Speaker 1: Jim Goal is an auctioneer based in Miami. He says
Speaker 1: that one day in two thousand and nine, his phone rang.
Speaker 1: The office called me and they said, John McAfee, don't
Speaker 1: call him mccafee. He has called and has properties and
Speaker 1: wants to speak with you. Well, I know who he
Speaker 1: is because everyone was talking about anti virus. So I
Speaker 1: was honored and humbled. Only months earlier, the stock market
Speaker 1: had crashed and the American economy sank into a deep recession.
Speaker 1: Unemployment hit ten percent. People who'd taken out loans on
Speaker 1: homes they couldn't afford lost them. It was a manic
Speaker 1: Monday in the financial markets. The now tumbled more than
Speaker 1: five hundred points. We're in the midst of a serious
Speaker 1: financial crisis. Lehman Brothers, a one hundred and fifty eight
Speaker 1: year old firm, filed for bankruptcy, brought down by bad
Speaker 1: mortgage investments. Lehman, which has twenty five thousand employees, will
Speaker 1: be liquidated. Against this backdrop of banks or closing properties
Speaker 1: and people being forced from their homes. John McAfee wanted
Speaker 1: to offload two if he's vacation houses. They were in obscure,
Speaker 1: hard to reach places. One of them in Hawaii had
Speaker 1: been a leper colony in the eighteen hundreds. So that's
Speaker 1: not a place where the cruise ships go. They have
Speaker 1: like one flight in and Outamolakai. It's not like going
Speaker 1: to Honolulu. And his properties in Rodeo were just north
Speaker 1: of the Mexican border, and there would be mules going
Speaker 1: through that area. He had guns in every corner of
Speaker 1: his house. The border patrol was everywhere. You had to
Speaker 1: travel far out of your way to reach those kinds
Speaker 1: of places, and Jim says this was deliberate on McAfee's part.
Speaker 1: So he was kind of reclusive, and he liked to
Speaker 1: live well. He traveled the world, and he just wanted
Speaker 1: to get out of the rat race of life. He
Speaker 1: just wanted to get away from it all. McAfee was
Speaker 1: so keen to get rid of his properties and quickly
Speaker 1: that he handed over all responsibilities to Jim, no questions asked.
Speaker 1: He says, I don't really want to be at any
Speaker 1: of the auctions. So I said, well, I'll need powers
Speaker 1: of attorney. He gave me either seven or eight powers
Speaker 1: of attorney. And so when I went to Hawaii, I
Speaker 1: sold his home there in Molokai and they would look
Speaker 1: at me like, you have the right to sign this.
Speaker 1: I said, here's the power of attorney. This is an
Speaker 1: original copy. Once the houses were gone, McAfee wanted Jim
Speaker 1: to offload other assets. He would say, can you sell these?
Speaker 1: And he dumped like three or four hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: worth of watches in my lap, Harry Winston eighteen carrot
Speaker 1: white gold, full of diamonds, Patek Philippe, Rolex. He had
Speaker 1: the best of the best. Why was McAfee trying to
Speaker 1: get rid of everything at once? Jim says that McAfee
Speaker 1: didn't even try to hide his reason. He told me,
Speaker 1: you know, people were suing him right and left, so
Speaker 1: now he had an unlawful death suit, so he was
Speaker 1: he was just fed up. He said, you know, I've
Speaker 1: got a blazon belize. You know I'm selling everything. And
Speaker 1: I remember he said to me, there's no process servers
Speaker 1: where I'm gone. Well delt into this wrongful death lawsuit.
Speaker 1: Later in this episode, it involved an extravagant and dangerous
Speaker 1: hobby flying ultralight aircraft at low altitudes, and Jim says
Speaker 1: that to get away from that lawsuit, McAfee wanted to
Speaker 1: not only offload all his properties, he also wanted to
Speaker 1: appear to have squandered all of his money, like he
Speaker 1: was just another person who had lost everything in the recession.
Speaker 1: And so Jim found himself providing another service from McAfee.
Speaker 1: I got a call from the New York Times. She
Speaker 1: was a business writer. Her name was Jerry Fabricant, and
Speaker 1: she said, Jim, I'm looking to do a story on
Speaker 1: people that had a lot of money and then they
Speaker 1: cannot blew up. Jim has an idea, So I called
Speaker 1: up John. I said, John, I know you've had a
Speaker 1: ton of money, and you still love a ton of money,
Speaker 1: but you know you've had, you know, some pitfalls along
Speaker 1: the way, and would you be willing to talk to
Speaker 1: someone with the New York Times? And he says yes,
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, he was jumping for joy. In August
Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, The New York Times publishes a
Speaker 1: story headlined Rise of the super Rich hits a sobering wall.
