Eventually, Adonizio explained, the work might also lead to an entire new class of antibiotics. McAfee was thrilled by the idea. He had fought off digital contagions, and now he could fight organic ones.
It was perfect. He immediately proposed they start a business to commercialize her research. Within minutes McAfee was talking in rapid-fire bursts about how this would transform the pharmaceutical industry and the entire world. They would save millions of lives and reinvent whole industries.
Adonizio was astounded. It was incredible. Adonizio said yes on the spot, quit her research position in Boston, sold the house she had just bought, and moved to Belize. McAfee soon built a laboratory on his property and stocked it with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment. Adonizio went to work trying to isolate new plant compounds that might be effective medicines, while McAfee touted the business to the international press. But the methodical pace of Adonizio's scientific research couldn't keep up with McAfee's enthusiasm, and his attention seemed to wander.
He began spending more time in Orange Walk, a town of about 13, people that was 5 miles from his compound. McAfee described it in an email to friends as "the asshole of the world—dirty, hot, gray, dilapidated. For some reason I have always been fascinated by these subcultures.
Though he says he never drank alcohol, he became a regular at a saloon called Lover's Bar. The proprietor, McAfee wrote to his friends, was partial to "shatteringly bad Mexican karaoke music to which voices beyond description add a disharmony that reaches diabolic proportions.
This was the real world he was looking for, in all its horror. The bar girls were given one Belize dollar for every beer a patron bought them. To increase their earnings, some of the women would chug beers, vomit in the restroom, and return to chug more.
One reported drinking 50 beers in one day. I couldn't walk away. McAfee started spending most mornings at Lover's. After six months, he sent out another update to his friends: "My fragile connection with the world of polite society has, without a doubt, been severed," he wrote. My hygiene is no better. Yesterday, for the first time, I urinated in public, in broad daylight. McAfee knew he had entered a dangerous world. Evaristo "Paz" Novelo, the obese Belizean proprietor of Lover's, liked to sit at a corner table and squint at his customers through perpetually puffy eyes.
He admits to a long history of operating brothels and prides himself on his ability to figure out exactly what will please his patrons. Early on, he asked whether McAfee was looking for a woman. When McAfee said no, Novelo asked whether he wanted a boy.
McAfee declined again. Emshwiller had a brassy toughness that belied her girlishness. In a matter-of-fact tone, she told McAfee that she had been abused as a child and said that her mother had forced her to sleep with dozens of men for money. McAfee felt a swirl of emotions: lust, compassion, pity. Emshwiller, however, felt nothing for him. McAfee soon realized that Emshwiller was dangerous and unstable, but that was part of her attractiveness.
She's a chameleon. She asked him to tell the girl to leave, and when McAfee refused, Irwin left the country. McAfee hardly blames her. One night Emshwiller decided to make her move. Her plan, if it could be called that, was to kill him and make off with as much cash as she could scrounge up. She crept to the foot of the bed, aimed, and started to pull the trigger.
But at the last moment she closed her eyes, and the bullet went wide, ripping through a pillow. McAfee leaped out of bed and grabbed the gun before she could fire again. She ran to the bathroom, locked herself in, and asked if he was going to shoot her. He couldn't hear out of his left ear and was trying to get his bearings. Finally he told her he was going to take away her phone and TV for a month.
She was furious. McAfee decided it was better for Emshwiller to have her own place about a mile down the road in the village of Carmelita. So in early he built her a house in the village. Many of the homes are made of stripped tree trunks and topped with sheets of corrugated iron; 10 percent have no electricity.
The village has a handful of dirt roads populated with colonies of biting ants and a grassy soccer field surrounded by palm trees and stray dogs. The town's biggest source of income: sand from a pit by the river that locals sell to construction companies.
Emshwiller, who had grown up in the area, warned McAfee that the village was not what it appeared to be. She told him that the tiny, impoverished town of 1, was in fact a major shipment site for drugs moving overland into Mexico, 35 miles to the north. As Emshwiller described it, this village in McAfee's backyard was crawling with narco-traffickers.
It was a revelation perfectly tailored to feed into McAfee's latent paranoia. He asked Emshwiller what he should do. It occurred to him that she might be using him to exact revenge on people who had wronged her, so he asked the denizens of Lover's for more information.
