It's January twenty nineteen and John McAfee is at sea. He's fleeing the United States after hearing that he was being investigated for tax evasion. He's with his partner Janus, their dogs, and security guards, sailing his boat from Miami to the Caribbean. The photojournalist Robert King is there too, filming the whole thing. Through the course of the journey, McAfee is seen drinking and smoking, and there are shots of ziploc bags with what looked like synthetic drugs. For King, documenting McAfee's travels was an exhausting assignment because there was a lot of you know, mind altering substances and alcohol, and we were sleeping with guns, and you know, it was nuts. McAfee, though, seems oddly at ease when he's talking to King. Remember they go back to his days in Belize when King was filming there for Vice. As they make for the Dominican Republic, McAfee tells King, this is the most important video he's ever made. I will fabricate whatever reality I see fifth to keep eyeballs on us. Robert, are we clearly do you have a problem with that. I'm near the album. This is a clip from the Netflix film Running with the Devil, The Wild World of John McAfee. You can hear McAfee start to come upon. If this one does not sell your fucking footage, nothing will, Robert, nothing will. Do you understand I have created this story? Do you understand? I have fabricated a perception that is matchment reality, ran jury's indictments, foreign countries, guns, that Uni video. So you tell me that this is not gold. It is gold. I really take in this golf and like fives check artis have woven it into the most magnificent jewels you must see. So it's hard to say what was real and what was theater? I mean, because he was he wasn't he he did Shakespeare plays. I mean he was extremely intelligent, well read. But I think a lot of that is psychosis too. When they dock in the Dominican Republic, everyone winds up in jail because their boat is loaded with cash, actual bricks of gold, drugs, and guns. McAfee did not want to get sent back to the US and face the American justice system. They all get deported. King is sent back to Tennessee. McAfee, who was born in England uses his UK passport to get him and janis transported to Europe. He will never set foot in America again. You're listening to Foundering. I'm your host, Jamie Tara Bay. In the final episode of this season, we retrace the last days of John McAfee. He's speaking at tech conferences and getting deeper and deeper into the dark side of crypto, all the while he's staggering across Europe. He's terrified of spending the rest of his life in an American prison, and yet he cannot resist the spotlight. He baits authorities with teasing tweets that hide his location but show a continued, reckless defiance. He's in his seventies, his paranoia is surging, his associates are fleeing, and he's left isolated, increasingly erratic and desperate. Success in business brings a sort of currency, not just money. People like McAfee, who started his own company, became a household name, and helped create an industry. There's a cultural currency that comes with that too, a cybersecurity legend. John McAfee pioneered the anti virus industry full stop. John was a super genius man. He really does me yeah, our introduction, mister John Jobs Gates Bazos. We practically worship these figures. For a fleeting period in the late nineteen eighties and nineties, McAfee belonged to this club. He understood the power of this currency, and he used it to an extreme that none of his peers did. He weaponized it the money and celebrity he accrued the enablers he surrounded himself with. McAfee often used these to benefit himself and to do harm up until the very end, and in those final days, there was very little left of the life McAfee once lived, except for one thing, his daughter Jen. McAfee had Jen with his first wife, Fran. We heard from Fran at the beginning of this season. She was the eighteen year old student in the math class McAfee was teaching in Louisiana. It was like living on the largest roller coaster in the world. So she had these tremendous highs, but then you bottom down and that was life. McAfee had a tumultuous relationship ship with his daughter too. Jen has rarely spoken in public, preferring to keep as much of her life private as possible. She declined to be interviewed, but her lawyer spoke on her behalf. Jen's had a lifetime to watch her father put his foibles and idiosyncrasies on display for the world to see, but they had moments of intense love where he exhibited his devotion to her. One example we found in our reporting is that during Jen's teenage meltdowns at home with her mother, she would ask for her dad. McAfee would fly often across the country within twenty four hours to be with her. There were other moments too. Here's Jen's lawyer, Joy Athanasiu. Jen and Joy have been friends since childhood. We had gone a visit and she was pregnant. His home in Woodland, her Colorado was very mountainous, with some cabins throughout the property, but it was a considerable hike to get to these cabins, and there was a point where she needed to slow down because, if I remember correctly, she was quite pregnant at that point. And he was really really attentive to her needs and really protective of her, but he could also be incredibly spiteful. The ups and downs in their relationship prompted him to rant to various people that children were the worst and no one should ever have them. Jen is the only known child of McAfee, although he once tweeted that he'd fathered forty seven children. We learned he posted that after he and jan had had a particularly bad phone call. McAfee had a lot of complicated relationships. He alienated a lot of people, and by twenty nineteen it was just McAfee and his partner Janus. The couple arrived in London in late July after being deported from the Caribbean. McAfee kept up a steady presence on Twitter, making claims about his whereabouts that were almost certainly fabrications, but by October he'd made his way to Spain. Here he is giving a speech on stage at a blockchain conference in Barcelona. Governments are just now starting to see the blockchain and cryptocurrency as an opportunity or a threat or something to fear. We asked Janus when they had come to Spain and why, and we were surprised that she was Heiji. Okay, so I can't really say when we arrived in Spain. The friends that were assisting Johnny, you know, those were John's friends, and there was an expectation of privacy that I want to be sure I'm respecting. She told us she was worried for her safety. She thought she'd been followed while shopping, and she didn't know who to trust. It was McAfee's relentless tweeting over the ensuing months that ultimately revealed his movements. Images he posted from his daily life caught the attention of at least one amateur sleuth, who goes by the name Senor Bigottis Catalan for mister Mustache. Here's our contributing reporter, Matthew Bremner. So we got a tip from Senor Bigottis and he told us to go to a tattoo parlor where we know McAfee visited a couple of times. It's called Scorpio Tattoo. It's in the center of Gambrills, and we spoke to the owner, Santiago Quebas. Cambriel's is a tiny beach community on Catalonia's Golden Coast, south of the Rocky Parades Mountains and ninety minutes from Barcelona by car. The population is just thirty thousand people. Santiago says McAfee came to his shop in late twenty nineteen. He knew exactly what he wanted. I was struck by it because I said, what is this you want? He said, well, look, this is like a word, a symbol of mine to know that I am alive. The tattoo that McAfee wanted was the word whacked. That tattoo became famous, a totem for McAfee's followers to brandish, alongside conspiracies that he'd been a wanted man