He spent his money on booze but managed to graduate and start a Ph.D. in mathematics at Northeast Louisiana State College in 1968. He got kicked out for sleeping with one of his undergraduate students (whom he later married) and ended up coding old-school punch-card programs for Univac in Bristol, Tennessee. That didn’t last long, either. He was arrested for buying marijuana, and though his lawyer got him off without a conviction, he was summarily fired.
Still, he had learned enough to gin up an impressive, totally fake résumé and used it to get a job at Missouri Pacific Railroad in St. Louis. It was 1969 and the company was attempting to use an IBM computer to schedule trains. After six months, McAfee’s system began to churn out optimized train-routing patterns. Unfortunately, he had also discovered LSD. He would drop acid in the morning, go to work, and route trains all day. One morning he decided to experiment with another psychedelic called DMT. He did a line, felt nothing, and decided to snort a whole bag of the orangish powder. “Within an hour my mind was shattered,” McAfee says.
People asked him questions, but he didn’t understand what they were saying. The computer was spitting out train schedules to the moon; he couldn’t make sense of it. He ended up behind a garbage can in downtown St. Louis, hearing voices and desperately hoping that nobody would look at him. He never went back to Missouri Pacific. Part of him believes he’s still on that trip, that everything since has been one giant hallucination and that one day he’ll snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in St. Louis, listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.
From then on he felt like he was always one step away from a total breakdown, which finally came at Omex in 1983. He was snorting lines of coke off his desk most mornings, polishing off a bottle of scotch every day, and living in constant fear that he would run out of drugs. His wife had left him, he’d given away his dog, and in the wake of what he calls a mutual agreement, he left Omex. He ended up shuttered in his house, with no friends, doing drugs alone for days on end and wondering whether he should kill himself just as his father had. “My life was total hell,” he says.
Finally he went to a therapist, who suggested he go to Alcoholics Anonymous. He attended a meeting and started sobbing. Someone gave him a hug and told him he wasn’t alone.
“That’s when life really began for me,” he says.
He says he’s been sober ever since.
• • •
When the Madonna concert ended, McAfee’s drunken guard finally emerged from his station and strolled over to find out what was going on. The police quickly surrounded him. They knew who he was: Austin “Tino” Allen had been convicted twenty-eight times for crimes ranging from robbery to assault, and he had spent most of his life in and out of prison.
The police lined everybody up against a rock wall as the sun rose. A low, heavy heat filled the jungle. Everybody began to sweat when the police fanned out to search the property. As an officer headed toward an outlying building, one of McAfee’s dogs cut him off, growled, and, according to police, went in for an attack. The cop immediately shot the dog through the rib cage.
“What the fuck!” McAfee screamed. “That’s my dog.”
The police ignored him. They left the dead dog in the dirt while they rummaged through the compound. They found shotguns, pistols, a huge cache of ammunition, and hundreds of bottles of chemicals they couldn’t identify. McAfee and the others were left in the sun for hours. (GSU commander Marco Vidal claims they were under the shade of a large tree.) By the time the police announced that they were taking several of them to jail, McAfee says his face was turning pink with sunburn. He and Allen were loaded into the back of a pickup. The truck tore off, heading southeast toward Belize City at eighty miles per hour.
McAfee tried to stay calm, but he had to admit that this was a bad situation. He had walked away from a luxurious life—mansions on multiple continents, sports cars, a private plane—only to end up in the back of a pickup cuffed to a notoriously violent man. Allen pulled McAfee close so he could be heard over the roar of the wind. McAfee tensed. “Boss, I just want to say that it’s an honor to be here with you,” Allen shouted. “You must be a really important person for them to send all these men to get you.”
• • •
In 1986 two brothers in Pakistan coded the first known computer virus aimed at PCs. They weren’t trying to destroy anything; it was simple curiosity. They wanted to see how far their creation would travel, so they included their names, addresses, and telephone numbers in the code of the virus. They named it Brain after their computer services shop in Lahore.
