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By MATT GUTMAN and SENI TIENABESO | Good Morning America John McAfee's month-long international run from police through two Central American nations ended with a flight to Miami, where the businessman who says he abandoned his fortune admitted to playing the "crazy card." As a gaggle of media waited near several exit doors at the airport Wednesday night, federal authorities whisked the founder of McAfee anti-virus software off the plane and into a van. "They said, 'Mr. McAfee, please step forward,'" McAfee, 67, later told ABC News exclusively overnight at a Miami Beach hotel. "I was met by a dozen or maybe fewer officers. I said, 'Am I arrested?' They said, 'No, sir, I am here to help you.' That felt the best of all." He eventually snuck out of the airport in a cab and headed to South Beach. After walking down famed Ocean Drive to the bewilderment of tourists and eating sushi, his first meal in three days, he sat down with ABC News and admitted to playing the "crazy card" and says he is broke. "I have nothing now," McAfee said. He claims he left everything behind in Belize, including $20 million in investments and about 15 properties. "I've got a pair of clothes and shoes, my friend dropped off some cash." Just hours earlier, the self-made millionaire was deported by Guatemalan police who forced him aboard his U.S.-bound flight away from the home and the two women he said he loves. After he arrived on South Beach, he said, a mysterious "Canadian friend" ordered another man he'd never met to drop off a wad of fresh $5 bills that McAfee later displayed to ABC News, pulling them from his coat pocket. He says he left his fortune, including a beachfront compound, behind after his neighbor Greg Faull was found shot to death in Belize on Nov. 10. Belize officials said he isn't a suspect, but when they asked to question him, McAfee disguised himself and ran. After three weeks ducking authorities in Belize, by hiding in attics, in the jungle and in dingy hotels, he turned up in Guatemala Dec. 3. Barely a day later he was detained for entering the country illegally. As Guatemala officials grappled with how to handle his request for asylum and the Belize government's demand for his deportation, McAfee fell ill. The mysterious illness, described by his attorney alternately as a heart ailment or a nervous breakdown, led to a scene with reporters chasing his ambulance down the narrow streets of Guatemala City and right into the emergency room, where McAfee appeared unresponsive. He now says it was all a ruse: "It was a deception but who did it hurt? I look pretty healthy, don't I?" He says he faked the illness in order to buy some time for a judge to hear his case and stay his deportation to Belize, a government he believes wants him dead. When asked whether he believes Belize officials where inept, he didn't mince words. "I was on the run with a 20-year-old girl for three and a half weeks inside their borders and everyone was looking for me, and they did not catch me," he said. "I escaped, was captured and they tried to send me back. Now I'm sitting in Miami. There had to be some ineptness." The man who many believe only wants attention answered critics who called his month-long odyssey and blog posts a publicity stunt by simply saying, "What's a better story, millionaire mad man on the run. You [the media] saved my ass. Because you paid attention to the story. As long as you are reporting, it is hard to whack somebody that the world is watching." He denies any involvement in his neighbor's death but adds that he is not particularly concerned about clearing his name. He is focused on getting his 20-year-old and 17-year-old girlfriends out of Belize and says he has no idea what he'll do next, where he'll live or how he'll support himself.
McAfee settling into Miami, 'will not go back to Belize' By Christine Mai-Duc December 14, 2012, 12:58 p.m. John McAfee says he won’t return to Belize to answer questions about his neighbor’s murder there, again professing his innocence. “I will not go back to Belize,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box Friday morning. “I had nothing to do with the murder of Gregory Faull.” McAfee said he would be happy to answer questions in a “neutral country.” During the bizarre, at times rambling, 12-minute interview, McAfee went on to say that he hasn’t done drugs in 30 years, but if he did, “I have the resources to do good drugs” and not bath salts, which he said were for “people that don’t have a lot of money.” He also reiterated claims that dozens of armed Belizean police had attacked his property in April, and that subsequent demands for bribes were what prompted him to go into hiding. It was the latest of several live TV interviews McAfee has done in the past week during the dramatic turn of events that brought him from a Guatemala detention center to the shores of South Beach in Miami. In various interviews, McAfee has told reporters that he faked chest pains while detained in Guatemala to buy his lawyers time and that he plans to stay in Miami until his girlfriends, 17 and 20, can join him. McAfee has also denied that IRS or FBI officials questioned him upon his return. "Why would they want to question me, about what?" he told the Associated Press. McAfee had been on the run from officials in Belize for more than a month after being named a “person of interest” in Faull’s murder. Belize police maintain that they merely want to question McAfee, who lived near Faull on Ambergris Caye, an idyllic Caribbean island off the coast of Belize. But McAfee, who founded the antivirus company that still bears his name, has said he fears for his safety if sent back to Belize. Officials in Guatemala arrested McAfee a week ago after denying his request for political asylum, saying he had entered the country illegally. A judge there ordered him released late Tuesday; McAfee was stateside by Wednesday evening. News anchors have grown accustomed to harried phone interviews with the software pioneer boarding his plane or freshly landed at his South Beach hotel. But in his interview Friday morning McAfee, tanned and dressed in a dark suit, appeared relaxed and confident. Since landing in Miami on Wednesday, McAfee has held impromptu press conferences on the steps of his hotel despite a request on his blog that still urges press to “please respect John’s privacy.” After dropping contact with two Vice journalists since Guatemala (he accused the magazine of purposefully revealing his location in a cellphone photo’s metadata), he’s since had two other Miami reporters in tow, who report that he spent Thursday dining on hundreds of dollars worth of sushi and browsed phones and sunglasses in a posh shopping district. “I have no future, and if I have no future, that means I have no fear,” McAfee said to the reporters. Meanwhile, the family of Gregory Faull, who was found faceup in a pool of his own blood in Belize, said McAfee should be questioned in Miami. “I’m shocked by this,” Faull’s stepfather, William Keeney, told Reuters on Thursday. “He’s running around footloose and fancy-free in Miami. How in the world can that be?” Belize police spokesman Raphael Martinez has said officials there have no plans to travel to the United States to question the tech giant. But Martinez also left open the possibility that McAfee could go from "person of interest" to a named suspect, a situation in which he said Belize could explore additional options under extradition treaties with the United States.
