How music got free

CHAPTER 11

Although he was one of their best customers, for the longest time Dell Glover couldn’t figure out how the smugglers were getting the compact discs out of the plant. Under Van Buren, Universal’s security regime was watertight. In addition to the randomized search gauntlet, employees were now required to pass their bags on a conveyor belt through an X-ray machine. The plant had no windows and the emergency exits set off a loud alarm. Laptop computers were forbidden anywhere on the premises, as were stereos, portable players, boom boxes, or anything else that might accept and read a compact disc.

On the production line, the pressing machines were digitally controlled, and they generated error-proof records of their input and output. The finished shrink-wrapped discs were immediately logged into inventory with an automated bar code scanner. Management generated an automated report for every run, tracking what had been printed and what had actually shipped, and any difference had to be accounted for. For a popular album, the plant might now press over a half million copies in a single 24-hour period, but advanced digital record keeping permitted the bosses to track their inventory at the level of the individual disc.

Once a wrapped disc exited the production line, it was not touched again by human hands until it made it to the store. The boxed discs were glued shut, then put on shipping pallets by robots. Automated laser-guided vehicles then drove those pallets to the warehouse, where employee access was strictly controlled. Only the loading dock workers were permitted to handle the boxes past this point.

And then there was the gauntlet. On an average shift, one out of every five employees was selected, and Van Buren’s randomized search regime had already nabbed several would-be thieves. Occasionally even this was not enough. Every once in a while a marquee release would come through the plant—The Eminem Show, say, or Country Grammar. These desiderata arrived in a limousine with tinted windows, carried from the production studio in a briefcase by a courier who never let the master tape out of his sight. After the glass production mold was sourced from the master, the courier put the tape back in the briefcase and left as mysteriously as he had arrived. When one of these anticipated albums was pressed, Van Buren would order wandings for every employee in the plant, from the plant manager on down.

And yet somehow even the high-value discs were making their way out. Glover could usually have them in his hands within a couple of days. What was going on? Had someone bribed a guard? Had someone disabled the alarm on an emergency exit, or managed to slip the discs through a crack in the doors? Was someone perhaps standing outside in a blind spot between the cameras and tossing the discs like Frisbees over the fence?

Glover began to think about how he would do it. First, he would have to get the discs out of inventory control. In this respect his position on the packaging line was perfect. Further down the line and the discs would be bar-coded and shrink-wrapped and logged in inventory. Further up and he wouldn’t have access to the final product. The packaging line was the only place in the entire plant where employees made physical contact with the finished discs.

Even better, work on the packaging line was becoming time-consuming and complex. This was one of the early side effects of the mp3, which was sonically equivalent to the compact disc but in any number of other ways superior. The files weren’t just smaller and cheaper than compact disc audio, they were also infinitely reproducible and utterly indestructible. Compact discs got scratched and cracked and stolen at parties, but an mp3 was forever. The only advantage the compact disc offered, therefore, was the tactile satisfaction of physical ownership. At Universal, packaging was all they were really selling.

When Glover had started in 1994, the job had been mindless. All he’d had to do was put on his surgical gloves and run the jewel case through the shrink-wrapper—that was it. Now album art was becoming ornate. The discs themselves were gold or fluorescent, the jewel cases were colorized in opaque blue or purple, and the album sleeves were thick booklets printed on high-quality paper stock with complex folding instructions. At every step along the way, the increased complexity introduced opportunities for error, and there were now dozens, sometimes hundreds, of extra discs printed for every run. These discs were deliberate overstock, to be used as replacements in case anything was damaged or smudged during the packaging process.

At the end of each shift, protocol instructed that Glover bring the overstock discs to a plastics grinder, where they were destroyed. The grinder was a simple device: a refrigerator-sized machine painted Heavy Industry Blue with a feed slot in the front leading to a serrated metal cylinder. The discs were dumped in the slot, and the cylinder crushed them to shards. For years, Glover had stood and watched as thousands of perfectly good compact discs were destroyed in the gears of the machine. And, over time, he came to realize that he was staring into a black hole in the Universal security regime. The grinder was efficient, but it was far too simple. The machine had no memory and generated no records. It existed outside of the plant’s digital inventory management process. If you were instructed to destroy 24 overstock discs and only 23 actually made it into the feed slot, no one in accounting would ever know.

