Inside John McAfee’s Wild Empire: Millions, Betrayal, & His Disappearance

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Kyle (0:12)

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Kyle (1:26)

This video that John McAfee did for me right after I got arrested, he's like, Kyle was the smartest con man I ever know. Even the antivirus itself was a scam. He reaches out to me, he's like, listen, I need help.

Matthew Cox (1:35)

What do you think happened with McAfee?

Kyle (1:38)

John was...

I've always flirted with crime, I guess. I had that, I don't know, that con man brain. I hate to say it like that. Right. You know, where I was that kid in school that never lived up to his full potential. I got decent grades, but I was completely bored. When I was 10 years old, me and a group of friends, we would hang out at the local putt-putt in Oakland Mills, a neighborhood in Columbia, and come to find out later that the man that owned it was having problems and needed the insurance money. We were 10 He paid us 500 bucks, we burned it down. We burned it down, but it gets better than that.

Matthew Cox (2:20)

How does that conversation even start with a 10-year-old? You guys need some...

I have this gasoline can and a lighter.

Kyle (2:27)

No, I had gotten in trouble for starting a brush fire in the woods.

Matthew Cox (2:32)

So you were known...

Kyle (2:33)

So I was known to play with matches. So we're talking to this guy, Big Rod, that's his name, Big Black Dude. And we have a little BMX Huffy Bikes, it's like five of us all together. And he talks to me and my friend John, and he offers us $500, we're 10 years old, that's all the money in the world, to burn this thing down. So we go at night to do this, it's like 10 o'clock at night, which when you're 10 years old, that's late. That's not like 3 o'clock as now, but we ride our bikes over to the putt putt and we put some gas and do whatever we're supposed to do.

And then I think about the fact that there's 15 video game machines in there, and we're about to burn this place down. So we go back to the house to get pillow cases to take all the money out of the video games.

This is really important because this is how we get caught. So we have the keys because we're going to burn the place down, and we open the doors and everything like that. Nobody expects anything. There's no police around or anything like this. This is 1985 or 86 And we go back to put the gas down to make the fire. We get the pillow cases, go back to unload all the video game money. We've got like, it's heavy. Quarters are heavy, especially for a 10-year-old on a bicycle. We've got pillow cases filled with quarters. We burn the thing down, the firetruck's come in, all this kind of stuff. Weeks go by, they're investigating it. But we're 10, and we're in our school, buying every kid in the school ice cream with all these quarters. And finally, one of the kids that gets caught, why are you buying so much ice cream? Go back to a locker, there's a pillow case full of quarters, and the principal wants to know where we got the quarter from. And so that was my first experience with rats.