John McAfee, the controversial antivirus software mogul who had multiple recent run-ins with the law in the United States, died at the age of 75. After being charged with tax evasion in the United States last year, McAfee was held in a Spanish prison awaiting extradition.
A medical examiner is on the scene after McAfee was discovered dead in his cell in a prison near Barcelona on Wednesday around 1 p.m. ET, according to a spokeswoman for the Superior Court of Catalonia. She stated that the cause of death is still being investigated.
According to a statement from the Catalonia regional government’s Justice Department, which manages prisons in the region, after finding McAfee, prison medical personnel and guards attempted but failed to perform life-saving procedures. According to the statement, “everything points to” McAfee’s death by suicide.
McAfee died after a three-judge panel at Spain’s National Court in Madrid ruled this week that he could be extradited to the US to face charges there. According to court documents, that decision could have been appealed to a larger panel of judges at the same court.
McAfee was arrested in Spain in October after being charged with tax evasion in the United States a few months before. According to court documents, he allegedly failed to file taxes for four years despite earning millions of dollars from promoting cryptocurrencies, consulting work, speaking engagements, and selling the rights to his life story for a documentary between 2014 and 2018. The indictment did not specify the amount he owed.
His extradition to face tax charges for the years 2016, 2017, and 2018 was approved by Spanish judges.
McAfee argued that the US tax evasion charges against him were politically motivated in a virtual hearing in Spanish court earlier this month, according to the Associated Press.
McAfee, the founder of the eponymous antivirus software company with which he is no longer affiliated, was also charged with fraud and money laundering in March. According to the US Department of Justice, he and a business partner were involved in a scheme to defraud unwitting investors out of more than $13 million by falsely promoting cryptocurrencies.
The last two decades of McAfee’s life were marked by a strange series of events.
McAfee briefly vanished in 2012 after fleeing his Belize home after local police attempted to question him about the death of his neighbor. (He has denied any involvement in the death, claiming that he fled because he was in danger.)
He lived in Guatemala for a while before moving to Montreal, Canada, to work on a documentary about his life. In 2016, he ran for President of the United States as a Libertarian, and he released a new security product that he described as “a f—-ing game changer.”