who wouldn't go quietly. He was convinced that powerful people wanted to kill him, and he advertised it on Twitter to make sure everyone knew. Santiago didn't know any of this at the time. He didn't even know what the word whacked meant, but McAfee left an impression on him. They chatted a lot over the hour and a half McAfee was in his chair. I thought he was quite a funny person, ugly, very nice. At the time. I didn't know who he was until I got a call from a newspaper in Tarragona and they told me. By the next year, things changed sharply from McAfee and his quiet existence in Spain. Twenty twenty begins with the rapid spread of the coronavirus, sending the world into crisis. Spain is among the hardest hit. In the beginning, the country is forced into an extraordinary lockdown. The Twitter sleuth Senor Bigottis notices that McAfee's showcasing he's defiance of those restrictions in his tweets at the beginning. He was in Tarragona, I think, and he was the few people that he was outside in the in the street. I thought, this guy is gonna have problems. Here's our reporter, Matthew. Spain has one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. Military on the streets, police are everywhere. And it's at this time that Senor Bigottis finds himself really tracking the whereabouts of John McAfee quite closely. Something to know about Senor Bigottis is he's just a guy who's bored online. He's locked in COVID quarantine like everyone else, and this is a way to pass the time. And in case you were wondering, mister mustache does have a mustache. It was funny for me because just in the beginning he has a picture peeking in the parking of McDonald's. If he didn't catch that he says, he finds a picture of McAfee peeing in the parking lot of a McDonald's and this is where he starts noticing very familiar things, things very close to home. On McAfee's Twitter feet he published a video near the beach, I could see a park, a child park. That's it's here. In Gambriel's he realizes that McAfee is in his hometown. I see some pictures and identify that he was in this National road National three hundred and forty. About a mile outside of town, just off a busy main road, is an abandoned hotel called Daurada Park. This is where Senor Begottis believes McAfee was staying. In early twenty twenty, Matthew visited the hotel. So the roof of the main entrance there is falling down. There's a big chunk out of it, as if someone had taken like a bite out of it. However, there is a security camera there. The hotel hasn't been operating in any official capacity since twenty seventeen. UM. There are no tourists here, that's for sure. On those balconies there is evidence that people are living there, So there are tables, their plants, their mosquito nets. In twenty eighteen, about a year after receiving its last guest, the police raided the hotel. Here's Rebecca Carunco, a crime reporter for the newspaper L Bays who covered McAfee's time in Spain. So beens that want people. The local authorities thought there was some sort of illegal activity going on there, related to a brothel or something like that, but then they raid the place and find out it's a crypto mine. Of course, a cryptocurrency mine in itself is not an illegal thing. It's just that some people who have cryptocurrency farms are often illegally tapping the electric supply. Matthew says it's an unusual place to have a crypto mine, mainly because the energy bills are high there, and well it's just really hot and supercomputer as well. They need to be kept cool. So it would be much more likely to find a crypto mine in a place like Alaska or Canada, and not on Spain's Mediterranean coast. Authorities found nothing illegal happening with the operation. No one was arrested, no assets were seized, the crypto mine was left intact. It flew under the radar until McAfee started uploading photos and videos in early twenty twenty. Senior Bigotis talks to us about one video in particular, which shows acafee at a bar with Janis talking to two Russians or Russian speakers, and they're teaching him and Janis how to speak Russian. I would like to introduce Janis and our Russian coaches, job Smith America. There's been a lot of speculation about this connection between McAfee and Russians in both the Spanish and international press of late For example, the Daily Mail called the hotel at the Park a ghost hotel which is owned by an unnamed Russian businessman. It all sounds very vague, and these shady references to Russians, I mean, it sounds a bit like a bad nineteen eighties Hollywood action film. But I mean that's where we are at the moment. No one who was close to McAfee at the time would tell us much about his associates, but Janus says their collaboration dated back to at least twenty eighteen. Janus also confirmed that she and McAfee had spent time at the Dawdada Park Hotel. We weren't able to get ahold of McAfee's associates in Spain. McAfee seemed to enjoy cultivating this air of mystery around them. The idea that they were powerful people with important connections in Russia appears to have been concocted by McAfee himself. From what we could gather, it seemed to be just another group of people trying to squeeze money for themselves out of crypto desperate enough or maybe savvy enough to hitch their wagon to McAfee. The crypto operation gives gafee enough cash to continue traveling. In the summer of twenty twenty, he's railing publicly about the loss of personal freedom the pandemic has caused, and he was making a joke of the health crisis on Twitter. I just put on my Twitter account a few hours ago. I'm auctioning off my COVID nineteen masks, which all made from women's underwear, all right, and Janis first of all wears them to stretch them and soften them. And the charges from the US against McAfee are still not public, but the net is tightening. He receives a notice from Google saying the IRS is asking for information about his account. Janis gets a similar message, and yet McAfee can't stop tweeting, discussing American foreign policy, talking about all the girlfriends who tried to kill him. And then on October third, a Saturday, McAfee is at the airport in Barcelona. He's about to board a flight to Istanbul, but his passport gets flagged and police take him into custody. Here's a report from Reuters. US federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against McAfee overcharges that he evaded taxes and wipefully failed to file returns for decades. He'd done everything possible to avoid accountability, dodging process servers, faking a heart attack, and sailing to the Caribbean to evade American authorities. There was no escape from this. Here's Rebecca the Lpius reporter. When he is arrested, it's a local judge from Catalonia who looks at what evidence there is and whether they put him in prison or not. Imprision, the judge decides that McAfee is a flight risk and should be locked up. Almost three weeks after his arrest, Janice posts an audio recording McAfee made from prison. She now has control over his Twitter account and posts updates on his behalf. I love you all and I miss being able to share videos and photos with you. It is impossible for America to extradite me. I do believe this. The documentation they have discovered about me, they simply pulls out of their ass And the Spanish people on Spanish courts are not stupid. So I do not work. I may even get out on bail in a week or two, and if not, I will eventually be The intention here might be to reassure his fans that he'll be released, but to me, it sounds more like he's trying to convince himself. He's slower, hesitant, even pensive. He almost sounds defeated. We'll be right back. John McAfee was facing a tough legal fight using money he apparently obtained through his crypto work. He hired several