The word crazy does not even start to describe Charlie Russell's documentary about the eccentric tech billionaire John McAfee. Two minutes into it and you realize that Running with the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee is not your garden-variety documentary.
It's a frantic footage-style meta feature that covers McAfee's perilous life from 2012 until his mysterious death in 2021. Armed with a hired camera crew of Rocco Castoro (editor) and Robert King (cameraman) from VICE and his barely legal girlfriend, McAfee set in motion an audacious escape plan from Belize to Guatemala.
On the run for the alleged murder of his neighbor, McAfee strikes you as both paranoid and irrational from the get-go. He tells the camera that people were out to get him and that he was a sitting duck in Belize.
McAfee brought the first anti-virus software to the world. He became a multimillionaire when his company went public in 1992. He left two years later saying that he wanted out before things got too corporate.
Once he departed the company, his life went wayward. All his new ventures tanked and he started hogging the limelight more for his philandering lifestyle than anything else.
When Intel expunged his name from the anti-virus to sell it under Intel Security, he famously remarked, "I am now everlastingly grateful to Intel for freeing me from this terrible association with the worst software on the planet."
In 2008, he flew to the central American country of Belize to set up a herb-based antibiotics business. Four years later, he was fleeing the country on the pretext of false murder charges and a high-level government conspiracy to hunt him down. Even though he escaped to neighboring Guatemala and used his money to bribe officials, he remained paranoid about his safety.
Until this point, I, as the viewer, was finding it hard to decipher what exactly was haunting McAfee. And, then comes this particular footage in the documentary where armed guards surrounded him and his crew.
Any ordinary human will be pissing his pants, but McAfee was made of a different constitution. He asks one of the guards for a cigarette and then walks over to a roadside peddler selling flutes and starts playing the flute even as sub-machine guns bear down on him. Incredible!
In another concocted act, the tech pioneer feigned a heart attack and somehow exploited a legal loophole to make it back to American shores.
The documentary is split into two parts - the first 45 minutes cover his escape from Belize to Guatemala and from Guatemala to the US in 2012. The remaining 60 minutes....Alex Cody Foster's (Ghostwriter) upcoming biography in 2023 - Always paranoid that since he had stuff about powerful people on tape, they were out to get him. Even the Sinaloa cartel was baying after his blood, justifying his possession of firearms. Claimed to have hacked the Belizean government's computers. In Jan 2019 in his 70s, he sold off all his assets and moved again from Miami to the Bahamas. Hired his old buddy Robert King (cameraman) again. Steps into a parlor, gets photos taken in a funny wig, and tells them he is McAfee. Shooting on the boat, full-blown paranoid. Towards the end, even King confirms - a doubt that the viewer is constantly having - that in all probability, drugs had fucked up McAfee's mind badly. That the US government is coming to get him with a full-blown military intervention could be nothing but his hallucinations.
"He was the most expertly manipulative person I had ever met. And he wanted to control the narratives. You really don't know what is truth and what is fiction."
He died in a Spanish prison the night after the Spanish courts ordered him to have him extradited to the US. If his life was a mystery, so was his death. Authorities claimed that he committed suicide, but if, like me, you have watched this documentary, you'd say 'Hell, no!'. Not possible. But then, you never know with McAfee.
During the last few documented shots with Robert King who was starting to lose his own mind, he tells him in a charged conversation, "I will fabricate whatever reality I see fit to keep eyeballs on us...If this one does not sell your f***g footage, nothing will, Robert. I have created this story. I have fabricated a perception that is matched with reality."
His alleged suicide only shrouded the mystery around him even more or maybe, his death was also a part of the narrative.
Janice, a prostitute he met and fell in love with after hitting the US shores after Guatemala, the same day, became his new wife. Crazy as it may sound.
This documentary is only an excerpt from his life. Imagine how ultra-crazy his life would have been. Take the definition of crazy, 10x it and you have McAfee crazy.
Something strikes you about his personality. He was unabashed, narcissistic, crude, and funny even when there was no light at the end of the tunnel... indicted in Tennessee on tax evasion charges. He also was charged in a cryptocurrency fraud case in New York.
"People say I remind them of the Joker. Possibly, the Joker is the best description of me. I mean, the motherf***r didn't give a sh*t, did he? Do you think I give a sh*t. No, people, I do not."
John McAfee
"You guys are f**d too, you realize that, if you are caught, right? If you get arrested with me, there is the chance that you may suffer some ill-treatment."
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