They told him stories of killings, torture, and gang wars in the area. For McAfee, the town began to take on mythic proportions. He decided to go on the offensive. After all, he was a smart Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had launched a multibillion-dollar company.
Even though he had lost a lot of money in the financial crisis, he was still wealthy. Maybe he couldn't maintain multiple estates around the world, but surely he could clean up one village. He started by solving some obvious problems. Carmelita had no police station, so McAfee bought a small cement house and hired workers to install floor-to-ceiling iron bars.
Then he told the national cops responsible for the area to start arresting people. The police protested that they were ill-equipped for the job, so McAfee furnished them with imported M16s, boots, pepper spray, stun guns, and batons. Eventually he started paying officers to patrol during their off-hours. The police, in essence, became McAfee's private army, and he began issuing orders.
When a year-old villager nicknamed Burger fired a gun outside Emshwiller's house in November , McAfee decided he couldn't rely on others to get the work done; he needed to take action himself.
An eyewitness told him that Burger had shot at a motorcycle—it looked like a drug deal gone bad. Burger's sister said that he was firing at stray dogs that attacked him. Either way, McAfee was incensed. He drove his gray Dodge pickup to the family's wooden shack near the river and strode into the muddy yard with Emshwiller as his backup she was carrying a matte-black air rifle with a large scope.
Burger wasn't there, but his mother, sister, and brother-in-law were. It doesn't matter where he goes. But she wasn't going to argue with McAfee. Her mother pulled the gun out of a bush and handed it to him.
Soon, McAfee was everywhere. He pulled over a suspicious car on the road only to discover that it was filled with elderly people and children. He offered a new flatscreen TV to a small-time marijuana peddler on the condition that the man stop dealing the guy accepted, though the TV soon broke. When I visited the village, Reynolds and others admitted that there were fights and petty theft but insisted that Carmelita was simply an impoverished little village, not a major transit point for international narco-traffickers, as McAfee alleges.
The village leaders, for their part, were dumbfounded. Many were unfamiliar with antivirus software and had never heard of John McAfee. The fact that he was running a laboratory on his property only added to the mystery. Adonizio was continuing to research botanical compounds, but McAfee didn't want to tell the locals anything about it. In part he was worried about corporate espionage. He had seen white men in suits standing beside their cars on the heavily trafficked toll bridge near his property and was sure they were spies.
It would be insanity to talk about it. McAfee became convinced that he was being watched at all hours. Across the river, he saw people lurking in the forest and would surveil them with binoculars. When Emshwiller visited, she never noticed anybody but repeatedly told McAfee to be careful. She heard rumors that gang members were out to "jack" him—rob and kill him.
On one occasion, she recorded a village councilman discussing how to dispatch McAfee with a grenade. McAfee was wowed by her street smarts—"She is brilliant beyond description," he says—and relished the fact that she had come full circle and was now defending him.
Adonizio was also worried about McAfee's behavior. He had initially told her that the area was perfectly safe, but now she was surrounded by armed men. When she went to talk to McAfee in his bungalow, she noticed garbage bags filled with cash and blister packs of pharmaceuticals, including Viagra. She lived just outside of Carmelita and had never had any problems.
If there was any danger, she felt that it was coming from McAfee. She wasn't comfortable living there anymore and left the country. Marco Vidal, head of the Gang Suppression Unit, concurred. They found no illegal drugs of any kind. They did confiscate 10 weapons and rounds of ammunition. Three of McAfee's security guards were operating without a security guard license, and charges were filed against them. McAfee was accused of possessing an unlicensed firearm and spent a night in the Queen Street jail, aka the Pisshouse.
But the next morning, the charges were dropped and McAfee was released. He was convinced, however, that his war on drugs had made him some powerful enemies. He had reason to worry. According to Vidal, McAfee was still a "person of interest," primarily because the authorities still couldn't explain what he was up to. Vidal's suspicions may not have been far off. Two years after moving to Belize, McAfee began posting dozens of queries on Bluelight.
