He fled the Central American country of Belize to Portland, Ore., by way of Guatemala and Miami in the wake of his neighbour’s murder, with his 20-year-old girlfriend and a film crew in tow. Yet little is what it seems with John McAfee, 67, the Virginia-raised software developer, who sold his eponymous anti-virus company in the mid-’90s to pursue a life of sun, sex and adrenalin. His life changed—though not necessarily for the worse—when he became a person of interest following the November 2012 killing of American Gregory Faull in Belize. McAfee claims the government wanted to frame him for the murder, and that he orchestrated his own media feeding frenzy to prevent his detainment. His escape from the country was certainly cable news fodder, and will be part of a series of movie and book-related projects by Montreal-based Impact Future Media.

Q: So, Belize to Guatemala to Miami to Portland to a five-star hotel in Mont Tremblant, Que. Please explain.

A: Well, it’s one step after another. It’s like in The Lion in Winter. After the most ferocious fight ever put on screen, Peter O’Toole says, “How, from where we started, did it ever get to this?” And she says, “Step by step.” From Belize, I escaped into Guatemala in the company of two journalists from Vice [magazine] and [then-girlfriend] Samantha Vanegas. We crossed the border by boat, spent the night in a hotel where I’d stayed many times but because I’d always been in disguise no one noticed me. We attempted to get our passports stamped, and the guy said, “Excuse me, I must go get my supervisor.” We knew we’d get sent back. I asked if we could go and eat. Instead of getting food, we went straight to the boats. We hired a skiff and went to the town of Fronteras. Unfortunately, the Vice journalists took a photograph and someone along the way neglected to remove the location data. Within five minutes there were Google images of the hotel we were staying at. Samantha packed our bags, and we left. We found the first taxi. I bought the taxi driver’s cellphone for $500. I opened it, threw the battery out the window. We found a little pub, thanked the cab driver for his time. I said we have an hour now. Let’s eat.

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Q: You were arrested there in Guatemala not long after and eventually deported to Miami, after you faked a heart attack to buy time for your lawyer, who fought to keep you from getting sent back to Belize. How does one fake a heart attack?

A: I dropped on the ground. I was actually in a fair bit of pain, and twitched a bit. The doctor kept me from being seized by the army.

Q: Do you think the Vice guys sent that picture by accident, or was it on purpose?

A: I am loath to think they did this on purpose, simply because we had become fast friends, I thought. I began to trust them. They were journalists, of course, but nevertheless human beings. Even for a journalist, this would have been way too low.

Q: You’ve said you “despised the media.”

A: I don’t like that word, “despise.” I see the media for what it is. It’s an occupation that forces an attitude and a way of acting that makes you not a lot of fun to play with. You’re slippery, tricky, deceitful.

Q: And yet you need us. What would have happened if the media hadn’t been around for you?

A: I probably wouldn’t have survived. The government of Belize would have had free rein.

Q: You hit this kind of media zeitgeist right around the time when you became a person of interest in the murder of Gregory Faull. You are a teetotaler, as you’ve said a number of times, yet you put it out that you’d tried “bath salts,” the recreational drug, and that it was the best high you’ve ever had. The immediate theory that came out was that you got “zombie high” and went off to shoot someone.

A: First of all, it is indeed a zombie high, I hear. It’s unpleasant to the user, and creates such a level of disturbance that a user had eaten the face off of a stranger in Florida a month or so earlier. It’s not something I would chase after. And yet, it was topical, and anything touching on bath salts was being talked about everywhere. I thought it was a seriously good topic. It’s all planned, of course.

Q: Up to the murder of Gregory Faull.

A: That was a tragic incident that was used by the government for the government’s benefit.

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