AP – John McAfee, external security software pioneer who tried to make a living as a hedonistic outsider while fleeing multiple legal troubles, was found dead in his prison cell near Barcelona on Wednesday.
Just hours after his death, a Spanish court announced that it had approved his extradition to the United States to face tax charges after decades in prison, officials said.
McAfee, who was among other things a cryptocurrency promoter, tax opponent, US presidential candidate and fugitive who publicly embraced drugs, guns and sex, had a history of legal woes from Tennessee to Central America to the Caribbean. . In 2012, he was sought for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor in Belize, but he was never charged with the crime.
McAfee’s body was discovered in the Brian 2 peninsula in northeastern Spain. Security personnel tried to revive him, but the prison’s medical team ultimately attested to his death, a statement from the regional Catalan government said.
“A judicial delegation has come to investigate the cause of death,” the statement said. “Everything points to death by suicide.”
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McAfee’s death was confirmed after Spain’s National Court ruled in favor of the extradition of 75-year-old McAfee, who, at a hearing earlier this month, argued that the charges against him by prosecutors in Tennessee were politically motivated. And he would spend the rest of his life in prison. If you return to America.
The court’s decision was made public on Wednesday and was open for appeal, with any final extradition order also requiring approval from the Spanish cabinet.
McAfee was arrested at Barcelona’s international airport last October and has since been in prison awaiting the outcome of extradition proceedings. The arrest came the same month in Tennessee after he was charged with tax evasion after failing to report income from promoting cryptocurrency while he did consulting work, had a speaking engagement, and rights to his life story for a documentary. sold. The criminal charges carried sentences of up to 30 years in prison.
Nishay Sanon, a Chicago-based lawyer who defended him in those cases, said over the phone that McAfee “will always be remembered as a fighter.”
“He tried to love this country but the US government made his existence impossible,” Sanan said. “They tried to eradicate him, but they were unsuccessful.”
Entrance of the Brian 2 Peninsula Center at St. Esteve Cesarovares, near Barcelona, northeastern Spain, June 23, 2021. (Joan Mateau / AP)
Born in Gloucestershire, England, in 1945 as John David McAfee, he moved to Virginia as a child and became troubled, with a father who “brutally beat him” and killed himself with McAfee’s shotgun, When the boy was 15 years old, said Steve Morgan, who spent 2016 in Alabama with McAfee to talk about his life for a biography he was contracted to write. Morgan is also the founder of market research firm Cybersecurity Ventures.
“He told me that his father never showed him an ounce of affection,” Morgan said, adding that McAfee cried during their long meeting as he recalled his father’s death.
Although McAfee’s tech legacy has been overshadowed by his tumultuous life in recent years, Morgan said he sees his most lasting impact as a software and security pioneer.
“I think ultimately what he really likes to be remembered the most. I think a lot of people will remember him as a very troubled soul. Some people will remember him as a criminal. It’s your age.” And depends on your contact,” Morgan said.
McAfee founded his company of the same name in 1987. At the time, Morgan said, he was operating a BBS, a bulletin board system that served as a precursor to the World Wide Web, and worked with his brother-in-law. When the first major computer virus, called “brain,” hit in 1986, “John immediately dialed a programmer he knew and said, There’s a big opportunity. We need to do something. You know “We want to write some code to deal with this virus,” said Morgan. He called the program VirusScan and the company McAfee Associates.
“He was a true pioneer, not only as a security technologist but as one of the first companies to distribute software over the Internet,” Morgan said.
California chipmaker Intel, which bought McAfee’s company in 2011 for $7.68 billion, for a time sought to separate the brand from its controversial founder by adding it to its larger cybersecurity division. But the rebranding was short-lived, and Intel spun off its cybersecurity unit into a new company called McAfee in 2016.
In the software industry, McAfee’s claim to fame was that it offered the first all-in-one virus scanner, said Veselin Bontachev, a Bulgarian computer scientist and an early antivirus researcher. Before that, Bontachev said, researchers would only scan for one virus at a time. But at that time there were only about a dozen computer viruses.
“Technically, as a scanner, it was nothing outstanding. It was just the general idea that was good. Not the implementation,” said Bontachev, a senior researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Bontachev said that McAfee was still “a strange man” at the time. He said he had written to McAfee about the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union to ask for a part-time job so that he could work on his post-doctoral dissertation in the US.
In response, McAfee told Bonchev in a letter that the Bulgarians were considered Soviet agents, so “they can’t work with me,” he said. “It’s a really weird way to say no to someone asking for a job.”
The two later met at the annual Virus Bulletin conference in the US, Bontchev said. “I don’t think he was a typical American. He was just weird.”
McAfee has twice made long runs for the US presidency and participated in the Libertarian Party presidential debate in 2016. He worked in the production of yoga, ultralight aircraft and herbal medicines.
John McAfee, founder of anti-virus software, answers questions from reporters as he walks Ocean Drive in the South Beach area of Miami Beach, Florida on December 12, 2012. (Alan Diaz/AP)
In 2012 he was wanted for questioning in connection with the death of Gregory Wyant Fall, who was shot and killed in early November 2012 on the island of Belize where both men lived.
McAfee told the AP at the time that he was being persecuted by the Belizean government. Belizean police denied this, saying they were only investigating a crime that McAfee was aware of. Dean Barrow, the then Prime Minister, expressed doubts about McAfee’s mental state, saying, “I do not wish to be unkind to the gentleman, but I believe he is extremely insane, even Bonkers too.”
A Florida court in 2019 ordered McAfee to pay $25 million to Faul’s estate in a wrongful death claim. He declined to pay it, writing in a statement posted on Twitter that he “has not responded to one of my 37 lawsuits for the past 11 years.” He claimed he had no property, writing that the order was a “silent point” – an obvious misspelling of “moot”.
He was released from detention in the Dominican Republic in July of that year after he and five others were suspected of traveling on a yacht carrying high-capacity weapons, ammunition and military-style gear.
Wired magazine reporter Joshua Davis spent six months investigating McAfee’s troubled life in 2012, when he was living in Belize and was being questioned in connection with the murder of his neighbor. He saw McAfee take out a pistol to illustrate a point.
“Let’s do it one more time,” Davis wrote, and turned it on its head. “Another round of Russian roulette. Like before he repeatedly pulls the trigger, the cylinder spins, the hammer comes down and nothing happens. ‘It’s a real gun. It’s a real bullet in a chamber,'” he says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have somehow turned out to be flawed. I’m missing something.”