McAfee 'not out of the woods' legally Bob Egelko Updated 11:33 pm, Friday, December 14, 2012 Software developer John McAfee is a free man because he managed to elude police in Belize and slip into Guatemala, from where - like any run-of-the-mill illegal immigrant - he was deported. Whether he stays free in the United States or is sent back to Belize is likely to depend, in the words of the extradition treaty with the Central American nation, on whether he becomes a "person sought for prosecution" in the murder of a fellow American expatriate. He hasn't reached that status, according to news accounts. But, said Bill Hing, a veteran immigration lawyer and law professor at the University of San Francisco, "This guy is definitely not out of the woods." The saga of the 67-year-old former Silicon Valley magnate and antivirus-software developer is extraordinary - he spent three weeks in disguise and on the run, claimed he was the target of a government plot after refusing to pay a bribe, and admitted faking a heart attack. But his legal situation is far from unique, and the last chapter hasn't necessarily been written. McAfee disappeared a month ago, shortly before police in Belize described him as a person of interest in the Nov. 11 shooting death of Gregory Faull, a businessman who was his neighbor on the island of Ambergris Caye, Belizean territory, where McAfee had lived since 2008. McAfee, who has kept in touch with U.S. media, has said that he's innocent and that Belize's government is after him. He claimed soldiers invaded his property in April, falsely accused him of running a drug lab, handcuffed him, shot his dogs and demanded a $2 million bribe, which he refused to pay. The nation's prime minister, Dean Barrow, has described McAfee as "extremely paranoid, even bonkers." McAfee, a British native, was arrested in Guatemala last week. He applied unsuccessfully for political asylum and told ABC News he faked a heart attack when it appeared a Guatemalan judge was about to order him deported to Belize. But after a week in custody, he was put on a plane to Miami. Hing said Guatemala apparently granted McAfee's request to be deported to his nation of origin. "Under standard deportation laws, you can be deported to the country of your nationality or the country from which you last embarked," he said. The usual practice, said San Francisco immigration attorney Marc Van Der Hout, is to deport illegal entrants to their country of citizenship - which could have been either the United States or Great Britain, as McAfee claims dual citizenship. The main exception, Van Der Hout said, is that undocumented immigrants caught at the airport will often be sent back where they came from. No warrants have been issued for his arrest, so McAfee is no longer a fugitive. But U.S. authorities could arrest him if Belize seeks extradition. The U.S.-Belize extradition treaty, signed in 2000, provides for removal of anyone "sought for prosecution" in either country. Belize authorities interpret that term to apply to criminal suspects. But Raphael Martinez, a spokesman for the nation's police, was quoted by Reuters as saying that while officers want to question McAfee, "we don't have enough information to change his status from person of interest to suspect." If that changes, Mc-Afee would be entitled to a hearing before a federal judge to challenge extradition. At the hearing, prosecutors from Belize wouldn't have to provide proof of McAfee's guilt, but they'd need to show that "they've got enough there, that the case hasn't been trumped up or is (a product of) some local political dispute," said Denver attorney Laura Lichter, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. The hearing would also examine whether the nation seeking extradition would provide a fair trial, a question on which a judge seeks the views of the U.S. State Department. According to the department's website, Belize's "independent judiciary generally enforced" the right to a fair trial, conducted by a judge without a jury. The State Department, Hing said, "can strongly urge a court (to deny extradition) for diplomatic reasons or for a history of human rights violations." But in McAfee's case, Hing said, "we get along with them (Belize). They have a system. ... If they give assurances to the U.S. that they will afford him sufficient due process, and there is an agreement between the two countries, they'll extradite him." Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: begelko@sfchronicle.com |