So what Glover could do was take off his surgical glove while holding an overstock disc on his way from the conveyor belt to the grinder. Then, in one surreptitious motion, he could wrap the glove around the disc and tie it off. Then, pretending to prime the grinder, he could open up its control panel or its waste repository or its fuse box. Following a quick look around to make sure he was alone, he could secrete the gloved disc into a cranny in the machine, and grind everything else. At the end of his shift he could return to the machine and, while shutting it down for the day, grab the disc from its hiding spot.

That still left the security guards and their wands. Glover didn’t dare play the odds; although Universal calmly ensured him that the screenings were random, he knew that packaging line employees were especially likely to be targeted. He himself had been selected for “random” screenings hundreds of times. But as the guards had been watching Glover, he had been watching them too, and one day, almost by accident, he learned something interesting. Glover typically wore sneakers to work, but on this day he was wearing steel-toed work boots. When he was tapped for a screening, the guard scanned his feet and the wand let off a querulous whine. The guard asked Glover if the boots had steel toes, and Glover confirmed that they did. And then, without further inspection, the guard just waved him through.

They hadn’t made him take off his boots. They hadn’t patted him down or asked him any difficult questions. He had set off the wand, and there were no consequences. At that moment, Glover realized that the wandings were performatory. This wasn’t security, but security theater, a pantomime intended to intimidate would-be thieves rather than catch actual smugglers. And the low-wage security guards who ran the daily showings were just as bored of them as everybody else. If Glover could somehow fit the compact discs inside of his boots, he could finally get them out on his own.

But they wouldn’t fit. The discs were just a little bit too big. Still, the seed of the idea was planted, and over the next few months, as he patiently waited in line each day to leave the plant at the end of his shift, he gradually came to see it: belt buckles. They were the signature fashion accessories of small-town North Carolina. Everyone at the plant wore them. The white guys wore big oval medallions with the stars and bars painted on. The black guys wore gilt-leaf plates embroidered with fake diamonds that spelled out the word “BOSS.” The Hispanic guys wore Western-themed cowboy buckles with longhorn skulls and ornate gold trim. Even the women wore them. The buckles always set off the wand, but the guards never asked you to take them off.

Hide the disc inside the glove; hide the glove inside the grinder; retrieve the glove and tuck it in your waistband; cinch your belt so tight it hurt your bladder; position your oversized belt buckle just in front of the disc; cross your fingers as you shuffle toward the turnstile; and, if you get flagged, play it very cool when you set off the wand. Glover finally saw it. This was how the smuggling was done.

From 2000 onward Glover was the world’s leading leaker of prerelease music. At Universal he was well positioned—the orgy of consolidation in the corporate boardroom had led to an astonishing stream of hits on the factory floor. Weeks before anyone else, Glover had the hottest albums of the year literally at his fingertips. Kali acted as his controller, spending hours each week online tracking the confusing schedule of signings, acquisitions, divestitures, and pressing agreements that determined what disc would be pressed where, when. When Kali saw something that he wanted under the Universal umbrella, he tipped Glover, and the two had weekly phone calls to schedule the timing of the leaks.

At arranged handovers at locations far from the plant, Glover bought the discs from the smugglers. After work, he returned home and digitally cloned these albums on his PC with software Kali had provided him. Then he converted them to mp3s and sent them off to Kali.

This conversion process was exacting. The Scene was well organized, and the standards for what constituted an “officially” pirated file were strict. The document that outlined the methodology for encoding and distributing Scene mp3s was over 5,000 words long and had been written by a supreme high council of Internet piracy, which had cheekily termed itself the “other RIAA.” The document specified quality standards, outlined naming conventions, prevented against duplicate leaks, and more. It was the underground version of the MPEG standards, a veritable pirate’s code.

Glover left the technical part to Kali. Unlike many Scene participants, he wasn’t interested in mind-numbing discussions about the relative merits of constant and variable bit rates. He just provided the discs, and after he’d ripped them and transmitted the data, he would usually listen to a smuggled disc only once or twice before growing bored. When he was done with a disc, he stashed it in a black duffel bag he had hidden away in his bedroom closet.

By 2002, the duffel bag contained more than 500 discs, representing nearly every major release to have come through the Kings Mountain plant. Glover leaked Lil Wayne’s 500 Degreez, Dr. Dre’s Chronic 2001, and Jay-Z’s The Blueprint. He leaked Queens of the Stone Age’s Rated R and 3 Doors Down’s Away from the Sun. He leaked Björk. He leaked Ashanti. He leaked Ja Rule. He leaked Nelly. He leaked Take Off Your Pants and Jacket.

