“Good evening, I think it is,” McAfee says.
I explain that it’s 9:41 a.m.
“You’re kidding me,” he says. “I haven’t slept for a couple nights. It felt like evening to me.”
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“I am back from Mexico, thank God,” he says, explaining that he was robbed and beaten outside of Cancun. Now he’s on Ambergris Caye. “Here it’s clear that they’re not going to harm me, they’re just trying to scare me,” he says. “They have to up the ante if they’re going to continue scaring me.”
I talk to him repeatedly over the next week. He fires all of his bodyguards because he thinks they are informing on him. He hires William Mulligan, a British national, to take their place. McAfee figures Mulligan will have fewer connections to the authorities, despite the fact that he’s married to a Belizean woman.
On Friday, November 9, 2012, I receive an e-mail from McAfee telling me that “a contingent of black-suited thugs” disembarked on the dock next to his property at ten-thirty pm. The men dispersed on the beach. “A half hour later all of my dogs had been poisoned,” he writes. “Mellow, Lucky, Dipsy, and Guerrero have already died. I had to call Amy and tell her about Mellow. She is hysterical.”
The next morning, November 10, 2012, McAfee calls to tell me that his dogs died horrific deaths. They were vomiting blood and convulsing on the ground. McAfee shot them to end their suffering. “It was an ugly thing,” he says.
“How is Amy doing?” I ask.
“I’ve tried calling her twice,” he says. “She’s not answering. She’s not doing well.”
I suddenly recall a conversation I had with Emshwiller in August. She was describing someone in Carmelita who tortured dogs and, with a chill, I remember her reaction: “Mess with my dog, you’re gonna get it, man,” she’d said.
In another conversation, she also said she had become profoundly committed to McAfee. “If he asked me to blow someone’s fucking brains out, I would,” she said.
Still on the phone with me, McAfee is searching for clues to explain the dead dogs and has noticed that the fence around his property is surrounded by boot prints—“military-style boot prints,” he says—and cites this as evidence that the police were involved. “I’m a paranoid person,” he says. “I really am. But the whole thing is looking really weird to me.”
I point out that his neighbors had been complaining about the barking. In August, Vivian Yu, operator of a bar and restaurant up the beach, asked one of McAfee’s guards to do something to control the eleven dogs that roamed his property. McAfee hired a carpenter to build a fence to corral them.
Greg Faull, a neighbor two houses to the south on Ambergris Caye, was particularly incensed by the racket and aggression of McAfee’s mutts. Faull was a big man—five-eleven, around 220 pounds—who owned a sports bars in Orlando, Florida, and spent part of the year in Belize. It was a tropical paradise to him, except for the nuisance McAfee’s dogs created. They growled and barked incessantly at anybody who walked by on the beach.
Faull had confronted McAfee about the animals in the past. According to McAfee, Faull once threatened to shoot them, but McAfee didn’t believe he’d do it. Allison Adonizio, who had stayed at Greg Faull’s house when she first moved to Belize in 2010, says there was bad blood between the two men back then. “McAfee hated his guts,” she wrote in an e-mail to me.
Earlier in the week, Faull had filed a formal complaint about the dogs with the mayor’s office in the nearby town of San Pedro. Now, as I try to catch up on the latest details, McAfee dismisses the suggestion that any of his neighbors could have been involved in the apparent poisoning of the animals. “They’re still dog lovers,” he says. “And I talked to them this morning. No one here would ever poison the dogs.”
He speaks specifically about Faull. “This is not something he would ever do,” McAfee says. “I mean, he’s an angry sort of guy, but he would never hurt a dog.”
On Sunday morning, Faull is found lying face-up in a pool of blood. He’s been shot once through the back of the head, execution-style. A 9-mm Luger casing lies on the ground nearby. There are no signs of forced entry. A laptop and an iPhone are missing, police say.
That afternoon, Belizean police arrive at McAfee’s property to question him about Faull’s death. McAfee sees them coming and is sure the authorities are intent on tormenting him again. He quickly digs a shallow trench in the sand and buries himself, pulling a cardboard box over his head. He stays there for hours.
“It was extraordinarily uncomfortable,” he says.
