greg Fall's murder, and if that's true, then he got away with it. In his lifetime, McAfee succeeded in evading consequences for many of his actions, but this would be the most notorious. You might think that MCA at this point is at an all time low. He's sixty seven years old, vending off accusations of murder and rape. He says he can't access any of his money, that his accounts of frozen, but his return to the US is the beginning of a personal renaissance. Once again, McAfee reinvents himself and surprises everyone by launching an unlikely bid to be the next President of the United States. That's next time on Foundering, The John mccafee Story. Foundering is hosted by me Jamie Tarabay Sean When is our executive producer. Pratana Prakash contributed reporting to this episode. Special thanks to Young Young and Eileena Peng for helping with production. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Serif Josef is our audio engineer, Mark Million and Vandermay, Andy Martin and Molly Shoots 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.

On November eleven, twenty twelve, a housekeeper in Belize entered the beachside residence of a man named Gregory Fall. According to court documents, she found him lying face up in the living room in the pool of blood. The television was still on and there were no signs of struggle. Once police arrived on the scene, it became clear the man was first tasted and then shot in the back of the head with a single bullet. The police found a nine millimeter shell next to the body. They told a local paper that there was no evidence that anything was missing, leading them to dismiss robbery as a motive for the murder. Following the murder for American national Gregory Fall, police in San Pedro have detained one man for his murder. They're also seeking American national John McAfee for questioning. McAfee is well known because he's the founder of the anti virus that bears his name. McAfee, who has a house in the area, has not been seen since this incident. Greg Fall and John McAfee lift two houses down from one another. Before greg was killed, they'd been arguing over McAfee's guard dogs. Now the police wanted to talk to McAfee, but he was nowhere to be found. He went on the lamb. Did you get away with murda? No? I did not do murder. This is you know. I think this is perfectly clear. I had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of Gregory Paul. But McAfee didn't hang around to answer any questions. Do you know who this is? He fled, claiming he'd been framed, and though he was avoiding the police, he was in constant contact with the media. Are you afraid? Wouldn't you be? So? How is this going to end? How do you see this coming to an end? I don't have a crystal ball. I'm going to continue to fight until something changes up. You won't turn yourself in. I will not. So it will either be that some how you get away or the authorities come and get you one of those two on the run under suspicion with the world watching. You're listening to Foundering, I'm your host, Jamie Tarabay. Belize is where everything changes from McAfee. It's sometimes referred to as his Heart of Darkness era. He's no longer the spiritually enlightened Yogi or the adrenaline seeking aircraft enthusiast, his flaunting guns, bodyguards, teenage girlfriends, and drugs. He's accused of orchestrating a murder. This image of a genius madman is one that will follow him for the remaining years of his life. A slew of negative news coverage comes out that documents disturbing allegations against him, and rather than running away from the bad press, McAfee embraces the media, introduces reporters to his homes, his science laboratory, and his entourage, and after his neighbor turns up dead, perversely, McAfee's famed skyrockets to an all time high, making him even more famous than during his heyday as CEO of McAfee and Associates. McAfee's life in Belize was marked by high drama and chaos, much of his own making. The reports being broadcast to viewers at home at the time were full of contradictions, accusations, and misinformation, and faithfully, two journalists from Bias News even go on the run with McAfee as he evades Belizean authorities. This is when events spiral out of his control and his antics seemed to lead to his undoing. I'll tell you more after a break. John McAfee arrived in Belize in two thousand and eight. He wanted it to be a new beginning. He was running away from an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit from his error trekking business. In Belize, McAfee lived like a rich man far outside the bound of US jurisdiction. Here's Jeff Weiss, a journalist who has covered McAfee since two thousand and seven and is also a contributor to Bloomberg Business Week. He says him now, Belize says all things having so much fun. He's got his ultra lights down there. He's like exploring these jungle rivers and there's like all these abandoned man in ruins. It's like a tourist brochure. Belize is a small country hugging the Caribbean coast of Central America, wedged