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- [00:01]
Jamie Tarabay
It's January 2019, 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 Janice, 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 look like synthetic drugs. For King, documenting McAfee's travels was an.
- [00:42]
Robert King
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.
- [00:54]
Jamie Tarabay
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.
- [01:14]
John McAfee
I will fabricate whatever reality I see fit to keep eyeballs on us.
- [01:19]
Jamie Tarabay
Robert.
- [01:20]
John McAfee
Are we clear? Do you have a problem with that?
- [01:22]
Jamie Tarabay
I'm here to. 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 apart.
- [01:34]
John McAfee
If this one does not sell your fucking footage, nothing will, Robert. Nothing will. Do you understand? I have created this car. Do you understand? Yeah. I have fabricated a perception that is matched with reality. Grand juries, indictments, foreign countries, guns that you have videoed. So you tell me that this is not gold.
- [01:58]
Jamie Tarabay
It is gold.
- [01:59]
John McAfee
I've really taken this gold and like a flying Aztec artist, have woven it into the most magnificent jewelry. You must see them.
- [02:12]
Robert King
So it's hard to say what was real and what was theater. I mean, because he was. He wasn't.
- [02:18]
Jamie Tarabay
He. He.
- [02:19]
Robert King
He did Shakespeare plays. I mean, he was extremely intelligent, well read, but I think a lot of that is psychosis, too.
- [02:29]
Jamie Tarabay
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 Janice transported to Europe. He will never set foot in America again. You're listening to Foundering. I'm your host, Jamie Tarabay. 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 70s. 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 is a cultural currency that comes with that, too.
- [04:30]
Robert King
A true cybersecurity legend, John McAfee pioneered the antivirus industry, full stop.
- [04:35]
Janice McAfee
John was a super genius man who.
- [04:37]
Jamie Tarabay
Really does need no introduction. Mr. John McAfee. Jobs, Gates, Bezos. We practically worship these figures. For a fleeting period in the late 1980s and 90s, 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 18 year old student in the math class McAfee was teaching in Louisiana. It was like living on just the largest roller coaster in the world because.
- [05:50]
John McAfee
You had these tremendous highs, but then.
- [05:53]
Jamie Tarabay
You bottomed out and that was life. McAfee had a tumultuous relationship 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 24 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.
- [06:55]
Joy Athanasiu
We had gone to visit and she was pregnant. His home in Woodland Park, 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.
- [07:25]
Jamie Tarabay
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 47 children. We learned, he posted, that after he and Jen had had a particularly bad phone call. McAfee had a lot of complicated relationships. He alienated a lot of people. And by 2019, it was just McAfee and his partner, Janice. 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.
- [08:36]
John McAfee
Governments are just now starting to see the blockchain and cryptocurrency as an opportunity or a threat or something to fear.
- [08:53]
Jamie Tarabay
We asked Janice when they had come to Spain and why, and we were surprised that she was so cagey.
- [09:01]
Nishe Sanon
Okay, so I can't really say. When we arrived in Spain, the friends that were assisting John, you know, those were John's friends, and there was an expectation of privacy that I want to be sure I'm respecting.
- [09:14]
Jamie Tarabay
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 bigotes, Catalan for Mr. Moustache. Here's our contributing reporter, Matthew Bremner.
- [09:49]
Matthew Bremner
So we got a tip from Senor Bigotes, 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 Cambrio's, and we spoke to the owner, Santiago Cuevas.
- [10:04]
Jamie Tarabay
Cambrios is a tiny beach community on Catalonia's golden coast, south of the Rocky prades mountains and 90 minutes from Barcelona by car. The population is just 30,000 people. Santiago says McAfee came to his shop in late 2019. He knew exactly what he wanted.
- [10:29]
Robert King
I was struck by it because I said, what is this you want? And he said, well, look, this is like a word, a symbol of mine, to know that I am alive.
- [10:43]
Jamie Tarabay
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.
- [11:23]
Robert King
I thought he was quite a funny person. Ugly, but 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.