Within a year the phone at the shop was ringing: Brain had infected computers around the world. At the time, McAfee had been sober for four years and gotten a security clearance to work on a classified voice-recognition program at Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California. But then he came across an article in the San Jose Mercury News about the spread of the Pakistani Brain virus in the United States.
He found the idea terrifying. Nobody knew for sure at the time why these intrusions were occurring. It reminded him of his childhood, when his father would hit him for no reason. “I didn’t know why he did it,” McAfee says. “I just knew a beating could happen any time.” As a boy, he wasn’t able to fight back. Now, faced with a new form of attack that was hard to rationalize, he decided to do something.
He started McAfee Associates out of his 700-square-foot home in Santa Clara. His business plan: Create an antivirus program and give it away on electronic bulletin boards. McAfee didn’t expect users to pay. His real aim was to get them to think the software was so necessary that they would install it on their computers at work. They did. Within five years, half of the Fortune 100 companies were running it, and they felt compelled to pay a license fee. By 1990, McAfee was making $5 million a year with very little overhead or investment.
His success was due in part to his ability to spread his own paranoia, the fear that there was always somebody about to attack. Soon after launching his company, he bought a twenty-seven-foot Winnebago, loaded it with computers, and announced that he had formed the first “antivirus paramedic unit.” When he got a call from someone experiencing computer problems in the San Jose area, he drove to the site and searched for “virus residue.” Like a good door-to-door salesman, there was a kernel of truth to his pitch, but he amplified and embellished the facts to sell his product. The RV therefore was not just an RV; it was “the first specially customized unit to wage effective, on-the-spot counterattacks in the virus war.”
It was great publicity, executed with drama and sly wit. By the end of 1988, he was on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour telling the country that viruses were causing so much damage, some companies were “near collapse from financial loss.” He underscored the danger with his 1989 book, Computer Viruses, Worms, Data Diddlers, Killer Programs, and Other Threats to Your System. “The reality is so alarming that it would be very difficult to exaggerate,” he wrote. “Even if no new viruses are ever created, there are already enough circulating to cause a growing problem as they reproduce. A major disaster seems inevitable.”
In 1992 McAfee told almost every major news network and newspaper that the recently discovered Michelangelo virus was a huge threat; he believed it could destroy as many as 5 million computers around the world. Sales of his software spiked, but in the end only tens of thousands of infections were reported. Though McAfee was roundly criticized for his proclamation, the criticism worked in his favor, as he explained in an e-mail in 2000 to a computer-security blogger: “My business increased tenfold in the two months following the stories and six months later our revenues were 50 times greater and we had captured the lion’s share of the anti-virus market.”
This ability to infect others with his own paranoia made McAfee a wealthy man. In October 1992 his company debuted on Nasdaq, and his shares were suddenly worth $80 million.
• • •
The jail cell was about ten feet by ten feet. The concrete floor was bare and cold,
the smell of urine overpowering. A plastic milk container in the corner had been hacked open and was serving as a toilet. The detention center was located in the Queen Street police station, but everybody in Belize City called it the Pisshouse. In the shadows of his cell, McAfee could see the other inmates staring at him.
No charges had been filed yet, though the police had confiscated what they said were two unlicensed firearms on McAfee’s property; they still couldn’t identify the chemicals they had found. McAfee said he had licenses for all his firearms and explained that the chemicals were part of his antibiotic research. The police weren’t buying it.
McAfee pulled twenty Belizean dollars out of his shoe and passed it through the bars to a guard. “You got a cigarette?” he asked.
McAfee hadn’t smoked for ten years, but this seemed like a good time to start again. The guard handed him a book of matches and a pack of Benson & Hedges. McAfee lit one and took a deep drag. He was supposed to be living out a peaceful retirement in a tropical paradise. Now he was standing in jail, holding up his pants with one hand because the police had confiscated his belt. “Use this,” Allen said, offering him a dirty plastic bag.