attorneys to argue his case. There was Niche Sannon. My name is Niche Santon. I'm a federal criminal defense attorney in Chicago. I have an office in New York. I also work on international tradition matters and practiced federal criminal trial work around the country. On the crypto side, there was Andrew Gordon. My name is Andrew Gordon. I'm the managing attorney and president at Gordon Law in Chicago, and we are a corporate tax and cryptocurrency law firm. McAfee had another two attorneys in Spain on various fronts. They were fighting the DJ and SEC charges and the extradition request. Andrew spoke to McAfee regularly about the case. I asked him how McAfee sounded when they spoke, Very positive spirits, very upbeat. Now, certainly prison is no favorable place to be in, but he would always talk about how popular he was in the prison and how respected as the old man in the prison and really is trying to make the best of it. McAfee would spend his last eight and a half months in Brand's to prison. The prison is forty five minutes outside of Barcelona. It's near the town of Martorel. So Matthew went to visit the site in the spring of twenty twenty two. The prison itself is this kind of nineteen seventies concrete monstrosity, and in the background you can sort of see the big wire fences which are about I don't know, three to four meters tall. And then there are these green roofed warehouses, which I assume are the cellbox where mac if you, probably spent a lot of his time. Matthew is there with Founderings executive producer Sean when they walk deeper inside the complex, beyond several checkpoints and the first bend in the road, but it starts to get quiet. There is no one around, only what looks like the prisoners entrance up ahead. But then the police car pulls up, so this is the police tell Matthew and Sean to leave the kick that they returned to the main entrance. In the hallway, they made a prison worker who says she knew McAfee. Do you remember if he had a lot of visitors. I can't give you this information, it's confidential, but I will only say he was a nice man to deal with. McAfee was very active on Twitter throughout his time in prison, describing the food and fellow inmates. But over time McAfee's mood changed, and this too was reflected in his tweets. Titles a tweet Notes from Prison, and he says, my body's confined. My mind has always been confined by fears, longings, ambitions, escapes from boredom, A prisoner of my own desires, circum stands move me from one prison to the other. There's little difference. His words are revealing because in a way, it's McAfee being honest in public for one of the first times in his life. He was struggling mentally, emotionally, and physically. McAfee and his lawyers argue in an extradition hearing that he's old and weak with a chronic lung condition. They say even a few years in jail could be a death sentence. If I am extraditement to the US, please translate it, I will certainly spend the rest of my life in prison conversed according to jail, all these things into consideration. Thank you. McAfee's lost weight. His hair is dark and pulled back from his face. He's hunched over. We were told that when McAfee's daughter watched this video from the hearing, she said he didn't even look like himself. A week later, the Spanish court decided to grant the US government's extradition request. Janner spoke to McAfee on the morning of June twenty third, he just returned from court. Our conversation was not There was nothing different in his voice. There was no change of his attitude. There was no He didn't sound down or depressed or anything. He actually was like, okay, so what's the attorney's working on. You know, I understand that we got this appeal and he was wanting to know, Okay, what's on the next steps that we're going to do, so you know, we can move forward in five days. Breaking news on your Wednesday afternoon. John McAfee, the creator of the McAfee anti virus software, has been found dead in his jail cell in Spain. Seventy five year old was arrested last October at the International Airport in Barstow. It's been a challenge trying to ascertain exactly what happened. In the early evening of June twenty third. Inside McAfee's cell, Janice told us that she'd been given a report on the investigation into the events of that day, but she wouldn't show it to us. Neither the police nor the court would say anything about the case, citing strict privacy laws in Spain. We know though, that at six pm When guards opened the door to McAfee's cell, they found him hanging from something attached to the window. John McAfee, the cybersecurity pioneer, the accused murderer and fraudster about to be extradited to face the American justice system, is dead at the age of seventy five. But Rebecca, the crime reporter, said Catalonia officials issued a press release announcing his death in prison. So I start calling police officers that I know who have ties to the area where this happened. Her contacts tell her that they believe McAfee was left alone in his cell for a couple of hours and that's when he killed himself. From the beginning, the police tell me that there might be a suicide note. A prison officer reports finding what appeared to be a suicide note in McAfee's pocket. It reads, I am a phantom parasite. I want to control my future, which does not exist. Janis shared this note on Twitter. We asked several people close to McAfee, who told us that the handwriting and the style are definitely his. The coroner rules his death a suicide. The case goes to a local court for review. The judge said, Okay, with everything I have, I have no indication that there is anything strange about this suicide. Rebecca says. In Spain, all violent deaths, including suicides, are investigated. The Spanish penal code considers suicide as a form of violent death. Why well, because you kill yourself. Andrew Gordon, McAfee's lawyer in Chicago found out when a reporter called his office with the news. She called me and said, asking for a comment on John's death. This is just bullshit. That's just you know, someone pulling her leg to get lost. Um. Then we got the second call, and then I started searching on the internet, and then I reached out to Janis, and Janis at that time was going through the literal same experience where she was finding out on the news in Barcelona. Janus struggled with the bureaucracy. She didn't understand why she couldn't see the body right away. When the Spanish authorities eventually grunted her access, she only saw McAfee from behind a window. It's likely Janus was kept in a different room because of COVID restrictions, but it just compounded her perception that Spanish authorities were involved in a cover up, and I think it's very telling that here I am a year later and I still can't get his body. Remember, Janis told us that she had been given a report on the investigation into the events of that day, but again she wouldn't show it to us. Janas says there was a brief discrepancy in the description of the noose. At first the police said he used a shoe string, and then later called it a rope. This could easily be explained by a clerical error, but Jana seized on it as yet another clue of something suspicious. Honestly, I think from the very beginning I didn't believe it, and so these things were just confirmation. Janice is determined to get her own independent autopsy report to prove that McAfee didn't take his own life. She's latched onto the theory that he was murdered. She believes someone drugged and strangled him. And it's hard to I don't know, it's just hard to move forward. It's hard to think about anything else because I just want to have these answers. I just want, you know, I just want't be done with this part. Court delays and the lack of information have