At the Q&A following the premiere of Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee, a question came from the front of the audience: now that the film was out, was the director Nanette Burstein concerned for her safety? “We do have security here,” Burstein said, “there were some threats made by his acolytes threatening they were going to come.” It wasn’t clear whether Burstein was joking, and a patter of uneasy laughter rippled across the room. “Fortunately,” she said scanning the theater, “it seems okay.”

Burstein has reason to be wary. Over the course of an hour a half, her documentary (a Showtime Documentary Film, premiering September 24th) lays out a searing body of evidence that suggests McAfee not only paid a hitman $5,000 to torture and kill his neighbor Greg Faull in Belize, but that he also had David Middleton, a local who had robbed his home, abducted, mutilated with knives and tasers, and dumped on the street to die. In addition, the film alleges McAfee drugged and raped his business partner Allison Adonizio. Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee, may be the most unexpectedly damning documentary since Andrew Jarecki’s The Jinx. Gringo opens on police car dashboard footage of McAfee’s from the summer of 2015, when McAfee was arrested for driving armed and under the influence. "You probably know about me," he tells his arresting officers. When they say they don’t, he launches into a glorified autobiography. Later, he points the officers to an article about himself that he keeps in his car. McAfee is a master at framing his own narrative, baiting and manipulating media into complicity. The McAfee antivirus empire was built on its founder’s calculated media fearmongering about Michelangelo, an early '90s virus that he threatened would cripple thousands, if not millions, of machines. (Only a few hundred were infected.) And in the three decades since he’s entered the public spotlight, his story has been told and retold often, most memorably in a 2012 Wired profile by Joshua Davis. McAfee is a master at framing his own narrative In 2009, McAfee told reporters that the previous year's market collapse had devastated his finances, and he sold off his properties. (Later he said he’d lied about the loss of his fortune.) He shuffled off to Belize, where he built a compound, and focused on a pharmaceutical operation that would harness the properties of local plants. But things took a dark turn — the pharmaceutical enterprise failed, and reports emerged of McAfee steeping himself in lurid activities: fostering a harem of teenage girlfriends, associating with armed criminals, and establishing an armed force to protect himself and harass a nearby village. He was, by all accounts, engaged in paranoid and delusional behavior. The local politicians were after him, he said, as were the gangs. Then, in the winter of 2012, McAfee’s neighbor Gregory Faull — who’d previously butted heads with McAfee — turned up dead, taser marks scarring his body and a gunshot wound to the head. Alleging he’d been framed, McAfee fled, illegally crossing the border into Guatemala before finally returning to the US in 2012. All this would seem like insurmountable disgraces, but in the last four years McAfee has, remarkably, reinvented himself. All the accusations out of Belize have been cast as some unfortunate tropical nightmare and he is, once again, the respectable, if eccentric, godfather of cybersecurity, often called upon as an expert on cable news networks. In late 2015 he announced his candidacy for the 2016 presidential election on a Libertarian ticket. (Though he never secured the nomination, he made a respectable showing.) And in May 2016 he became the CEO of a small tech outfit in Virginia, pushing the company’s stock up 700 percent on the strength of his name alone. Out of the ashes, McAfee rises again. But Burstein still wanted to know: what actually happened in Belize?

Courtesy of TIFF

The documentarian traveled to Belize for three months late last year, sitting down with those McAfee spent his time with — from his masseuse, local journalists, and his girlfriends to his bodyguards, the town mayor, and others. What emerges is a shocking portrayal of an expat whose activities weren’t just questionable, but sadistic, psychotic, and outright villainous. Burstein (who directed the 2002 Robert Evans doc The Kid Stays in the Picture) is a dogged documentarian, confronting those at the center of the alleged murders and placing herself in the middle of a series of unsolved crimes. When I spoke to her the day after the Gringo's debut at TIFF, Burstein said McAfee had harassed her through the film’s production and post-production. Even that morning, hours after the premiere, Burstein says she received an email with the subject line "You are a horrible person." The email threatened to dig through her past. "If I can’t find anything, I’ll make it up," she recounts the email. "We are watching you…" "It didn’t say, I am John McAfee, but it sounded like him," she told me. "That weighs on me because I get these emails a lot. They don’t stop."

Michael Zelenko: When did you first start following McAfee? Nanette Burstein: I’d been following John’s story since he was fleeing to Guatemala and I read that Wired piece. Being a documentary film maker you get fascinated with these types of stories. [But] I didn’t pursue anything at the time. Then I was approached two years ago — Spike was doing a series where they wanted to do something on John… following him day to day as a parallax view: is he paranoid? Or [are] the Belizean government and cartels actually after him? They sent me some footage that they had shot and I thought, I don’t get this. A year later, Jeff Wise, who is a journalist who’d been following [McAfee for] years, shot some footage. Because he’d written about John so often, people came out of the woodwork… to say, I have a lot more to this story that you should know about. And so he shot a couple interviews. And because he’s a journalist and not a filmmaker, they contacted me — Showtime was interested. And then I became very interested and I decided to take it on. The story had been told so many times before, what convinced you that there was something more here? That you weren’t going to be retelling the McAfee narrative? Well, I started spending a lot of time in Belize. I knew that the Middleton murder was something new. As I got more into it I realized, Wow, there’s a bigger story here. I did learn a lot of unexpected things … Alison’s story — I knew that he had business with her but I had no idea about the whole story until we started talking a lot. And then what happened with the Gregory Faull case also came as a surprise. There was a lot of learning in the moment. At first I thought maybe this would just be a character study with one new thing to add to it. You only spent three months in Belize — how did you build trust with the your subjects within that time? Did they have concerns for their own safety? Yes, they did. [With] some people, there was no way they were going to talk to me. "At first I thought this would just be a character study" [Belize] is very small country, only 300,000 people. And then you’re talking about these very small areas. So maybe three months isn’t a long time, but when you’re down there and you make yourself known, and you’ve met people who know them well, it sort of happens. The [girlfriends] weren’t commenting on the murders — they were just commenting on their own personal experiences. There’s a youth and naïveté about it. Other people felt really burned by what had happened to them. Eddie [McAfee’s body guard] felt like his life was at risk, Cash [a member of McAfee’s staff] had gone to jail. When John went on the run, they arrested the people in his house. Cash was there and there were illegal guns in the house — he went to jail for three months, just for being there. McAfee refused to be in your documentary, but he continued to email you, sometimes obsessively. Why do you think he did that? It was weird. I have so many more emails than were in the film. And now he’s claiming that he never personally wrote me these emails. But at the same time he’d write me emails and say "my fingers are sore" and then call me on the phone. So it’s hard for me to believe that I was catfished. Sometimes they were friendly, sometimes they were threatening, sometimes they were nonsensical — like, I don’t even know what you’re saying. He had a huge grudge against this guy Jeff Wise, who stepped back from the project, but he never believed me about that. He always had this narrative that Jeff had concocted this whole project and that I was just stupid and naive beyond belief.