Following "Tiger King" and "Obedience: Prayer and Obedience in a Cult", Netflix once again tried to "dance with the devil" - "Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee" continues the "crazy devil" routine: choosing crazy, dark, paranoid topical characters, and highlighting the chaos and disorder of his life, even dog blood, in the content...
Is this the "traffic password" that the Netflix documentary production team has recently grasped?
Written by | Rare
Editor | Xu Jing
Proofreader | Zhang Shuai
Produced | Figure Documentary
If you take the standards of a general biography documentary: the story from the cradle to the grave, the flashback of the highlight moment of the protagonist's life, interspersed with the narration of relatives, friends or critics, the last paragraph of the elevation conclusion... All of the above cannot be seen in the documentary "McAfee, the Father of Antivirus Software: Demons, Escape and Crazy Life".
It's like a chaotic and chaotic wild journey cut by the director after drinking too much, oscillating between fascinating and crazy, so are you ready?
John David McAfee, who is famous in the history of the Internet, is an eccentric character, rich and willful, even unscrupulous.
According to the documentary, in 2012, McAfee was asked to cooperate with the Belize police investigation and was interrogated about the suspected death of his neighbor. However, for fear of political persecution and a host of conspiracy theories, the tech moguilla chose to flee. Curiously, he also invited a video team from VICE to document his escape...
Borrowing years of dusty material, director Charlie Russell has produced a crazy work that confuses and exhausts the viewer—how to fall into hell with a capricious, extremely deranged person.
Rich "extralegal maniacs"
Domestic audiences feel unfamiliar with this technology giant, perhaps also related to the difference between the internal and external computer software environment.
Most of the computers used by Chinese people use free domestic antivirus software. But around the world, McAfee is one of the world's best-selling antiviruses, and countless computers receive Regular Pop-up alerts from McAfee every day about whether your computer is infected with a virus or, more precisely, your free service subscription has expired and it's time to pay for it...
When Intel acquired McAfee's parent antivirus in 2011, it cost about $7.7 billion, but John McAfee sold his stake in the company he developed and founded back in 1999 for $100 million — $100 million 23 years ago.
John McAfee's "extrajudicial" version of Zhou Hongyi's life experiences — drug use, weapons possession, and all kinds of chaotic private lives — are almost all tossed around with "billions" of money.
If you count from your place of birth, John McAfee is British. He was born in 1945 in a small British town near a U.S. military base, where his father, Donald, was an American soldier and his mother, Joan, was a local town girl.
After World War II, the family moved to Roanoke, Virginia, where Donald worked as a road surveyor and Joan became a bank teller. Alcoholic Donald committed suicide when McAfee was 15 years old.
My father influenced his life, and McAfee later recalled, "Every day I woke up thinking of him, no matter who I was associating with, he was haunted by me, and if I didn't trust people, he would convince me to believe in others." As a result, my life was a mess."
In the years following his father's death, McAfee began drinking and drug abuse without changing his true colors. In 1967 he received a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Roanoke College in Virginia. A year later, he enrolled at Louisiana State University to pursue a Ph.D., but was removed from the school for having sex with one of his students during a substitute class.
McAfee, who was not a scumbag at this time, left the school and married the female student.
With his education trail interrupted, McAfee began his career as a programmer, working in software design and operations at NASA, Univac, and Xerox, including writing a piece of code for the Apollo moon landings, but was often fired for sucking — he once told Wired magazine that he smoked cocaine at his desk every day while working for an information storage systems company called Omex.
McAfee in the programmer's days
In the 1980s, McAfee's life took a major turn. McAfee, who was working as a programmer at Lockheed at the time, received a replica of the world's first personal computer virus, Brain, and saw a huge business opportunity. Then, in a year, McAfee wrote the world's first commercial antivirus and named it McAfee.
McAfee is a marketing genius, he first put the antivirus software on the Internet for free, with millions of downloads, in exchange for his own lightspeed fame, became the darling of the media. Subsequently, through continuous interviews and reports, the harm of computer viruses was hyped up, thus serving the company's fee-based business.
