Over the edge

Wired Magazine has an article in the January 2013 issue about the fall of John McAfee:

On 12 November 2012, Belizean police announced that they were seeking John McAfee for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor. Six months earlier, I began an in-depth investigation into McAfee’s life. This is the chronicle of that investigation.
Twelve weeks before the murder, John McAfee flicks open the cylinder of his Smith & Wesson revolver and empties the bullets, letting them clatter onto the table between us. A few tumble to the floor. McAfee is 66, lean and fit, with veins bulging out of his forearms. His hair is bleached blond in patches, like a cheetah, and tattoos wrap around his arms and shoulders.
More than 25 years ago, he formed McAfee Associates, a maker of antivirus software that went on to become immensely popular and was acquired by Intel in 2010 for $7.68 billion. Now he’s holed up in a bungalow on his island estate, about fifteen miles off the coast of mainland Belize. The shades are drawn so I can see only a sliver of the white sand beach and turquoise water outside. The table is piled with boxes of ammunition, fake IDs bearing his photo, Frontiersman bear deterrent, and a single blue baby pacifier.
McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed, manic intensity. “This is a bullet, right?” he says in the congenial Southern accent that has stuck with him since his boyhood in Virginia.
“Let’s put the gun back,” I tell him. I’d come here to try to understand why the government of Belize was accusing him of assembling a private army and entering the drug trade. It seemed implausible that a wildly successful tech entrepreneur would disappear into the Central American jungle and become a narco-trafficker. Now I’m not so sure.
But he explains that the accusations are a fabrication. “Maybe what happened didn’t actually happen,” he says, staring hard at me. “Can I do a demonstration?” He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver, spins the cylinder. “This scares you, right?” he says. Then he puts the gun to his head.
My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. “Yeah, I’m scared,” I admit. “We don’t have to do this.”
“I know we don’t,” he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple. And then he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession. There are only five chambers.
“Reholster the gun,” I demand.
He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. “I can do this all day long,” he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. “I can do this a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong.”
It’s the same thing, he argues, with the government’s accusations. They were a smoke screen— an attempt to distort reality— but there’s one thing everybody agrees on: The trouble really got rolling in the humid predawn murk of 30 April 2012.
It was a Monday, about 4:50 am. A television flickered in the guard station of McAfee’s newly built, 2.5-acre jungle outpost on the Belizean mainland. At the far end of the property, a muddy river flowed slowly past. Crocodiles lurked on the opposite bank, and howler monkeys screeched. In the guard station, a drunk night watchman gaped at Blond Ambition, a Madonna concert DVD.
The guard heard the trucks first. Then boots hitting the ground and the gate rattling as the lock was snapped with bolt cutters. He stood up and looked outside. Dozens of men in green camouflage were streaming into the compound. Many were members of Belize’s Gang Suppression Unit, an elite force trained in part by the FBI and armed with Taurus MT-9 submachine guns. Formed in 2010, their mission was to dismantle criminal organizations. The guard observed the scene silently for a moment and then sat back down. After all, the Madonna concert wasn’t over yet. Outside, flashlight beams streaked across the property. “This is the police,” a voice blared over a bullhorn. “Everyone out!”
Deep in the compound, McAfee burst out of a thatched-roof bungalow that stood on stilts twenty feet off the ground. He was naked and held a revolver. Things had changed since his days as a high-flying software tycoon. By 2009 he had sold almost everything he owned— estates in Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas as well as his ten-passenger plane— and moved into the jungle. He announced that he was searching for natural antibiotics in the rain forest and constructed a mysterious laboratory on his property. Now his jungle stronghold was under attack. The commandos were converging on him. There were thirty of them; he was outgunned and outmanned.
McAfee walked back inside to the seventeen-year-old in his bed. She was sitting up, naked, her long frizzy hair falling around her shoulders and framing the stars tattooed on her chest. She was terrified.
As the GSU stormed up the stairs, he put on some shorts, laid down his gun, and walked out with his hands up. The commandos collided with McAfee at the top of the stairs, slammed him against the wall, and handcuffed him. “You’re being detained on suspicion of producing methamphetamine,” one of the cops said.
McAfee twisted to look at his accuser. “That’s a startling hypothesis, sir,” he responded. “Because I haven’t sold drugs since 1983.”

Rico says you can buy the issue or read the rest on-line, but it's a sad tale of someone who went off the rails... (But it does have the great line about one of his young lovers: "She can pretend sanity better than any woman I have ever known."