between Mexico to its north and Guatemala to its south and west. Its population is tiny, just four hundred thousand people. Many American retirees flocked to the town of Saint Pedro. That's the version of Belize that gets promoted on travel sites. White sandy beaches, sparkling turquoise water, scuba diving in coral reefs. But McAfee being McAfee, decided to make his base of operations for his first years in Belize in a town called orange Walk, which was something else altogether. Here's Jules Vasquez, the news director of Channel seven News, a TV station in Belize. I would see the difference is it's a rural, agrarian community as opposed to tourist tone. There are no white men living in that area of orange Walk where you was. Orange Walk is on the mainland. It's a poorer community. The only other so called white men in orange Walk were a group of Mennonites. So it was here that McAfee decided to build the laboratory. He said he was developing a new sort of antibiotic derived from rare plants that grow wild in the Belizian rainforest. This research would build upon a real emerging area of medicine called quorum sensing, which studies how bacteria communicate. The basis for McAfee's research sounds pretty technical. Here's Jeff Weiss again. So the bio drug thing he was looking for, he had this whole backstory that was largely based in reality. There's this thing called quorum sensing, where organisms that team up, like slime molds and things, organisms that are only sometimes dangerous, like if they infect your wound, they can send a signal, and if you can interrupt that signal, you can maybe prevent them from becoming dangerous. In an article Jeff wrote for Fast Company, he posed the question could McAfee do for human health what he'd done for computers. It was a tantalizing prospect. And he also employed a biologist and she had actually done some work. She actually was we talked about Charles earlier. She was actually a researcher at Harvard, as I understand it, so she was working in some Harvard lab there really was working on this kind of thing. The biologist is a woman named Alison at Anisio. She was relatively young when she was working for McAfee, just thirty one years old. Alison had quit her job at Harvard and abandoned the grant for a three year research program to go to work for McAfee. They co founded a company to cultivate natural antibiotics and topical medicine to treat wounds. But once Jeff is on site, he has trouble understanding McAfee's explanation of how he would actually develop the new drugs. They're supposed to be based on rare plants only available in the jungle in Belize. So McAfee walks Jeff to an area on his property where he says these plants were going to spring up. So he was claiming that, like he was, he had a plot of land where this stuff was growing and he was going to clear it so that it was going to grow better. But he wasn't going to plant it. It was just going to grow. And I and I made him walk me through this several times because it didn't make any sense to me. I've never heard of like growing a crop but not planting the crop, just like hoping it'll grow. I'm like, how do you know so much about this plant that it's just going to grow? He just he said at one point he said to me, like, I'm a very smart man, and so you have to take my word for it. A seed of doubt is planted in Jeff's mind. One he never really shakes. It's all a bit handwavy, frankly, But this was the kind of spiel that he would fold for people who were This was this was the claim that he was making the natural antibiotics never come to fruition. Jeff says that McAfee puts Allison onto another project he's interested in. John McAfee had a very long standing interest in female libido enhancing drugs, so he wanted to find a real life Spanish fly. He like, experimented with like testosterone, and he experimented with various stimulants. At one point he had Alison Adanitzio, his biological researcher, working on a libido drug that he wanted her to take, and I guess she did um. But so it got it got it. You know, you sort of peel one layer away and it gets pretty. It gets skibe frankly, and the partnership between McAfee and Alison Adernethia doesn't last very long. She leaves John McAfee's lab in Orange Walk and returns to the US. She later alleges that McAfee drugged and assaulted her when she said she wanted out of the business. In an interview with ABC News, McAfee called Allison a madwoman and rejected her allegations. We haven't been able to reach Allison and haven't been able to verify what she said McAfee did to her, whatever you believe. Her story highlights an aspect of McAfee's personality that seemed to intensify with age. This obsession with sex and younger women, and the use of his money and power to allegedly exploit them. It got more and more egregious over the years. In addition to his medical research project, McAfee also seemed to be using his money to buy influence. The Saint Pedro soun quotes him as saying that he donated over two million dollars worth of