Johnny Mac Goes Down
How we learned not to play John McAfee’s game, and how he’s finally busted, but not in the way you think.
By now you’ve heard that John McAfee, the “randy” gazillionaire mad genius behind McAfee anti-virus software who sold his company, launched a bunch of schemes, pulled a disappearing act, started writing screeds about the benefits of various pharmaceuticals in terms of how great they are for making you want to eff everything that moves, was arrested in Guatemala city. What likely specifically did him in was metadata left on a photo he posed for with Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro, shot by photographer Robert King—it put him in Guatemala. Vice’s King tried to obscure the data with a cover story. So did McAfee. This is what he does. He breaks a law, gets someone hurt, intimidates or frightens or offends, then says, “I’m kidding!” To a lesser degree, my 7-year-old tries the same tactic. McAfee tried it when we published our story on him in 2010.
Jeff Wise reported the bejesus out of it down in Belize (with video!) and wrote the story with then-Fast Company features editor Will Bourne (who just got named EIC of the Village Voice, which excites me to no end). As soon as it went online, McAfee started sock-puppeting in the comments section. Eventually he complained under his own name, and, true to form, he claimed that he had perpetrated an elaborate hoax on Jeff—it’s even clearer now how crazy that notion is. Jeff knew it back then. In an email at the time, Jeff proposed (but held off) replying to McAfee’s “just kidding!” claim by pointing out to him its logical flaws:
"Let me get this straight. Your story is that you decided that I was coming to write an expose, so to trip me up you decided to stage an elaborate hoax to tell me all this incredibly unflattering stuff about yourself? And then I believed your stuff and wrote an unflattering piece? a) So your hoax worked -- what are you upset about? b) What was my original expose going to be about?"
The whole thing was a fascinating if not an obviously misleading string of comments. It was obvious to us, at least, what was going on, but I see how the doubts McAfee tried to inject in Jeff’s reporting could have been seemed like red meat in the world of Web comments, where every conspiracy is plausible and everyone ends up being compared to Hitler. Jeff and I collaborated on calling McAfee out (mostly this involved Jeff standing behind his thorough reporting), but the whole thing left us feeling the way you feel when you cook a massive batch of bacon in a small kitchen with no shirt on. Greasy.
We realized that the only way to win against a guy who lied and deceived without worrying about whether his lies and deception seemed logical or plausible was to ignore him.
But now he’s been caught in a whopper. Vice screwed up, tried to cover. So did McAfee—by claiming that, naw, I wasn’t where the metadata on that photo put me. That was part of my plan to mislead authorities! I’m kidding! Then, wham. He’s nabbed right there. Finally, we get a concrete example of how, exactly, the McAfee fantasy factory works. That, more than the arrest, is him getting coldbusted.
Apart from all involved with the latest version of this story (Vice’s) getting pretty much what they deserved (see: the succinct summary here of the difference between a Vice story and a New York Times story), there’s still a part of the McAfee saga that annoys me—so many people did so many stories so late in the game. Of course no one could ignore this story. But, wow, full-on features? Series? An ebook? Never underestimate the power of rich white guys—even those strung out on, at the very least, an ego-powered fire hose of dopamine—to move units.
To the credit of the Internet, we’ve been seeing lots of traffic back to our 2010 story (done whining, I swear) since McAfee got himself back in the news. And part of me wishes Wise would have reached out to the digital team here before taking the story to Gizmodo (ok, so there was one more bit of whining). But the bigger part of me realizes that it’s actually off-brand for us. It’s a great tale. It’s arguably about the dark side of the personalities that drive innovation and how there’s a fine line between genius and megalomania. (See: Color, Bill Nguyen.) But we published the definitive story on McAfee, under the direction of a first-class scandal editor. We talked about the continuing saga as it unfolded. Revisiting it, giving in to our voyeuristic urge to rubberneck at every turn of this story without regard to the more immediate interests of our readers, felt wrong. We did little updates, but we let our original story speak for us.
The Times story last week spent a few grafs quoting from our quotes and crediting us and Jeff Wise by name. That felt good, but the story, which was front and center Sunday morning on the Times homepage, didn’t link once to our original story—it did link to several others including Wired’s ebook on the subject. It didn’t drive a lick of traffic (at what point does the Times catch up and put in place a digital policy to cover these digital best practices?!). But at the end of the day, it was actually the Times story that made me realize we’d made the right move for our brand. It was the kicker of the paper’s catch-up story on McAfee on the cover of Sunday Biz. It ended thusly:
To still others, he’s a publicity seeker, par excellence. Mr. Spiegel, the Rojo Lounge owner, has a simple, low-budget plan to drive him out of hiding. “The police should declare him a person of noninterest,” Mr. Spiegel says. “Soon as they do that, he’ll be knocking on their door.”
