Francois Garcia is a Canadian filmmaker. He purchased the rights to make a documentary based on John mccafee's life in late twenty twelve, about two months after McAfee's neighbor in Belize turned up dead, and over the next couple of years he would try to line up meetings with people in the film industry. Never stood involved. We're talking to several high profile directors as well, So idol, John, I want to set up a meeting. You guys can chat.
Francois says that during this period, John mccafee was taking bathsols, a very addictive synthetic drug known to cause euphoric highs and hallucinations, which was making it hard to set up meetings because McAfee said he didn't feel safe anywhere. He had fears of the cartel everywhere he went. So, can we do this in La? In La, it's too dangerous for me, too many Mexican cortels. Okay, John, all right? Can we do this in New York? No? I can't
do New York because I can't carry weapons in New York. Therefore, I can't protect myself from the cartels like my god Man, just to help me out here. I'm not gonna ask you every city in the United States. Just give me a city. McAfee chooses Boston. He tells Francois that he's Irish and he feels like he'd be safe there, surrounded
by other Irish people. So they're at the Hilton in Boston waiting in the lobby for the potential director to show up, and McAfee starts to get jittery, and he says, sorry, I can't do this, I have to leave immediately. The hotel is surrounded by cartels all over the lobby. Here look at us. There was a Microsoft conference and the hotel and I'm like, all I see is blue shirts with the Microsoft loco in it. And it's like, well,
these are all cartel operatives. They are together and like they're Microsoft employees and it's like, no, they work for the cartel. They don't know it, but they do. McAfee starts to spiral in front of Francois. He says he wants a limo with tinted windows to take him to the airport. Francois notices that the director has just walked into the lobby. He wants to salvage the meeting, He offers to drive McAfee to the airport in his own car so that the director can sit in the back
with McAfee and discuss the movie. McAfee agrees. They head up to his room to pack. Francois sees McAfee's partner Jenesis there, then, I haven't seen any drugs yet, but it's it's it's obvious. It's like a state of paranoia. There's guns everywhere, loaded guns. His fidgety guns falls out of his pocket. Janus technologies they were guns, but denies that either of them were high in any event. Francois, he's cameraman, McAfee, Janis, and the director all pile into
the car. So off we drive to the airport. All of this is on video by away on a car chase with invisible cars, and it's like, okay, they're behind us, durned left and there's nobody behind us. They're there. Drive faster. I can drive faster. And I mean he's holding a gun and waving the gun. Can you just point your gun down like, because I'm driving and I want to hold it in the back of my head. Now, keep in mind the director is in the car the whole time,
seeing everything. When they arrive at the airport, McAfee and Janus leave their guns in Francois's black seat and they check in for a flight to the UK. As Francois is driving the director back, McAfee calls him with one more favor to ask. McAfee says he who left his own car at the hotel, and he wants Francois to give the keys to one of his security guards, who drive it to McAfee's house in Tennessee. Francois finds the car in the parking garage as soon as they opened
the car. I mean I cev the arsenal, using the word lightly, an arsenal of weapons, all sizes, all over the vehicle, and the bags ziplock bags, probably too well, and says each full of this substance inside those ziplock bags, according to Francois, was a drug similar to bath salts, but even stronger. Later, Francois goes out for dinner and drinks with the film director. His reaction to the whole thing, according to Francois, was what the hell just happened? But
as it turns out, their meeting was a success. The deal goes through. You're listening to Foundering, I'm your host, Jamie's harrabay. It's the beginning of the end. When John McAfee ran for and lost the Libertarian Party presidential nomination, it propelled him to the national stage once again. He was on TV regularly discussing politics, civil liberties, and cybersecurity.