goods to various police departments while he was in Belize. He spent on housing police officers, brought them m sixteens, tasers, handcuffs, pepper spray, and metal detectors. He gave the Coastguard a million dollar boat, and he seemed especially focused on crime in the town of Carmelita, near his Orange Walk home. A twenty twelve profile in Wired magazine says McAfee paid officers to patrol the streets when they were supposed to be off duty. He apparently told them to sniff out drug dealers. Here's a clip from the documentary Gringo, on which Jeff Wise was an executive producer. But I moved to the village of Carmelito. I decided I would try to clean it up friend to do it legally. For on, it makes sense to hire off duty officers to collect information and farm that information. Maybe they can do or do something, and they did. I have an officer living on my compound. It makes me feel safe, makes me feel safer to know that all the criminals that might want to rob me, no, there's a policeman living there, and they think there's something wrong with that. Now, Belize does have one of the highest murder rates in the world, but when we looked at government issued crime maps, we saw that Orange Walk is not an especially dangerous area. Jules Vasquez told us that the town had a history of drug violence in the nineteen eighties, but it's not seriously violent anymore. The sense of danger appeared to be mostly in McAfee's own mind. McAfee built a sprawling property there. This is Tamara Sniffin, the editor of The Sampedro sum. It was a compound. It was like a several freestanding buildings that were enclosed, but it was surrounded by jungle that was very tucked away and looked lovely, all wood structures and comfortable and cool. McAfee's Orange Walk home reminded me of his previous setups in Colorado with his yoga retreat and New Mexico with his ultralight aircraft operation. It was as if he wanted to leave civilization as he knew it behind and built something new, something out of reach, where he could assert his own authority. There were also several teenaged girls living in McAfee's compound. He boasts about them in the documentary film Gringo. I live a lifestyle which might be over the line of normal behavior. It's a lot of fun. I get to hang out with cute girls who are scantilly clad. I do have teenage girlfriends, and many at a time. Nothing illegal. They're well beyond the aged consent and I've seen nothing wrong with it. And if you do, then that's okay. He was sixty seven years old at this point. The age of consent in Belize is sixteen. Journalist Jeff Wise said that he met a number of the girls living on macafee's compound, and you'd have five at a time. It was in Belize where because he could just like, you know, everyone was so poor and he has so much money, and like he seems relatively more glamorous there. He could have five. He would have multiple buildings on his property, and he would house different women, and each one of them, as you say, each one, we think they were the special one. In addition to flaunting his girlfriends, he stood out in still another way. He would travel around town with an armed entourage, big scary people, you know, a lot of times wearing fatigues, big guys. They always had a rifle slung over their shoulder, and they were always on the aware, you know, always kind of scoping things out, like he was in danger or something. It was very bizarre. According to local news reports, including the Saint Pedro Son and Belize Channel seven News, several of the men in McAfee's employ weren't registered to carry weapons and weren't licensed to work as security guards. All of this behavior, the armed protection, the new properties, the money he's splashing around in this underdeveloped area, begins to attract the attention of law enforcement. The police thought it was suspicious that he had bought this property kind of in the middle of nowhere, not a scenic location, easily accessed by road that sits on a river that goes to Mexico. So if you want to move something in or out without attracting attention of customs, that would be a good place to do it. In April twenty twelve, at six in the morning, Belize's Gang Suppression Unit stormed McAfee's Orange Walk compound. Jules Vasquez says, the Gang Suppression Unit officers are in a different league to the local police forces. They are a paramilitary, specialized police unit that should should primarily deal with the suppression of guns. But they're commander at the time, Marco Videal, you wished for them to have a much broader footprint in law enforcement, so he would have them pursue pretty much anything that it was felt that other units were too corrupt or compromised to pursue. Remember McAfee had donated significant money to the local police, but the leader of the Gang Suppression Unit, Marco Video, felt that his team was outside that kind of influence. However, it was his feeling. I believe that many times these local police had already been compromised by the thick wallets of US investors, and the Gang