fueled the perception that the Spanish authorities have something to hide. The Internet is awash with conspiracy theories. The circumstances played perfectly to McAfee's fan base. He'd been saying for years he was wanted, that people were out to get him. He got it tattooed on his arm. He said he'd never kill himself, that if he was found hanging like Jeffrey Epstein, it could only be a hit job. The absence of any kind of resolution has even one of McAfee's lawyers believing it wasn't a suicide. I think you blamed either cover uprespacidity. That's niche Sannon again. I mean there's two extremes in it, and I just can't believe a government is that stupid. So it's got to be a cover up. I mean, what else is there? What else has left? The timing of it is suspicious, the way it supposedly happened is suspicious. And for him to say it's going to happen, none of this adds up. It wasn't John's personality to do something like this. But Rebecca has covered the Spanish police for years and has at times written critically of their methods, But she says a cover up is unlikely and that the real issue is their policy of silence on open cases. In the absence of information, she says, conspiracy theories can flourish. Look my newspaper reacted by saying, this is a story of global international interest. We have to cover it. But there was none of that interest on the part of authorities. They didn't call a press conference where they made it super clear what had happened. They weren't transparent. Now everyone is wondering what happened to him? So why is the state being so tight lipped? But Rebecca thinks it has something to do with embarrassment. And when a person who is in custody, who is in the custody of the administration, ends up committing suicide, there is negligence of some kind. You do have to do some kind of critical reflection on that. Some six months after his death, prosecutors in both New York and Tennessee applied to have their cases against McAfee dismissed. Meanwhile, McAfee's body remains in a morgue in Barcelona. McAfee's Spanish lawyer, Javier Villalba, says that Janus is appealing the judges ruling of suicide to a higher court and they're waiting to hear whether the case would be accepted, he told us in a WhatsApp message. From our point of view, the autopsy report from the government is incomplete. This is why it's taking so long to repatriate the body, because as long as this case is open, McAfee's remains can't go anywhere. We'll be right back. While McAfee's body is stuck in limbo, his family is left in another kind of purgatory. Janus's legal appeals prevent the people who were close to McAfee from being able to bury him, and his money has apparently vanished. In conversations with Janus and the attorneys were told McAfee did not leave an estate. That's what he said to me. He didn't have a will when whatever crypto he had that was his crypto, So I don't know what would have happened to that or wallets. I don't you know. Obviously I had access to his phone, but that information wasn't there, so wherever that was, I don't know. Remember, McAfee has two multimillion dollar lawsuits against him that are outstanding the aerotrekking wrongful death, and the killing of his neighbor. In belize any money left in an estate would likely go to pay those judgments. His lawyer said, we know McAfee made a habit of buying assets and putting them in other people's names. It was one of the things noted in the indictment for tax evasion. We heard that he rarely had money on hand, something Janus confirmed. Were you that John didn't have any money at the end, he didn't have he was cash poor. Yeah, you know, when I was the one here with him, I was the one that when his money ran out, I used my money, you know, my money which was separate from his, you know, to pay for lawyers right, to make sure he had money on his books and he had what he needed. And yet Janice also told us that McAfee had taken care of her financially. She described her situation as comfortable. McAfee's daughter, Jen has said that she has no interest in his money or in pushing for an investigation. She would, however, like to put an end to a newer conspiracy that McAfee faked his own death. Jen's being deluged by people telling her that McAfee has been spotted in Texas. There's one really effective way to shut this noise down, says her lawyer Joy. The only thing that she would like is she would like his remains to be released. She is a person of faith. It has been very, very difficult for her to think about his being kept by the Spanish government and not being allowed to have him laid at rest, and she wants to do everything possible to prevent any further delay. She does not contest the findings of the court that he died by suicide. Jen knew her father longer than just about anybody, longer than his team of lawyers, certainly longer than his Twitter fans who propelled the conspiracies about his death. Jen knew who he was, and she witnessed, both in public and in private, his self destruction. There were times in the last few years where they had conversations and it was apparent that he was not sober, and of course he could be very dismissive, and you know, that's that's that's an effect of drinking and of addiction. Sadly, at the beginning of this season, I mentioned that when McAfee tells the story of his life. He always starts it in the same way he talks about his father, a violent alcoholic. Nobody has an ideal life, even children. Dad. When you're fifteen fifteen, they have shot himself. He shot himself. Yeah. People always looked at the beast to explain the present. It doesn't work that way. McAfee set out to defy the example his father set for him, but in the end, he's drinking and substance abuse, his volatile temper, the strained relationship with his daughter all seemed to point to the same destination. It also fits that a man who escaped accountability at every turn in his life was caught like others who thought they were above the law, by something as simple as not paying your taxes. And maybe the prospect of being forced to do something he'd bragged he would never do was something that his arrogance couldn't tolerate. I always wanted to know who his lifelong friends were, the people who'd stayed with him through it all. I was told he didn't have any Most of the ones who stuck around were there because they benefited from him. I heard he would discard people when they no longer were useful to him. Nearly everyone we spoke to said that felt manipulated by him, conned by him, betrayed by him. That he was the ultimate hype man who could sell anyone anything. The final con was a promise he'd made publicly that a flood of embarrassing and dangerous information would be released upon his death, a so called dead man's switch. It's what the conspiracists have been waiting so long for, but no data trove or secret files ever emerged. It did, however, succeed in keeping the McAfee name alive a little longer even after his death, lingering there like that little shield in the bottom corner of the computer screen. This season of Foundering was hosted by me Jamie Tarabay Sean When Is Our executive producer. Matthew Bramner contributed reporting to this episode. Special thanks to Young Young Gilda Di Carli and Catherine Fink for help with production, and to Jakie Dablos, Nick Turner, and Lucy Papa Christu. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Sure if Usurf is our audio engineer and editorial assistant. Mark Million oversaw production of this episode and edited the story along with Andy Martin, Anne Vandermay, and Molly Shitz. This is the end of the John McAfee story. If you liked our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends and keep us in your feed. We'll be back with more Foundering See you next time.