- [11:40]
Jamie Tarabay
By the next year, things change sharply for McAfee and his quiet existence in Spain. 2020 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 bigotis notices that McAfee's showcasing his defiance of those restrictions in his tweets.
- [12:09]
Janice McAfee
At the beginning, he was in Tarragona, I think, and he was. The few people that he was outside in the streets, I thought, this guy is going to have problems.
- [12:21]
Jamie Tarabay
Here's our reporter, Matthew.
- [12:23]
Matthew Bremner
Spain has one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. Military on the streets, police are everywhere. And it's at this time that Senhor Bigotis finds himself really tracking the whereabouts of John McAfee quite closely.
- [12:37]
Jamie Tarabay
Something to know about Senhor Bigotis 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, Mr. Moustache does have a mustache.
- [12:54]
Janice McAfee
It was funny for me because just in the beginning, he had a picture peeing in the. In the parking of McDonald's.
- [13:04]
Jamie Tarabay
If you didn't catch that, he says he finds a picture of McAfee peeing in the parking lot of a McDonald's.
- [13:12]
Matthew Bremner
And this is where he starts noticing very familiar things, things very close to home. On McAfee's Twitter feed, he published a.
- [13:20]
Janice McAfee
Video near the beach. I could See a park, a child park, that it's here in Cambridge.
- [13:29]
Jamie Tarabay
He realizes that McAfee is in his hometown.
- [13:33]
Janice McAfee
I see some pictures and identify that he was in this. National Road, National 340.
- [13:45]
Jamie Tarabay
About a mile outside of town, just off a busy main road, is an abandoned hotel called Daurada Park. This is where senor Bigotis believes McAfee was staying. In early 2020, Matthew visited the hotel.
- [14:01]
Matthew Bremner
So the roof of the main entrance there is falling down, so 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.
- [14:10]
Jamie Tarabay
The hotel hasn't been operating in any official capacity since 2017.
- [14:18]
Matthew Bremner
There are no tourists here, that's for sure. On those balconies, there is evidence that people are living there. So there are tables, there are plants, their mosquito nets.
- [14:27]
Jamie Tarabay
In 2018, about a year after receiving its last guest, the police raided the hotel. Here's Rebecca Carranco, a crime reporter for the newspaper El baiz, who covered McAfee's time in Spain.
- [14:45]
Rebecca Carranco
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.
- [15:10]
Jamie Tarabay
Matthew says it's an unusual place to.
- [15:13]
Matthew Bremner
Have a crypto mine, mainly because the energy bills are high there and, well, it's just really hot. And supercomputers, 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.
- [15:35]
Jamie Tarabay
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 Kos started uploading photos and videos in early.
- [15:54]
Matthew Bremner
2020, Senhor Bigotes talks to us about one video in particular, which shows McAfee at a bar with Janice talking to two Russians or Russian speakers, and they're teaching him and Janice how to speak Russian.
- [16:11]
John McAfee
I would like to introduce Janice and our Russian coaches. This is John Smith. Say something.
- [16:32]
Matthew Bremner
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 Daurada 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 1980s Hollywood action film, but, I mean, that's where we are at the moment.
- [17:06]
Jamie Tarabay
No one who was close to McAfee at the time would tell us much about his associates. But Janice says their collaboration dated back to at least 2018. Janice also confirmed that she and McAfee had spent time at the Daurada Park Hotel. We weren't able to get a hold 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 McAfee enough cash to continue traveling in the summer of 2020. 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.
- [18:14]
John McAfee
I just put on my Twitter account a few hours ago. I'm auctioning off my COVID 19 masks, which are all made from women's underwear, all right? And Janice, first of all, wears them to stretch them and soften them. And then I put them.
- [18:35]
Jamie Tarabay
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 ex girlfriends who tried to kill him. And then on October 3rd, 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 over charges that he evaded taxes and willfully 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 El Pais reporter.
- [19:51]
Rebecca Carranco
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.
- [20:00]
Jamie Tarabay
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.