Suppression Unit was the only one that could act with the necessary discretion and the professionalism to conduct the read properly. The Gang Suppression Unit, also known as the GSU, told local media they rated the property based on reports of illegal activity occurring at the compound and they were there to search for drugs and illegal firearms. Here's a clip from SBS Stateline, a current affairs show in Australia. If I came out naked with a handgun, I laid mine downs and as I saw the souldiers marching information down my driveway, I put my pants on went back outside. Before I could even get outside the door, I was grabbed, thrown up against the wall, A piece of paper was shoved in my face. You know. This is the warrant and the day it was pretty much a nightmare. McAfee says he was lying in bed naked with a seventeen year old girl when the Gang Suppression Unit charged to his property. He had barely gotten dressed when the police handcuffed him and four of his security guards. He says he was left in the sun for fourteen hours and that one of his guard dogs was shot and killed. The officers ransacked nine houses on the compound. They found a significant cache of weapons. The red conducted by the Gang Suppression Unit resulting in the discovery of ten fire arms, seven twelve gage pump action shotguns, one twelve gage single action shotgun, one tourist nine millimeter pistol. McAfee was released early the next morning. He told reporters the raid was in retaliation for his refusal to pay a bribe to a local politician. ABC News quoted a Belizian reporter who said the gang Suppression unit raided McAfee's lab because they suspected that he was manufacturing meth. They tested samples they collected from the scene. In the end, they didn't file a single drug charge, ends him. Jeff suggests that this may have had less to do with the absence of drugs and what to do with the nature of the drugs. At this time, McAfee was in the early stages of a very strong interest in let's call them bath salts. It's kind of a catch all term, but it's basically a kind of pharmacologically psychoactive drug that is not illegal because it's different. It has its chemical structure, is somewhat different from the stuff that's actually scheduled by the us DA, so you can have it and technically it's there's nothing they can do to you. Although McAfee walked away a freeman, the raid changed him. He became obsessed with the idea that there were people out to get him. His bouts of paranoia intensify in his later years. Many of these actions seemed driven by the idea that the govern was hunting for him, the cartel was after him, assassins were hidden in the dark, and this paranoia was reinforced in reality by the violent raid McAfee endured. After that, he moved out of Orange Walk and settled into his beach house in Saint Pedro, bringing his entourage with him. McAfee took up permanent residence in the tourist town, living near another American retiree, a Florida man named Gregory Fall We'll be right back. After John McAfee's compound on the mainland of Belize was raided by the gang Suppression Unit, he moved his life to Saint Pedro on the island of Amber, Greece Key. His beach house over look the white sands and crystal blue waters of the Caribbean. Saint Pedre was a community largely composed of retirees from the US and Canada. Here's Jules Vasquez. They have a certain Margharitaville lifestyle, right, like they're all straight out of that Jim A. Buffett song. And he comes in and he has quotery of dangerous, huge quotes dangerous black people around him, right Like he has an entourage, right of these people around him. So he really doesn't fit in with that community, which is really more retirement gringos, right, and then he comes in with all this alacrity, all this m combustion. McAfee is suspicious with people he doesn't know. He tells Wired Magazine that he keeps mainly to his beach house and his women. He's having erratically and he's convinced he's a target, says Tamara Sniffin. He just thought they were out together because he stepped on the wrong toes. Of course, he would never be forthcoming on exactly like why he was being picked on, just very vaguely that he was the white man coming in and stepping on toes or whatever. McAfee's presence in Saint Pedro was disrupting everyday life for many locals, says Jeff Weiss. He's kind of terrorizing the neighborhood. Everyone's freaked out. He's scared of this guy Dodgs. You're biting people, the guards, you're staring at people, and it's about six months of high tension on this stretch of beach. There was one neighbor in particular who took McAfee to task about the dogs, Gregory Fall, a fifty two year old former contractor and restaurateur from Florida. Here's Tamara. I did know that Greg was really unhappy with the dog situation. I had heard that he was trying to talk to the mayor about it and anybody he could to try and get this dog situation remedied. I've been to that area and they were really scary dogs, very very intimidating when you walked on the beach. I