He had largely shrugged off the accusations that he'd murdered his neighbor in Belize, and he was able to use his fame to court a new sort of wealth, cryptocurrency. In this chapter of McAfee's life, he becomes a major player in the crypto world. With a single tweet, he could send the price of a new digital currency soaring. He was living large again and evading taxes, but behind the scenes, McAfee was deteriorating. His world was composed of guns, drugs,
delusions that ruled his life for years. McAfee had pushed the notion that he was wanted by one government or another. This time because of his dealings in crypto and those unpaid taxes. Authorities in the United States really are after him and they're closing in. We'll tell you more after the break. Stories of John McAfee doing synthetic drugs have floated around for years. As early as twenty ten, John McAfee was posting on a message board called blue Light
about his experiments with bath salts. The journalist Jeff Wis quotes McAfee's writing, I think it's the finest drug ever conceived. I had visual and auditory hallucinations and the worst paranoia of my life. Over the years, McAfee posted dozens of times on this site, which is now defunct. Another journalist, Joshua Davis, asked McAfee about these posts, and he insisted it was just a big prank, but then McAfee went
on to describe elaborate hallucinations to the reporter. For what it's worth, Janice McAfee describes him more as a drinker. Whatever he was on, it made him super annoid. I first spoke to Janus in June of twenty twenty two, about a year after John McAfee's death. I specifically wanted to ask her about McAfee's repeated insistence that the cartel was out to get him. It's a story that Janus has corroborated, mostly in tabloids. Like The Daily Mail and
The Sun, but also in outlets like Newsweek. In fact, she said over the years that it was related to her past as a sex worker. I didn't know that my pimp had been approached by someone who was claiming to be a representative of the cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel. John McAfee spent years saying that the Sinaloa Cartel was after him. It's an international crime ring mostly known for drug trafficking. It was led by El Chapo for decades.
There's no evidence of any truth to McAfee's claims about the cartel, and the only other person who seemed to believe it was Janus. They knew that we were together and they wanted to have me be sort of their inside man, you know, giving them information. And Janus says that her pimp was in on it. His whole thing was like, oh my gosh, we're gonna get so much money. And my thing was, okay, I'm going to get away
from you, Like this was my plan. You know, I'm going to get I'm going to use the situation to get away from you. While we weren't able to verify Janice the story, it's been widely documented that women leaving this type of sex work often have a difficult time shaking off their traffickers. Maybe Janice and McAfee's fears became sandwich together. She was convinced the pimp was following her every move with macafe, and he was convinced the cartel
was out to get him. Here's Francois. He ran with that story for so long that I think, like any good lie, he just at some point he did start believing himself. It was interesting because I do believe that when he was under the influence of batstols, he did believe the paranoia, the invisible men chasing him. I mean, I've seen him starting shooting at the walls from inside
his house. From twenty thirteen through twenty seventeen, Francois was actively filming with McAfee, often at his home in Lexington, Tennessee. I would go to the back door, knock at the door, and immediately moved myself out of the frame of the door against a brick wall, because the chances that he would start shooting from inside the house, blazing bullets out of his living room or bedroom. Jana's confirmed the story
and the situation with the shooting in the house. You know, if you heard something where it sounded like someone was in are at it, you know, that's what he would do, you know, fire, no kind of a warning shot, but she claims McAfee had reasons to be alarmed. The pimp was still around, she says, and still a threat, and Janice blames herself for bringing this source of danger into
McAfee's life. I really felt really guilty, and I felt a lot like the things that were happening around him and why he felt so unsaved was because of me? Was my fault? Is that why you guys divorced? No? No, no, it just were just idn't know that there was really a why we divorced. We just we just did. Janice and McAfee get divorced in twenty nineteen. They would remain partners for the rest of his life. There was always a need for me to try to reassure him no,
that I wasn't trying to do him arm. I didn't want to do him ARM. So whatever I needed to do too to let him know that I was willing to do that. Janus didn't go into too many details about the divorce, but we know that McAfee was volatile, that he had a tendency to push people away. Janus managed to hang on to his trust, and my interpretation is that the divorce was Janice's way of showing her commitment that she would still be there without a claim
to his money. For Francois, though, the trust that existed between him and McAfee that began to wither. Well, I think that he started realizing that the projects, it's not just a biography that's gonna glorify him and and and repeat his side of the story or whatever he says at face value. Eventually, the day that probably felt inevitable came, McAfee turned on Francois, accusing me being connected to the curtail.
