If you’ve not heard, John McAfee, founder of McAfee Antivirus, is on the lam in Belize, wanted for murder wanted for questioning in a murder murder investigation (though Gizmodo previously quoted police in Belize saying McAfee is the prime suspect in the murder). Joshua Davis has been covering McAfee’s time Belize has published a short e-book about the fiasco:
McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed, manic intensity, his light blue eyes sparkling. “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 down,” I tell him. I’d come here to investigate 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 and 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.
Wired: John McAfee’s Last Stand Excerpt
Update: McAfee has published a blog post claiming that was feeding Davis “as much nonsense as I could muster.” He has also posted what he claims are a recording of an ex-village councilman planning to kill him, and a letter threatening his life if he didn’t pay up $150,000.