mean they were running free and they would run right up patchen. Pretty ferocious. So all I know is that Greg and McAfee thought about that quite a bit. Gregfull didn't have much tolerance for McAfee's behavior. McAfee is pretty good at intimidating people. He's pretty good at manipulating people. But I sensed that, you know, Greg Fall just like had been around the block a few times himself and was just it was having none of it, and so when McAfee pushed, he pushed back, And these guys get into a dispute and complaints are filed, threats are made. Fall allegedly says, if you know, if your dogs keep offing me, I will poison them. The dogs are poisoned, and then soon thereafter, Greg Fall's housekeeper comes in one morning to find Fall shot dead. Here's the police press conference about the murder. She arrived at mister Fall's home where she saw him in a motionless state, lying in a pool of blood. The police were called and the scene was processed. The buddy had an apparent gunshot wound to the back of the heaven Tamara says that the killing shocked the North American retirees who were living in Belize. I mean, Greg was well liked. He was horribly executed, you know, so there was a lot of sadness and then anger. You know, a lot of people immediately assumed that McAfee had some liability in it, and they were upset. You know, we don't have many murders on the island, and we specially don't have expat to expat kind of murder. I mean, that's just unheard of. I think that's the only one I've ever heard of on this island. So yeah, then it was number one conversation at every local watering hole even that, and the watering hole gossip speculated that McAfee had ordered full be killed. I don't necessarily believe that it was McAfee who pulled the trigger, but like I said, he is always surrounded by armed guys and some very faithful people, and all I think he had to say was I want that soob dead, you know, and somebody said note taken. You know, in my mind, I think that's a likely scenario. And on the very day that Greg Fulls body was found, McAfee disappeared. He wasn't in his beach house, and though he was hiding from the police, he was basically talking to everyone else. Police say he is a person of interest, but have not called him a suspect or charged him. Despite that, McAfee says he's now in hiding fearful of what he calls a corrupt government. Belize's Prime minister publicly taunting McAfee Wednesday. It strikes me that he's extremely paranoid and in fact that it also far as to see bonkers. International and US television networks descend on Belize. McAfee gives several of them what they call exclusive interviews. He's on the crackly phone line here with ABC. I have had an adventure. I want to say that right now, sir, flying in the bottom of cavs Burt did for almost efeteen hours. I have buried myself in sand. I have slept on roofs ide have I will do whatever takes in case he didn't catch that, he said he buried himself in sand. By his account, he's the one being persecuted here running from the police. He started spreading a story that he wasn't wanted for murder at all, that he was wanted for hacking into the Belizian government. Here's McAfee talking to Australia's Channel seven News. I hacked the Polician government for five months and I have all that data, tens of thousands of hours, recordings and videos of the Prime Minister of ordering the murder of his competitors. McAfee made these claims with zero evidence, Though fears of the cartel became a running theme in the remaining years of McAfee's life. ABC also interviewed police spokesperson Raphael Martinez. He sounded almost puzzled by McAfee's flight. I did not know the reason why he should be well, not coming and forward to speak with the police. I mean, not coming forward knowing that you are wanted for questioning. I mean it begs the question exactly a state of mind. Of course, it was incredibly difficult for the murder victim's family to watch. Here's his father, Arthur Fall, speaking to SPS state Line from Australia. Do you believe that McAfee was involved. You're convinced that McAfee was involved, not entirely, but but but why would he run? Why did he not answer the questions? And if he has nothing to hide, why doesn't he speak. It's very frustrating to find that that that he gets all the attention and my son's kind of a prop for his infamy. The whole time. McAfee's playing the police and the media, trying to drum up sympathy while evading having to so questions about the murder. Here's Jeff again, I mean it was it was McAfee's fleeing that created the whole hullabaloo. He it was, it was it was his disappearance. It wasn't the discovery of Greg Fall's body that set the whole thing in motion. It was McAfee running away. McAfee's calling up American national news organizations and like ultimately flying down journalist, he actually winds up hanging out with a film crew. That's but again, it's like what he is mother's milk to a journalist. A great narrative, protagonist antagonist, high stakes. McAfee creates a