The man who solved a sea of troubles for us couldn’t resist a big trouble with justice: John McAfee, the inventor of the antivirus system installed on computers all over the world when the world started having a computer, has killed today in a Barcelona prison to avoid extradition to the United States. He was accused of tax evasion.
The Spanish High Court had just authorized his extradition, but at the age of 75 McAfee didn’t feel like facing an epilogue he couldn’t stand. Arrested at Barcelona airport in October 2020, at the extradition hearing he had made it clear how he felt: the charges against him were politically motivated. He could still have appealed the Spanish court’s decision, but evidently he no longer felt like fighting.
Tax evasion, the king of antivirus McAfee arrested in Spain
According to McAfee, his tax woes stemmed from the refused offer to run again for the 2020 US presidential elections. For the Spanish prosecutor Carlos Bautista, however, McAfee was just a tax evader, other than political motivations: the Libertarian Party in which he wanted running, on the other hand, rarely gets more than 1% of the vote in US elections.
US federal prosecutors indicted him last October for evading taxes and voluntarily failing to file tax returns. Shortly before, the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced it had filed a civil lawsuit against McAfee claiming more than $ 23 million in omitted income through a series of cryptocurrency ploys with “false and misleading” claims.
The Spanish court had authorized his extradition to answer for the charges related to the tax returns from 2016 to 2018, but McAfee killed himself without even trying to take the path of an impervious appeal against the Spanish sentence.
The jewel of McAfee, that company created in 1987 for the analysis of computer networks, had begun to shine everywhere since 1997, when it had acquired the tools to work on the engine of its antivirus system. Fighting the sworn enemy of the global digital network, the viruses that had already begun to rage in that pioneering era, had turned out to be a gold mine: in 2000, its antivirus already had 50 million registered users. In 2010, the giant Intel had put the entity on paper by buying the company for 7.8 billion dollars.
But his life had been a veritable odyssey of sex, drugs and prostitutes. On the night of November 21, 2012, the body of 52-year-old Gregory Faull was found in a pool of blood at his home in San Pedro, Belize, where he had moved after his divorce. He was killed by a 9mm bullet whose case is found close to the body. His phone and computer are gone but there are no signs of a break-in. Two days earlier he had had the latest in a series of furious quarrels with his neighbor, a computer engineer who, despite his advanced age, spent his days amidst noisy drug parties and very young prostitutes. The cops look for him to question him but John McAfee he has already managed to escape.
A month later they find him in Guatemala, where he is arrested for illegal immigration. To avoid being deported to Belize, he fakes a heart attack. No formal charges are brought against him in connection with Faull’s mysterious death and he is only sought as a person with knowledge of the facts, it is then cleared up. He tells reporters that he fled because he feared that the Belize government wanted him dead. His relationship with the authorities of the Latin American state where he had moved in 2008, after having lost almost all of his assets due to the financial crisis, had in fact always been difficult.
A few months earlier they had dismantled the lab where it made antibiotics claiming that it actually made amphetamines there. However, nothing illegal had been found in the facility. And the contrasts seemed to have been closed: the mayor of San Pedro had also thanked him when on November 8, 2012, in a press conference, McAfee he had given the local police 40 stun guns, handcuffs and batons as a personal contribution to the fight against the crime that plagued the Belize tourism industry.
In Guatemala McAfee find a lawyer who is blocking his move to Belize. The computer scientist is deported to Miami where in a restaurant he meets his future wife, Janice Dyson, a former prostitute. The couple moved first to Portland, Oregon, and then to Lexington, Tennessee.
McAfee finally seems to have found peace after a troubled life marked by excesses. Try running unsuccessfully in the Libertarian Party primaries to run for the US presidency and return to one of his old loves, the world of cryptocurrencies. In the world of information technology, McAfee it was a legend. The requests for advice are flooding. The 23.1 million dollars earned, with advice deemed fraudulent, however, are missing from the appeal of the tax authorities.
And on 5 October 2020, indicted by the Justice Department, McAfee he leaves for his last escape, towards Istanbul, but is stopped by the Spanish police at the Barcelona airport waiting to be extradited to the United States, where he faces up to five years in prison. Suicide today, which ended his life.
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