McAfee looked confused. “You tie your pants,” Allen explained.
McAfee fed the bag through two of his belt loops, cinched it tight, and tied a knot. It worked.
“Welcome to the Pisshouse,” Allen said, smiling.
• • •
McAfee lived in Silicon Valley for nearly twenty years. Outwardly he seemed to lead a traditional life with his second wife, Judy. He was a seasoned businessman whom startups turned to for advice. Stanford Graduate School of Business wrote two case studies highlighting his strategies. He was regularly invited to lecture at the school, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Roanoke College. In 2000 he started a yoga institute near his 10,000-square-foot mansion in the Colorado Rockies and wrote four books about spirituality. Even after his marriage fell apart in 2002, he was a respectable citizen who donated computers to schools and took out newspaper ads discouraging drug use.
But as he neared retirement age in the late 2000s, he started to feel like he was deluding himself. His properties, cars, and planes had become a burden, and he realized that he didn’t want the traditional rich man’s life anymore. Maintaining so many possessions was a constant distraction; it was time, he felt, to try to live more rustically. “John has always been searching for something,” says Jennifer Irwin, McAfee’s girlfriend at the time. She remembers him telling her once that he was trying to reach “the expansive horizon.”
He was also hurting financially. The economic collapse in 2008 hit him hard, and he couldn’t afford to maintain his lifestyle. By 2009 he’d auctioned off almost everything he owned, including more than 1,000 acres of land in Hawaii and the private airport he’d built in New Mexico. He was trying in part to deter people from suing him on the assumption that he had deep pockets. He was already facing a suit from a man who had tripped on his property in New Mexico. Another suit alleged that he was responsible for the death of someone who crashed during a lesson at a flight school McAfee had founded. He figured that if he were out of the country, he’d be less of a target. And he knew that, should he lose a case, it would be harder for the plaintiffs to collect money if he lived overseas.
In early 2008 McAfee started searching for property in the Caribbean. His criteria were pretty basic: He was looking for an English-speaking country near the United States with beautiful beaches. He quickly came across a villa on Ambergris Caye in Belize. In the early nineties he had visited the nation of 189,000 people and loved it. (Today the population is around 356,000.) He looked at the property on Google Earth, decided it was perfect, and bought it. The first time he saw it in person was in April 2008, when he moved in.
Soon after his arrival, McAfee began to explore the country. He was particularly fascinated by stories of a majestic Mayan city in the jungle and hired a guide to go see it. Boating up a river that snaked into the northern jungle, they stopped at a makeshift dock that jutted from the dense vegetation. McAfee jumped ashore, pushed through the vines, and caught sight of a towering, crumbling temple. Trees had grown up through the ancient buildings, encasing them in roots. Giant stone faces glared out through the foliage, mouths agape. As the men walked up the steps of the temple, the guide described how the Mayans sacrificed their prisoners, sending torrents of blood down the very stairs he and McAfee were now climbing.
McAfee was spellbound. “Belize is so raw and so clear and so in-your-face. There’s an opportunity to see something about human nature that you can’t really see in a politer society, because the purpose of society is to mask ourselves from each other,” McAfee says. The jungle, in other words, would give him the chance to find out exactly who he was, and that opportunity was irresistible.
So in February 2010 he bought two and a half acres of swampy land along the New River, ten miles upriver from the Mayan ruins. Over the next year, he spent more than a million dollars filling in the swamp and constructing an array of thatched-roofed bungalows. While his girlfriend, Irwin, stayed on Ambergris Caye, McAfee outfitted the place like Kublai Khan’s sumptuous house of pleasure. He imported ancient Tibetan art and shipped in a baby grand piano even though he had never taken lessons. There was no Internet. At night, when the construction stopped, there was just the sound of the river flowing quietly past. He sat at the piano and played exuberant odes of his own creation. “It was magical,” he says.
