‘This isn’t going to be a movie about sex and violence,” says John McAfee in the introduction to this documentary. Boo! “Even though there may be some in it.” Hooray! The highly quotable antihero adds: “It’s James Bond meets Scarface, with a little Indiana Jones.” Pass the popcorn and count us in.
The latest TV show from Netflix’s seemingly endless true-crime conveyor belt is Running With the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee. It tells the belief-beggaring story of the Silicon Valley golden boy who fled from murder charges and ran for US president. McAfee himself asks: “Am I a successful entrepreneur who went mad and murdered his neighbour? Or the potential saviour of America?” Across this outrageous film’s 105-minute running time, you will probably lean towards the former. This is Tiger King: Tech Tycoon Edition.
Born, rather incongruously, in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, McAfee moved to the US, graduated in mathematics and became a programmer at Nasa, working on the Apollo space missions. In 1987, he invented McAfee antivirus, one of the most successful – not to mention most hated – pieces of software ever. At his peak, McAfee had a personal fortune of $100m. The company that bears his name is worth $14bn today.
In 1994, the maverick mogul quit his business to take up yoga and meditation, moving to the wealthy tourist enclave of Ambergris Caye in Belize. The owner of the mansion next door was 52-year-old Florida expat Gregory Faull, whose pet parrot was permanently perched on his shoulder (because God forbid anyone in this tale should be remotely normal). He had a problem with McAfee’s dogs. When the beloved mutts were poisoned, McAfee was heard vowing to kill Faull as retribution. Two days later, Faull was shot in the back of the head. McAfee was the prime suspect but by the time local police raided his compound, he was gone.
This bizarre yarn begins in earnest in 2012, when McAfee invites Vice magazine’s editor in chief Rocco Castoro and cameraman Robert King (an endearingly grizzled character, reminiscent of The Dude from The Big Lebowski) to document his life in hiding. They follow him from Belize to Guatemala, accompanied by his ex-military bodyguards and much younger girlfriend Sam (she was 18 when they met, 46 years his junior). We see McAfee attempting to bribe customs officials, swigging whisky from the bottle and firing guns for fun. “I hate to advocate alcohol, drugs, violence and insanity to anybody,” he deadpans. “But it’s always worked for me.”
The Vice guys seem intoxicated by him, too. They publish an online article with the headline: “We are with John McAfee right now, suckers.” Ironically, they forget to take the geo-data off the accompanying photograph, giving away the IT security guru’s location. Cue him going on the run again. “Clearly I’m a flight risk,” McAfee chuckles in the getaway car. “I specialise in flighting.”
When things go pear-shaped, he fakes a heart attack to get himself airlifted back to the US, ditching poor Sam at the border. Within hours of landing in Miami, he has hooked up with sex worker Janice, who he soon marries. Asked if it was love at first sight, she laughs: “Fuck no … I just saw an opportunity.”
The narrative becomes as chaotic as the man himself. McAfee repeatedly goes into hiding, then re-emerges and invites the camera crew back. Those close to him admit he is a master manipulator and narcissist. He compares himself to The Joker and relishes being a wanted man. On his still-active Twitter page, McAfee’s bio reads: “Iconoclast. Lover of women, adventure and mystery.”
One of the sweetest scenes sees the wannabe master-of-disguise visit a small town wig store to get fitted with a Michael Fabricant-style hairpiece. The shop assistant can’t believe her luck when he suddenly offers $500 cash for her cheap sunglasses. Much less charmingly, McAfee also fakes disability to evade detection.
McAfee darkly claims to have “hacked the world”, hinting that he has bugged governments worldwide, including the White House. He insists Belize authorities conducted a witch-hunt because he had evidence of corruption, that politicians want him silenced and that Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa drug cartel have a contract out on him.
King says this was probably paranoid, self-aggrandising nonsense. The intel that McAfee claimed to possess has never been released. In 2016 and 2020, he ran for US president on a libertarian ticket, boasting that he would never pay taxes again and wearing his arrest warrant as a badge of honour. He failed to secure a nomination both times.
It all goes a bit Hunter S Thompson when he buys a yacht from Jordan Belfort, AKA the Wolf of Wall Street, and sets sail for the Bahamas with a cargo of drugs, hard liquor and heavy weaponry. Psychosis takes hold. In the middle of the Atlantic, McAfee threatens to shoot King “in the dick”. Despite decades as a war photographer, King understandably quits – but he is soon lured back to continue the story.
The Vice documentary was never released but in 2019, British director Charlie Russell approached McAfee about a potential follow-up. “This is a man who lived his life like he was the protagonist of a movie,” says Russell. “He’s clearly trying to control his own narrative – but how much anyone can do that over a period of years, let alone a man in his 70s who drinks heavily and advocates the use of mind-altering substances. I’m not sure.”
Russell – whose Bafta-winning CV includes acclaimed films about Terry Pratchett, Caroline Flack and Chris Packham – sifted through hundreds of hours of unseen footage. He skilfully uses Castoro and King’s raw material, supplemented by new interviews, to build a portrait of McAfee’s dissolute life and dramatic downfall.
“John came up with an elaborate plan to allow us to interview him,” says Russell. “We would fly to a European airport and be met by his security team, who would take away our phones, put bags over our heads and drive us around for five hours so we’d have no idea of John’s location. I later discovered that this sort of behaviour was pretty standard for John. He liked to constantly test those around him. We didn’t get the chance to discover whether the danger was real or not. By the time we were in a position to travel post-pandemic, John had been picked up by the authorities.”
After the escape artist’s arrest in the Dominican Republic in 2019, things take a darker turn. By the end of the documentary, big questions surround McAfee’s tale, and Faull’s murder remains unsolved. This tragedy hangs over the entire film, preventing it from becoming a larger-than-life lark. Another dark twist comes when ghostwriter Alex Cody Foster discovers that during his troubled teens, McAfee might have shot his abusive father and made it look like suicide. “John was the virus,” concludes Foster. Whatever McAfee’s truth, this fever dream of a documentary certainly gets under your skin.
• Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee streams globally on Netflix from 24 August.