The police confiscate all the weapons on the property and take Mulligan in for questioning. When they leave, Cassian Chavarria, McAfee’s groundskeeper, tells him that Faull has been killed. According to McAfee, that was the first he heard of the murder. His initial reaction, he says, is that it was the GSU trying to kill McAfee himself. “I thought maybe they were coming for me,” he says. “They mistook him for me. They got the wrong house. He’s dead. They killed him. It spooked me out.”
McAfee decides to go on the run and begins calling me at all hours. I ask him if he shot Faull. “No sir, no sir,” he says. “That’s not even funny.” (Emshwiller also denies any involvement in Faull’s death.)
All McAfee knew about the murder, he says, was that the police were after him, and he believed that if they caught him, he would be tortured or killed. “Once they collect me, it’s the end of me,” he says.
Over the next forty-eight hours, McAfee bounces from place to place around Belize, aided by a network of “people who can’t be followed,” he tells me. “It’s complicated, and there are a lot of risks, and people could turn south at any minute.” Samantha Vanegas, one of his girlfriends, is with him, and he says that they’ve been subsisting on Oreo Cakester cookies and cigarettes. On Tuesday morning, he says, the police raided the house next door, but they evaded capture, eventually landing in a house with no hot water and a broken toilet. There is, however, a working TV.
“We watched Swiss Family Robinson,” he says. “It’s about castaways. That’s why we got into it. It was like, wow, we could do that. We could get bamboo and build something like that.”
The movie had a happy ending. McAfee liked that.
The Atavist
FINALIST—REPORTING
One of the victims of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 was the Bounty, a replica of an eighteenth-century tall ship that sank off the coast of North Carolina. Matthew Shaer’s story about this disaster is, as the National Magazine Award judges said, “a tale of hubris, courage, resourcefulness, and loss that weaves together maritime history, profiles, and sturdy narrative.” A staff writer at Smithsonian, Shaer also writes regularly for New York. His book, Among Righteous Men: A Tale of Vigilantes and Vindication in Hasidic Crown Heights, was published in 2011. The Atavist is a digital monthly published at atavist.com and on mobile apps. The editor is Evan Ratliff, whose story “Vanished” was nominated for a National Magazine Award and included in Best American Magazine Writing in 2010.
Matthew Shaer
The Sinking of the Bounty
“And tell me, wasn’t that the best time, that time when we were young at sea; young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing, except hard knocks—and sometimes a chance to feel your strength …”
—Joseph Conrad, “Youth”
One. Monday, October 29, 2012, 5:30 a.m.
Five hundred feet over the Atlantic Ocean, Coast Guard Petty Officer Second Class Randy Haba jammed himself into the rear bucket seat of the Jayhawk helicopter and waited for the doomed ship to come into view. Through the window he could see the crests of the waves and a flotilla of detritus that seemed to spread out in every direction toward the horizon—wormy coils of rope, sharp splinters of yard, tatters of sailcloth. The phosphor screens of his ANVIS-9 night-vision goggles rendered the ocean neon green—a flat, unceasing green that bled into the gray-green of the clouds and the yellow-green of the sky. The kind of green that made i
t difficult to distinguish distance or depth of field, let alone the blink of the chest-mounted strobe that the guys up in the C-130 transport airplane had sworn was out there, somewhere in the hurricane-roiled sea.
Haba felt the helicopter lurch into a hover. The winds were blowing at close to ninety miles an hour, and in the cabin, Lieutenant Commander Steve Cerveny was fighting the sticks. “Left side,” Lieutenant Jane Peña, the safety pilot, called over the radio. “Got it?”
“Roger,” Haba, the crew’s rescue swimmer, replied. Setting down the ANVIS-9s, he pulled on his fins, dive helmet, mask and snorkel, and thick neoprene gloves. He checked the neck seal of the flame-retardant dive suit and the pockets above the harness, which contained flares, a radio beacon, and one very sharp, spring-loaded knife.