Glover’s leaks weren’t always chart-toppers—he didn’t have access to big-tent mom-rock artists like Celine Dion and Cher. But they tended to be the most sought after among the demographic that mattered: generation Eminem. The archetypal Scene participant was a computer-obsessed male, age 15 to 30, irresponsible and hormonal and flirting online with low-grade criminality. Kali—whose favorite artists were Ludacris, Jay-Z, and Dr. Dre—was the perfect example. The high point of Kali’s year came in May 2002, when Glover leaked The Eminem Show 25 days early. Even though it would go on to become the year’s bestselling album, the rapper was forced to reschedule his tour.

Every Scene release was accompanied by an “NFO” (pronounced “info”), an ASCII-art text file that served as the releasing group’s signature tag. NFO files were a way for Scene groups to brag about their scores, shout out important associates, and advertise to potential recruits. They also contained technical specs and were used by Scene archivists to avoid duplicating releases. A sample Rabid Neurosis NFO contained the following information, framed by psychedelic smoke trails emanating from a marijuana leaf at the bottom:

Team Rns Presents

Artist: Eminem

Title: The Eminem Show

Label: Aftermath

Ripper: Team RNS

Genre: Rap

Bit rate: 192 kbps

Play time: 1hr 17min

Size: 111.6 mb

Release Date: 2002-06-04

Rip Date: 2002-05-10

The most important line was the rip date, establishing the primacy of the RNS leak. Kali drafted many of these release notes himself, and his tone was sarcastic and inflammatory, taunting both the rival releasing groups and the artists themselves. For The Eminem Show, he ended with a question: “Who else did you think would get this?”

When Kali saw an album he really wanted, he would start calling Glover incessantly. He became impatient and impulsive, and sometimes even a little pissy. If he got too lippy, Glover would delay leaking the album out of spite. He knew that Kali needed him, and that it would be next to impossible for him to find someone else this far up the supply chain.

Who was Kali anyway? Glover wasn’t sure, but as their relationship evolved he created a hypothetical profile from sundry details. First off, there was the 818 area code from his cell phone number: that was California, specifically the Los Angeles area. Then there was the voice in the background Glover sometimes heard on the calls: Kali’s mother, he suspected. There was also the ASCII-art marijuana leaf that acted as RNS’ official emblem: Glover could tell when Kali was calling him high. Most striking of all was the exaggerated hip-hop swagger Kali affected: Kali only ever called Glover “D” and complained to him about how he didn’t like white people. No one else called him that. The voice on the other end of the phone was trying to be cool, trying to be hard, but Glover wasn’t buying it.

In fact, he found it patronizing. Glover might have been black, and he might have been a pirate, but that didn’t make him a thug. He was playing it straight these days. He spoke in a friendly basso profundo with a rural Southern accent. He lived in a small town, he liked to fish, and he attended church regularly. On weekends, he raced quad bikes through the Appalachian mud. Sure, he liked Tupac—who didn’t?—but he also liked Nickelback, and he had grown up driving a tractor. His friends called him a “black redneck.”

So when Kali tried to be “down,” Glover had to roll his eyes. He’d given up on such posturing years ago. He liked white people just fine: his girlfriend, Karen Barrett, was white, and so was his friend Tony Dockery, and so were many members of the Quad Squad. In fact, Glover thought the way Kali talked was a manipulative ploy to establish racial solidarity based on what Kali thought it was like to be a black American. For, while he sensed that Kali probably wasn’t white, Glover knew he wasn’t black either—his hip-hop affect was entirely too phony.

Glover decided to do a little investigating. He typed the name “Kali” into a search engine and was presented with an image of the four-armed, black-skinned Hindu Goddess of Death. Was the guy on the other end of the line South Asian, maybe Indian? If so, Glover had a supremely odd image of his own Kali: the Hindu God of Leaking, a stoned Desi wigger who lived at home in the Valley with his mom.

This was the guy at the top of the pyramid, and Glover, along with Dockery, had the distinct privilege of answering to him directly. But this cutout in the command hierarchy came at a price: Glover was not permitted to interact with the other members of the group. This prohibition extended even to the group’s other leader, a guy who had been promoted to the position of “ripping coordinator” after years of service. His online handle was “RST,” but his real name was Simon Tai.

Tai lived in a different world than Glover and Dockery. He was an Ivy League biology student who came from a background of privilege. He was raised in Southern California, then matriculated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. As a freshman on campus with a T1 Internet connection, he’d watched RNS from the sidelines, feeling a bit in awe of the group and wondering how he might contribute. After hanging around in the chat channel for nearly a year and completing various menial technical tasks, he was given an invite.

