While awaiting extradition to the US on tax evasion charges, Antivirus tech billionaire John McAfee dies under suspicious circumstances in prison.

Last October, the jailed tech mogul tweeted, “I am content in here. I have friends. The food is good. All is well. Know that if I hang myself, à la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.” That tweet proved ominous when McAfee was found to have apparently hanged himself in a Barcelona prison.

On June 23, just hours before his death, Spain’s National Court in Madrid announced that McAfee could be extradited to the US to face a 10-count federal indictment for tax evasion. He was charged with directing income into bank accounts and cryptocurrency exchange accounts in the names of others and accused of hiding assets, including real estate and a yacht.

In July 2019, McAfee posted: “Getting subtle messages from US officials saying, in effect: We’re coming for you, McAfee! We’re going to kill yourself. I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn’t. I was whackd. Check my right arm.”

Included was a photo of his bicep, sporting fresh ink that read “$WHACKD” — seemingly a reference to the Mafia-style assassination he was expecting.

Soon after hearing of his apparent suicide, his wife, Janice Dyson McAfee, blamed the US for his death, telling reporters at the prison where he spent the last eight months that her husband was not suicidal.

“I blame the US authorities for this tragedy,” she read from a prepared statement. “Because of these politically motivated charges against him, my husband is now dead.”

Days before his death, she had tweeted, “Now the US authorities are determined to have John die in prison to make an example of him for speaking out against the corruption within their government agencies.”

It’s only appropriate that McAfee would go out with one last jaw-dropping twist. How could anyone expect any less from the anti-virus software millionaire, who claimed to have fathered 47 children and once lived with a harem of seven young women?

McAfee’s life was as strange and mysterious as his death. Like some modern-day Jessie James, McAfee seemed to enjoy life on the run. He first became a fugitive when he was named as a person of interest in a murder in Belize.

It is said that McAfee was wildly paranoid. Reports were that When he fled Belize and sought political asylum in Guatemala, he changed his appearance by dying his hair and beard and sticking wads of chewed bubble gum to his upper gums to fatten his face. Those around him said that he always believed that he was being pursued by “dark forces” within the US government.

A Life of Excess

McAfee styled himself as a mad genius with an addictive personality. By his own account, he sold magazine subscriptions to fund his undergraduate math degree at Roanoke College and ended up making a small fortune. He finished his BA in 1967 but spent much of the cash getting drunk. A year later, he enrolled in an advanced degree program at Northeast Louisiana State College, where he also taught classes, but was kicked out for having sex with one of his students, an undergraduate whom he later married.

Although he worked for various tech companies, including Xerox, General Electric, and NASA, McAfee spent the next several years in a drug and alcohol-fueled haze, dropping acid, snorting cocaine, and washing everything down with a bottle of scotch.

“Most of my bosses also used drugs of some kind,” he told the BBC in 2012. “I was in the tech field, after all. We were the leading edge in technology and the leading age in personal experimentation.”

He said his life changed radically in 1984 after a therapist convinced him to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and he got clean. But in 2010, McAfee began to extoll the hallucinations and increased sex drive he derived from a chemical compound known as alpha-PHP. The drug used in “bath salts” is highly addictive and can cause cognitive impairment and intense paranoia.

A Software Genius

Despite the drugs, McAfee was a computer visionary. It was during a stint at the defense contractor Lockheed Martin in 1986 that he came face-to-face with a computer virus. “I’d never heard of a virus before, neither had anyone in technology,” he said.

McAfee worked on software to disinfect the company’s computers and was inspired to set up his McAfee Associates in 1987 to create security software.

“He could unravel [viruses] and come up with a solution,” said writer Mark Eglinton, author of “No Domain: The John McAfee Tapes,” due in December. “[His company] came up with a standardized virus package that people could install. It was the first one sold to corporations and sold to individuals.”

Although the company made a great deal of money, McAfee wanted nothing to do with the corporate world, said Eglinton, who spent two years interviewing him. “When the company was sold, he got his share and walked away with hundreds of millions.” Long after McAfee resigned in 1994, the company was sold to Intel for $7.7 billion.

Flush with cash, McAfee went on “a spree of buying and building,” said Eglinton. He founded an instant messaging system, a yoga retreat, and an “aero-trekking” — engine-powered hang-gliding — company.

Said McAfee, a flight enthusiast who was a trained pilot, “It’s what Icarus dreamed of,” but like Icarus of legend, McAfee may have been flying a little too close to the sun, only to be brought down by his own hubris.

Burnout in Belize

In 2008, McAfee built a compound in Belize, where he had a harem of seven women, some said to be underage. It was said that there he grew increasingly paranoid and hired a small army of armed men that could be seen regularly patrolling the compound.

He seemed to be living the life he wanted, but McAfee ran afoul of his neighbor Gregory Faull, another American expatriate who complained that McAfee allowed his pack of dogs to run freely on their shared beachfront. Faull, a Florida builder, became so exasperated that he poisoned some of the dogs in November 2012. A few days later, Faull himself was found shot to death in his home. McAfee denied he had anything to do with the killing, but when local police sought him for questioning, he fled across the border to Guatemala to seek political asylum. He was deported to Miami in December 2012 but was never charged in connection to the death.

In 2016, a documentary filmmaker unearthed evidence alleging that McAfee paid a local hitman to kill Faull. In “Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee,” Nanette Burstein also interviews Allison Adonizio, a former business associate of McAfee’s who claimed that he drugged and raped her in Belize. And the film alleges that David Middleton, a local who robbed McAfee’s home, was abducted and mutilated with tasers and knives by McAfee’s thugs, then killed.

Tax Evasion

A few years later, he began to promote cryptocurrency on social media and charged more than $100,000 per tweet to publicize initial currency offerings — a situation that caught the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission, which began to investigate him for tax evasion and hiding assets.

As US authorities probed his finances in 2018, McAfee was again on the run, living at a “ghost hotel” and alleged secret bitcoin farm on the Catalan coast. He was arrested at Barcelona’s international airport on tax evasion charges in October.

On June 16, in one of his last tweets from jail, McAfee lamented that “my remaining assets are all seized. My friends evaporated through fear of association. I have nothing. Yet, I regret nothing.”

“John operated in the margins of life,” said biographer Eglinton. “He liked to be slightly misunderstood. He succeeded in that — even in death.”