Haba, a six-foot-three former high school football star with hard blue eyes and a weather-beaten face, had been based at the air station in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, for more than eight years, the majority of his Coast Guard career. He’d participated in plenty of rescues in the waters off Cape Hatteras, a dangerous patch of sea known by generations of mariners as the “Graveyard of the Atlantic.” There, past the pastel beach houses and salt-stained crab shacks, the North Atlantic’s cold Labrador current collides with the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, yielding frequent storms and high waves capable of swallowing a ship whole.
But Haba had never encountered a situation like this. An hour and a half earlier, he’d been snoozing on a lumpy leather couch at the air station when the call came in: A large wooden ship was in trouble one hundred miles east of Elizabeth City with sixteen people on board. The ship’s water-removal systems were malfunctioning, and it was limping into the path of Hurricane Sandy, the vast superstorm swirling over the North Carolina coast. Haba had trotted downstairs and rendezvoused with his helicopter crew. One of the command-center staffers had printed out a picture of the ship in question from Google Images, and only when he saw it did Haba grasp how strange his morning was about to become. Because the distressed vessel wasn’t a yacht. It wasn’t a schooner. It looked more like a pirate ship.
Bounty, as she was known, was a working replica of the eighteenth-century tall ship of the same name, commissioned half a century earlier for a film. She measured 120 feet from stern to bow, and 128 feet from keel to masthead. Her three wooden masts held 10,000 square feet of sail. A couple of days earlier, she’d departed New London, Connecticut, under the command of Robin Walbridge, a veteran tall-ship captain. At first she’d tacked east, in an effort to avoid the worst of the storm, but at some point, Walbridge had turned the ship southwest, toward shore and Sandy’s perilous center mass. Until four a.m., when the crew abandoned ship, she’d been in contact with a C-130, which was still circling overhead at 1,000 feet. After that, there was only silence on the radio.
The number of survivors was uncertain. But the C-130 crew had spotted at least one figure bobbing alone amid the debris—a small shape swaddled in an immersion suit, with a blinking strobe on his chest. The straggler, they called him. Maybe he was dead—a floater—but maybe he wasn’t. Either way, Haba was about to find out. He clipped into the winch, gave a thumbs-up to the flight mechanic, and, the cable whistling behind him, dropped into the waves.
Almost immediately, he began to eat seawater. He was swimming against the current, against the wind. It didn’t help that Cerveny had the Jayhawk so low. The rotor wash was spectacular, drowning out any other sound. Still, Haba paddled like hell, and a minute later, he reached the straggler. The hood of the immersion suit was pulled tight around the guy’s head and all Haba could see was his face, which was covered in fresh lacerations. His skin was pale and his cheeks sunken. One arm hung limply at his side.
With some effort, Haba angled the sling under the man’s other armpit, and pulled the man close to his chest. Sometimes survivors fight back, out of confusion or panic—the surest way to drown is to fight us, rescue swimmers like to say. But the straggler was docile, barely even able to talk, and Haba made good time back to the winch. He gave the thumbs-up to the mechanic and waited for the cable to pull them skyward. Beneath the Jayhawk, illuminated by the rising sun, the tall ship Bounty was slipping under the surface of the sea.
Two. Thursday, October 25, 11:00 a.m.
It amused the hands on the Bounty—a motley collection of retirees, bearded and tattooed twenty-somethings, and midlife re-inventionists—to watch the navy guys go all weak-kneed at the sight of the 112-foot masts. Bounty sailors knew every inch of that rigging, from sheets to spar. But to the local nuclear submarine crew in New London, who had come aboard that afternoon for a demonstration in square-rig sailing, it was utterly unfamiliar territory. In the end, only a few of them were brave enough to strap up and attempt a climb. The weather was calm and overcast, a pleasant fifty-eight degrees.
Later that day, after the sub crew departed, Captain Robin Walbridge convened a brief all-hands meeting. Walbridge was a naturally reserved man, but at musters he presented a calmly confident mien. Peering out over the top of his eyeglasses, a ball cap partially obscuring his brow, he outlined the course for the two weeks ahead. Bounty would depart New London that night—setting sail on a Friday was considered to be bad luck—and head south. If they kept up a pace of a hundred miles a day, they could easily make Florida by the second week of November.
