About Devil in the Details: Running With John McAfee
When computer anti-virus mogul John McAfee was wanted for questioning over the murder of Gregory Faull in Belize, he went on the run and invited VICE editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro. Alongside conflict photojournalist Robert King, Castoro documented McAfee’s white-knuckle escape from Belize into Guatemala. But their story has remained untold, killed by VICE's top brass days before publication. Ten years in the making, this podcast drags you through the heat of the jungle and inside the paranoid web of McAfee’s twisted reality. It tells the long-censored true story of what happened before Netflix’s Running With the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee drops on August 24.
While John McAfee sat in a Guatemalan detention cell, he made an exclusive deal with documentary producer Francois Garcia to tell his story. After his deportation to Miami, McAfee traveled the country worming his way back into the media spotlight, despite looming cartel paranoia. Garcia followed McAfee for several years producing a documentary series about McAfee's life with director Billy Corben, facing some typical challenges of "show business," along with strange interference by documentary filmmaker Nanette Burstein.
2 Sept 2022
Last Call with Lev Parnas
Days before reporting to Otisville Federal Correctional Institution to face his sentence for fraud and false statements, Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas chatted with The Knows about the 2017 inauguration as well as the Ukraine-related dealings he was tasked with alongside others like Kash Patel and John Solomon.
29 Aug 2022
Part 6: The Robert and Rocco Show
Rocco Castoro and Robert King talk about the aftermath of their adventure and how VICE barred Rocco from any further reporting on McAfee. Robert King continued with the story when McAfee was deported to Miami, using a list of questions from Rocco.After Rocco announced his resignation from VICE at a media ethics panel at the University of Chicago, King released a short video clip clearing their names of responsibility for the geodata incident, leading to an email from VICE regarding McAfee that raised major red flags.When McAfee settles in Tennessee, King picks up the story again, going back “on the run” with McAfee after he gets in trouble with the law over and over.
24 Aug 2022
Part 5: The Rocco and Robert Show
Polishing off the Running With McAfee article, Rocco walks through the experience of having his belongings stolen and trying to get them back from a Guatemalan detention center.Rocco and Robert King tell you in explicit detail how the media works vis-a-vis the John McAfee story VICE Media’s bosses killed. Rocco and Robert clown the entire media. They were 100% correct and every other journalist who wrote about how they weren’t but didn’t bother to call them is a baby brained loser who should roll up the carpets and go hide in the woods before they hurt themselves or someone else does.
23 Aug 2022
Part 4: The Bust
After making it to Guatemala City, John McAfee retains the former attorney general of Guatemala, Telésforo Guerra, who also happens to be the great uncle of McAfee's girlfriend Samantha Vanegas. Guerra assures crew he can get their passports stamped. Guerra arranges a press conference for McAfee to announce his application for political asylum in Guatemala. Just as the heat seems to simmer down after the geodata incident, federal police and Interpol appear outside the hotel and detain McAfee. Rocco also speaks with Rick Stepp, professor of anthropology at the University of Florida who spent close to a decade of his career in the same region of Belize that McAfee tried to subvert and commandeer.
17 Aug 2022
Part 3: We Are With John McAfee Right Now, Suckers
This episode begins to dissect the specter that has haunted Rocco Castoro since he was editor-in-chief at VICE: the geodata incident. Since 2012, hundreds of news reports blamed Castoro for leaking McAfee’s location in Guatemala while he was on the run. Despite Castoro’s warnings to remove the data before publishing, the VICE news desk in Brooklyn made the monumental error by irresponsibly publishing the photo with exif data, which had been included in case someone needed to find Castoro's body. For the first time, Castoro’s former colleague Sasha Hecht talks about what it was like at the VICE office that day while Castoro ran for his life and tried to protect his source after authorities were alerted to his location — and the whereabouts of his source, who was wanted for questioning by Interpol.
10 Aug 2022
Part 2: Guatemala or Bust
Rocco Castoro draws us further into the nebulous vortex of John McAfee as he follows him down the Rio Dulce and into Guatemala. Evading an international crisis of his own making after being labeled a person of interest in his neighbor’s murder, McAfee schemes ways to cross into Guatemala undetected by the government officials, death squads, and narcos whom he is convinced want his head. Rocco continues his conversation with François Garcia, a film producer who was also managing McAfee’s publicity at the time. Garcia speaks about his intensely bizarre experiences dealing with the world’s most devilish social engineer who, it seems, has forever been on the run. But is McAfee running from oppressive adversaries… or just his own mind?