compelling narrative, one that overshadows the news of Greg Fall's killing. This is a news story about McAfee running for cover, fleeing from corrupt Belizean officials. John McAfee had long ago recognized the power a news story could have. Remember that, even during his anti virus days, he was harnessing the media to drive sales of his product. Jules Vasquez watched as McAfee dominated the news cycle with his bizarre theatrics, and then McAfee went full crazy because you know, he really is a white man dancing at that point, right like he really is living out this fantasy. It just becomes this galloping circus of stupidity that he finds so cute. A man is dead, right, But yeah, so you know, he comes across as justice, this wild and crazy guy, and then he's the wanted person, and so he takes on that role completely and goes into full gringo fugitive mode, making a mockery of the police along the way, paints himself as the victim of judicial or a law enforcement system that wants entrup incarcerit and kill him. We'll be right back. Francois Garcia is a filmmaker based in Canada. He met John mccafee years before Greg Fall's death when he and his wife were on vacation in Belize. So fast forward to twenty twelve watching CNA, and I see the news reports about John McAfee on on their own one ponful questioning for the murder of his neighbor. I'm a filmmaker, I'm always hunting for a good story. I gotta jump on it. So this Canadian filmmaker calls McAfee. He says they make a verbal agreement to work together with Francois acting as a kind of pr agent free of charge. Francois offers to take over who is McAfee dot com, a website controlled by McAfee himself that posts updates on his whereabouts, and Francois also offers to help reach out to the media on McAfee's behalf. At this point, he has no opinion on whether McAfee killed fall. I immediately understood no matter what his claims were, either way was a good story. If he's innocent based on his claims, so it's a great story. If he's guilty of what he's accused of, it's still a great story. So it was a win win. Francois was picturing all the ways he could package and sell McAfee story. I'm thinking of feature film down the road, I'm thinking of a book. My money focus was on documentaries. Francois also says he made an offer to get McAfee out of Belize. He said he had a friend who could fly a plane to Mexico and land near the border. That McAfee would need to the border on foot, but that he could get him out of the country. He says McAfee didn't want to leave the media circus he created. He wanted to to stay. He wanted to continue. I mean he was saying that he was hiding in a sailboat. He was hiding in a cardboard box. He kept moving locations on the hour. In reality, he was sitting in a small apartment complex about twenty minutes from Belize, a city. As a filmmaker, Francois also wanted to get footage of McAfee on the ground in Belize, but he didn't have a team on Cole to send out to shoot McAfee. So he has a new idea, get the press involved to basically document McAfee for him, and Francois could always license this footage after he makes a call to Vice News as then editor in chief Rocco Castoro. I reached out to to Rocco and there there were in a plane hours leader. These vice reporters, Rocker Costoro and photographer Robert King, would get closer to McAfee than any of the other journalists in the wake of Gregfall's murder. They actually travel with him for weeks and they alter the trajectory of McAfee's Central American exploits. They meet up in Belize and make their way out of the country all together. The Vice reporters start rolling tape on McAfee. The Prime Minister has one hundred and fifty thousand dollars bounty. Im sholl if you are Sholl, yes kill. There was no one hundred and fifty thousand dollars on McAfee's head. But McAfee is building his own mythology here. He's the anti hero, the outlaw, escaping the corrupt Belizian government. They head for the border. On the phone, McAfee is giving instructions to Frontois team on what a post on who is McAfee dot com. So an unconfirmed, unnamed sources has contacted has contacted the blog with the information that mister McAfee has been has been arrested just across the border of police in the country, in the country of Mexico. Write that down. It's so funny to me that he's on the phone dictating misinformation. This story actually got picked up. A handful of news outlets published that McAfee was arrested in Mexico and then had to issue corrections. In fact, McAfee did make a successful border crossing. Michael McDonald is a reporter for Bloomberg News. In twenty twelve, he was reporting for Reuters out of Guatemala. Like so many others, he was assigned to cover the software entrepreneurs Saga. He snuck into Guanama from Belize. I mean, there are official checkpoints at the border, but it is a very porous border, so if you want to sneak in, it's it's not that difficult. Um. You know, there's a river separating both countries, so it's it's pretty easy to cross that at night if