The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  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. “I don’t fall in love,” she told him. “That’s not my job.” She carried a gun, wore aviator sunglasses, and had on a low-cut shirt that framed her ample cleavage.

  McAfee felt a swirl of emotions: lust, compassion, pity. “I am the male version of Amy,” he says. “I resonated with her story because I lived it.”

  Emshwiller, however, felt nothing for him. “I know how to control men,” she says. “I told him my story because I wanted him to feel sorry for me, and it worked.” All Emshwiller saw was an easy mark. “A millionaire in freaking Belize, where people work all day just to make a dime?” she says. “Who wouldn’t want to rob him?”

  McAfee soon realized that Emshwiller was dangerous and unstable, but that was part of her attractiveness. “She can pretend sanity better than any woman I have ever known,” he says. “And she can be alluring, she can be very beautiful, she can be butch-like. She’s a chameleon.” Within a month they were sleeping together, and McAfee started building a new bungalow on his property for her.

  Visiting from Ambergris Caye, McAfee’s girlfriend, Jennifer Irwin, was flabbergasted. She asked him to tell the girl to leave, and when McAfee refused, Irwin left the country. McAfee hardly blames her. “What I basically did was can a solid twelve-year relationship for a stark-raving madwoman,” he says. “But I honestly fell in love.”

  One night Emshwiller decided to make her move. She slipped out of bed and pulled McAfee’s Smith & Wesson out of a holster hanging from an ancient Tibetan gong in his bedroom. 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. “I guess I didn’t want to kill the bastard,” she admits.

  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.

  “But I didn’t even kill you!” she shouted.

  • • •

  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 2011 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 1,600 was in fact a major shipment site for drugs moving overland into Mexico, thirty-five 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. “I was massively disturbed,” he says. “I fell in love with the river, but then I discovered the horrors of Carmelita.”

  He asked Emshwiller what he should do. “She wanted me to shoot all the men in the town,” McAfee says. 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. “Carmelita was literally the Wild West,” he says. “I didn’t realize that two miles away was the most corrupt village on the planet.”

  He decided to go on the offensive. After all, he was a smart Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had launched a multi-billion-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. “What I’d like you to do is go into Carmelita and start getting information for me,” he told the officers on his payroll. “Who’s dealing drugs, and where are the drugs coming from?”

  When a twenty-two-year-old villager nicknamed Burger fired a gun outside Emshwiller’s house in November 2011, 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. “I’m giving you a last chance here,” McAfee said, holding his Smith & Wesson. “Your brother will be a dead man if he doesn’t turn in that gun. It doesn’t matter where he goes.”

  “It was like he thought he was in a movie,” says Amelia Allen, the shooter’s sister. 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 smalltime marijuana peddler on the condition that the man stop dealing (the guy accepted, though the TV soon broke). “It was like John Wayne came to town,” says Elvis Reynolds, former chair of the village council.

  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. “I thought he would come by, introduce himself, and explain what he was doing here, but he never did,” says Feliciano Salam, a soft-spoken resident who has served on the village council for two years. “He just showed up and started telling us what to do.”

  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. “Do you realize that Glaxo, Bayer, every single drug company in the world sent people out there?” McAfee says. “I was working on a project that had some paradigm-shifting impact on the drug world. 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 r
elished the fact that she had come full circle and was now defending him. “He got himself into a very entangled, dysfunctional situation,” says Katrina Ancona, the wife of McAfee’s partner in the water taxi business. “We kept telling him to get out.”

  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. “He turned into a very scary person,” she says. She wasn’t comfortable living there anymore and left the country.

  George Lovell, CEO of the Ministry of National Security, was also concerned that McAfee was buying guns and hiring guards. “When I see people doing this, my question is, what are you trying to protect?” Lovell says. Marco Vidal, head of the Gang Suppression Unit, concurred. “We got information to suggest that there may have been a meth laboratory at his location,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Given the intelligence on McAfee, there was no scope for making efforts to resolve the matter.” He proposed a raid, and his superiors approved it.

  When members of the GSU swept into McAfee’s compound on April 30, 2012, they found no meth. They found no illegal drugs of any kind. They did confiscate ten weapons and 320 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, a.k.a. 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. “The GSU makes no apologies for deeming a person in control of a laboratory, with no approval for manufacturing any substance, having gang connections and heavily armed security guards, as a person of interest,” Vidal wrote.

  Vidal’s suspicions may not have been far off. Two years after moving to Belize, McAfee began posting dozens of queries on Bluelight.ru, a drug discussion forum. 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. “When I first started doing this I accidently got a few drops on my fingers while handling a used flask and didn’t sleep for four days,” McAfee posted. “I had visual and auditory hallucinations and the worst paranoia of my life.”

  McAfee indicated, though, that the heightened sexuality justified the drug’s risks and claimed to have produced fifty pounds of MDPV in 2010. “I have distributed over 3,000 doses exclusively in this country,” he wrote. But neither Emshwiller, Adonizio, nor anyone else I spoke with observed him making the stuff. So how could he have produced fifty 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. “It was the most tongue-in-cheek thing in the fucking world,” he says, and denies ever taking the substance. “If I’m gonna do drugs, I’m gonna do something that I know is good,” he says. “I’m gonna grab some mushrooms, number one, and maybe get some really fine cocaine.

  “But anybody who knows me knows I would never do drugs,” he says.

  • • •

  In August, McAfee and I meet for a final in-person interview at his villa on Ambergris Caye. 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 seventeen and twenty; 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. “I would be perceived as running away,” McAfee says. “Within three days, all of Carmelita would return to no-man’s-land, and it would be the staging post for every illegal activity in northern Belize.”

  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 U.S. 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 fucking love these things,” he says.

  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.

  “Ninety-nine percent of all crimes are never, ever reported to the police,” he says. “Because if the gang kills your sister and you report it, the gang will come back and kill you. 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.

  “Let’s do this one more time,” he says, and puts it to his head. Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger repeatedly, the cylinder rotates, the hammer comes down, and nothing happens. “It is a real gun. 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. “You thought you were creating your reality,” he says. “You were not. 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 four-thirty in the morning. I’m back in the United States and groggily pick up. “I’m sorry to wake you up at this hour, sir, but the GSU had me surrounded all night,” McAfee says in a breathless rush. 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. “You can tell the GSU vehicles because they have this low roar,” he says, a hint of panic creeping into his voice. “I think they put special mufflers on them to scare people.”

  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. “As soon as I heard that, my heart sank,” he says. “They were fucking everywhere.”

  McAfee spends the next twenty-five minutes describing to me how the GSU silently surrounded him in the darkness. “Two of them were less than three feet away,” he says “They stood unmoving. 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 four o’clock in the morning, he says, they retreated quietly and disappeared.

  McAfee then walked onto the darkened beach. He thought he could see Marco Vidal, head of the GSU, motoring away in a boat. He screamed Vidal’s name. (Vidal denies any GSU encounters with McAfee after the April 30 raid.)

  A security guard approached and asked if he was OK. “After a while my heart was beating so fast it was like one big hum,” he says. “I was bursting with perspiration.”

  I suggest he get some rest. He sounds frantic and scared.

  “They’re coming back,” he says suddenly. “This is too fucking much. I’m hanging up. I’m going.”

  The line goes dead.

  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. “I have just escaped from hell,” he says.

  The next day he’s in an $800-a-night suite at the Royal in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. “It has a sushi restaurant,” he says. “Do you realize I haven’t had sushi in years?” He sounds refreshed and says he’s feeling better.

  Six days pass, and McAfee calls again. “Good morning, John,” I say.