Speaker 1: Geraldine Fabricat reports that he's one hundred million dollar fortune
Speaker 1: had dwindled to four million. She writes an additional article,
Speaker 1: once the property is sold, there is no mention of
Speaker 1: the wrongful dead lawsuit in either of the stories. Instead,
Speaker 1: McAfee is said to be selling because he wanted to
Speaker 1: spend more time in Beliefs because of its favorable taxes.
Speaker 1: Jim says that McAfee didn't tell the reporter the whole truth.
Speaker 1: He was certainly not in distress, and you know, it
Speaker 1: was like, you know, a wink, and like I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be just fine, meaning money wise, okay, with all these lawsuits,
Speaker 1: the wrongful death and everything else. He liked the appearance
Speaker 1: of losing a lot of money to kind of keep
Speaker 1: people away from these lawsuits. You know that we're probably
Speaker 1: asking for financial statements, asking for this, asking for that.
Speaker 1: I think it was a little bit of a facade
Speaker 1: that John liked. He knew how to play every opportunity.
Speaker 1: McAfee actually wrote a letter to The Times, which was published.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Geraldine for the publicity for my new Mexico auction.
Speaker 1: You've done a good job. I spoke to the reporter
Speaker 1: Geraldine Fabrican on the phone when I told her about
Speaker 1: Jim Gold's suggestion that McAfee miss led her so she
Speaker 1: could report that he had lost nearly all his money
Speaker 1: to ward off lawsuits. She said she didn't know he
Speaker 1: was being sued at the time. You're listening to Foundering.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jamie Tarabay. In the previous episode, we
Speaker 1: discussed John McAfee's invention of an anti virus software that
Speaker 1: dominated the computer market and made a name for him
Speaker 1: in the process, and two years later John sold most
Speaker 1: of his shares and walked away with reportedly a hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars in hand. He would spend the next two
Speaker 1: decades largely out of the public eye, and his vast
Speaker 1: riches make him even more unaccountable for his behavior than
Speaker 1: he was in his early life. McAfee builds massive estates
Speaker 1: in remote, far flung places throughout the country. He's physically isolated,
Speaker 1: he's insulated by his money, and he begins to embrace
Speaker 1: increasingly indulgent, reckless rule breaking that eventually costs lives. We'll
Speaker 1: tell you more about McAfee's descent into lawlessness after this
Speaker 1: quick break. John McAfee had exhibited impulsive behavior throughout his
Speaker 1: adult life, but he was emboldened by his increasing wealth
Speaker 1: and position to push boundaries even further. When we were
Speaker 1: interviewing computer programmers who knew McAfee in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: They talked about his early interest in computer viruses, but
Speaker 1: several of them also wanted to highlight that there was
Speaker 1: another thing he was just as obsessed with at the
Speaker 1: same time. You know, probably the biggest thing was when
Speaker 1: he wanted me to start putting together sex parties. But
Speaker 1: one day out of the blue he called up. I
Speaker 1: still remember this day. My wife said, Hey, you know
Speaker 1: this guy John McAfee's on the phone that Roger Grimes.
Speaker 1: Roger was one of the analysts helping John McAfee crack
Speaker 1: computer viruses. The two of them had a professional relationship.
Speaker 1: McAfee would send Roger a virus. Roger would disassemble the virus,
Speaker 1: analyze it, write a report, and send that back to John.
Speaker 1: Roger said he looked up to McAfee. He was only
Speaker 1: twenty two years old and starting out in the industry,
Speaker 1: and he was so excited to get the call. He
Speaker 1: was hoping for a permanent job in McAfee's company, but
Speaker 1: he never expected to be asked to help with this,
Speaker 1: And so John was calling to tell me that he
Speaker 1: had this great idea and that he wanted he wanted
Speaker 1: to get people tested for AIDS and you'd get like
Speaker 1: a driver's license looking thing that would talk about whether
Speaker 1: or not you had AIDS or not. And if you
Speaker 1: didn't have AIDS you could go to these club parties
Speaker 1: he put together that were really swinger sex parties, and
Speaker 1: he said, Hey, I'm starting one in California. I would
Speaker 1: like you to start one in New York City. Roger
Speaker 1: says this was in nineteen eighty eight or eighty nine.
Speaker 1: There was an epidemic of AIDS at the time. Up
Speaker 1: to ninety percent of people who contracted the disease died.
Speaker 1: Scientists were trying to understand how it was transmitted or
Speaker 1: how it affected people, and fear of AIDS was rampant.