It's January twenty nineteen and John McAfee is at sea. He's fleeing the United States after hearing that he was being investigated for tax evasion. He's with his partner Janus, their dogs, and security guards, sailing his boat from Miami to the Caribbean. The photojournalist Robert King is there too, filming the whole thing. Through the course of the journey, McAfee is seen drinking and smoking, and there are shots of ziploc bags with what looked like synthetic drugs. For King, documenting McAfee's travels was an exhausting assignment because there was a lot of you know, mind altering substances and alcohol, and we were sleeping with guns, and you know, it was nuts. McAfee, though, seems oddly at ease when he's talking to King. Remember they go back to his days in Belize when King was filming there for Vice. As they make for the Dominican Republic, McAfee tells King, this is the most important video he's ever made. I will fabricate whatever reality I see fifth to keep eyeballs on us. Robert, are we clearly do you have a problem with that. I'm near the album. This is a clip from the Netflix film Running with the Devil, The Wild World of John McAfee. You can hear McAfee start to come upon. If this one does not sell your fucking footage, nothing will, Robert, nothing will. Do you understand I have created this story? Do you understand? I have fabricated a perception that is matchment reality, ran jury's indictments, foreign countries, guns, that Uni video. So you tell me that this is not gold. It is gold. I really take in this golf and like fives check artis have woven it into the most magnificent jewels you must see. So it's hard to say what was real and what was theater? I mean, because he was he wasn't he he did Shakespeare plays. I mean he was extremely intelligent, well read. But I think a lot of that is psychosis too. When they dock in the Dominican Republic, everyone winds up in jail because their boat is loaded with cash, actual bricks of gold, drugs, and guns. McAfee did not want to get sent back to the US and face the American justice system. They all get deported. King is sent back to Tennessee. McAfee, who was born in England uses his UK passport to get him and janis transported to Europe. He will never set foot in America again. You're listening to Foundering. I'm your host, Jamie Tara Bay. In the final episode of this season, we retrace the last days of John McAfee. He's speaking at tech conferences and getting deeper and deeper into the dark side of crypto, all the while he's staggering across Europe. He's terrified of spending the rest of his life in an American prison, and yet he cannot resist the spotlight. He baits authorities with teasing tweets that hide his location but show a continued, reckless defiance. He's in his seventies, his paranoia is surging, his associates are fleeing, and he's left isolated, increasingly erratic and desperate. Success in business brings a sort of currency, not just money. People like McAfee, who started his own company, became a household name, and helped create an industry. There's a cultural currency that comes with that too, a cybersecurity legend. John McAfee pioneered the anti virus industry full stop. John was a super genius man. He really does me yeah, our introduction, mister John Jobs Gates Bazos. We practically worship these figures. For a fleeting period in the late nineteen eighties and nineties, McAfee belonged to this club. He understood the power of this currency, and he used it to an extreme that none of his peers did. He weaponized it the money and celebrity he accrued the enablers he surrounded himself with. McAfee often used these to benefit himself and to do harm up until the very end, and in those final days, there was very little left of the life McAfee once lived, except for one thing, his daughter Jen. McAfee had Jen with his first wife, Fran. We heard from Fran at the beginning of this season. She was the eighteen year old student in the math class McAfee was teaching in Louisiana. It was like living on the largest roller coaster in the world. So she had these tremendous highs, but then you bottom down and that was life. McAfee had a tumultuous relationship ship with his daughter too. Jen has rarely spoken in public, preferring to keep as much of her life private as possible. She declined to be interviewed, but her lawyer spoke on her behalf. Jen's had a lifetime to watch her father put his foibles and idiosyncrasies on display for the world to see, but they had moments of intense love where he exhibited his devotion to her. One example we found in our reporting is that during Jen's teenage meltdowns at home with her mother, she would ask for her dad. McAfee would fly often across the country within twenty four hours to be with her. There were other moments too. Here's Jen's lawyer, Joy Athanasiu. Jen and Joy have been friends since childhood. We had gone a visit and she was pregnant. His home in Woodland, her Colorado was very mountainous, with some cabins throughout the property, but it was a considerable hike to get to these cabins, and there was a point where she needed to slow down because, if I remember correctly, she was quite pregnant at that point. And he was really really attentive to her needs and really protective of her, but he could also be incredibly spiteful. The ups and downs in their relationship prompted him to rant to various people that children were the worst and no one should ever have them. Jen is the only known child of McAfee, although he once tweeted that he'd fathered forty seven children. We learned he posted that after he and jan had had a particularly bad phone call. McAfee had a lot of complicated relationships. He alienated a lot of people, and by twenty nineteen it was just McAfee and his partner Janus. The couple arrived in London in late July after being deported from the Caribbean. McAfee kept up a steady presence on Twitter, making claims about his whereabouts that were almost certainly fabrications, but by October he'd made his way to Spain. Here he is giving a speech on stage at a blockchain conference in Barcelona. Governments are just now starting to see the blockchain and cryptocurrency as an opportunity or a threat or something to fear. We asked Janus when they had come to Spain and why, and we were surprised that she was Heiji. Okay, so I can't really say when we arrived in Spain. The friends that were assisting Johnny, you know, those were John's friends, and there was an expectation of privacy that I want to be sure I'm respecting. She told us she was worried for her safety. She thought she'd been followed while shopping, and she didn't know who to trust. It was McAfee's relentless tweeting over the ensuing months that ultimately revealed his movements. Images he posted from his daily life caught the attention of at least one amateur sleuth, who goes by the name Senor Bigottis Catalan for mister Mustache. Here's our contributing reporter, Matthew Bremner. So we got a tip from Senor Bigottis and he told us to go to a tattoo parlor where we know McAfee visited a couple of times. It's called Scorpio Tattoo. It's in the center of Gambrills, and we spoke to the owner, Santiago Quebas. Cambriel's is a tiny beach community on Catalonia's Golden Coast, south of the Rocky Parades Mountains and ninety minutes from Barcelona by car. The population is just thirty thousand people. Santiago says McAfee came to his shop in late twenty nineteen. He knew exactly what he wanted. I was struck by it because I said, what is this you want? He said, well, look, this is like a word, a symbol of mine to know that I am alive. The tattoo that McAfee wanted was the word whacked. That tattoo became famous, a totem for McAfee's followers to brandish, alongside conspiracies that he'd been a wanted man