The software mogul once posted a selfie on Twitter with a thong on his face and a mask on his private parts
This style of play was called a nuclear bomb on the commercial battlefield at that time. Within five years, McAfee's company had captured nearly 70 percent of the world's desktop antivirus software market, and half of the Fortune 100 companies were using his software.
Just when the company was in full swing, McAfee, 50, suddenly announced his retirement because he was tired...
Since then, the Internet world has lost a big guy who founded a sect, and the flower world has one more unstoppable upstart.
After leaving the company, McAfee began to buy and buy like crazy: he owned 12 estates successively, and the top rich people such as private planes and yachts did not fall as standard...
The 2008 financial crisis dealt McAfee a blow. Outside of his trench shopping, a significant portion of his assets were used to buy lehman Brothers Holdings bonds. When Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, these investments were all lost. The New York Times broke the news that his fortune had shrunk from $100 million to $4 million.
After selling most of his mansions, private jets and collectibles to make up for the deficit, McAfee chose to settle in the small Central American country of Belize, avoiding lawsuits while continuing a relatively affluent life.
Scenic Belize
In Belize, McAfee bought a villa compound and started a few "pocket money" businesses such as cigar manufacturing, coffee distribution companies and water taxi services, but contributed to the poor communities surrounding the villas, investing in electricity and clean water.
But soon McAfee regained his alcoholic nature, spending the night in the villa in a "harem" of seven young women— some of them as teenagers, and hiring a team of heavily armed bodyguards to protect himself.
The story of the documentary "McAfee, the Father of Antivirus Software", opened the curtain from this time.
"It's not a film about sex and violence — although these topics are all covered in it — it's a story about human nature. And I, McAfee, just happened to experience this story first-hand in a very intense and full way."
"Isn't this story worth recording?"
"My decisions were the same as any ordinary person would make. If you were in my position, I'm sure you would do the same."
In November 2012, McAfee's neighbor, Gregory Fore, a builder from Florida, was found shot in the head and killed in her home. Just a few days earlier, McAfee had accused several of his dogs of being poisoned by Gregory and was listed as a "stakeholder."
But before the police could take any further action, McAfee took the initiative to run away...
"They said I might have absconded and were going to send me to jail. Obviously, I ran first."
Perhaps the quiet escape did not fit the tech mogul's aesthetic, and he felt that a documentary team should be used to document his "feats" .
The pie fell on the heads of VICE journalist Rocco Castoro and photographer Robert King, "We have the opportunity to cover the biggest news in the world". "We didn't have a plan to shoot, the plan was just to follow and shoot this wanted man, but we didn't know how far we could go." Robert King recalled.
Their shooting began with a very 007 scene. At the Belize airport, Kastoro put on a blue scarf at McAfee's request, and then, surrounded by taxi drivers who flocked to pick up customers, he waited for the one that was different, "And the connector would say, 'Excuse me, I'm late.'" That's the car we should get on."
However, the espionage atmosphere dissipates from the first sight of McAfee, and the story turns to conspiracy theories and even absurdities.
In the seven-seater van, in addition to the driver, there is McAfee and his girlfriend Shan (Shan Herrera). There was not even a greeting, and the recording began.
After a few unspoken conversations, McAfee suddenly pulled off the rose petals and stuffed them into his mouth, signaling the camera to shoot them.
"He was acting, pretending to have a stroke, or gesturing to show that he had a physical disability." Kastoro recalled that he expressed doubts on the spot, "When he was in trouble, he had the financial resources to escape easily, was it necessary to do strange things?"
"We present danger, risk, risk, uncertainty. So that's where I can tell my story." McAfee answered very well. At the same time, he also seemed to falsely mention that he had hacked the mobile phones of Belize government officials, and suggested that the Belize government wanted him to involve "many shocking things": "I just received news from a former policeman that the prime minister offered a reward of $150,000 to take my life."
At the hotel, McAfee continued to pretend to be disabled
Unexpectedly and easily, riding a speedboat out of the open seas, the escape team successfully disembarked in Livingston, Guatemala, and fled Belize.
McAfee breathed a sigh of relief, and then everyone collectively lowered their minds and did something stupid that normal people could not understand: taking a passport to the customs report - a group of illegal immigrants, taking the initiative to find the official "surrender"...
