From technology legend to fugitive in the Caribbean. From rural Tennessee ranch to White House candidate. From bitcoin prophet to fugitive from American justice.
The eccentric life of American billionaire John McAfee came to an end this Wednesday. Officials from a prison where he was detained in Barcelona, Spain, found him dead in what they preliminarily considered a suicide.
The death of the antivirus pioneer, of 75 years, it was known a few hours after the National Court of Spain gave the go-ahead to extradite him to the United States, where he has been accused of tax evasion for years.
It had been given to the leak in January 2019, when Washington authorities began to look for him after he himself confessed that had not paid taxes for more than 8 years considering them “unfair”.
- John McAfee, the eccentric multimillionaire pioneer of antivirus, is found dead in a cell in Spain
- McAfee: from antivirus pioneer to Belize police fugitive
Since then he has been declared a “persecuted” and “victim of a forced exile ”Which took him on a tour of the Caribbean islands and which culminated in his arrest last October at the Barcelona airport, when he was trying to fly to Turkey.
A Spanish court had earlier denied him his last request for conditional release, after considering that the “risk of flight” continued “to be evident” and that he had “no appreciable sign of roots.”
A life on the run
The last trip that took him to a jail in Spain and finally to his death began in January of 2019, when he escaped from the US
He arrived first in the Bahamas and from there he also fled after alleging that he was “persecuted” by the CIA.
He then traveled to Cuba, where he anchored his yacht in the exclusive Marina Hemingway, and from where day by day he published photos, videos and comments on tobacco, restaurants, b Expensive drinks and parties.
In Havana, in fact, he announced that he would establish his tropical headquarters for the elections of 2020, his second attempt to reach the White House, with a campaign based on cryptocurrencies and free trade.
Shortly after, he announced that he was again “at sea” and was arrested a few weeks later with weapons and more than $ 80, 000 dollars in cash in Dominican Republic .
He was released and his destination was unknown again for months, until he announced that he was in London, his last whereabouts until his arrest in Barcelona.
Other leaks
It was not the first time that the founder of McAfee Associates had to hide and run fugitive.
In 2012, t He was also considered a fugitive by the authorities of Belize, where he was residing at the time.
He fled the Central American country after being considered a “person of interest” in the homicide of Gregory Faull, his neighbor, with whom he had supposedly a dispute over some dogs.
So, she dyed her hair and his beard, he painted his teeth and put gum on his gums so they couldn’t recognize him. As he told the magazine Wired , he even hid in boxes buried under sand to evade the police.
He escaped to Guatemala and was deported from there to the US
According to He said, it was on his first night after being extradited that he met his last wife, Janice McAfee, in Miami Beach after she offered him her services as a prostitute.
They married shortly after and settled on a rural ranch in Tennessee, from where the computer scientist launched his first campaign for the presidency in 2016 for the Libertarian Party, although his candidacy did not progress.
Citizen of two countries
Despite his southern accent, the businessman was born on a US military base in England, the son of a British woman who met a soldier American during World War II.
As a young man he moved to Virginia, where he had a troubled childhood ica: his father was an alcoholic who committed suicide when McAfee was 15 years.
He himself soon began to drink excessively and use drugs of all kind, although he managed to maintain a promising academic career, which came to an abrupt end in 1960.
So, Louisiana State University ended his doctorate in mathematics after it was revealed that he had slept with a student he was mentoring.
He later married her and began working with some of the biggest technology organizations of the day, such as NASA, General Electric, Siemens, Univac, and Xerox , while he continued to be immersed in his addictions.
Things came to a head in the decade of 1980, when his dependence on drugs and his fondness for prostitutes forced him to seek help.
According to him several times, he had 47 children.
Digital guru
McAfee got a career-changing job nearly three decades ago: he was offered a position at defense firm Lockheed Martin, where he began working on a secret voice recognition program.
There he found himself with unusual self-replicating code, designed to copy itself to any floppy disk inserted into infected computers.
His first contact with a virus fascinated him and he devised a way to disinfect computers and then extend the heals through a precursor network system.
The challenge inspired him to create his own business from the parking lot of his house: McAfee Associate, with which he developed all kinds of programs to detect and eliminate computer viruses.
At first he offered it free to common users and later he began to sell it to different companies.
For a large number of companies used McAfee antivirus, who not long after sold the signs to Intel.
Mid-years 90, to the 50 years, McAfee retired from the company.
Since then he has dedicated himself to other computer projects, but what focused his attention was the still incipient world of cryptocurrencies.
Since then, his life full of trucu slow, adventures and eccentricities of all kinds, for which he continued to grab headlines.
The US government accused McAfee of not reporting in recent years the profits it obtained from the promotion of cryptocurrencies, for holding talks on the subject and for the sale of the rights of the story of his life for a television documentary.
For these accusations he was arrested in Spain, where he finally met his death.
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