who wouldn't go quietly. He was convinced that powerful people wanted to kill him, and he advertised it on Twitter to make sure everyone knew. Santiago didn't know any of this at the time. He didn't even know what the word whacked meant, but McAfee left an impression on him. They chatted a lot over the hour and a half McAfee was in his chair. I thought he was quite a funny person, ugly, very nice. At the time. I didn't know who he was until I got a call from a newspaper in Tarragona and they told me. By the next year, things changed sharply from McAfee and his quiet existence in Spain. Twenty twenty begins with the rapid spread of the coronavirus, sending the world into crisis. Spain is among the hardest hit. In the beginning, the country is forced into an extraordinary lockdown. The Twitter sleuth Senor Bigottis notices that McAfee's showcasing he's defiance of those restrictions in his tweets at the beginning. He was in Tarragona, I think, and he was the few people that he was outside in the in the street. I thought, this guy is gonna have problems. Here's our reporter, Matthew. Spain has one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. Military on the streets, police are everywhere. And it's at this time that Senor Bigottis finds himself really tracking the whereabouts of John McAfee quite closely. Something to know about Senor Bigottis is he's just a guy who's bored online. He's locked in COVID quarantine like everyone else, and this is a way to pass the time. And in case you were wondering, mister mustache does have a mustache. It was funny for me because just in the beginning he has a picture peeking in the parking of McDonald's. If he didn't catch that he says, he finds a picture of McAfee peeing in the parking lot of a McDonald's and this is where he starts noticing very familiar things, things very close to home. On McAfee's Twitter feet he published a video near the beach, I could see a park, a child park. That's it's here. In Gambriel's he realizes that McAfee is in his hometown. I see some pictures and identify that he was in this National road National three hundred and forty. About a mile outside of town, just off a busy main road, is an abandoned hotel called Daurada Park. This is where Senor Begottis believes McAfee was staying. In early twenty twenty, Matthew visited the hotel. So the roof of the main entrance there is falling down. There's a big chunk out of it, as if someone had taken like a bite out of it. However, there is a security camera there. The hotel hasn't been operating in any official capacity since twenty seventeen. UM. There are no tourists here, that's for sure. On those balconies there is evidence that people are living there, So there are tables, their plants, their mosquito nets. In twenty eighteen, about a year after receiving its last guest, the police raided the hotel. Here's Rebecca Carunco, a crime reporter for the newspaper L Bays who covered McAfee's time in Spain. So beens that want people. The local authorities thought there was some sort of illegal activity going on there, related to a brothel or something like that, but then they raid the place and find out it's a crypto mine. Of course, a cryptocurrency mine in itself is not an illegal thing. It's just that some people who have cryptocurrency farms are often illegally tapping the electric supply. Matthew says it's an unusual place to have a crypto mine, mainly because the energy bills are high there, and well it's just really hot and supercomputer as well. They need to be kept cool. So it would be much more likely to find a crypto mine in a place like Alaska or Canada, and not on Spain's Mediterranean coast. Authorities found nothing illegal happening with the operation. No one was arrested, no assets were seized, the crypto mine was left intact. It flew under the radar until McAfee started uploading photos and videos in early twenty twenty. Senior Bigotis talks to us about one video in particular, which shows acafee at a bar with Janis talking to two Russians or Russian speakers, and they're teaching him and Janis how to speak Russian. I would like to introduce Janis and our Russian coaches, job Smith America. There's been a lot of speculation about this connection between McAfee and Russians in both the Spanish and international press of late For example, the Daily Mail called the hotel at the Park a ghost hotel which is owned by an unnamed Russian businessman. It all sounds very vague, and these shady references to Russians, I mean, it sounds a bit like a bad nineteen eighties Hollywood action film. But I mean that's where we are at the moment. No one who was close to McAfee at the time would tell us much about his associates, but Janus says their collaboration dated back to at least twenty eighteen. Janus also confirmed that she and McAfee had spent time at the Dawdada Park Hotel. We weren't able to get ahold of McAfee's associates in Spain. McAfee seemed to enjoy cultivating this air of mystery around them. The idea that they were powerful people with important connections in Russia appears to have been concocted by McAfee himself. From what we could gather, it seemed to be just another group of people trying to squeeze money for themselves out of crypto desperate enough or maybe savvy enough to hitch their wagon to McAfee. The crypto operation gives gafee enough cash to continue traveling. In the summer of twenty twenty, he's railing publicly about the loss of personal freedom the pandemic has caused, and he was making a joke of the health crisis on Twitter. I just put on my Twitter account a few hours ago. I'm auctioning off my COVID nineteen masks, which all made from women's underwear, all right, and Janis first of all wears them to stretch them and soften them. And the charges from the US against McAfee are still not public, but the net is tightening. He receives a notice from Google saying the IRS is asking for information about his account. Janis gets a similar message, and yet McAfee can't stop tweeting, discussing American foreign policy, talking about all the girlfriends who tried to kill him. And then on October third, a Saturday, McAfee is at the airport in Barcelona. He's about to board a flight to Istanbul, but his passport gets flagged and police take him into custody. Here's a report from Reuters. US federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against McAfee overcharges that he evaded taxes and wipefully failed to file returns for decades. He'd done everything possible to avoid accountability, dodging process servers, faking a heart attack, and sailing to the Caribbean to evade American authorities. There was no escape from this. Here's Rebecca the Lpius reporter. When he is arrested, it's a local judge from Catalonia who looks at what evidence there is and whether they put him in prison or not. Imprision, the judge decides that McAfee is a flight risk and should be locked up. Almost three weeks after his arrest, Janice posts an audio recording McAfee made from prison. She now has control over his Twitter account and posts updates on his behalf. I love you all and I miss being able to share videos and photos with you. It is impossible for America to extradite me. I do believe this. The documentation they have discovered about me, they simply pulls out of their ass And the Spanish people on Spanish courts are not stupid. So I do not work. I may even get out on bail in a week or two, and if not, I will eventually be The intention here might be to reassure his fans that he'll be released, but to me, it sounds more like he's trying to convince himself. He's slower, hesitant, even pensive. He almost sounds defeated. We'll be right back. John McAfee was facing a tough legal fight using money he apparently obtained through his crypto work. He hired several