John McAfee Was Found Dead In His Spanish Jail Cell Hours After His Extradition To The U.S. Was Approved And Somehow His Story Continues To Get Crazier And Crazier
Fox Business - Tech entrepreneur John McAfee was found dead on Wednesday in a prison cell near Barcelona hours after a Spanish court approved his extradition to the U.S. on tax evasion charges, according to a report.
The news of McAfee's death was first reported by Spanish newspaper El Mundo. The U.S. Department of Justice declined to comment and referred FOX Business to Spanish authorities.
McAfee, 75, said at an extradition hearing earlier this month that the charges against him were politically motivated. He ran for U.S. president as a Libertarian candidate in 2016, coming in third in the party’s primary.
McAfee was arrested at Barcelona’s airport on Oct. 7, two days after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged him with evading taxes and failing to file tax returns.
The Department of Justice alleged McAfee made over $23 million due to materially false and misleading statements about cryptocurrencies.
McAfee was charged in March by the Southern District of New York with fraud and money laundering conspiracy crimes related to two cryptocurrency schemes that netted his team $13 million.
McAfee, who founded McAfee antivirus software, was worth over $100 million before the value of his investments plunged during the 2008 financial crisis.
After selling his company, he retired to Belize and said in 2011 he uncovered a government plot to kill him. He fled to Guatemala in November 2012 after he was named a person of interest in the death of his neighbor.
McAfee was returned to the U.S. after a lengthy legal battle and lived in Tennessee until 2019 when he said he was fleeing from the U.S. government. He said taxes were illegal and that he hadn't paid his taxes in eight years.
Note how the title of this blog didn't say "committed suicide". For good reason. McAfee predicted this day would come 9 months ago.
The word eccentric doesn't do John McAfee justice. The man was off the walls. He might have seemed completely unhinged at times, and a bit off his rocker, but you can't read one of his last tweets posted below and tell me he was totally insane.
John McAfee built his fortune by installing his free trial McAfee Antivirus on computers in the 1990's like my bad boy compaq presario.
He founded the company in 1987, and sold his stake in the 1990s for more than $100 million.
(sidebar - I will go to my grave convinced that the antivirus companies were the same people that created the virus' and embedded them in the "Carmen Electra and Pamela Anderson home video lesbian scene" videos and "Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac unreleased track" mp3's on Limewire but that's a story for another day.)
In the mid-2000s, Mr. McAfee gave up the corporate world and spent millions of dollars building a series of airstrips in the southwestern U.S., where he indulged his passion for “aerotrekking,” or low-altitude flyover exploration of desert terrain
In recent years, he had focused on cryptocurrencies, which he promoted with an outlaw image and a reputation for brash pronouncements. In 2017, Mr. McAfee in a tweet predicted that bitcoin would be valued at $500,000 within three years.
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From that point on McAfee went on to have several run-ins with the law. He moved to Belize, where police went on a manhunt for him after his neighbor was found shot to death in 2012. He fled from there to Guatemala before being nabbed and was later deported to the U.S.
U.S.attorneys charged him with failing to file tax returns between 2014 and 2018 and avoiding taxes by naming other people as the owners of his assets in cryptocurrency accounts, real estate, and yachts.
Federal prosecutors in New York later charged McAfee with fraud saying he deceptively promoted cryptocurrencies via his Twitter account in "pump-and-dump" schemes which netted him millions.
In one of his last public messages on Twitter, sent last week to his 1 million followers, Mr. McAfee claimed that his cryptocurrency assets had “dissolved” and the government had seized his remaining assets.
“My friends evaporated through fear of association,” the tweet said. “I have nothing. Yet, I regret nothing.”
McAfee was arrested in Spain in October after being indicted in the United States months earlier.
Around 1 p.m. this afternoon, a few hours after a three-judge panel at Spain's National Court in Madrid ruled McAfee could be extradited to the United States to face charges here, he was found dead in his cell in a prison near Barcelona.
Honestly, I have no idea what to think.
The guy was a wild card so could he have shit his pants knowing he was done for and said fuck it and off himself? Absolutely.
But then there are breadcrumbs like this
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And you gotta scratch your head.
Especially when you consider the fact that Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself and was suicided in the same exact manner.
(Sidebar - shit should be getting wild in the Epstein case the next few weeks given that the U.S. Virgin Islands is leading the investigation and uncovering a massive spiderweb of shell companies, accomplices, and aliases in his network.)
Like with Epstein's story, where the fuck were McAfee's guards at?
"Sleeping" like Epstein's lied to police about (and somehow will avoid jail time?)
Fishy as fuck for sure.
Things should get even more insane with McAfee's story given the fact that he promised to disclose all the secrets he had stored away the minute he was off'd/died.
What gets really weird and fishy is that McAfee's Instagram account posted the following minutes after he was confirmed dead.
Was this shitposting to throw people off from something and discredit McAfee further as a looney tune?
Was this posted by somebody who took control of his account by nefarious means?
Who knows?
All we know is the John McAfee story was always nuts and has somehow managed to become even crazier.
If this story proves nothing else, death and taxes are yes in fact inevitable.
p.s. - For more insight into the man, the myth, the legend, listen to Kirk Minihane's interview with him from 2019.