25th June: On Wednesday, John McAfee, the flamboyant security software pioneer who tried to live life as a hedonistic outsider while fleeing a slew of legal problems, was discovered dead in his jail cell near Barcelona. According to authorities, his death occurred just hours after a Spanish judge granted his extradition to the United States to face tax accusations punishable by decades in prison.
McAfee, a cryptocurrency proponent, tax opponent, U.S. presidential contender, and fugitive who publicly embraced drugs, firearms, and sex, had a history of legal problems extending from Tennessee to Central America to the Caribbean. He was sought for questioning in connection with the death of his neighbor in Belize in 2012, but he was never charged. The body of McAfee was discovered at the Brians 2 jail in northeastern Spain. According to a statement from the regional Catalan government, security personnel attempted to resuscitate him, but the jail’s medical team eventually declared his death.
McAfee’s death was confirmed after Spain’s National Court ruled in favor of extraditing McAfee, 75, who had argued in a hearing earlier this month that the charges against him by prosecutors in Tennessee were politically motivated and that if he was returned to the US, he would spend the rest of his life in prison. The court’s decision was made public on Wednesday and was available to appeal, with any final extradition order requiring permission from the Spanish Cabinet as well.
McAfee was caught at Barcelona’s international airport last October and has been held in jail since then awaiting the outcome of extradition proceedings. The arrest follows accusations in Tennessee the same month for tax evasion after failing to declare money from marketing cryptocurrency while doing consulting work, speaking engagements, and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary. The criminal charges carried a maximum prison sentence of 30 years.
Brief Biography:
Born John David McAfee in Gloucestershire, England, in 1945, he moved to Virginia as a child and grew up troubled, with a father who “beat him mercilessly” and killed himself with McAfee’s shotgun when the boy was 15, according to Steve Morgan, who met McAfee in Alabama in 2016 to talk about his life for a biography he’d been hired to write. Morgan is also the founder of Cybersecurity Ventures, a market research organization. While McAfee’s tech legacy has been eclipsed in recent years by his turbulent life, Morgan sees his most lasting impact as a software and security pioneer.
McAfee established his own corporation in 1987. Morgan claimed that at the time, he was running a BBS, a bulletin board system that functioned as a forerunner to the World Wide Web, and worked with his brother-in-law. When the first major computer virus, dubbed “Brain,” appeared in 1986, “John immediately dialed up a programmer he knew and said, there’s a tremendous potential.” We must take action. We want to develop some code to resist this infection, you know,” Morgan explained. He referred to the program as VirusScan, and the organization as McAfee Associates.
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