That's that was part of his m I mean, he has He had accused plenty of people in the past that they either they had no more use for him or they were getting too close for him. That's how we would get rid of people. You know why you're not talking to to this friend of yours anymore? Oh he's my sources just confirmed that he was working with the courteils against me. How you know that? Oh, well, he just bought a new car. These accusations marked the
end of their relationship. When we spoke to Francois, his documentary on McAfee had been in the works for about a decade. Remember, he first started calling news agencies on McAfee's behalf in twenty twelve, after Greg Fall's murder in Belize. He still plans to release his project. Francois says he stopped communicating with McAfee by late twenty seventeen. He then watched as McAfee had a sort of career revival by
tweeting about cryptocurrency. It just went on fire. His following started drawing, and the massive crypto community there so that he just embraced John. Francois felt like he was seeing a whole new community of people taken in by McAfee's star power. In spite of his addictions and delusions, McAfee would carve out a next chapter as a cryptocurrency prophet. That's next. Cryptocurrency became McAfee's major project during the last
years of his life. Our responsibility, i don't think, is to build the ultimate currency, but to understand the power that cryptocurrency not developed by governments and institutions, but by people. Offers us, for the first time in human history, a chance for absolute financial freedom, where your wallet is your bank. That's McAfee speaking at a crypto conference in Barcelona in twenty nineteen. Cryptocurrencies allow people to anonymously exchange money directly
with each other. McAfee saw huge potential in this. He saw in it a promise of privacy, a world without banks or the irs. No one will know what you do with your money. Neither should they. It's your fucking money. You worked for it. That attitude that the government has no business meddling with his money would eventually catch up with him. He went all in on crypto in twenty seventeen, starting a new money making scheme. A few people who were part of his failed presidential campaign went to work
for him, and they called themselves Team McAfee. They operated out of his house in Tennessee. Jimmy Watson, a former Navy seal, joined McAfee's security team. He still remembers his first day on the job. John McFee steps out of this dark corner in the back of the house. You know, I'm looking across the kitchen and across this living room, and it's all dark and there's bullet holes in the wall like around his door. Jimmy could see that the
compound was dedicated to crypto. Everybody in the house, everyone even the mate I think, has a computer screen at the laptop and they're trading on this crazy which looks like the stock market. To me. I had heard a bitcoin, just very very slightly. But I remember John McFee like kind of laughing and screaming out out like how much money made that day. Jimmy hadn't spent a lot of
time online. He spent much of his adult life in the Navy, and then he went on to work for Blackwater, the security contractor that massacred Iraqi civilians in two thousand and seven. He said he didn't know anything about digital currency, and that McAfee took him under his wing. He taught me basically like no other teacher had ever talked to me before, and he taught it to be in a way that I can understand cryptocurrency. He and McAfee developed
a close relationship. We look for father figures in our life generally psychologically we do. And when we find someone in our life said we look up, we look up to as a mentor or a father figure. We kind of cling onto that individual and did we put him on a pedestal. And that's pretty much what happened with me and John McFee with less than a year in the job, and so his complete surprise, Jimmy says, McAfee gave him a new rank and title. He goes, I promoted you the CEO two weeks ago on Twitter and
you didn't see it. You did, and he was like, yeah, but I'm not gonna pay you extra. So with that scout relationship we had, Jimmy works all day and all night. He doesn't stop, and neither does McAfee. We would be up all night, sometimes all night, you know, to four or five six in the morning, get maybe two hours to sleep and wake up. A normal day with him would be to go to the Linkuer store, pick up a case of Scotch, like a case, sit at his house.
He'd blare the TV on loud and he'd do all his crypto businesses stuff from his phone, and then maybe go to Walmart. He lived a pretty mundane life when we weren't traveling because he was very paranoid. He didn't want to leave the house. Despite the drinking, the paranoia. There was a method to the madness. Team McAfee was always moving forward looking into emerging cryptocurrencies. My colleague hammah Miller covers crypto, so twenty seventeen was a pivotal time
in crypto. Tons of new coins coming out all the time. It would be impossible for anyone to keep track of these projects, and McAfee was a bit of a guide to them. Jimmy's job was to read up on all the new cryptocurrencies and pass on to McAfee the ones that Jimmy thought were unique or interesting. Most of them were getting ready to sell their new tokens to the
public for the first time. If McAfee liked one, he or his team would often reach out to the project and the offer to promote it on his Twitter account. But he usually had an ulterior motive. He might buy up that coin himself, so after he promotes it, makes it his coin of the day, and the price goes up, his own stake would rise, and then he could sell
that cryptocurrency and make a profit. He would also sometimes charge these projects to get promoted by him, and so he was really building a business out of you know, this idea of becoming a crypto influencer back when that was a really new phenomenon. Now it's not illegal to do a sponsorship or a promotional deal with crypto companies, but what could be considered illegal is to not disclose that you're being paid to promote that cryptocurrency or security.