you want to. And McAfee's entry into Guatemala was actually illegal and obviously if you don't go through an official checkpoint, you have no stamp in your passport, and he had no Guatemala stamp in his passport, so he had essentially entered the country illegally. Remember McAfee crossing the border with two reporters from Vice is a situation engineered by Francois Garcia, who's watching this all unfold from Canada. I'm watching the madness from from Afar. But they want with John to guatemalaf did it crossed the first by car and then by by boat. Photo journalists Robert King took the famous Vice picture of John and Rocco and the headline we are with McAfee suckers. Vice published the picture of the image without removing ge location, and they just went viral. Robert King, the photographer who took the photo with geolocation data on it, later posted this video online of the moment they realized the data had leaked. Our good friends friends in New York published the XFT. Okay, here's the spin on this. You guys are fucked here. You realize that if we got right, you know that you're you're fighting for your life. Here. McAfee's voice sounds calm, but he's saying dire things to the reporters. That they'll likely be tortured because they're with him, that he may lose fingers and toes if he's found, and that there'd be a massive reward for his capture. McAfee's heard telling them that the story now is about how two journalists get out of a tight situation. If you get arrested with me, there is the chance that you might suffer some gil treatment. The way you spend this is that Jesus, they were coming to get us. We were on the line. Now we became part, we became part of a different story. At that point, the Vice reporters who were traveling with McAfee were widely blamed for the GEO data leak. We asked Rocco for a statement. He sent us this recording, which we've edited for length and clarity. He starts by saying, the data leak wasn't his fault. Yes, I instructed Vice staff multiple times to scrub the metadata from the image. I was never given a clear, specific reason for why the photo was published with the metadata intact. Rocco says that he was in the field with McAfee when the leak happened. I started receiving panic calls and messages from colleagues, friends and family regarding the exposure of the metadata and our exact coordinates. When King and I returned from Guatemala to the VICE office in Brooklyn, people looked at It's like we were ghosts that has just walked into the office. Roca Castoro and Robert King did suffer significant reputational damage. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Vice released a statement. Here's an exit quote. We have always been transparent in our filmmaking and will continue that practice. This will be no exception. The story as a whole has engaged people around the world precisely because it is so freaky, and even if it shows that we made mistakes on the ground during a very hectic and dangerous week of reporting on McAfee's mistakes, we are sure it's going to make one hell of a documentary end quote. But McAfee's other warnings that the revelations of his location would lead to arrests, torture, and interrogation did not come true. Here's Jeff Weiss again, to be clear, do the cops then come rolling down the street? No, they don't. That's not how it works. So so McAfee's like, oh shit, and like apparently he freaks out. I think it's on They have it on film of Macie what you got, so they run, they won't have In Guatemala City, reporter Michael McDonald is in Guatemala City covering McAfee's escapades. He recognizes the former Attorney General of Guatemala in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel. He had this lawyer named t les Fro Guera, and TLEs Farro was sort of this this powerful lawyer that you would contact in Guatemala that the elites would use when they were in trouble. Ex presidents would hire him when they were in trouble, so he was sort of the go to lawyer for big cases. The lawyer tells Mike that the goal is to keep McAfee from being extradited. In this clip from Vice you can hear McAfee asking for reassurances that he won't get sent back to Belize to because I'm not worried. Of course they want. While McAfee was in limbo in Guatemala, Mike interviewed him in his hotel room. He said that at times McAfee seemed like he wasn't all there. He did come across as deranged at some points, um I like he did. He did appear to be on drugs. He always insisted that he wasn't. You know, some of the things he does and some of the things he says to you make you wonder are you on drugs now? In the end, McAfee was arrested for entering Guatemala illegally. Vice News shot footage of him being shoved into a police fan and cut it off to prison again, he seems composed. Where are they taking you, John John? Where are you going to jail? Even from jail mac. If he couldn't stay away from the media, he would call reporters, including Mike, at all hours. The first time he called it was probably three in the morning. Actually, he told