- [20:19]
John McAfee
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, quote, discovered about me, they simply pulled out of their ass. And the Spanish people and Spanish courts are not stupid. So do not worry. I may even get out on bail in a week or two. And if not, I will eventually be freed here.
- [21:03]
Jamie Tarabay
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 Nisha Sanon.
- [21:47]
Robert King
My name is Nishe Sanon. I'm a federal criminal defense attorney in Chicago. I have an office in New York. I also work on international extradition matters and practice federal criminal trial work around the country.
- [21:58]
Jamie Tarabay
On the crypto side, there was Andrew Gordon.
- [22:01]
Robert King
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.
- [22:12]
Jamie Tarabay
McAfee had another two attorneys in Spain. On various fronts, they were fighting the DOJ and SEC charges and the extradition request. Andrew spoke to McAfee regularly about the case. I asked him how McAfee sounded when they spoke.
- [22:33]
Robert King
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 he was trying to make the best of it.
- [22:56]
Jamie Tarabay
McAfee would spend his last eight and a half months in Briand 2 prison.
- [23:02]
Matthew Bremner
The prison is 45 minutes outside of Barcelona. It's near the town of Marel.
- [23:08]
Jamie Tarabay
So Matthew went to visit the site in the spring of 2022.
- [23:13]
Matthew Bremner
The prison itself is this kind of 1970s 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 cell blocks where McAfee probably spent a lot of his time.
- [23:34]
Jamie Tarabay
Matthew is there with Foundering's executive producer Sean Wen. 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 prisoner's entrance up ahead. But then a police car pulls up. So this is interfering with the police. Tell Matthew and Sean to leave.
- [24:05]
Matthew Bremner
Stopped by the police. Kick that bit of adrenaline. But no, he's being released.
- [24:12]
Jamie Tarabay
They return to the main entrance. In the hallway, they meet a prison worker who says she knew McAfee.
- [24:21]
Matthew Bremner
Do you remember if he had a lot of visitors?
- [24:25]
Rebecca Carranco
I can't give you this information. It's confidential. But I will only say he was a nice man to deal with.
- [24:35]
Jamie Tarabay
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.
- [24:49]
Matthew Bremner
He 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. Circumstance move me from one prison to the other. There's little difference.
- [25:04]
Jamie Tarabay
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.
- [25:30]
John McAfee
If I am extradited to the U.S. please translate. I will most certainly spend the rest of my life in prison. Please translate. I would ask the court to take all of these things into consideration. Thank you.
- [26:09]
Jamie Tarabay
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. Jana spoke to McAfee on the morning of June 23rd. He'd just returned from court.
- [26:41]
Nishe Sanon
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 attorneys working on? You know, I understand that we got this appeal, and he was wanting to know, okay, what are the next steps that we're going to take so, you know, we can move forward and fight this? Breaking news on your Wednesday, Thursday afternoon. John McAfee, the creator of the McAfee antivirus software, has been found dead in his jail cell. In Spain. The 75 year old was arrested last October at the international airport in Barcelona.
- [27:19]
Jamie Tarabay
It's been a challenge trying to ascertain exactly what happened in the early evening of June 23rd 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 6pm 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 75. Rebecca, the crime reporter, said Catalonia officials issued a press release announcing his death in prison.
- [28:17]
Rebecca Carranco
So I start calling police officers that I know who have ties to the area where this happened.
- [28:24]
Jamie Tarabay
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.
- [28:34]
Rebecca Carranco
From the beginning, the police tell me that there might be a suicide note.
- [28:39]
Jamie Tarabay
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. Janice 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.
- [29:15]
Rebecca Carranco
The judge said, okay, with everything I have, I have no indication that there is anything strange about this suicide.
- [29:25]
Jamie Tarabay
Rebecca says, in Spain, all violent deaths, including suicides, are investigated.
- [29:32]
Rebecca Carranco
The Spanish penal code considers suicide as a form of violent death. Why? Well, because you kill yourself.