In addition to working with cryptocurrency companies, McAfee also took paid speaking gigs at conferences. He was able to draw so much attention to cryptocurrency because he was such an a vandalist for the movement. His presence on Twitter was very high profile, very colorful. In twenty seventeen, he tweeted that the price of a bitcoin would jump to five hundred thousand dollars within three years, adding if not, I
will eat my own dick on national television. For the record, bitcoin never got anywhere close to that amount, and McAfee didn't make good on his promise. The main business of Team McAfee was his coin of the day. In twenty seventeen, McAfee chose to promote a project called redcoin, a crypto token designed to be used as a tip or gratuity
on social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter. This is redcoin's developer, who goes by the pseudonym tech Adept or TIA for short, McAfee certainly was on the radar from being a bit of a pioneer in the anti virus space. He's a computer genius. He's this, you know, but it didn't really touch our world at all up until the point I checked the data was December twenty fourth, Christmas Eve that he actually tweeted out, you know, redcoin, the social coin, go for it, and people did. Ta says
he didn't pay McAfee to promote redcoin. He believes McAfee found redcoin on his own. Redcoin isn't the company, it's a group of volunteers who dedicate their spare time to it. In his tweet, McAfee called red cooin a sleeper and the most widely used social network coin in the world. It was Christmas Eve and you know, the egg nog must have been flowing, and it was a great time. But it ended very quickly. Redcoin hit an all time
high in January twenty eighteen. The crypto data tracker coin gecko reported that the price surged sixteen from the month before. Redcoin has never broken the record price. It reached after McAfee's tweet. Ten months later, members of Team McAfee reached out to TA over linked in an email and wanted to strike a deal with Redcoin for another promotion from McAfee. It was clear they had no memory of the prior promotion,
which was a major red flag for TA. They mentioned a million dollar payment just to be involved, and clearly some sort of significant equity in the company, which doesn't really exist as such. So I don't even know on their team how much communication was going on, but clearly they were still looking for customers, partners, people to take money from that they could then promote and make a bunch of money, and they did. They were they were
using the crypto community as an ATM. It was November twenty eighteen when Team McAfee approached red Coin for that paid promotion. Around this time, McAfee and his CEO Jimmy had a falling out. I had a sort of a mental bakedown, but it was like a spiritual awakening, and it was like a vail was lifted off of my eyes, as crazy as that sounds, and it's like I could see the evil around me and that I just bounced and at the cost of pretty much everything to me,
like I feel utterly used by him. Jimmy says he hadn't talked to McAfee since late twenty eighteen or early twenty nineteen, but he remembered how he felt during that conversation. I think he just said, you've played the full Jimmy my son basically like I won. And that was really hard for me because I had I felt like he was like a dad to me, a father, And that's what you get for thinking those kind of things in life, you know. And it was a huge lesson for me
to learn. But at this moment, in the fall of twenty eighteen, McAfee has bigger problems than Jimmy all the Red coin deal. McAfee gets word that the federal government is planning to press charges against him. Janie tells Our contributing reporter Matthew Bremner that she and McAfee make plans to leave the country. John at gunn he gotten a letter from one of his attorneys, and they had said that they had been called to give testimony to a grand jury. He then gotten word that he himself, myself,
and four other people were named in this grand jury. Indictment. It was supposed to We weren't supposed to know about it, but obviously John you know, has his ways to get information until he found out about that in November, until we ended up leaving on January of the next year, January twenty nineteen, go directly to space. No no, no. We went to the Bahamas. We drove from Cattara's Island. We drove from there down to Miami, and then from Miami we took our boat, the Freedom Boat. We were
unable to confirm this chain of events with McAfee's attorney. However, we spoke to a legal expert who told us that it's unusual for attorneys to give grand jury testimony during a federal investigation. That said, it's very common for people under investigation for white collar crimes to know they're being investigated.