attorneys to argue his case. There was Niche Sannon. My name is Niche Santon. I'm a federal criminal defense attorney in Chicago. I have an office in New York. I also work on international tradition matters and practiced federal criminal trial work around the country. On the crypto side, there was Andrew Gordon. My name is Andrew Gordon. I'm the managing attorney and president at Gordon Law in Chicago, and we are a corporate tax and cryptocurrency law firm. McAfee had another two attorneys in Spain on various fronts. They were fighting the DJ and SEC charges and the extradition request. Andrew spoke to McAfee regularly about the case. I asked him how McAfee sounded when they spoke, Very positive spirits, very upbeat. Now, certainly prison is no favorable place to be in, but he would always talk about how popular he was in the prison and how respected as the old man in the prison and really is trying to make the best of it. McAfee would spend his last eight and a half months in Brand's to prison. The prison is forty five minutes outside of Barcelona. It's near the town of Martorel. So Matthew went to visit the site in the spring of twenty twenty two. The prison itself is this kind of nineteen seventies concrete monstrosity, and in the background you can sort of see the big wire fences which are about I don't know, three to four meters tall. And then there are these green roofed warehouses, which I assume are the cellbox where mac if you, probably spent a lot of his time. Matthew is there with Founderings executive producer Sean when they walk deeper inside the complex, beyond several checkpoints and the first bend in the road, but it starts to get quiet. There is no one around, only what looks like the prisoners entrance up ahead. But then the police car pulls up, so this is the police tell Matthew and Sean to leave the kick that they returned to the main entrance. In the hallway, they made a prison worker who says she knew McAfee. Do you remember if he had a lot of visitors. I can't give you this information, it's confidential, but I will only say he was a nice man to deal with. McAfee was very active on Twitter throughout his time in prison, describing the food and fellow inmates. But over time McAfee's mood changed, and this too was reflected in his tweets. Titles a tweet Notes from Prison, and he says, my body's confined. My mind has always been confined by fears, longings, ambitions, escapes from boredom, A prisoner of my own desires, circum stands move me from one prison to the other. There's little difference. His words are revealing because in a way, it's McAfee being honest in public for one of the first times in his life. He was struggling mentally, emotionally, and physically. McAfee and his lawyers argue in an extradition hearing that he's old and weak with a chronic lung condition. They say even a few years in jail could be a death sentence. If I am extraditement to the US, please translate it, I will certainly spend the rest of my life in prison conversed according to jail, all these things into consideration. Thank you. McAfee's lost weight. His hair is dark and pulled back from his face. He's hunched over. We were told that when McAfee's daughter watched this video from the hearing, she said he didn't even look like himself. A week later, the Spanish court decided to grant the US government's extradition request. Janner spoke to McAfee on the morning of June twenty third, he just returned from court. Our conversation was not There was nothing different in his voice. There was no change of his attitude. There was no He didn't sound down or depressed or anything. He actually was like, okay, so what's the attorney's working on. You know, I understand that we got this appeal and he was wanting to know, Okay, what's on the next steps that we're going to do, so you know, we can move forward in five days. Breaking news on your Wednesday afternoon. John McAfee, the creator of the McAfee anti virus software, has been found dead in his jail cell in Spain. Seventy five year old was arrested last October at the International Airport in Barstow. It's been a challenge trying to ascertain exactly what happened. In the early evening of June twenty third. Inside McAfee's cell, Janice told us that she'd been given a report on the investigation into the events of that day, but she wouldn't show it to us. Neither the police nor the court would say anything about the case, citing strict privacy laws in Spain. We know though, that at six pm When guards opened the door to McAfee's cell, they found him hanging from something attached to the window. John McAfee, the cybersecurity pioneer, the accused murderer and fraudster about to be extradited to face the American justice system, is dead at the age of seventy five. But Rebecca, the crime reporter, said Catalonia officials issued a press release announcing his death in prison. So I start calling police officers that I know who have ties to the area where this happened. Her contacts tell her that they believe McAfee was left alone in his cell for a couple of hours and that's when he killed himself. From the beginning, the police tell me that there might be a suicide note. A prison officer reports finding what appeared to be a suicide note in McAfee's pocket. It reads, I am a phantom parasite. I want to control my future, which does not exist. Janis shared this note on Twitter. We asked several people close to McAfee, who told us that the handwriting and the style are definitely his. The coroner rules his death a suicide. The case goes to a local court for review. The judge said, Okay, with everything I have, I have no indication that there is anything strange about this suicide. Rebecca says. In Spain, all violent deaths, including suicides, are investigated. The Spanish penal code considers suicide as a form of violent death. Why well, because you kill yourself. Andrew Gordon, McAfee's lawyer in Chicago found out when a reporter called his office with the news. She called me and said, asking for a comment on John's death. This is just bullshit. That's just you know, someone pulling her leg to get lost. Um. Then we got the second call, and then I started searching on the internet, and then I reached out to Janis, and Janis at that time was going through the literal same experience where she was finding out on the news in Barcelona. Janus struggled with the bureaucracy. She didn't understand why she couldn't see the body right away. When the Spanish authorities eventually grunted her access, she only saw McAfee from behind a window. It's likely Janus was kept in a different room because of COVID restrictions, but it just compounded her perception that Spanish authorities were involved in a cover up, and I think it's very telling that here I am a year later and I still can't get his body. Remember, Janis told us that she had been given a report on the investigation into the events of that day, but again she wouldn't show it to us. Janas says there was a brief discrepancy in the description of the noose. At first the police said he used a shoe string, and then later called it a rope. This could easily be explained by a clerical error, but Jana seized on it as yet another clue of something suspicious. Honestly, I think from the very beginning I didn't believe it, and so these things were just confirmation. Janice is determined to get her own independent autopsy report to prove that McAfee didn't take his own life. She's latched onto the theory that he was murdered. She believes someone drugged and strangled him. And it's hard to I don't know, it's just hard to move forward. It's hard to think about anything else because I just want to have these answers. I just want, you know, I just want't be done with this part. Court delays and the lack of information