5 Aug 2022
Part 1: Better Belize It
Featuring unheard audio, Rocco Castoro illustrates his first day documenting McAfee's escape from Belize as the paranoid millionaire fugitive crafts elaborate distractions for the authorities to assist his escape. Ten years later, Rocco re-connects with the man who set him on his bizarre excursion, Francois Garcia, perhaps the world’s foremost authority on this chapter of the antivirus mogul’s life. Like Rocco, Garcia’s long-gestating project on McAfee has been killed by powerful forces time and time again.
2 Aug 2022
Prologue: The McAfee Virus
Ahead of the upcoming Netflix documentary, Running With the Devil: The Wild World of John McAfee, Rocco Castoro sets the stage for what really happened when he and Robert King went on the run of a lifetime with John McAfee — and the aftermath of having one of the biggest stories in the world caught and killed by a major media outlet.
7 Jul 2022
Chapter Two: Tiny Trojan Horse
"Get out of my f*cking business, you b*tch!"
The tea really starts to boil in this episode.
Former Tony Blair advisor and speechwriter-turned-reality show producer Jonathan Reynaga recounts a call with CNN producer Christie Bear Johnson after Trump's strategic advisor Boris Epshteyn flipped out over a pre-taped interview with Tom Barrack, head of the Presidential Inaugural Committee.
Reynaga complains to PIC advisor-turned-whistleblower Stephanie Winston Wolkoff about having to rewrite actor Jon Voight's remarks because the initial draft sounded "very liberal."
UPDATE: An earlier version of this episode misstated the amount of the CNN broadcast deal proposed to Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, which was $2 million. Please excuse the error.
21 Jun 2022
Chapter One: Chairman of the Ball
Before billionaire real estate magnate and chairman of Colony Capital Tom Barrack posted a $250 million bail and was fitted with an ankle GPS tracker after being indicted for allegedly violating foreign influence laws, Donald Trump put him in charge of the contribution-funded but publicly accountable 58th Presidential Inaugural Committee. Barrack is at the center of an indictment for improper foreign influence over elements of the Trump administration. In this episode, we delve into Barrack’s shadowy history working for a Saudi prince, and how it all dovetails with his decades’ long relationship with Trump and his disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort.
17 Jun 2022
Queuing Up For Tom Barrack's “Long Lines”
The first part of the Knows' analysis of the “long-lines” relationships of indicted billionaire Tom Barrack explores his ties to Ukrainian oligarchs and how he was able to get Paul Manafort hired on Donald J. Trump's 2016 campaign.
6 Jun 2022
Prologue: A Man and a Microphone
Amazon Studios was on the cusp of green-lighting a reality TV series centered around Donald J. Trump’s inauguration; audio engineer Eric Rosas was hired for the production but was stiffed on payment — his signature forged on an NDA he never saw.
Eric Rosas shares this historic audio with The Knows, recounting what he witnessed during the week leading up to the inauguration. A week that’s still being dissected five years later in the form of ongoing federal investigations and countless scandals that continue to haunt many featured on the recordings, like Tom Barrack, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr., Elliott Broidy, and many more.
5 Jun 2022
Trump Inauguration Reality Series: TOO HOT For TV
Associates of Mark Burnett and Elizabeth Koch feverishly worked all sides of a deal for Amazon Studios to produce a reality series about Donald J. Trump’s 2017 inauguration — one that evaporated as quickly as it appeared, leaving ominous questions to linger around F.T.C. oversight of Amazon’s $8.5 billion MGM Studios acquisition and their knowledge of 20 hours of unaired footage reported for the first time exclusively by THE KNOWS.
Read more at https://theknows.net/ (https://theknows.net/)
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
4.2 / 5
33 ratings
Contact Devil in the Details: Running With John McAfee
Guest appearances
Books guests
Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.
Host of Devil in the Details: Running With John McAfee?
Claim your podcast to manage its listing and keep your show details accurate.
Pod Engine is an independent podcast discovery and analytics service and is not affiliated with or endorsed by this podcast. Artwork and show content belong to their owners. Full legal notice.
Explore this show Podcast research with Pod Engine
