John McAfee, the anti-virus software designer and fugitive from Belizean justice, has been anything but shy about talking to the press since police started looking for him in connection with the shooting of his neighbor, fellow American expatriate Gregory Faull, a week ago. He’s kept reporters abreast of his movements, his sleeping arrangements, and his opinions of the Belizean government, while still managing to avoid police. But it’s not enough to simply tell reporters things, or to post your own screeds in darkened corners of the Internet, so this weekend McAfee launched a blog of his own. He’s using it to brag about the disguises he’s using and to repay some personal vendettas, including with the prime minister of Belize, from whom he wants an apology.
If McAfee’s account of his life on the lam is to be believed, he’s been having a pretty good time dressing up in disguises and watching the cops search his residence. He claims to have gone as a beach vendor and sold a dolphin carving to an AP reporter who was covering his story. He also went as a taco and burrito vendor one day, and on another day writes that he dressed up as a drunk German tourist “with a partially bandaged face and wearing speedo swimming trunks and a distasteful, oversized Hawaiian shirt and yelling loudly at anyone who would listen – ‘Leck mich um ausch!’” Subtle!
Police are searching for McAfee because he was known to have argued with Faull, who didn’t like McAfee’s dogs’ barking, before Faull was found dead. But McAfee writes in his blog he’s pretty sure the real reason police are out to get him dates back to a raid they carried out on his place back in April. McAfee had apparently been doing a bit of DIY pharmaceutical research at his Belize house: Gizmodo reported he’d been known to have an interest in bath salts, but that this time he was making an “herbal antibacterial compound.” One neighbor told a CNN reporter he was “trying to make a female version of Viagra.” When the cops raided in April, he wrote, “a sheet of paper was produced stating that the GSU was looking for an illegal meth lab.” They held him for eight hours, McAfee wrote, but let him go.
A few days later I emailed the Prime Minister and asked for a public apology. “Who does he think he is?” was his reply to a close associate.
I think I am an innocent person who was violated by the Belizean Government. In polite society, apologies are in order.
This was the beginning of my antagonism with the Prime Minister and a few of his powerful associates. I have been a vocal opponent of the PM ever since and I will not stop until I receive my apology.
In his last entry, McAfee wrote that his friend Chad Essley (who is writing a graphic novel about McAfee with the same name as McAfee’s blog) would continue the blog if he was captured. “I have pre-written enough material to keep this blog alive for at least a year.” That also means he can focus full-time on making disguises.
