At Gizmodo, Jeff Wise writes about antivirus firm MacAfee founder John McAfee’s bizarre life in Belize, holed up with heavily-armed gang members, "garbage bags full of Viagra," 17 year old local girls, did we mention lots and lots of guns, and many unanswered questions.

  • Mister44

    re: “and a small armory’s worth of firearms: seven pump-action shotguns, one single-action shotgun, two 9-mm. pistols, 270 shotgun cartridges, 30 9-mm. pistol rounds, and twenty .38 rounds”

    LOL That, son, is not an armory. That is just barely a fun afternoon.

    • GawainLavers

      Beat me to it.  There are very few houses in Red-State America that lightly armed.

      • EH

        Hah, yeah. When my dad died we got rid of about 1000 rounds of .38, and that was in suburban Northern California.

        Maybe some Nick Denton property can do a story about this BIZARRO state of affairs! What a joke he is.

      • taj

        My family home in Canada had more or an “armory”. A variety of shotguns and rifles for hunting along with .357, .22, and 9mm handguns for competition. You’d easliy find that much ammo under the seat of the half-ton (pick-up truck) at the right time of year.

      • http://twitter.com/bazimmerman Brad Zimmerman

        Pfft, there are plenty of houses in Blue states that are better armed than that.  Anyway, at least he could get some Benelli supersports or M4s or that AA-12 that I saw FPSRussia play with. Sheesh.

    • TWX

       Hmmm…  eight shotguns is a bit much, but only about 30 rounds each isn’t exactly a crazy horde of ammunition, and neither is fifteen rounds each for the two pistols in the same caliber.  If anything, the missing .38 to fire those rounds is a little peculiar, but maybe someone bought a box of the wrong ammo for the nines…

      I am acquainted with a man who grew up in a reasonably wealthy farming family in what used to be called Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.  As the tides were turning he described receiving training, as a child, to take an automatic weapon, fire a few rounds from a window, move to another window, fire a few more rounds, change floors in the plantation house and find another window, fire a few more rounds, etc.  Basically, he was taught to help simulate the presence of more armed men in the house than there actually were.  Apparently he never had to put this training to the test, and his family chose to permanently leave Rhodesia and settle into a middle-class life in the United States.  My guess is that while I look on this Rhodesian situation and training as fairly extreme, it’s possible that it wasn’t.  I’ve never lived through a local revolution.

      By contrast, if Mr. McAfee has defensive weapons for eight guards plus a couple of pistols for himself I don’t look at that as necessarily too extreme.  He’s not pulling a Charlton Heston or a Ted Nugent, in that it seems that basically there’s a reasonable amount of defensive firepower for each man.  Whether or not he needs the defense is another matter, but he hasn’t exactly built an arsenal large enough to press a significant criminal enterprise or to start a revolution either.  It’s large enough to make gangs or bandits think twice about trying to pull anything, but not so many as to lead to a Waco or Ruby Ridge with a standoff for months either.

    • bill wilson

      ‘ell yeah,maybe an armory for a seventeen year old.

  • Ito Kagehisa

    Honestly, I’m always amazed if I meet a rich bachelor who isn’t at least this bent.

    • Boundegar

      I know.  One would think that nice, honest rich bachelors would be dying of loneliness.  What’s wrong with this world?

  • gwailo_joe

    He’s mad of course.  Mad as a March hare in the full moonlight…

    But I can’t be too quick to judge.  If given the opportunity to be able to do anything, anywhere at any time…I would like to think I would give everyone in the equatorial Third World a mosquito net.  

    But very likely I’d first want to spend that money developing a fully automatic pneumatic shuriken hurler

    or begin filming my screenplay…Waterworld II.

    • EH

      “…this time it’s personal“

      • Florian Bösch

        And no filiming on open ocean, that was a really stupid idea. Also no Kevin Costner, same reason.

  • chellberty

    “Success, for me,” he has said, “is being able to wake up in the morning and feel like a 12 year old.” he is a Catholic priest? oh i must have read that wrong.

    • Mister44

       Keep your day job ;o)

      • Jonathan Badger

        A somewhat better done version of the joke would claim that he was missing commas, as in he meant: “Success, for me is being able to wake up in the morning and feel, like, a 12 year old”

  • bcsizemo

    You can never have enough guns:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhe58xORWG0

  • bryan rasmussen

    needs vampires to really make this movie work. 

  • gd23

    “We know of a meeting between McKoy and McAfee at his café in San Pedro Town, Ambergris Caye in which McAfee was flanked by the two leaders of the most notorious and violent gang operating in Belize City. At that meeting McAfee also took along a Police Officer. We believe that his intention was to make it categorically clear to McKoy that he controlled both the legitimate and the illegitimate armed forces.” 
    and then

    “… his latest business venture—According to McAfee, it is called “observational yoga,” and involves sitting in comfortable chairs and watching other people perform asanas. Thanks to its numerous health benefits, McAfee said, “it’s very popular” in Belize and he planned to franchise the concept around the country.”

    • bill wilson

       I haven’t been to belize in fifteen years and from the sound of it I may not go back.What a shame.

  • Sigmund_Jung