You know all those videos of underclothed college students getting down and dirty on the beaches in Florida and Mexico? They got nothing on technology executives. This week brings two stories of high-tech head honchos behaving very very badly.
Let's start with Legos lover Thomas Langenbach, the Terror of Target.
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Langenbach, a vice president at SAP's Palo Alto labs, was arrested and charged with illegally obtaining thousands of boxes of Legos from Target stores earlier this week. Yes, I said Legos -- the multicolored snap-together construction pieces.
Langenbach's grand criminal scheme: He allegedly printed bogus bar codes and slapped them over the real UPCs while inside the store. For example, instead of paying $279 for a Lego version of the Millennium Falcon from "Star Wars," Langenbach snuck his own label on the box and dropped just $49.
Granted, anyone who pays nearly $300 for a toy replica of Hans Solo's ride needs to get his head examined. It appears the same goes for Langenbach, who is charged with scamming Target stores out of more than 2,100 Legos sets, then selling the kits on eBay for roughly $30,000.
Langenbach got caught on tape buying the mismarked Legos, and he was arrested with fake bar codes in his car and a house full of Lego bricks. His eBay handle? Tomsbrickyard. I think Blockhead would have been more appropriate.
Have I mentioned the man is a VP at a multi-billion-dollar multinational, easily pulling down a mid-six-figure salary, not including stock options? Or that he owns a $2 million home?
What he also owns: a whole lot of crazy, yet Langenbach's story pales in the comparison to our second tale of execs gone wild.
John McAfee, founder of the antivirus software company that still bears his name, is on the lam in Belize after being accused by local authorities of running a meth lab. Gizmodo's Matt Honan has the story, and it's a doozy.
It seems that after selling off McAfee, the 66-year-old serial entrepreneur moved to Belize to start up a biopharm company to manufacture antibiotics. According to a May 2010 article in Fast Company, a series of civil lawsuits in which McAfee was the defendant may have also influenced his change of address.