What McAfee did that was uncommon was flee Today January twenty seconds, the IRS has convened a grand jury in the state of Tennessee to charge myself, my wife, Missus McAfee, four of my campaign workers with unspecified IRS crimes of a felonious nature. They want to silence me. I will not allow that. I am running my campaign in exile on this boat. If you didn't catch that, McAfee attempted to run for president again as the Libertarian candidate in
the twenty twenty election. While he was at c he was still very active online and closely followed by the crypto community. He insisted he would continue to campaign with his partner Janus by his signed even as he was being investigated. I will not allow them to imprison me and shut my voice down. While he was on the lamp, he made this recording that was played to an audience on the crypto themed cruise. Hello everyone, I'm John McAfee. I'm very sorry I cannot be with you enjoying this
wonderful cruise that you're on. The reason I'm not with you is had I attempted to go, I would have been picked up by interbalm and carted off back to America to face charges for tax evasion. It is true. I have not paid taxes in eight years. I have not filed taxes in eight years. I will not file taxes again. Jeff Albert is a part at the law firm Prior Cashman and a former federal prosecutor with the Southern District of New York. Jeff specializes in white color crime.
He said that McAfee's actions fit the profile of a type of crime known as a pump and dump scheme involving securities. You take a security that is selling at a fairly low price, You buy a bunch of it at that low price. Then you make a bunch of extravagant claims publicly about the security and how it's likely to go up in value. The value then goes up, and then you sell all of those securities that you bought and make a tidy little profit. Jeff says the
McAfee name did some heavy lifting in this scheme. Don McAfee was well known as somebody who had created antivirus software, presumably was very smart, and people viewed him as somebody that they could rely on to go in and look at a computer science related product and assess whether or not it was really valuable. Right now where in a legal gray area. Governments have been trying to figure out how to regulate cryptocurrency. Many of them wanted to treat
it more like a stock. That way, they could use existing rules to discourage people from manipulating the market or trying to gain unfair advantages to make money. John McAfee became one of their first high profile targets. On October fifth, twenty twenty, the SEC charged McAfee and Jimmy Watson with fraudulently promoting cryptocurrencies to McAfee's Twitter followers without disclosing they
were being paid to do so. Federal prosecutors at the Justice Department came out with similar charges in twenty twenty one. In total, McAfee and Jimmy were accused of committing a thirteen million dollar fraud. After he left McAfee, Jimmy lived abroad. He kept busy doing contract work. He never crossed paths with his former boss again. Jimmy declines to go into detail about why he moved overseas, and he didn't have
a good explanation for why he did what he did. Next, which is with a federal indictment hanging over his head, he goes back to the US. In March twenty twenty one, he travels to Texas to see family and renew his passport. I was with my mom outside at a coffee shop. A little did I know the FBI had been watching my house and following me. These are two SUVs just pulled up really fast, guns in my face, fingers on sugar, you know, you know, yelling at you get on the ground.
I'm only conserved with my mom. I was a mom, Get mom back up. This is bad. That was it. They rescued me, you know. Jimmy's spent five days in a federal penitentiary before being released under a ten million dollar bail and house arrest. He pleaded not guilty. Just over a year later, a federal judge ordered Jimmy to pay almost four hundred thousand dollars in fines and banned him from buying and selling any digital assets security. It was near the end of the road from McAfee as well.
He'd fled the United States in haste in twenty nineteen after years of saying he was being chased. He really was wanted by the US government on several charges, and he would spend the next few years flitting from one foreign city to another, attempting to disguise his whereabouts. And Jimmy, who'd spent so much time traveling with McAfee before their split, he had a strong sense of what McAfee was up to. We did go to Spain, he hung out with Russians.
They're very, very powerful, successful Russians. When I heard that he was arrested in Spain, I knew that he was. He had been with them, and these are very powerful man. I don't want to get too far into it, just to protect myself. McAfee's last stand, that's next time on Foundering, The John mccafee story. Foundering is hosted by me Jamie
Tera Bay Sean When is our executive producer. Hannah Miller and Matthew Bremner contributed reporting to this episode special thanks to Young Young and Eileena Pen for help with production. Molly Nugent is our associate producer. Sharif Josef is our audio engineer and editorial assistant. Mark Million and Vandermay, Molly should and Andy Martin are our story editors. Be sure to subscribe and if you like our show, leave a review. Most importantly, tell your friends see you next time.