Speaker 1: I remember as soon as he said the idea to
Speaker 1: me that I was kind of put off. I'm like,
Speaker 1: is it even legal? And you know, if you get
Speaker 1: a test that you don't have AIDS, you know, does
Speaker 1: that mean you don't have AIDS when you're at the
Speaker 1: party later on? And how? And I don't think the
Speaker 1: tests were very accurate at the time, and I just
Speaker 1: you know, it was just seemed kind of slimy, weird.
Speaker 1: So as he was super excited, he was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I need you to follow up on this. I just
Speaker 1: completely blew it off. Roger says McAfee was single minded
Speaker 1: about this and chased him relentlessly. I mean for months,
Speaker 1: he is just calling me on stop about how far
Speaker 1: along I'm getting in, you know, trying to open these
Speaker 1: swinger sex club things, and I'm doing nothing. So I'm
Speaker 1: ghosting him. And eventually, you know, remember, you know, one
Speaker 1: time he had called, my wife had picked up the
Speaker 1: phone and she it is John McAfee, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to talk to him. Just don't you know,
Speaker 1: I don't want to talk to him. Like so it
Speaker 1: definitely turned and from that, you know, he stopped sending
Speaker 1: me work, stopped talking me. In the years since, McAfee
Speaker 1: bragged on social media about his sexual conquests, about having
Speaker 1: multiple partners, and about seeing sex workers. But Roger says
Speaker 1: that this business idea was off putting an offensive to
Speaker 1: many of the people who knew about it. I think
Speaker 1: John McAfee and his sexual proclivities are fairly well known,
Speaker 1: and I think that he just saw this. He was
Speaker 1: being an entrepreneur and he saw a need and he
Speaker 1: was putting together a new business, and you know, but
Speaker 1: every single person, at least that I know, when we
Speaker 1: talked about it. It was just kind of like wiged Ow.
Speaker 1: If starting a swinger sex club is one sign of
Speaker 1: how McAfee defied social norms, another was his relationship with women.
Speaker 1: To tell that story, we have to go back in
Speaker 1: time to the mid seventies. When John McAfee was working
Speaker 1: as a programmer. His employer reassigned him from California to Cincinnati, Ohio,
Speaker 1: where he met a teenage girl named Barbara dep Key,
Speaker 1: and both of us took the bus downtown, and so
Speaker 1: I met him on the bus and he just came
Speaker 1: up to me and asked me out. I guess I
Speaker 1: don't remember exactly, but I was young, you know, I
Speaker 1: was like seventeen or eighteen. Barbara dated John from nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four to seventy seven. She said he was around
Speaker 1: thirty years old when they got together, fresh over his
Speaker 1: breakup from his first wife. Friend. Yeah, he was eleven
Speaker 1: years older, and so I did go to his house
Speaker 1: with him. You know, we went out, and we actually
Speaker 1: got on very well right away, and I ended up
Speaker 1: moving in with him. She remembers what drew her to him.
Speaker 1: He had beautiful green eyes, and he had this voice
Speaker 1: that was just mesmerizing, and he was very handsome. Women
Speaker 1: just felt I don't know what it was, some magnetism
Speaker 1: that he had. It was just very strange. They soon
Speaker 1: began traveling together. They went to Mexico, Belize, and then
Speaker 1: McAfee got a job with Siemens in Germany and she
Speaker 1: went with him. She said she posed as his wife,
Speaker 1: although they weren't married at the time. They had a calm,
Speaker 1: domestic life with one constant, nagging interruption. It was so normal,
Speaker 1: you know. My life with him was just so normal.
Speaker 1: And we had lunch, and you know, I would make
Speaker 1: dinner for him. He went to work and then he
Speaker 1: would come home. But the whole time he has gone
Speaker 1: at work, I would worry, like, okay, he was he
Speaker 1: fucking down, you know? Or it is he affecting a
Speaker 1: secretary or whatever. This was something that Barbara slipped into
Speaker 1: conversation so casually. I was shocked. She said that John
Speaker 1: was constantly cheating on her. He was always in teresting
Speaker 1: other women. So I never trusted him ever. And so
Speaker 1: like if we'd go to a restaurant, he could be
Speaker 1: in the back hall with the waitress fucking her in
Speaker 1: the bathroom. He's awful. He was awful about that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. But I wasn't willing to give up the
Speaker 1: other thing for that at that point. And I you know,
Speaker 1: we would talk about it, but he would, I believe, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that was our worst that was the worst thing. He
Speaker 1: really would cheat on me all the time. I couldn't
Speaker 1: even have a friend. Actually, if I had a friend,
Speaker 1: he would be in bed with her the next day.
Speaker 1: It's amazing how when we were together that women would
Speaker 1: just like fallen his spell and sleep with him or
Speaker 1: go away with him or you know. It was just amazing.
