In the future, we won’t need tired spy franchises. The entertainment industry will simply sign up adventurous publicity hunters to create the type of reality viewing experience you might get if you crossed The Game with Total Recall and the Amazing Race.
And when that great day comes, who better to produce the show than John Mcafee, the antivirus pioneer and self-promoter extraordinaire who has been publicizing his month-long lam from the Belizean police in blog posts, social media and interviews with the seemingly never-ending line of journalists to travel to the Central American nation seeking interviews.
The latest:
In a blog post this morning, Mr. McAfee revealed that he and his young lover Sam have escaped Belize, with the aid of a “‘double,’ carrying on a North Korean passport under my name, (who) was in fact detained in Mexico for pre-planned misbehavior, but due to indifference on the part of authorities was evicted from the jail and was unable to serve his intended purpose in our exit plan.”
Reading through the garble, it sounds like Mr. McAfee—who has previously bragged about eluding police with disguises that included posing as a drunk German tourist, and a separate instance in which he shoved a tampon up his nose—sent a lookalike to Mexico on a fake North Korean passport in Mr. McAfee’s name, with the intention of fooling the Belizean law enforcement. (To aid the ruse, Mr. McAfee’s website posted the rumor that he’d been apprehended over the weekend.)
If the details are murky, we should soon know more: Mr. McAfee says he’s currently in the company of two journalists from Vice, who will be posting video later in the day.
Still, this has all reached the stage where it’s appropriate to ask whether Mr. McAfee is fooling the Belizean police, his friends in the media or himself—or all three.
Which is the question, more or less, that The New York Times asked in a very long piece in yesterday’s paper, in which reporter David Segal noted both Mr. McAfee’s self-serving hype of the Michaelangelo virus back in the 1990s, and Mr. McAfee’s recent message board posts on his attempts to recreate a potent form of bath salts he called “the tan”—posts that Mr. McAfee would later call an elaborate hoax.
“I think he’s living a movie in his mind,” one source told Mr. Segal in what struck us as a sober take on the saga, “and he’s enjoying the movie.”
But then—aren’t we all.