He explained that he had started to experiment with MDPV, a psychoactive stimulant found in bath salts, a class of designer drugs that have effects similar to amphetamines and cocaine. McAfee indicated, though, that the heightened sexuality justified the drug's risks and claimed to have produced 50 pounds of MDPV in But neither Emshwiller, Adonizio, nor anyone else I spoke with observed him making the stuff. So how could he have produced 50 pounds without anyone noticing? McAfee has a simple explanation: The whole thing was an elaborate prank aimed at tricking drug users into trying a notoriously noxious drug.
He greets me wearing a pistol strapped across his bare chest. Guards patrol the beach in front of us. He tells me that he's now living with five women who appear to be between the ages of 17 and 20; each has her own bungalow on the property. Emshwiller is here, though McAfee's attention is focused on the other women.
He has barely left the property since he came out of hiding in April. He says he spends his days shuttling from bungalow to bungalow, trying to mediate among the women. I ask why he doesn't leave the country, given that the Belizean government has returned his passport. As McAfee tells it, he is all that stands between Carmelita and rampant criminality.
The police raided him, he says, because he had run the local drug dealers out of town. These dealers had political connections and had successfully lobbied to have the police attack him. They wanted him gone. He says he also refused to make political contributions to a local politician, further antagonizing the ruling party.
If he gives in, he argues, it will send a message that Belize's corrupt government can control anybody, even a rich American. As McAfee talks, we walk across the white sand beach and into his bungalow. In many ways, his life has devolved into a complex web of contradictions. He says he's battling drugs in Carmelita, but at the same time he's trying to trick people online into taking drugs.
He professes to care about laws—and castigates the police for violating his rights—but he moved to Belize in part to subvert the US legal system in the event he lost a civil case. The police suggest he's a drug kingpin; I can't help but wonder if he has lost track of reality. Maybe he imagines that he can fix himself by fixing Carmelita. His bungalow is sparsely furnished. The small open kitchen is strewn with dishes, rotting vegetables, half-drunk bottles of Coke, and boxes of Rice Krispies and Cheerios.
A dog is licking a stick of butter off the counter. A bandolier of shotgun shells hangs from a chair. He pops open a plastic bottle of Lucas Pelucas, a tamarind-flavored Mexican candy, and depresses the plunger, extruding the gooey liquid through small holes in the top. I tell him that while I was in Carmelita, the villagers described the place as quiet and slow-moving. There is crime, most admitted, but it is limited to stolen bicycles and drunken fights. It did not seem like a particularly dangerous place to me.
Nobody says anything. When I tell him that the locals I spoke with can remember only two murders in the past three years, he argues that I'm not asking the right questions. To illustrate his point, he takes out his pistol. Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger repeatedly, the cylinder rotates, the hammer comes down, and nothing happens.
It has a real bullet in one chamber," he says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have somehow proven faulty. I'm missing something. The same is true, he argues, with Carmelita. I'm not seeing the world as he sees it. He opens the door to the bungalow, aims the gun at the sand outside, and pulls the trigger. This time, a gunshot punctures the sound of the wind and waves.
I was. He pulls the spent cartridge out of the chamber and hands it to me. It's still warm. Eight weeks later, my phone rings at in the morning. I'm back in the US and groggily pick up. He explains that he's staying at Captain Morgan's Retreat, a resort on Ambergris Caye, and he decided to go for a walk at dusk. As he strolled along the beach, he heard the sound of approaching gas-powered golf carts.
He dashed onto the porch of a nearby hotel room and hid behind the bushes. Then he heard someone cough on the balcony above him. McAfee spends the next 25 minutes describing to me how the GSU silently surrounded him in the darkness. No one said a word all night long. They just surround you and stand still. Think about it. It's freaky shit, sir. He sat there all night, he tells me, terrified that the shadowy figures he was seeing would kill him if he moved.
Around 4 o'clock in the morning, he says, they retreated quietly and disappeared. McAfee then walked onto the darkened beach. He screamed Vidal's name. A security guard approached and asked if he was OK. I'm hanging up. I'm going. A week later, McAfee calls me from the Belizean-Mexican border.