Speaker 1: This experience changed Barbara. It made her neurotic, suspicious. Well,
Speaker 1: he tried to hide it, but I would spy on him,
Speaker 1: Like he'd leave the house with his underwear on right
Speaker 1: and come back with him on backwards or inside out,
Speaker 1: or the bed was messed up if I was gone
Speaker 1: or i'd come home, I'd find things that I knew,
Speaker 1: you know, underwear and whatever. Eventually, she said she was
Speaker 1: fed up with the cheating and she broke up with McAfee.
Speaker 1: When I finally left him, I was like so upset
Speaker 1: about the whole thing, and torn up. You would not
Speaker 1: believe how much I'd loved him. I actually I really
Speaker 1: really loved John a lot, and I still do because
Speaker 1: he wasn't anything to me, like he wasn't anybody else.
Speaker 1: Decades later, in conversation, Boba still gets emotional when she
Speaker 1: talks about John. She said their relationship was singular, and
Speaker 1: she also stressed how young she was and how inexperienced
Speaker 1: she was when she first met him. I was young
Speaker 1: and sweet and innocent, and he treat me. He just
Speaker 1: treat me like a little princess. I can't. He was
Speaker 1: my protector, He was my best friend. He was my lover.
Speaker 1: John's first wife, Fran, was also eighteen when she met him.
Speaker 1: She also mentioned their age difference and her own relative inexperience.
Speaker 1: And he just slowly like a spider throwing a web
Speaker 1: around its prey. My family never liked him, and it's
Speaker 1: because they could see. They could sense something that I
Speaker 1: could not see at my age, and I was I
Speaker 1: was the definition of naiblity. It struck me that, like Barbara,
Speaker 1: Fran believes that her relationship with McAfee was unique, that
Speaker 1: though he went on to be with many other women,
Speaker 1: there was something about their particular love that was irreplaceable.
Speaker 1: There are things about John Bett you know, special to me.
Speaker 1: For example, it's like I always knew he loved me.
Speaker 1: He used to tell me, you're the thing that grounds me.
Speaker 1: There's nobody else in my life that grounds me. Even now,
Speaker 1: decades later, in some ways, he's still a good person
Speaker 1: in their eyes. Yet in conversation with us, both Fran
Speaker 1: and Barbara said that they felt controlled and manipulated by John.
Speaker 1: I think this goes back to how young and impressionable
Speaker 1: they were when they were his partners. We're highlighting mac
Speaker 1: of his treatment of women because it speaks to from
Speaker 1: very early on in his life, his sense of entitlement,
Speaker 1: of doing whatever he wanted, with whoever he wanted, with
Speaker 1: little to no regard for the consequences or the feelings
Speaker 1: of others. He displayed the sort of behavior that would
Speaker 1: be considered toxic, and yet he was revered even by
Speaker 1: the very women he was cheating on. As we've heard
Speaker 1: constantly in our reporting, when people think you're a genius,
Speaker 1: you can get away with anything. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety four, John McAfee made a call to
Speaker 1: a tax consultant my name is David les Bronze. I
Speaker 1: am a Canadian who deals with immigration, tax, family law
Speaker 1: solutions for wealthy individuals and families globally, including Americans who
Speaker 1: are looking to give themselves some options with regards to
Speaker 1: international movement and potentially leaving permanently the US tax system.
Speaker 1: David Lesperance said John mccofee contacted him after seeing an
Speaker 1: article in Forbes magazine about super rich Americans abandoning their
Speaker 1: citizenship to avoid paying US taxes. So he said, I
Speaker 1: want to pay as little tax as possible. Said, okay,
Speaker 1: but I want to have a certain type of lifestyle.
Speaker 1: So you know, clients, I occasionally will get a client
Speaker 1: to say, well, you know, move me somewhere where there's
Speaker 1: no tax and no divorce courts or no no litigation warriors.
Speaker 1: I said, no problem, will moving to a rock in
Speaker 1: the middle of the ocean. But you know, pack a
Speaker 1: gun because within six months, either you're going to want
Speaker 1: to kill yourself or your family is going to want
Speaker 1: to kill you, like oh no, no, no, I want
Speaker 1: you know this lifestyle, etc. Etc. So it's coming up
Speaker 1: with a plan that is actually livable. It was striking
Speaker 1: to me that as soon as nineteen ninety four, McAfee
Speaker 1: was already laying the groundwork to leave the US for good,
Speaker 1: even at a time when things were going well for him.
Speaker 1: In fact, free of his first company, he set about
Speaker 1: launching more businesses. He created an instant messaging platform that
Speaker 1: looked a lot like AOL Instant Messenger. Actually, he lifted
Speaker 1: so many features that AOL sued his company for copying
Speaker 1: one chronic component, the Buddy List. This week on the
Speaker 1: Computer Chronicles video to lephony on the Internet, we'll show
Speaker 1: you the hardest thing in online chat. Pow Wow. Yes,
Speaker 1: it was called pow Wow, made by McAfee's company, Tribal Voice.