He didn’t like the idea of getting old, though, so he injected testosterone into his buttocks every other week. He felt that it gave him youthful energy and kept him lean. Plus, he wasn’t looking for a quiet retirement. He started a cigar manufacturing business, a coffee distribution company, and a water taxi service that connected parts of Ambergris Caye. He continued to build more bungalows on his property even though he had no pressing need for them.
• • •
In 2010 McAfee visited a beachfront resort for lunch and met Allison Adonizio, a thirty-one-year-old microbiologist who was on vacation. In the resort’s dining room, Adonizio explained that she was doing postgrad research at Harvard on how plants combat bacteria. She was particularly interested in plant compounds that appeared to prevent bacteria from causing infections by interfering with the way the microbes communicated. Eventually, Adonizio explained, the work might also lead to an entire new class of antibiotics.
McAfee was thrilled by the idea. He had fought off digital contagions, and now he could fight organic ones. It was perfect.
He immediately proposed they start a business to commercialize her research. Within minutes McAfee was talking in rapid-fire bursts about how this would transform the pharmaceutical industry and the entire world. They would save millions of lives and reinvent whole industries. Adonizio was astounded. “He offered me my dream job,” she says. “My own lab, assistants. It was incredible.”
Adonizio said yes on the spot, quit her research position in Boston, sold the house she had just bought, and moved to Belize. McAfee soon built a laboratory on his property and stocked it with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment. Adonizio went to work trying to isolate new plant compounds that might be effective medicines, while McAfee touted the business to the international press.
But the methodical pace of Adonizio’s scientific research couldn’t keep up with McAfee’s enthusiasm, and his attention seemed to wander. He began spending more time in Orange Walk, a town of about 13,000 people that was five miles from his compound. McAfee described it in an e-mail to friends as “the asshole of the world—dirty, hot, gray, dilapidated.” He liked to walk the town’s poorly paved streets and take pictures of the residents. “I gravitate to the world’s outcasts,” he explained in another e-mail. “Prostitutes, thieves, the handicapped.… For some reason I have always been fascinated by these subcultures.”
Though he says he never drank alcohol, he became a regular at a saloon called Lover’s Bar. The pro
prietor, McAfee wrote to his friends, was partial to “shatteringly bad Mexican karaoke music to which voices beyond description add a disharmony that reaches diabolic proportions.” McAfee quickly noticed that the place doubled as a whorehouse, servicing, as he put it, “cane field workers, street vendors, fishermen, farmers—anyone who has managed to save up $15 for a good time.”
This was the real world he was looking for, in all its horror. The bar girls were given one Belize dollar for every beer a patron bought them. To increase their earnings, some of the women would chug beers, vomit in the restroom, and return to chug more. One reported drinking fifty beers in one day. “Ninety-nine percent of people would run because they’d fear for their safety or sanity,” McAfee says. “I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t walk away.”
McAfee started spending most mornings at Lover’s. After six months, he sent out another update to his friends: “My fragile connection with the world of polite society has, without a doubt, been severed,” he wrote. “My attire would rank me among the worst-dressed Tijuana panhandlers. My hygiene is no better. Yesterday, for the first time, I urinated in public, in broad daylight.”
McAfee knew he had entered a dangerous world. “I have no illusions,” he noted in another dispatch. “We are tainted by everything we touch.”
• • •
Evaristo “Paz” Novelo, the obese Belizean proprietor of Lover’s, liked to sit at a corner table and squint at his customers through perpetually puffy eyes. He admits to a long history of operating brothels and prides himself on his ability to figure out exactly what will please his patrons. Early on, he asked whether McAfee was looking for a woman. When McAfee said no, Novelo asked whether he wanted a boy. McAfee declined again. Then Novelo showed up at McAfee’s compound with a sixteen-year-old girl named Amy Emshwiller.
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