Simultaneously, he applied for a DJ slot at the school’s radio station. For two years Kali had waited patiently as Tai made his way up the ranks. He’d cultivated Tai’s interest in rap music and directed him to make connections with the promotional people at the relevant labels. Finally, in 2000, as a trusted senior, a 21-year-old Tai was promoted to music director and given a key to the station’s office. He now had direct, unmonitored access to the station’s promo discs. Every day he checked the station’s mail, and when something good came in, he raced back to his dorm room to upload it as quickly as possible. Victory sometimes came down to a matter of seconds.

Tai scored two major leaks that year, back to back: Ludacris’ Back for the First Time, and Outkast’s Stankonia. The albums shifted the regional focus in rap music away from New York and Los Angeles and toward Atlanta, and they were massive gets for RNS. Kali was delighted with his apprentice, and over time Tai came to realize that he was being groomed as his replacement. His promotion to ripping coordinator was the dark-world mirror to his position at the campus radio station, and soon he was delegating orders to the RNS rank and file. Kali began to include him in higher-level discussions with the leaders of other Scene groups, and he was given privileged information about the location and management of the group’s topsites. He even came to know some of the other members’ real names.

For the next two years Tai managed RNS’ roster of leakers. Along with Kali, he carefully tracked the major labels’ distribution schedules and directed his sources to be on the lookout for certain hot albums. Matching sources with albums was an inexact science, particularly since RNS had international scope with potential at every level.

First there were the radio DJs, who could provide access to their respective station formats: “MistaEd” in Baltimore for underground hip-hop, “BiDi” in Georgia for mainstream R&B, “DJ Rhino” in Minnesota for independent rock.

Then there were the British music journalists “Ego_UK” and “Blob.” Like Tai, they relied on promotional connections at the major labels and focused on whatever rap artists Universal hadn’t managed to snap up. Their greatest coup was 50 Cent’s “lost” debut, Power of the Dollar, scheduled for release in 2000 by Sony, but canceled after the rapper was shot. Never officially released, it fell on RNS to make sure the album saw the light of day.

Then there were the Japanese. Presence here was a must, as albums sometimes launched in Japan one or two weeks ahead of the U.S. release date. And even when trans-Pacific launches were simultaneous, the Japanese editions often contained bonus track rarities that appealed to Scene completists. Tai relied on “kewl21” and “x23” to source this material, one an expat, the other a native.

Finally there were the Tuesday rippers. These were the foot soldiers who spent their own money to purchase music legally the day it appeared in stores. “RL,” “Aflex,” and “Ziggy” weren’t even leakers really, just enthusiasts. This was the lowest level of access, whom Tai directed to scoop up whatever fell through the cracks.

In 2002, Kali offered to step down and let Tai lead. Tai, now 23, had graduated and was suffering from postcollege malaise. He still lived near campus and worked in the school’s IT department. He’d been relieved of his position at the radio station upon graduation, but he’d managed to keep the key to the office. He had a laptop now, and by night he snuck into the station to make copies of the promotional CDs.

It was a tempting offer, but for some reason Tai turned it down. In later years he struggled to remember why. It wasn’t fear exactly—at that age he still felt invincible. And he had grown close to Kali, with whom he chatted daily. The group had given Tai a sense of belonging, and he would maintain a presence in its chat channels for years to come. But, for whatever reason, at the age of 23 he opted for retirement. He was given the title “leaker emeritus.”

And yet, through it all, even from this privileged position of confidence, Tai had no idea that Dell Glover existed. He knew of Dockery, vaguely, and was aware that the group occasionally sourced leaks from inside Universal’s manufacturing plant. But he had no knowledge whatsoever of the quiet presence named “ADEG,” who was in fact the group’s best asset. He had managed the leakers for two years, and almost led the group himself, but even he was in the dark. Kali’s greatest coup was a secret he kept to himself.

Kali told Glover this was done for his own protection. Glover didn’t buy it. He suspected the real reason Kali kept him isolated was that he didn’t want a rival Scene crew to poach him. But he went along with it, because he needed Kali too. Estimates were difficult, but at any given time global Scene membership probably comprised no more than a couple of thousand people. Kali, with his worldwide network of leaking insiders, was the elite of elites, close to the very top. He had helped to draft the mp3 leaking standards himself. Being Kali’s source was definitely worth the headache. A typical Scene pirate, bribing record store employees and cracking software, might be granted passwords to only three or four topsites. By 2002, Glover had access to two dozen.