Speaker 1: Here it is featured on the PBS show Computer Chronicles
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety nine. Million free download, free download. This
Speaker 1: is sort of the text version of powell that's correct.
Speaker 1: On the left hand side, here you see what we'll
Speaker 1: call a traditional chat, AOL type chat room where people
Speaker 1: are talking to the keyboard. Pow Wow was panned by critics.
Speaker 1: The interface was clunky and unattractive, Yet McAfee reportedly managed
Speaker 1: to sell the company for seventeen million dollars. Those days,
Speaker 1: he was investing money in small tech firms and more property.
Speaker 1: He bought a house in Santa Cruz. He purchased several
Speaker 1: acres on Molokai Island in Hawaii, homebase for most of
Speaker 1: those early years. After he left McAfee and associates was Colorado.
Speaker 1: McAfee bought two hundred and eighty acres. He turned the
Speaker 1: estate into a yoga retreat, reportedly pouring over twenty million
Speaker 1: dollars into it. It was a beautiful, beautiful property. It
Speaker 1: was in the shadow of Pike's Peak. It was at
Speaker 1: nine thousand feet high altitude. You drove up to the
Speaker 1: property and he had his main home. It was a
Speaker 1: little lake, and right in the edge of it was
Speaker 1: a wood burning sauna that was quite large, which I
Speaker 1: had been in. And then there was a like a barn,
Speaker 1: a couple of guest houses, and a beautiful yoga studio.
Speaker 1: Robbie Raman is an executive coach who lives in Minneapolis.
Speaker 1: In the early two thousands, he found ads from McAfee's
Speaker 1: Colorado Yoga center and visited several times. He says people
Speaker 1: could come and go. That was very open the times
Speaker 1: I was there, I mean people were just there, some
Speaker 1: other sort of yogis or students who were studying or caretakers,
Speaker 1: yoga teachers just being there cooking meals and seemed to
Speaker 1: be you can just sort of go wherever you wanted.
Speaker 1: As far as Rabie could tell, the entire operation was
Speaker 1: funded personally by John McAfee. I never paid for any
Speaker 1: of my trips out there. For the initial yoga workshop,
Speaker 1: I paid, but I just paid my studio. I never
Speaker 1: paid John anything, and then I made two other trips
Speaker 1: out to his property. I never paid. I made a
Speaker 1: donation to the teachers who supported me. They never asked
Speaker 1: for a dime, and I just paid as an offering.
Speaker 1: I just assumed he had had a career and made
Speaker 1: some money, and it was looking to deepen his understanding
Speaker 1: and share what he knew. McAfee taught yoga and meditation.
Speaker 1: When Rabbie went to the yoga retreat for the first
Speaker 1: time in two thousand and three, he was personally instructed
Speaker 1: by McAfee. He would join us for breakfast and swing by,
Speaker 1: and I got to do with the breathing classes that
Speaker 1: he would lead, and I actually learned med meditation technique
Speaker 1: from him. Nothing struck me as weird or odd or
Speaker 1: so fit into other practices I had but he just
Speaker 1: had a very specific approach for me, given where I
Speaker 1: was in that moment. I never got the sense he
Speaker 1: was any kind of enlightened being or anything like that.
Speaker 1: I was never I have never looked at human beings
Speaker 1: in that way. John went on to put out several
Speaker 1: books about yoga that list him as the author. Robbie
Speaker 1: said he had a few copies, which again he never
Speaker 1: paid for. He ended up giving them away to friends.
Speaker 1: Two people who were close to McAfee told us he
Speaker 1: didn't write these books. Here's Barbara again. He was a
Speaker 1: bullshitter and he made up things, and people just fell
Speaker 1: for because he was like, you know, mesmerizing, and the
Speaker 1: way he talked and looked at you. I think people
Speaker 1: just wished him. And so then it turned out there
Speaker 1: he had these books that he wrote. He didn't even
Speaker 1: write them. They were all like, you know, yoga books
Speaker 1: and spiritual things. And I had one of them signed
Speaker 1: by him. I even called him on that one time.
Speaker 1: I said, that is such bullshit, John, that is not
Speaker 1: your words. The books are still for sale on Amazon
Speaker 1: and some of the reviews of Pretty Brutal. One reviewer wrote, wow,
Speaker 1: he just copied and pasted this whole book from other
Speaker 1: yoga books. McAfee would later dismiss the books as garbage
Speaker 1: and said he was embarrassed by them. Over the course
Speaker 1: of these years in relative isolation, McAfee's eccentricities began to deepen.