The ups and downs of the story are reflected in this moment, when she is about to be repatriated to Belize, when XiaoShan proposes that her uncle is a former Guatemalan minister of justice and a lawyer, and that "I can call him and ask him for help."
"There is almost no legal girlfriend, there is a relative of a high-ranking Guatemalan official, what the hell is this?" Years later, photographer Robert King still can't help but complain, "The tropical jungle is such an incredible magical place."
McAfee and girlfriend Shan Herrera
What's even more amazing is that without waiting to contact Xiao Shan's uncle, a group of fugitives easily left the customs and stayed at the local Four Seasons Hotel under a false name.
The rollercoaster plot continues. The next morning, the film crew took a conversation with McAfee, the atmosphere was good, so after the completion of the group photo, Castoro posted the article on the VICE website blog.
Another stupid operation!
As an Internet media company, neither the camera crew nor the website manager remembered one thing: the digital original image data taken by the camera included all the information such as time and geolocation, and should be converted before release.
The original image was thus posted on the Internet world, and the GPS coordinates of the McAfee Escape Team were leaked. "We both believed we had messed up everything and caused trouble." Photographer Kim recalled.
Fortunately, it was Xiao Shan's uncle who arrived first, and after that, McAfee temporarily changed his plans and decided to hold a press conference. At the press conference, he told the media that he was seeking asylum in Guatemala because of political persecution, and that "I will release all my videos, all the videos and documents to expose the corruption situation within the Belize government".
McAfee answers questions from reporters in front of Guatemala's Supreme Court on December 4, 2012
The Guatemalan government responded with action: SWAT, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and even Interpol, a large group of people from all walks of life entered the hotel and arrested McAfee.
The atmosphere began to get strange, and the film crew was placed under house arrest in the hotel room, and they called Uncle Shan for help, "He really just said, 'I don't understand, I don't know anything.'" He's the highest-ranking lawyer in the country, incredible."
Just as they were helpless as caged birds, things took another turn for the worse: McAfee suffered a heart attack in a detention center and was transferred to the hospital for emergency treatment.
Then, "I don't know if it's because of a miracle or a bribe." Kastolo said someone in the Guatemalan government actually said, "I think McAfee should be released." Then McAfee was actually sent on a plane and "deported" back to the United States.
Kastolo exclaimed into the documentary camera, "Oh my God! He [McAfee] really put a lot of thought into it."
As soon as he got off the plane in Miami, McAfee got into a taxi and stayed at a luxury hotel in South Beach, a world-famous nightlife paradise.
The VICE film crew, which is still trapped in Guatemala, also got the news that the company stopped the project - if it were not for Netflix's money to restart, the video of this escape trip should not have had a chance to see the light of day.
Years later, journalist Kastolo is still a little angry about the project being stopped
"I have nothing. However, I don't regret it."
Halfway through the documentary, director Charlie Russell seemed to have calmed down and planned to add some biographical content about McAfee's life and shift the character documentary a little further toward the orthodoxy.
A celebrity autobiographer, Ghostwriter Alex Cody Foster, pulled out a few recordings. One passage in which McAfee talks about his father's long-term domestic violence, "until I stopped him," convinces Foster that McAfee killed his father and faked it as a suicide.
Another passage is mcAfee saying that he was "framed" by some powerful agency, "they wanted to arrest me, not because of Gregory's death, but because of the information I had."
McAfee said he had tapped the computers of all U.S. government ministers and had all the information: "I carried a weapon with me, and even when I had sex, I had a gun in my hand, because the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, the world's most powerful drug cartel, wanted to kill me..."
Corresponding to the conspiracy theory is McAfee's dashing life.
On the first night of his "deportation" back to Miami, he broke up with Shan, who remained in Guatemala, and instead fell in love with Janice, a $2,000 sex worker who had been in the industry for 10 years and paid $2,000 a night, the future Mrs. McAfee.
Janice McAfee
After that, the tech mogul switched to venture capital, such as investing in digital currencies and making hacker-proof mobile phones, none of which could get him back to the top. The brief "glory" of his political career — McAfee's two-time campaign for the presidential nomination of Libertarian Will, the third largest party in the United States, in 2016 and 2019 for advocating for the legalization of cryptocurrencies and marijuana — also came to an end.