That would allow them to meet an obligation in St. Petersburg, a tour for members of an organization that promoted awareness of Down’s syndrome—and maybe even make a pit stop in Key West, where the crew could swim, hit the bars, and recharge after what was sure to be a difficult voyage south. In mid-November, the Bounty would sail around the tip of Florida, across the Gulf of Mexico, and into Galveston, Texas, where she’d be put up for the winter.
Walbridge was sixty-three, with unruly silver hair and meaty, callused hands. He had come relatively late to professional seafaring after a series of stints on oil rigs and a short career as a long-haul trucker. He’d grown up in St. Johnsbury, a cloistered town in northeastern Vermont, and claimed to have first sailed at the age of eighteen, although he was tight-lipped about that part of his life; when his crew members asked his age, he would offer an array of different numbers. Perhaps something painful lurked in his past, they thought. Or perhaps Walbridge simply preferred to talk about his ships.
He’d worked on plenty over the previous two decades, all of them throwbacks in one way or another. There was the nineteenth-century schooner Governor Stone; the HMS Rose, a tall ship built in 1970 to the specifications of eighteenth-century British Admiralty drawings; and the USS Constitution, the famous frigate christened by George Washington, on which Walbridge had served as a guest captain once in the 1990s. But his true love was Bounty, a vessel he’d captained since 1995.
Tall-ship crews are usually drawn from two cohorts of people. First there are the amateur adventurers—the retirees and armchair admirals, the recent college graduates putting off adulthood. These volunteers might sail with a tall ship for a week or a few months or a year, but they are not paid; in many cases, they are actually billed for berth and board. The second cohort, the mates, tend to be experienced sailors who have decided to make a career out of tall-ship sailing. Generally speaking, they have worked their way up the totem pole, from volunteer to paid hand.
On average, the crew of Bounty numbered around eighteen, with a small cadre of paid officers, a paid cook, a few lower-ranking hands, and the occasional volunteer. Walbridge never discriminated among the various groups. If anything, he seemed to lavish more attention on the sailors who were still learning to navigate the ship, to take in line and climb the rigging. He was intoxicated by the old-fashioned way of doing things, and he was pleased to be around those who were in the process of becoming intoxicated themselves. “He considered square-rigged sailing a truly dying art, and he was the one keeping the idea alive,” one longtime Bounty hand has said.
And yet Walbridge was no fusty antiquarian. He had sailed the Bounty up and down the Ea
st Coast, through the Panama Canal and over to the West Coast, and twice across the Atlantic. Along the way, he’d seen plenty of bad weather, including a pair of hurricanes and pants-shittingly high waves that heaved across the decks, and he had acquired a certain bravado about it. Walbridge was “clearly brilliant,” says a former first mate of Bounty, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The kind of guy who could play three games of chess at once, who could take apart a diesel engine and put it back together with his bare hands. But the term ‘prudent mariner’ doesn’t really enter the mix.”
The former first mate recalled a series of harrowing close calls aboard the ship, including a “thirty-six-hour nightmare ordeal” off Cape Hatteras in 1998, when rough seas sent water pouring into the Bounty’s engine room. Both the Coast Guard and the Navy had sent vessels to the scene, and extra pumps were dropped on board to clear out the water. But in the end, Walbridge declined to be towed back to shore by the Coast Guard—fearing, the first mate believes, that it would prompt a federal investigation. Instead, Bounty managed to sail under her own power back to Charleston for repairs. In a few days, she was at sea again.
Around the same time that Walbridge was convening his crew on Bounty’s deck in New London, on October 25, a new storm, Hurricane Sandy, was arriving on the Florida coast, 1,000 miles to the south. Several crew members who were in the meeting on deck say that Walbridge believed Sandy would barrel up the coast and eventually track inland, somewhere near North Carolina. By sailing southeast before turning south, Bounty could stay windward of the storm. Remaining in Connecticut, Walbridge felt, wasn’t an option—he subscribed to the old maxim that a ship was always safer at sea than at anchor. In a crowded port like New London, there would be practically zero “sea room,” and Bounty would be hemmed in, dangerously close to the docks. Better to take our chances “out there,” Walbridge told the crew.
The Best American Magazine Writing 2014 Page 39