Glover had a remarkable facility for mental accounting. He didn’t budget or keep records, but tracked his cash flows in a mental ledger. On one side was earnings, where, going all the way back to his days as a dishwasher, he could quickly estimate what he had earned in a given week in a given year. On the other side was living expenses, which contained entries for things like utilities, groceries, and rent. Net those two amounts, and you arrived at Glover’s ultimate bottom line: the cash available for high-end discretionary purchases.

First there was the street bike. Solely relying on his overtime earnings, Glover had purchased a Suzuki 750 racing motorcycle, then tricked it out with aftermarket chrome rims and a nitrous oxide booster kit. He had joined a loose confederation of local street racers and together they explored the empty expanses of highway that surrounded the town. On Memorial Day weekend each year, he would ride with his crew of racers out to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for Black Bike Week. It was a thrilling hobby—on full throttle with the nitrous kicked in, a Suzuki bike could approach 200 miles an hour.

Then there was the handgun. In spite of its trappings of small-town Southern decency, Shelby was dangerous. The sheriff’s department was kept busy with drug dealers, gang activity, and a continuous barrage of violent domestic disputes. At the age of 15, while standing in his parents’ driveway, Glover himself had been shot at following an altercation over a girl. The shots were errant, but the experience had marked him, and now he felt he had enemies. The gun, a Heckler and Koch .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, cost more than six hundred dollars, plus further application fees for a license.

Then there was the quad bike. The four-wheel off-road vehicle complemented the street bike perfectly. On the weekends when he wasn’t street racing, he went “mudding” with a racially mixed group of thirty other locals. This was a separate group from the bikers, one with a softer, more countrified edge. They called themselves the Quad Squad.

Then there was the car. He still needed a commuter vehicle for the plant, and there was no way he was going to fit Dockery on the back of a street bike. The Cherokee was nearing 100,000 miles and would soon need to be replaced, presumably by something more stylish. Glover had established a savings account for this purpose. In the meantime, he’d upgraded the stereo with a subwoofer in the trunk.

Finally, there was the computer. Bikes, guns, and cars were durable assets, and Glover always had a general sense of their salvage value. A used computer, by contrast, was a hazardous piece of electronic waste. The machine he’d purchased from Sears in 1989 had become obsolete before he’d even paid it off, and by 1996, in an effort to keep up with evolving technology, he’d upgraded to a new box three separate times.

He added to this with an expensive peripheral purchase. The new generation of compact disc burners were the first ever produced for home consumers. Philips’ first entry into this market had come in early 1996, at a retail price of $649. The same company that employed Glover for industrial-scale manufacturing now provided him with an opportunity for artisanal home production. But a six-hundred-dollar CD burner wasn’t just a discretionary purchase; it was an investment. Glover could use the burner to make clones of the music he already owned, and then resell those clones to his friends. If he was really daring, he could use it to make copies of the unreleased music that was making its way out of the plant.

But leaking CDs from the plant was risky. The technician whose party Glover had attended in 1995 had recently been fired, after anonymous plant employees had reported his ill-starred DJ sets to management. Security at the plant couldn’t prove anything, but they took the allegations seriously and had brought in a polygraph examiner to give the technician a lie detector test. He had failed, and his employment was terminated. Glover had seen other workers lose their jobs as well, including a clueless temp who had left a stolen disc in plain view on the dashboard of his car. In that case, PolyGram had arrested the worker and pressed charges for embezzlement. In repeated meetings with employees, PolyGram made it clear that smuggling hurt everyone, especially the workers. Even so, the discs were making their way out. Glover wasn’t sure how, but at the weekend flea markets he attended, in the parking lots of Shelby and beyond, he could still reliably find leaked albums available many weeks ahead of their release dates.

There were other problems. First of all, the burner was slow, and would take about an hour to make a copy. Second, the demand wasn’t there. Even highly anticipated leaks sold for only about five dollars, not nearly enough to compensate for the risk. But if demand was bad, supply was worse. Glover only had access to what came through the plant, and PolyGram’s upcoming release schedule just wasn’t that good. The label had a dominant position in adult contemporary, and had signed Bon Jovi and Sting, but that wasn’t going to move product on the streets. The kind of people who bought a knockoff CD from the trunk of a car didn’t want an advance copy of Ten Summoner’s Tales. They wanted The Chronic, and Glover didn’t have it.

He abandoned the idea. He used the burner to make a few copies of video games, a few CDs here and there, but the scattered sales he made did not recoup his costs. As with everything else, he’d charged the burner to his credit card, and as the financing charges mounted he began to regret the investment.

At least the payments built his credit. To the community he was a roughrider, and to the marketplace a bootlegger, but to the reporting agencies he was a model customer. He had a steady job with a presentable paycheck, and he never missed a payment. He had even talked his mother into cosigning for the bike.

Loretta Glover loved her son dearly. Dell had two older sisters, but he was her firstborn son, and she knew that, despite appearances, he was kind, responsible, and diligent. She saw too that he was interested in technology, and this was something she encouraged. Still, at times she worried about his judgment, and his level of maturity. Glover, now 22, had only just moved out of the house—into a small trailer in the backyard, rented for a nominal amount of money.

Several months later his girlfriend moved in. Glover convinced her, too, to go along with his moneymaking schemes. First, like his father and his father’s father, he opened up a sideline as a tinkerer. Expertise in computing hardware was rare in Shelby, and Glover realized he could charge for it. By mid-1996 Glover was getting five or six repair jobs a week. His trailer became a repository for broken game consoles and computers, and—to his girlfriend’s delight, no doubt—his kitchen table was scattered with tools and disassembled equipment in various states of repair.

In addition to the modest income from fix-it work, he began a dog breeding business. Purebred pit bull puppies were sought after in Shelby, and a single litter of certified pedigree might bring in over a thousand dollars. Glover bought a high-yielding bitch from another local breeder and contracted for a stud. Within a few months he had dozens of puppies for sale, kept in outdoor pens behind his parents’ house. Glover liked this breed of dog. He liked their musculature, their attitude, and the ferocity of their appearance. He liked them so much that, at the age of 18, he’d gotten a tattoo of the grim reaper holding a snarling pit bull on a chain. He’d followed that up on the opposite arm with a tattoo of a tribal band wrapped around the outline of a heart.

The overall picture was not glamorous. He worked in a factory and lived with his girlfriend in a trailer behind his parents’ house. He kept twenty pit bulls in his yard, and on weekends he alternated between street racing and off-roading. His girlfriend was unhappy, his tattoos were stupid, and he was driving himself into debt. His favorite musical genre was rap, his second favorite was country, and his lifestyle was like a mash-up of the two.