Speaker 1: With the yoga retreat, he set himself up as a
Speaker 1: spiritual leader, as a guru, even though his qualifications were
Speaker 1: sketchy at best, and he succeeded in recruiting people. He
Speaker 1: drew so many to join him in the mountaintop retreat
Speaker 1: where they lived under his generosity. It didn't matter who
Speaker 1: they were or why they were there. There were always
Speaker 1: other people there and hanging around, and he allowed people
Speaker 1: to stay there and just very generous in that respect.
Speaker 1: I would characterize it as strays. There were strays all
Speaker 1: the time. That's Joy Athanasiu, an attorney who represents McAfee's daughter.
Speaker 1: Joy is also McAfee's daughter's childhood friend. She first met
Speaker 1: John McAfee when she was still a teenager, and she
Speaker 1: remembers visiting the Colorado property. I think that John had
Speaker 1: some you know, he had some narcissistic qualities quite frankly,
Speaker 1: and I always had like an entourage around him. And
Speaker 1: people really elevated to him to this cult like status.
Speaker 1: The Colorado used was significant because they were the beginning
Speaker 1: of a pattern. This was the first time John McAfee
Speaker 1: would create his own world where he made the rules.
Speaker 1: He began to see what his money could buy, his
Speaker 1: own mountaintop kingdom. He had a desire to go to
Speaker 1: out of the way places where his charisma and personality
Speaker 1: could dominate. As far as we can tell, Woodland Park, Colorado,
Speaker 1: is the only place with its formula didn't end in tragedy.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. In two thousand and six, McAfee
Speaker 1: got bored doing yoga and he picks up a new
Speaker 1: hobby he called aerotrekking. Here's Javier Prato, a videographer who
Speaker 1: worked with McAfee. No. Aerotreking is like it's a mix
Speaker 1: of a motorcycle and a hang layer. There's speed there
Speaker 1: so you can because there's an engine in the back, adrenaline,
Speaker 1: you know it. He's like a sport. Aerotreking on the
Speaker 1: face of it looks almost absurdly dangerous. It's the art
Speaker 1: of flying an ultralight aircraft really low to the ground.
Speaker 1: The planes they use for aerotreking have an engine run
Speaker 1: on fuel and often have fabric wings, and there's no cockpit.
Speaker 1: You're entirely exposed. The aircraft are small, light and nimble,
Speaker 1: so you can skim along canyon walls, the mountain side
Speaker 1: and the tops of trees. McAfee wanted Javier to make
Speaker 1: a series of ads, and he flew Javier out to
Speaker 1: New Mexico to see error trekking up close. On his
Speaker 1: way there, aboard McAfee's private plane, Javier had a conversation
Speaker 1: with the pilot. The pilot confirmed to me when I
Speaker 1: was flying there, like this year, you know he's in
Speaker 1: terror treking, you know, last year maybe getting you know boats,
Speaker 1: you know, so who knows what's going to be next.
Speaker 1: So he used to get bored too easily. There are
Speaker 1: a number of videos online featuring the sky Gypsies. This
Speaker 1: was the club that McAfee formed with his friends to
Speaker 1: fly these aircraft. These are amateur videos, not shot by Javier.
Speaker 1: In one, a young woman is landing the ultra light
Speaker 1: and steering toward a hangar. She's wearing a helmet, she
Speaker 1: has a seatbelt strapped around her waist. There's no safety
Speaker 1: harness and there's no parachute. At her back is a
Speaker 1: gallon of very flammable fuel. You can see the liquid
Speaker 1: slashing around, but she's pulling in in one piece and
Speaker 1: she's ecstatic. All right, Goldie, I love life, I love
Speaker 1: me alive. Welcome to Wow. Scream like a fucking wait
Speaker 1: a day. Oh, I didn't want to come down. This
Speaker 1: was filmed on macafee's property in Rodeo, New Mexico. The
Speaker 1: site that the auctioneer, Jim Gold said was kind of scary.
Speaker 1: Guns everywhere, Border patrol agents nearby. Anyway, This was a
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty seven acre spread. McAfee spent about
Speaker 1: eleven million dollars building a complex for him, Andy's friends
Speaker 1: to fly ultralight aircraft. Amcafee created a business called Southwest
Speaker 1: Air Trekking Academy, and sky Gypsy's released ads enticing people
Speaker 1: to come out and go for a ride. He built
Speaker 1: a general store and a movie theater and a cafe,
Speaker 1: and bought vintage cars for guests to check out. For
Speaker 1: a time, it seemed like a fantastical desert oasis for
Speaker 1: McAfee and his fellow adrenaline junkies. But then one morning
Speaker 1: in November two thousand and six, two people went for
Speaker 1: a ride in one of the aircraft. They crashed into
Speaker 1: a canyon and died. One of those killed was McAfee's nephew,
Speaker 1: Joel Beato, who was working as an instructor at the academy.
