On the Run

June 23, 2021, the Brians 2 penitentiary in Sant Esteve de Sesrovires, Spain. John McAfee, seventy-five, the founder of the antivirus company that had borne his name, is found hanging in his cell. The Spanish National Court has approved his extradition to the United States on tax-evasion charges six hours earlier. The ruling is suicide. He had announced on Twitter the previous year that if he was ever found dead by suicide he had been killed.

Sterling Aldridge's biography opens earlier — in Cinderford, Gloucestershire, where John David McAfee was born in 1945 to an American GI father and an English mother — and follows the arc through the Salem, Virginia, childhood, the Roanoke College mathematics degree, the long IT consulting at NASA, Lockheed, and Computer Sciences Corporation, the 1987 founding of McAfee Associates and the 1992 IPO, the 1994 retirement, the Belize compound years of 2008-2012 and the November 2012 disappearance into Guatemala after the murder of his neighbour Gregory Faull, the 2016 and 2020 Libertarian Party presidential campaigns, the long crypto-token endorsement years, the October 2020 Spanish arrest at the Barcelona-El Prat airport, the long Brians 2 detention, and the June 23, 2021 cell discovery.

What emerges is a portrait of the antivirus-software founder whose 1990s fortune the IT-security industry continues to pay him for, and whose final decade the U.S. Internal Revenue Service spent trying to bring him back from a Belize compound, a Guatemalan border crossing, and a Spanish penitentiary.