Devil in the Details: Running With John McAfee The Knows

While John McAfee sat in a Guatemalan detention cell, he made an exclusive deal with documentary producer Francois Garcia to tell his story. After his deportation to Miami, McAfee traveled the country worming his way back into the media spotlight, despite looming cartel paranoia. Garcia followed McAfee for several years producing a documentary series about McAfee's life with director Billy Corben, facing some typical challenges of "show business," along with strange interference by documentary filmmaker Nanette Burstein.

Rocco Castoro and Robert King talk about the aftermath of their adventure and how VICE barred Rocco from any further reporting on McAfee. Robert King continued with the story when McAfee was deported to Miami, using a list of questions from Rocco.After Rocco announced his resignation from VICE at a media ethics panel at the University of Chicago, King released a short video clip clearing their names of responsibility for the geodata incident, leading to an email from VICE regarding McAfee that raised major red flags.When McAfee settles in Tennessee, King picks up the story again, going back “on the run” with McAfee after he gets in trouble with the law over and over.

Polishing off the Running With McAfee article, Rocco walks through the experience of having his belongings stolen and trying to get them back from a Guatemalan detention center.Rocco and Robert King tell you in explicit detail how the media works vis-a-vis the John McAfee story VICE Media’s bosses killed. Rocco and Robert clown the entire media. They were 100% correct and every other journalist who wrote about how they weren’t but didn’t bother to call them is a baby brained loser who should roll up the carpets and go hide in the woods before they hurt themselves or someone else does.

After making it to Guatemala City, John McAfee retains the former attorney general of Guatemala, Telésforo Guerra, who also happens to be the great uncle of McAfee's girlfriend Samantha Vanegas. Guerra assures crew he can get their passports stamped. Guerra arranges a press conference for McAfee to announce his application for political asylum in Guatemala. Just as the heat seems to simmer down after the geodata incident, federal police and Interpol appear outside the hotel and detain McAfee. Rocco also speaks with Rick Stepp, professor of anthropology at the University of Florida who spent close to a decade of his career in the same region of Belize that McAfee tried to subvert and commandeer.

This episode begins to dissect the specter that has haunted Rocco Castoro since he was editor-in-chief at VICE: the geodata incident. Since 2012, hundreds of news reports blamed Castoro for leaking McAfee’s location in Guatemala while he was on the run. Despite Castoro’s warnings to remove the data before publishing, the VICE news desk in Brooklyn made the monumental error by irresponsibly publishing the photo with exif data, which had been included in case someone needed to find Castoro's body. For the first time, Castoro’s former colleague Sasha Hecht talks about what it was like at the VICE office that day while Castoro ran for his life and tried to protect his source after authorities were alerted to his location — and the whereabouts of his source, who was wanted for questioning by Interpol.

Rocco Castoro draws us further into the nebulous vortex of John McAfee as he follows him down the Rio Dulce and into Guatemala. Evading an international crisis of his own making after being labeled a person of interest in his neighbor’s murder, McAfee schemes ways to cross into Guatemala undetected by the government officials, death squads, and narcos whom he is convinced want his head. Rocco continues his conversation with François Garcia, a film producer who was also managing McAfee’s publicity at the time. Garcia speaks about his intensely bizarre experiences dealing with the world’s most devilish social engineer who, it seems, has forever been on the run. But is McAfee running from oppressive adversaries… or just his own mind?