He parlayed this access into the bootleg movie hustle. The growing trade in pirated movies paralleled the rise of pirated music, and in 2001 the home DVD burner debuted. The move from the inferior VCD to the rental-quality DVD brought an explosion in business for Glover. He built another tower to replace the first, with seven DVD burners replacing the CDs. He upgraded his Internet connection from satellite to broadband. He downloaded the last few years’ most popular movies from the Scene topsites to his home PC, then burned a couple dozen copies each. He printed the movies’ titles on the mailing labels and then affixed them to the discs. For each film he also now printed out a full-color cover sleeve and stuck that into a photo album to create a makeshift catalog. During the sales process, customers selected the movies they wanted by pointing to the posters, and, as always, Glover then retrieved the counterfeit discs from “inventory” in the trunk of his car.

Glover built his customer base carefully. He was selling contraband, and he needed to trust the people who bought the discs. He started with his coworkers at the Kings Mountain plant. Then he branched out to local barbershops and clubs. Soon he was keeping regular business hours in the parking lot of a nearby convenience store. Around Cleveland County, Glover became known as the “movie man.” For five bucks he would sell you a DVD of Spider-Man weeks before it was available at Blockbuster, maybe while it was even still in theaters. And not just Spider-Man; Gangs of New York, Bend It Like Beckham, Toy Story 2, The Ring, Drumline . . . any first-run mainstream movie from the past five years. And if you wanted something more obscure—say, some art house flick that wasn’t in his immediate inventory—he could usually fill your request overnight.

The value proposition for his customers was irresistible. Business flourished as Glover undercut the legitimate competition on price and product selection, offering outright ownership with no late fees. He reached a cartel-like agreement with Dockery to serve separate market segments, and by early 2002 Glover was selling 200 to 300 DVDs a week, frequently grossing over a thousand bucks in cash. He bought a second PC and another burner just to keep up with demand. Although he knew what he was doing was illegal, Glover felt he had insulated himself from suspicion. All transactions were hand to hand, no records were kept, and he never deposited his earnings in the bank. He refused to sell music, they didn’t make DVDs at the Universal plant, and the Scene was so far underground that he was sure his customers wouldn’t understand where the supply was coming from.

Still, he kept his sideline a secret from Kali, who he was certain would not approve. Kali’s paranoia was justified. Since the beginning of the millennium, the FBI and Interpol had been targeting the Scene under a wide-ranging program called Operation Buccaneer. In 2001, an international sting had netted over seventy members of RiSC_ISO, a DVD and software piracy group. Arrests were made in over ten countries, with FBI agents raiding dormitories at Duke, MIT, and UCLA, and even busting four rogue Intel employees who were using the company’s servers to host pirated files. Kali had learned what he could about the investigation from publicly available legal documents posted online. It seemed the Feds had started a topsite of their own, which they dubbed a “honeypot”: a sticky trove of goodies that looked like a secure Scene file repository, but that actually logged the IP address of anyone who used it, and fed that information back to the Hoover Building and Scotland Yard. Sentences had ranged from one to five years.

Glover had been lucky to avoid this sting. He had never logged on to any of the RiSC_ISO servers. For that he could thank Kali, who had always felt the group was looking for trouble. RiSC was an outlier in the Scene, an amorphous and undisciplined collection of unreliable operators whom the FBI suspected of having ties to offline organized crime. Operation Buccaneer confirmed these suspicions, with Interpol producing evidence that RiSC had brokered sales of cracked prerelease software to underworld groups in Eastern Europe and Russia.

It was a long-standing principle of the Scene that the leaks were not to be sold. The culture drew a distinction between online file-sharing and for-profit bootlegging. The closed system of topsites was seen as an informal system of cooperation and trade, one that was not only morally permissible but maybe not even illegal. The physical bootlegging of media, by contrast, was seen as a serious breach of ethical principles, and, worse, it was known to bring tons of heat.

As a moral argument it was perhaps a little tortured; from a legal standpoint it was completely misinformed. Nevertheless, it was an ethos that Scene participants stuck to, and the cultural prohibitions against using the topsites for profit were strong. In fact, for most participants, membership in RNS was a money-losing proposition. They spent hundreds of dollars a year on compact discs, and thousands on servers and broadband, and got little that was useful in return.