have fueled the perception that the Spanish authorities have something to hide. The Internet is awash with conspiracy theories. The circumstances played perfectly to McAfee's fan base. He'd been saying for years he was wanted, that people were out to get him. He got it tattooed on his arm. He said he'd never kill himself, that if he was found hanging like Jeffrey Epstein, it could only be a hit job. The absence of any kind of resolution has even one of McAfee's lawyers believing it wasn't a suicide. I think you blamed either cover uprespacidity. That's niche Sannon again. I mean there's two extremes in it, and I just can't believe a government is that stupid. So it's got to be a cover up. I mean, what else is there? What else has left? The timing of it is suspicious, the way it supposedly happened is suspicious. And for him to say it's going to happen, none of this adds up. It wasn't John's personality to do something like this. But Rebecca has covered the Spanish police for years and has at times written critically of their methods, But she says a cover up is unlikely and that the real issue is their policy of silence on open cases. In the absence of information, she says, conspiracy theories can flourish. Look my newspaper reacted by saying, this is a story of global international interest. We have to cover it. But there was none of that interest on the part of authorities. They didn't call a press conference where they made it super clear what had happened. They weren't transparent. Now everyone is wondering what happened to him? So why is the state being so tight lipped? But Rebecca thinks it has something to do with embarrassment. And when a person who is in custody, who is in the custody of the administration, ends up committing suicide, there is negligence of some kind. You do have to do some kind of critical reflection on that. Some six months after his death, prosecutors in both New York and Tennessee applied to have their cases against McAfee dismissed. Meanwhile, McAfee's body remains in a morgue in Barcelona. McAfee's Spanish lawyer, Javier Villalba, says that Janus is appealing the judges ruling of suicide to a higher court and they're waiting to hear whether the case would be accepted, he told us in a WhatsApp message. From our point of view, the autopsy report from the government is incomplete. This is why it's taking so long to repatriate the body, because as long as this case is open, McAfee's remains can't go anywhere. We'll be right back. While McAfee's body is stuck in limbo, his family is left in another kind of purgatory. Janus's legal appeals prevent the people who were close to McAfee from being able to bury him, and his money has apparently vanished. In conversations with Janus and the attorneys were told McAfee did not leave an estate. That's what he said to me. He didn't have a will when whatever crypto he had that was his crypto, So I don't know what would have happened to that or wallets. I don't you know. Obviously I had access to his phone, but that information wasn't there, so wherever that was, I don't know. Remember, McAfee has two multimillion dollar lawsuits against him that are outstanding the aerotrekking wrongful death, and the killing of his neighbor. In belize any money left in an estate would likely go to pay those judgments. His lawyer said, we know McAfee made a habit of buying assets and putting them in other people's names. It was one of the things noted in the indictment for tax evasion. We heard that he rarely had money on hand, something Janus confirmed. Were you that John didn't have any money at the end, he didn't have he was cash poor. Yeah, you know, when I was the one here with him, I was the one that when his money ran out, I used my money, you know, my money which was separate from his, you know, to pay for lawyers right, to make sure he had money on his books and he had what he needed. And yet Janice also told us that McAfee had taken care of her financially. She described her situation as comfortable. McAfee's daughter, Jen has said that she has no interest in his money or in pushing for an investigation. She would, however, like to put an end to a newer conspiracy that McAfee faked his own death. Jen's being deluged by people telling her that McAfee has been spotted in Texas. There's one really effective way to shut this noise down, says her lawyer Joy. The only thing that she would like is she would like his remains to be released. She is a person of faith. It has been very, very difficult for her to think about his being kept by the Spanish government and not being allowed to have him laid at rest, and she wants to do everything possible to prevent any further delay. She does not contest the findings of the court that he died by suicide. Jen knew her father longer than just about anybody, longer than his team of lawyers, certainly longer than his Twitter fans who propelled the conspiracies about his death. Jen knew who he was, and she witnessed, both in public and in private, his self destruction. There were times in the last few years where they had conversations and it was apparent that he was not sober, and of course he could be very dismissive, and you know, that's that's that's an effect of drinking and of addiction. Sadly, at the beginning of this season, I mentioned that when McAfee tells the story of his life. He always starts it in the same way he talks about his father, a violent alcoholic. Nobody has an ideal life, even children. Dad. When you're fifteen fifteen, they have shot himself. He shot himself. Yeah. People always looked at the beast to explain the present. It doesn't work that way. McAfee set out to defy the example his father set for him, but in the end, he's drinking and substance abuse, his volatile temper, the strained relationship with his daughter all seemed to point to the same destination. It also fits that a man who escaped accountability at every turn in his life was caught like others who thought they were above the law, by something as simple as not paying your taxes. And maybe the prospect of being forced to do something he'd bragged he would never do was something that his arrogance couldn't tolerate. I always wanted to know who his lifelong friends were, the people who'd stayed with him through it all. I was told he didn't have any Most of the ones who stuck around were there because they benefited from him. I heard he would discard people when they no longer were useful to him. Nearly everyone we spoke to said that felt manipulated by him, conned by him, betrayed by him. That he was the ultimate hype man who could sell anyone anything. The final con was a promise he'd made publicly that a flood of embarrassing and dangerous information would be released upon his death, a so called dead man's switch. It's what the conspiracists have been waiting so long for, but no data trove or secret files ever emerged. It did, however, succeed in keeping the McAfee name alive a little longer even after his death, lingering there like that little shield in the bottom corner of the computer screen. This season of Foundering was hosted by me Jamie Tarabay Sean When Is Our executive producer. Matthew Bramner contributed reporting to this episode. Special thanks to Young Young Gilda Di Carli and Catherine Fink for help with production, and to Jakie Dablos, Nick Turner, and Lucy Papa Christu. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Sure if Usurf is our audio engineer and editorial assistant. Mark Million oversaw production of this episode and edited the story along with Andy Martin, Anne Vandermay, and Molly Shitz. This is the end of the John McAfee story. If you liked our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends and keep us in your feed. We'll be back with more Foundering See you next time.