But a series of operations sustained McAfee's social media popularity, and he became a small influencer, promoting the cryptocurrency with a single tweet quoted at more than $100,000, successfully attracting the attention of the US TAX OFFICE and beginning to investigate his tax evasion and hidden assets.
In 2013, McAfee uploaded a spoof video called How to Uninstall the Antivirus McAfee
Faced with the "persecution" of government agencies, McAfee, who is in his 70s, embarked on a journey of escape, once again. By the way, he called out again to photographer Robert King to continue the shooting from a few years ago.
This time, McAfee had the experience to get even crazier, "he cleared everything, transferred all the property, sold the house, the car, packed his bags, and set off."
In Robert King's footage, McAfee begins to teach him how to run around, such as using more cash, using wigs for cross-dressing, and so on.
At wig shops, McAfee is also a popular boy
The ultimate escape tool was a yacht, McAfee said he had bought from the Wolf of Wall Street crew. The ship was modified with eight layers of fiberglass and three layers of Kevlar, and the bullets could hardly penetrate the hull.
"Across the Straits of Florida, we headed for the Bahamas, just as Hemingway had done before."
Robert King found that there was more wine than water on board, and everyone grabbed a container and poured wine into it, drinking today and tomorrow. There are also a large number of drugs, bath salts ten times more powerful than methamphetamine, which will make people more deranged and completely crazy.
McAfee apparently sucked a lot, and in the shot he was manic, suspicious, and even frantically searching for non-existent "lurkers" on the ship, standing on the deck and firing at the air.
"Crazy people, psychopaths, paranoia, millionaires who were delirious due to drug use," Robert King recalled, "and I realized then that maybe John really dared to kill..."
Wandering the Caribbean, McAfee and his team of bodyguards carried 20 weapons that greatly hampered his escape. In the Bahamas, McAfee paid a large fine to barely pass. However, in Dominica, they were still arrested and placed in detention on charges of illegal possession of military assault weapons and ammunition.
Using his British passport, McAfee was deported to Europe rather than the United States, but could not escape justice. In October 2020, McAfee was arrested in Spain at the request of the U.S. government. The U.S. Department of Justice accused him of defrauding investors of more than $13 million by falsely advertising cryptocurrencies; Failed to file tax returns for four years and are suspected of tax evasion.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, McAfee appeared in court in Spain as a video
On June 23, 2021, a Spanish court ruled to extradite McAfee to the United States. "The defence's assertion of social, economic or any other relevance to the appellant does not confer any immunity on him." The ruling also stated that "no data disclosed or indication that Mr. McAfee may have been subjected to any political persecution."
Later that day, John McAfee was found dead in a Barcelona prison – what the police believed was suicide.
For years, McAfee has claimed to have been hunted down and killed, and has said on Twitter that "if I commit suicide in prison, then I am not suicidal, but murdered", coupled with what happened after Jeffrey Epstein was imprisoned, McAfee's suicide is naturally not short of conspiracy theory interpretations.
McAfee once said on Twitter that he would never commit suicide
At the end of "McAfee, the Father of Antivirus: Demons, Escape, and a Crazy Life," the director retains a surprising statement from his ex-girlfriend, Xiao Shan, who says that McAfee is still alive and that just two weeks before the recording he called from Texas, "He said, 'I bribed some people and created the illusion of my death, but I'm not dead.'"
Director Charlie Russell is noncommittal about Xiao Shan's statement, but he ends the film with this scene of dog blood, which is a bit irresponsible from a journalistic point of view, or lack of insight, indulging all kinds of rumors and speculations about McAfee...
McAfee's widow, Janice, refutes Shan's claims on Twitter. "Oh, how I wish it were true. If John had been alive, I'm sure he wouldn't be hiding in Texas." She wrote.
Reference:
John McAfee Dies in Prison: The Father of Computer 'Antivirus Software' and His Life
《'Running With the Devil' can't make sense of John McAfee's wild world》
《How did John McAfee die?》
《John McAfee's Mysterious Death Gets Another Look in Netflix's Running with the Devil》
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