Speaker 1: Then I hear I get the call that one of
Speaker 1: the instructors they got killed in an accident. After that
Speaker 1: we basically lost that he was. He was very depressed
Speaker 1: and shocked about what happened. Joel Beato was twenty two
Speaker 1: years old. The other person flying with Joel was Robert Gilton,
Speaker 1: a retired pipe fitter from New Hampshire. Here's Gilson's family lawyer,
Speaker 1: Frank Fleming. He read about error Trekking in a magazine,
Speaker 1: responded to the article by getting in touch with McAfee's
Speaker 1: school and signed up and went out and took a
Speaker 1: took a ride. I think he took one or two
Speaker 1: rides before the fatal crash, but on the third or
Speaker 1: fourth hop with mister Boteaux, they flew into the mountain.
Speaker 1: Frank is an aviation lawyer for decades. He has represented
Speaker 1: families in plane crashes, helicopter crashes and military crashes. It's
Speaker 1: clearly a consequence of an undertrained and ill equipped pilot
Speaker 1: who had no business flying with passengers or students. The pilot,
Speaker 1: Joel but Toe, obviously flew into a box canyon where
Speaker 1: he was surrounded on several sides by terrain, and then
Speaker 1: he tried to turn and didn't allow enough room for
Speaker 1: the aircraft to complete the turn and flew into the
Speaker 1: side of a mountain. And that's an unforgiving situation. I mean,
Speaker 1: most pilots don't want to go into box canyons under
Speaker 1: any circumstances. But that's the feeling that they're trying to generate.
Speaker 1: We got a copy of the police report from the
Speaker 1: Coaches County Sheriff's Department in Arizona. It says that a
Speaker 1: small plane crashed in the place called Starvation Canyon. Fire
Speaker 1: enveloped the aircraft, leaving only the metal framework and engine behind.
Speaker 1: One body was burned beyond recognition. A second was thrown
Speaker 1: over one hundred feet away. Joel Beto's parents provide aided
Speaker 1: his dental records to help identify the remains, and the
Speaker 1: sheriff's report contained one other alarming detail that the pilot
Speaker 1: had been in a previous accident just four months prior
Speaker 1: to the fatal crash. In that incident, the engine died
Speaker 1: on his ultralight aircraft midflight, and he tried to do
Speaker 1: an emergency landing in the best place he could find.
Speaker 1: The plane hit several rocks and flipped over. The ultralight
Speaker 1: was totaled, and Joel sustained injuries to his left arm.
Speaker 1: He told police that the plane belonged to his uncle,
Speaker 1: John McAfee. Frank Fleming said that once the crash was reconstructed,
Speaker 1: they filed a claim against McAfee, Southwest Aerotrekking Academy, and
Speaker 1: Joel Beato's father, John Beato. The lawsuit was filed in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight. Just one year later, McAfee was
Speaker 1: selling off his properties to leave for Belize, where he
Speaker 1: declared that he would be out of the court's reach.
Speaker 1: He took off, leaving behind the grieving families, including his
Speaker 1: ex wife's relatives. For years, McAfee had been living by
Speaker 1: his own rules, defying in convention, but now he was
Speaker 1: disregarding court orders. He ignored requests to produce financial documents.
Speaker 1: He left to build yet another new life, this time
Speaker 1: on the shores of the Caribbean. While thumbing his nose
Speaker 1: at the American justice system. We will talk about Belize
Speaker 1: a lot in a different episode. We know that in
Speaker 1: three short years after moving there, McAfee would be forced
Speaker 1: to come back home, and during this time Frank Fleming
Speaker 1: kept pushing on the wrongful death lawsuit, and he was
Speaker 1: also trying to compel McAfee to testify. He eventually succeeded.
Speaker 1: When McAfee returned to the US, he was deposed. Here's Fleming.
Speaker 1: I did not think he was a good witness. I
Speaker 1: did not think he was credible. He very arrogant and
Speaker 1: contemptuous of the process. Fleming says he also didn't look
Speaker 1: too good. I remember him as a chain smoker. He
Speaker 1: was not a very healthy person. He coughed regularly, I
Speaker 1: mean incessantly. He was very high strung. I might have
Speaker 1: used the term uptight in my personal experience. I would
Speaker 1: have suspected that he was on some kind of medication.
