So remember the whole John McAfee drama from late 2012? Wired journalist Joshua Davis scored a series of increasingly, uh, candid interviews with millionaire software security originator John McAfee from his compound in Belize. Those interviews just so happened to wind up corresponding with John McAfee being wanted for questioning in the mysterious murder of his neighbor. After a series of disguises, close calls, and who knows what else, John McAfee successfully managed to get himself back on American soil, eventually settling in Portland, Oregon.

The saga was something of a coup for Wired and their publishers at Conde Nast, who have now wrapped up Davis’ content on McAfee into a .99$ E-Book option called “John McAfee’s Last Stand.” But let’s not forget that VICE Magazine was there, too, and their reporting on the subject (from Gavin Haynes) remains blessedly open-sourced and entirely free. Wired would rather you forgot the VICE component, and / or would like to cast them as the villainous barker in last year’s McAfee circus.

Here’s what Wired’s Mat Honan had to say about VICE’s coverage:

The McAfee story, with its drugs and guns and prostitutes and allegations of police corruption, seemed tailor-made for Vice, a publication that revels in all of those subjects on a regular basis. It is as if some hipster god reached down and extended a smelly, fickle finger of fate to Vice editor-in-chief Rocco Castoro, muttering โ€œhereโ€™s a cool story, bro.โ€

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Burn! But why are we talking about McAfee today? Is it because he now resides in the city of Portland, and there have been confirmed McAfee sightings at the Stumptown on 3rd and Oak? Is it because our website is pretty much just a cipher for Google Reader’s daily “coffee” search term results? Yes, and sometimes, yes. In a recent entertainingly batshit public Q&A with Slashdot, John McAfee revealed that he doesn’t know how to code, loves dressing in fantastical costumes (screaming German tourist, construction worker), and may or may not own a coffee company. Here’s the pertinent excerpt, just one part of a sprawling Q&A with Mr. McAfee:

I became interested in quorum sensing (the means of communication favored by bacteria) the instant I heard about the concept. I hired a young Phd who had written the definitive paper on the subject – a young woman named Allison Adonicio – and set up a lab in the jungle to research anti-quorum sensing properties of tropical plants. You can read all about it at quorumex.com. Against all odds, the woman turned out to be crazier than myself. After a year and a half, the fractured elements of her psyche reassembled themselves into an exact likeness of a snarling ferret and she self destructed. She destroyed all of our research results, destroyed our bacteria samples, erased the hard drives of our computers, destroyed our carefully collect plant samples and went home to Boston. I cogitated the situation for a brief period, said “Fuck it!” And went into the coffee business. Thus was formed the New River Coffee Company.

 

There totally *is* a real New River Coffee Company, located in Christiansburg, Virginia, with a Facebook here that isn’t updated very often. To find out whether or not this was the company McAfee owns, we called New River and spoke to one of their baristas, a gentleman named Amir. When asked if his cafe was owned by John McAfee, he told us “I don’t think so.” Further web digging reveals that the New River in Christiansburg is owned by a couple of guys named Hisham and Sameh Khayat, and there’s also this 2003 filing from the Virginia Commonwealth State Corporation Commission that lists oneย Jason P. Magenheimer as the Registered Agent for New River. All of which makes it increasingly unlikely that this company is owned by John McAfee.

But one thing is clear: John McAfee is a coffee enthusiast. Mr. McAfee, if you’re reading this, we’re a coffee publication based in Portland, you are a coffee enthusiast based in Portland – we’d love to interview you for a feature on your favorite beans.

 

 

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