He tells me he's had enough of Belize. A day ago, he was walking down the beach on Ambergris Caye when several GSU "frogmen" walked out of the water. Later, he says, a troop of GSU officers crowded into his room but didn't say or do anything. It felt like evening to me. Now he's on Ambergris Caye. I talk to him repeatedly over the next week. He fires all of his bodyguards because he thinks they are informing on him.
He hires William Mulligan, a British national, to take their place. McAfee figures Mulligan will have fewer connections to the authorities, despite the fact that he's married to a Belizean woman. On Friday, November 9, , I receive an email from McAfee telling me that "a contingent of black-suited thugs" disembarked on the dock next to his property at pm.
The men dispersed on the beach. I had to call Amy and tell her about Mellow. She is hysterical. The next morning, November 10, , McAfee calls to tell me that his dogs died horrific deaths.
They were vomiting blood and convulsing on the ground. McAfee shot them to end their suffering. She's not doing well. I suddenly recall a conversation I had with Emshwiller in August.
She was describing someone in Carmelita who tortured dogs and, with a chill, I remember her reaction: "Mess with my dog, you're gonna get it, man," she'd said. In another conversation, she also said she had become profoundly committed to McAfee. Still on the phone with me, McAfee is searching for clues to explain the dead dogs and has noticed that the fence around his property is surrounded by boot prints—"military-style boot prints," he says—and cites this as evidence that the police were involved.
But the whole thing is looking really weird to me. I point out that his neighbors had been complaining about the barking. In August, Vivian Yu, operator of a bar and restaurant up the beach, asked one of McAfee's guards to do something to control the 11 dogs that roamed his property. McAfee hired a carpenter to build a fence to corral them.
Greg Faull, a neighbor two houses to the south on Ambergris Caye, was particularly incensed by the racket and aggression of McAfee's mutts. Faull was a big man—5'11", around pounds—who owned a sports bars in Orlando, Florida, and spent part of the year in Belize. It was a tropical paradise to him, except for the nuisance McAfee's dogs created. They growled and barked incessantly at anybody who walked by on the beach.
Faull had confronted McAfee about the animals in the past. Allison Adonizio, who had stayed at Greg Faull's house when she first moved to Belize in , says there was bad blood between the two men back then.
Earlier in the week, Faull had filed a formal complaint about the dogs with the mayor's office in the nearby town of San Pedro. Now, as I try to catch up on the latest details, McAfee dismisses the suggestion that any of his neighbors could have been involved in the apparent poisoning of the animals. No one here would ever poison the dogs. He speaks specifically about Faull. On Sunday morning, Faull is found lying faceup in a pool of blood.
He's been shot once through the back of the head, execution-style. A 9-mm Luger casing lies on the ground nearby. There are no signs of forced entry. A laptop and an iPhone are missing, police say. That afternoon, Belizean police arrive at McAfee's property to question him about Faull's death. McAfee, 67, is wanted for questioning in connection with a murder discovered Sunday morning in Belize.
Convinced that he'll be killed if he's taken into custody for questioning, the millionaire antivirus pioneer has gone into hiding somewhere in the Central American nation, where he moved in to retire. Starting at this morning, Belize time, he has been calling to tell me his side of the story. According to police, Faull was found face up in a pool of blood with a single gunshot wound to the back of his head.
Authorities found a single Luger brand 9mm expended shell at the scene. They mistook him for me. They killed him. It spooked me out. If McAfee is involved, it may trace back to the half-dozen dogs McAfee keeps at his beachside compound. Faull, like other McAfee neighbors, had been complaining about the dogs and reportedly filed a formal complaint about them with the mayor of the nearby town of San Pedro last week.
According to McAfee, the dogs were poisoned on Friday night. McAfee blames the death of the dogs on the Belizean authorities, with whom he has been tangling for months. In April, the Gang Suppression Unit raided his property on the mainland and accused him of manufacturing methamphetamine and possessing unlicensed weapons.
Those charges were dropped but McAfee believes that the government has a vendetta against him. He believes the death of his dogs was just another attempt to get him to leave the country.
A half hour later all of my dogs had been poisoned. Mellow, Lucky, Dipsy, and Guerrero have already died. While I was interviewing him in Belize in August, one of his neighbors complained about the dogs. Anytime someone walked by on the beach, the animals would charge the fence and bark.
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