Originally published 2021-06-27.
John McAfee, the British-born American programmer who founded the McAfee antivirus company, was found dead in his cell at the Brians 2 prison near Barcelona on 23 June 2021. He was 75. Only hours earlier Spain's National Court had approved his extradition to the United States, where he faced tax evasion charges in Tennessee. An official autopsy and a Spanish court concluded that he died by suicide; his widow and his lawyer disputed that, and the dispute left his body in a Barcelona morgue for more than two years.
What happened in Spain
McAfee had been held in the prison at Sant Esteve Sesrovires, in Catalonia, since October 2020. He was detained on 5 October 2020 at the request of the US Justice Department, reportedly while preparing to fly out of Barcelona to Istanbul. For eight months he fought extradition from his cell.
On 23 June 2021 the National Court in Madrid ruled that he could be sent to Tennessee to stand trial. That evening prison staff found him dead. Catalonia's justice department said guards had tried to revive him without success. The ruling could still have been appealed, and McAfee's lawyer said his client had shown no sign of planning to take his life.
His widow, Janice McAfee, said she did not believe he had died by suicide and called for a thorough investigation. Spanish courts nonetheless upheld the official finding.
The charges he faced
A federal indictment in Tennessee accused McAfee of failing to file tax returns between 2014 and 2018 even though, prosecutors said, he had earned millions of dollars in that period. The income allegedly came from promoting cryptocurrencies, consulting work, speaking engagements and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary.
He had more legal trouble waiting. On 6 October 2020, the day after his arrest, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil complaint accusing him of touting initial coin offerings to his large social media following without disclosing that he was being paid. In March 2021 prosecutors in New York indicted him and an adviser over an alleged cryptocurrency "pump and dump" scheme.
From prison, McAfee insisted he had nothing left. In a tweet a week before his death, he wrote that his crypto had "dissolved through the many hands of Team McAfee" and that his assets had been seized.
The US believes I have hidden crypto. I wish I did but it has dissolved through the many hands of Team McAfee (your belief is not required), and my remaining assets are all seized. My friends evaporated through fear of association.
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) June 16, 2021
I have nothing.
Yet, I regret nothing.
The man behind the antivirus software
McAfee was born on 18 September 1945 at a US Army base in Gloucestershire, England, and grew up in the United States. After working as a programmer for NASA, Xerox and other employers, he founded McAfee Associates in 1987 to sell VirusScan, widely described as the first commercial antivirus program. Its shareware model, letting people try the software for free, helped it spread quickly as personal computers took off.
He left the company in the early 1990s and sold his remaining shares in 1994, making a fortune. He had no role in the business for decades afterwards, and later spoke scornfully of the product that still bore his name. Intel bought the company in 2010 for about $7.7 billion, and it was later spun off again.
Belize, Guatemala and years on the run
From around 2008 McAfee lived in Belize, where he invested in various ventures and lived on a guarded property with armed staff. In November 2012 his neighbour on Ambergris Caye, the American Gregory Faull, was found shot dead in his home. Belizean police said they wanted to question McAfee as a person of interest. He was never charged, but rather than talk to police he went into hiding and then slipped across the border into Guatemala, claiming that Belize's government was persecuting him and that he feared for his life.
Guatemala arrested him in December 2012 for entering the country illegally. He was briefly hospitalised, then deported to the United States. The episode, which he narrated in real time on a blog and in interviews, made him a fixture of tabloid coverage.
Politics, crypto and conspiracy talk
Back in the US, McAfee reinvented himself as a libertarian provocateur. He sought the Libertarian Party's presidential nomination in 2016, finishing third at the party convention, and launched another, chaotic campaign for 2020. He became one of the loudest promoters of cryptocurrencies, at one point making extravagant predictions about the price of Bitcoin.
In 2019 he said he was living outside the United States to avoid tax authorities, and he spent periods on a yacht and in the Bahamas before ending up in Spain. He often claimed that governments wanted him dead and that, if he were ever found dead, it would not be suicide. No evidence was ever produced to support those claims, but they ensured that conspiracy theories spread within minutes of the news of his death.
Why power corrupts. pic.twitter.com/cwbKHcaQsd
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) June 17, 2020
After his death
Because his family contested the autopsy and asked for further checks, a Catalan judge ruled that the body could not be released while the appeals were pending. It stayed in refrigerated storage at the forensic facility in Barcelona's Ciutat de la Justícia for well over two years. Spanish courts eventually confirmed the suicide finding, and in December 2023 the body was released to the family to be taken to the United States for a funeral.
Janice McAfee later said in interviews that her husband left no will and no estate. The once-wealthy software pioneer, in the end, left behind mostly a legend and a string of unresolved legal cases.
If you are struggling or thinking about suicide, please reach out to someone you trust or a local crisis line. In the US you can call or text 988; in the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be reached on 116 123.
Sources: Wikipedia: John McAfee; tweets embedded from John McAfee's Twitter account; Facebook post embedded from WikiLeaks.
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