me his jail cell was lacking color and he wanted me to figure out how to get plants into his jail cell in order to spruce it up. A couple days later he called me from the jail again, and he said he was bored, and he wanted me to bring a chess set to his jail cell, so he would call me. He probably called me three or four times from the jail cell. In jail, he's vulnerable. His fate seemed to be in the hand of the Guatemalan authorities. As much as he tries to influence things from inside prison, he's powerless. I don't think he anticipated ending up in a jail in Guatemala. I think he probably figured he could work his way around that and get out of that. So he, you know, he created this whole scene, and he faked a heart attack and they took him to the hospital, that's right. Fearing that he might be deported back to Belize, McAfee tried to retake control by faking a heart attack. He was treated for chest pains and then went back into detention. Ironically, despite all of his fears, Belizian authorities never took concrete steps to bring him back. I remember speaking with the police spokesman and Belize and he kept telling me, well, he's a you know, John's a person of interest and we would like him back. But he told me they weren't going to file an official extradition request. I always wondered, well why not, And so I was always suspicious that maybe they maybe they don't want him back, and they just kind of want to get rid of him, and they don't really care what his future held. The Belizian police didn't respond to numerous requests for comments, and Guatemala found a way to get rid of McAfee as well. Within the week, Mike gets word that McAfee's going to be deported back to the US for entering Guatemala illegally. A crowd of journalists rushed to see him off before he leaves. So we were at the airport in about ten minutes, and we were all there waiting for him. I mean, the entire press crew was there waiting for him. Immigration officers were there, the police were there, and the pickup showed up, and it was just sort of this mad scramble to get the last quote from John McAfee before he was driven through this gate at this side gate at the airport and onto the tarmac. Mike doesn't remember what McAfee said, only that his demeanor was calm. The truck went through the gates and onto the tarmac, and Mike returned to his office to file a story that John mccafee had been deported. My editors were in Mexico at the time, and they wanted to he absolutely certain that he was on the plane, and so I was like, well, how do I figure this out? And then I remembered it, Well, I wonder if his Guatemala's cell phone is still working. So I called the Guatemala cell phone and he picked up, and he was on the plane, and you could hear the dinging of the seat belt signs and you could hear the captain speaking in the PA system, and he said, yeah, I'm on my way to Florida. And that was just the first flight that they could get me on back to the US. And so we're about to take off and I have to go. And with that the wild ride was over, McAfee is flown back to the United States, away from Belize, where he would have had to face questioning over Greg folds murder. The victim's family never saw justice. They filed a civil suit in the Middle District Court in Florida. The judge granted fourth daughter five million dollars to compensate for the harm caused by her father's death. The court added another twenty million dollars to quote punish McAfee for his misconduct and deter further such action in the future end quote. When the judgment came down, McAfee refused to respond to requests from the court and never appeared to answer for the complaint. He tweeted, I was never charged with murder by Belizing authorities or any other authority. It was a suit based entirely on media reporting. McAfee was at least partially right. He was never charged. Many in the expact community in Belize, as well as journalists who closely reported on McAfee's time there, blame him for Greg Fall's murder, and if that's true, then he got away with it. In his lifetime, McAfee succeeded in evading consequences for many of his actions, but this would be the most notorious. You might think that MCA at this point is at an all time low. He's sixty seven years old, vending off accusations of murder and rape. He says he can't access any of his money, that his accounts of frozen, but his return to the US is the beginning of a personal renaissance. Once again, McAfee reinvents himself and surprises everyone by launching an unlikely bid to be the next President of the United States. That's next time on Foundering, The John mccafee Story. Foundering is hosted by me Jamie Tarabay Sean When is our executive producer. Pratana Prakash contributed reporting to this episode. Special thanks to Young Young and Eileena Peng for helping with production. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Serif Josef is our audio engineer, Mark Million and Vandermay, Andy Martin and Molly Shoots 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.