Speaker 1: Fleming said. McAfee tried to blame the accident on the
Speaker 1: passenger who died, Robert Gilson. He claimed Gilson shifted his
Speaker 1: weight in the aircraft, making it impossible for the pilot
Speaker 1: to maintain control. Also, Gilson had had heart problems months
Speaker 1: before he turned up in New Mexico, and McAfee said
Speaker 1: tried to suggest that he'd had a heart attack and
Speaker 1: that caused the crash, But Fleming says there's no evidence
Speaker 1: of McAfee's claims. McAfee wasn't just antagonistic towards the people
Speaker 1: suing him. He made things difficult for his own lawyers too.
Speaker 1: He fired at least one of them. I contacted one
Speaker 1: of McAfee's lawyers, Ralph Ellenwood, and asked him several times
Speaker 1: for an interview. He agreed at first, and then emailed
Speaker 1: me later to say that he changed his mind that
Speaker 1: talking to me quote would be an ethical minefield. Several
Speaker 1: people who were named as defendant in the trial, including
Speaker 1: John Beeto, the pilot's father, did not respond to our
Speaker 1: requests for interviews. Fleming said McAfee was to post several
Speaker 1: times because he kept refusing to produce financial documents. When
Speaker 1: the judge forced McAfee to turn over the documents, they
Speaker 1: showed that McAfee paid for the aircraft, for the flight complex,
Speaker 1: for pretty much everything there. McAfee's financial documents also showed
Speaker 1: where some of his money was kept. Here's Fleming, I
Speaker 1: should also point out that he had some sort of
Speaker 1: a trust set up organized in the Cook Islands. It
Speaker 1: tells you a lot about the purpose of the trust.
Speaker 1: The Cook Islands in the Pacific are outside of US jurisdiction.
Speaker 1: They serve as a notorious tax haven for the wealthy.
Speaker 1: They can also be used by Americans who want to
Speaker 1: protect their assets from lawsuits. We scoured SEC filings and
Speaker 1: court documents to see what we could find out about
Speaker 1: McAfee's trust. It was originally set up in John and
Speaker 1: his ex wife, Judy's name in nineteen ninety three. That year,
Speaker 1: he transferred at least half of his shares in McAfee's
Speaker 1: associates to the trust. Judy took control of it after
Speaker 1: they divorced in two thousand and six, and by that
Speaker 1: point its assets were worth about seven million dollars, Which
Speaker 1: brings me to the kicker in the error Trekking lawsuit.
Speaker 1: McAfee could have avoided a lot of this trouble because
Speaker 1: the family of the crash victim, Robert Gilson, began proceedings
Speaker 1: by offering to settle without trial. If McAfee agreed to
Speaker 1: pay half a million dollars, that would make it all
Speaker 1: go away. McAfee turned it down. Instead, he spent years
Speaker 1: ignoring court orders, dodging people trying to serve him papers
Speaker 1: at tech conferences, and ultimately being forced into a lengthy,
Speaker 1: invasive lawsuit. McAfee could have prevented that by accepting the offer. Now,
Speaker 1: let me say, at the end of the day, if
Speaker 1: you will, he succeeded because he hasn't paid the judgment.
Speaker 1: When the judgment came down, the court ruled that McAfee,
Speaker 1: Southwest Aerotrekking Academy, and the Beto estate had to pay
Speaker 1: over two million dollars in damages, penalties and interest. Well,
Speaker 1: it's higher than that now because it continues to earn interests.
Speaker 1: But he has not paid the judgment. That's correct, After
Speaker 1: all that McAfee died without paying. Now there may be
Speaker 1: something Fleming can do after McAfee's estate lawyers go through
Speaker 1: what remains of his assets, But he acknowledges that even
Speaker 1: that day will be a long time coming. It is
Speaker 1: a testament to McAfee's determination to avoid accountability. John Coffee
Speaker 1: spent the first fifteen years after he left his company
Speaker 1: largely out of the public eye, under the cloak of obscurity.
Speaker 1: He descended further and further into lawlessness. He went from
Speaker 1: breaking social conventions to outright defying the legal system. He
Speaker 1: takes off for Belize, a tropical paradise where it looked
Speaker 1: like McAfee could yet again start over on his own terms.
Speaker 1: But soon things there would get even darker, and John
Speaker 1: mccafee would have more than one death blamed on him.
Speaker 1: That's next time on Foundering, The John mccafee Story. Foundering
Speaker 1: is hosted by me Jamie Tarabay. Sean Wen is our
Speaker 1: executive producer, Matthew Bramner, Andrew's Malin, Eileena Pang and Joe
Speaker 1: Williams contributed reporting to this episode special thanks to Press
Speaker 1: on the Prakash. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Sharif
Speaker 1: Yusef is our audio engineer, Mark Million and Vandermay, Andy
Speaker 1: Martin and Molly Shutz are our story editors. Be sure
Speaker 1: to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review.
Speaker 1: Most importantly, tell your friends see you next time.