Glover was the exception. Following the Operation Buccaneer raids, Kali put the word out to his own people that anyone suspected of selling material from the topsites would be kicked out of the group. Dockery, for a time, complied with this directive, but Glover did not. He knew he wasn’t getting kicked out of anything. He was too well placed. With Tai’s relevance fading and Universal’s Southern rap acts ascending, Kali would have to rely on Glover alone.

The suits at Universal had noticed the regional shift in taste, and, having missed out on Outkast, they were now pushing aggressively to lock down the rest of the region. At the urging of rap impresario Russell Simmons, Doug Morris had signed the Houston legend Scarface, formerly of the Geto Boys, and appointed him head of their new Def Jam South imprint. Scarface repaid the favor almost immediately by signing a young Atlanta radio DJ named Ludacris. Combining upbeat production with brash, exuberant wordplay, Ludacris had quickly established himself as the millennium’s big-tent party rapper, and his single “What’s Your Fantasy” had become a spring break staple and a massive radio hit.

Ludacris was Kali’s favorite rapper, and the standing order to RNS was to leak any and all Def Jam South releases first. In the weeks before Ludacris’ November 2001 follow-up release Word of Mouf, Kali started calling Glover every single day to check on the status of the leak. Some days he called him twice. Glover was annoyed and felt that Kali was taking him for granted, as usual. He was also annoyed by Ludacris, whose music he didn’t care for. After securing the album from inside the plant, he deliberately stashed it in his bedroom closet duffel bag for a full week before handing it over. Even with this delay, RNS leaked Word of Mouf to the Scene 24 days before its official release.

The next big title from Def Jam South was Scarface’s own album The Fix. Scheduled for an August 2002 release, once again Kali began calling Glover incessantly, looking to schedule a handover as early as June. Glover, annoyed, simply capitulated and sent the album as soon as he received it. It hit the Internet on July 15, 22 days before it was scheduled to arrive in stores.

The next day, in Kings Mountain, management called a plant-wide meeting. Attendance was mandatory. Standing in front of hundreds of assembled employees, the Danish boss cut straight to the point: a complete copy of Scarface’s album The Fix has been found on a server at Duke University. How did it get there? It rolled off the packaging line only yesterday, and it hasn’t left the warehouse yet. One of you must have leaked it. Tell us who it was. You can do so anonymously if you like, no questions asked.

Kali had screwed up. In his quest to dominate the piracy league tables, he’d leaked too early, too aggressively, and Universal had been able to narrow down the source of the breach. Glover experienced a sinking feeling, akin to panic. He and Dockery made nervous, surreptitious eye contact across the manufacturing floor. Perhaps only his naturally laconic manner saved him from being caught outright.

In conversations afterward, the belt buckle posse assured him they wouldn’t snitch. They didn’t want to lose their jobs either. But they weren’t Glover’s only worry. Around the plant, he was starting to hear questions about where, exactly, all these pirated movies were coming from. He even suspected the plant brass might have gotten their hands on some of his knockoff DVDs. He should have known better than to sell the movies to his supervisor. He decided against confronting or warning any of his customers, and they in turn seemed to avoid him. If he was lucky, some sort of implied omertà might save him.

Five days after this meeting one of Glover’s key suppliers was busted. Van Buren’s security regime had nabbed a temporary shift worker named Chaney Sims after the wand picked up on a prerelease compact disc he’d stuffed into his shirt. He was arrested on the spot and charged with felony embezzlement.

Glover was in trouble. His sideline was now decidedly unsafe. Sims had been part of his crew, and if he cooperated with the police, the whole operation would be outed. If the cops approached, Glover’s only option would be to stonewall, and pray he only lost his job. Even if he didn’t, he was known to be close to Sims and was certain to be a person of interest in the Scarface leak. His best hope for now was for the investigators to focus on the Duke lead. That was a red herring: neither Glover nor RNS had any connection to the school. Glover had no idea how The Fix had ended up on a campus server, and he didn’t care. All he knew now was that he had to shut it down.

After work, Glover called Kali and broke the bad news. They had crossed the line. They had leaked too early and the pressure was on. In their conversation, Glover put the blame entirely on Kali, avoiding mention of the movie racket. Their exchange became heated. Glover announced he was quitting RNS forever, then hung up. When Kali called him back, he didn’t answer. He drove home and packed all his contraband DVDs into the trunk of his car. There were two spindles full of merchandise, over 600 movies, worth nearly 3,000 dollars retail. In the dead of night, he drove to the Shelby city limits, and threw them in the town dump.