- [29:43]
Jamie Tarabay
Andrew Gordon, McAfee's lawyer in Chicago, found out when a reporter called his office with the news.
- [29:50]
Robert King
She called me and said, asking for a comment on John's death and said, this is just bullshit. It's just, you know, someone pulling our leg. Tell them get lost. Then we got the second call and then I started searching on the Internet and then I reached out to Janice. And Janice at that time was going through the literal same experience where she was finding out on the news.
- [30:15]
Jamie Tarabay
In Barcelona, Janice struggled with the bureaucracy. She didn't understand why she couldn't see the body right away. When the Spanish authorities eventually granted her access, she only saw McAfee from behind a window. It's likely Janice 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.
- [30:43]
Nishe Sanon
And I think it's very telling that here I am a year later, and I still can't get his body.
- [30:51]
Jamie Tarabay
Remember, Janice told us that she'd been given a report on the investigation into the events of that day, but again, she wouldn't show it to us. Janice says there was a brief discrepancy in the description of the noose. At first the police said he used a shoestring and then later called it a rope. This could easily be explained by a clerical error. But Janice seized on it as yet another clue of something suspicious.
- [31:23]
Nishe Sanon
Honestly, I think from the very beginning I didn't believe it. And so these things were just confirmation.
- [31:29]
Jamie Tarabay
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.
- [31:47]
Nishe Sanon
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 to be done with this part.
- [32:03]
Jamie Tarabay
Court delays and the lack of information have fueled a perception that the Spanish authorities have something to hide. The Internet is awash with conspiracy theories. The circumstances played perfectly to McAfee's fanbase. 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.
- [32:46]
Robert King
I think you blamed either coverup or stupidity.
- [32:49]
Jamie Tarabay
That's Nishe Sanon again.
- [32:51]
Robert King
I mean, there's two extremes, 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 is 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.
- [33:11]
Jamie Tarabay
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.
- [33:35]
Rebecca Carranco
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.
- [33:57]
Jamie Tarabay
So why is the state being so tight lipped? Rebecca thinks it has something to do with embarrassment.
- [34:07]
Rebecca Carranco
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.
- [34:23]
Jamie Tarabay
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 Janice is appealing the judge's 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 Janice and the attorneys, we're told McAfee did not leave an estate.
- [35:47]
Nishe Sanon
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 phones, but that information wasn't there, so. So wherever that was, I don't know.
- [36:06]
Jamie Tarabay
Remember, McAfee has two multimillion dollar lawsuits against him that are outstanding. The error trekking, 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 Janice confirmed.
- [36:39]
Matthew Bremner
Were you suggesting that John didn't have any money at the end?
- [36:43]
Nishe Sanon
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.
- [37:02]
Jamie Tarabay
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's been spotted in Texas. There's one really effective way to shut this noise down, says her lawyer, Joy.
- [37:45]
Joy Athanasiu
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 body 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.
- [38:22]
Jamie Tarabay
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.
- [38:44]
Joy Athanasiu
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 an effect of drinking and of addiction.
- [39:07]
Jamie Tarabay
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, the violent alcoholic.
- [39:23]
John McAfee
Nobody has an ideal life. Even children died when you were 15. 15?
- [39:29]
Jamie Tarabay
Yeah.
- [39:30]
John McAfee
He shot himself.
- [39:31]
Robert King
He shot himself, yeah.
- [39:32]
John McAfee
People always look to the past through explain. The present doesn't work that way.
- [39:41]
Jamie Tarabay
McAfee set out to defy the example his father set for him. But in the end, his drinking and substance abuse, his volatile temper, the strained relationship with his daughter, all seem 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 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 Wen is our executive producer. Matthew Bramner contributed reporting to this episode. Special thanks to Yang Yang, Gilda decarli and Katherine Fink for help with production and to Jackie Davilos, Nick Turner and Lucy Papacristu. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Sherif Youssef is our audio engineer and editorial assistant. Mark Million oversaw production of this episode and edited the story along with Andy Martin, Ann Vandermee and Molly Schutz. 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.