Dockery had built a tower, too, and he sold to many of the same customers. But Dockery’s inventory was better than Glover’s—better in fact than anyone in the state. Dockery was somehow finding things on the Internet that Glover couldn’t: movies still in theaters, applications still in beta, PlayStation games that weren’t scheduled to be released for months. When Glover asked Dockery where he was sourcing this material, the answers he received were evasive.

Competition sucked. Dockery’s refusal to share put a strain on the two men’s friendship. They stopped commuting together, and at the plant they scheduled different shifts. Thus Glover was alone when he was pulled over in 1999 for a routine traffic stop while driving through the town of Kings Mountain. He hadn’t committed a traffic violation, and suspected he was guilty only of “driving while black.” This happened often, and Glover had a rehearsed routine. When the police officer approached the vehicle, Glover, as required by law, informed him that he had a gun stored in the gap between his car seats.

The officer told Glover that he had just committed a crime. He explained that North Carolina state law required handguns to be placed on the dashboard during a traffic stop, in full view of the officer. Even though Glover had a permit for the gun, the traffic stop ended with him facing a felony weapons charge. Before the first court date, the prosecutor offered him a bargain: turn the weapon over to the cops, and the charge would be dismissed. Glover did so, and his record remained clean, but the experience felt to him like a shakedown.

A dark period followed. His sleep apnea worsened. Two of his friends died in street racing accidents, and, confronted with his own mortality, he sold the Suzuki bike. He began working hard again—long hours, late hours, overnight shifts. His relationship deteriorated. He spent too much time on the Internet. His girlfriend moved out, taking their baby.

Then came the announcement: Philips was selling PolyGram to Universal Music Group. The sale included the music labels, the studios, the intellectual property, the contracts with artists, and the entire pressing and distribution network, including the Kings Mountain plant. The employees were nervous, understandably, but management told them not to worry. The plant wasn’t shutting down—it was expanding.

The production lines were upgraded to the point where they could manufacture half a million CDs a day. An extra warehouse was built to store the finished product. The labor force nearly doubled and the empty positions were filled by temp agencies in a mad rush of hiring. The parking lot overflowed with cars, and the cafeteria could barely feed the workers.

One of the new hires was a Shelby local by the name of Karen Barrett. The manufacturing floor was not normally a place of beauty, but Barrett was a stunner. She was thin, with high cheekbones, fair skin, and long, naturally blond hair. Her squarish jaw and her slightly upturned nose gave her a spritely, impudent appearance, and while shy on first contact, she soon revealed her true persona through tart and surprisingly opinionated exchanges with her coworkers. She showed up in late 1999, and they put her on the packaging line.

Dockery tried first. He was unsuccessful in repeated attempts. He did, however, manage to convince her to join him, Glover, and a group of other employees in regular outings to the bowling alley. At the lanes, over beers, as Dockery continued to petition, Glover noticed that Karen was looking in his direction instead.

In the weeks to come, the two learned they had much in common. Like Glover, Barrett was a product of the small-town South. She spoke with an accent as thick as Glover’s, and used many of the same regional colloquialisms. She had the same education and similar economic prospects. She shared his taste in music, listening to a broad variety of country, rock, and rap. And she loved car culture—loved the big stereos and the joyrides and the rims.

Like Glover, Barrett had a child from a previous relationship, and the two commiserated over the difficulties of single parenthood. Within a few months, they were discussing cohabitation, and soon lived together in a complex family relationship. Glover informally adopted Barrett’s child and began to raise him as his own. When visitation allowed, Markyce stayed the night as well. Barrett and Glover arranged offsetting shifts at the plant, ensuring that one would always be home with the children.

Karen wasn’t the only new face at the plant. A new manager was brought in from Denmark as well, a tightly wound expert in manufacturing efficiency. Other local facilities were shut down, and Kings Mountain became the regional command center. (If you followed that chain of command up through several levels of hierarchy, you would eventually get to Doug Morris, and above that, Junior himself.) The merger was a hassle, but it meant more shifts, more overtime hours, and, best of all, more music. Universal, it seemed, had cornered the market on rap. Jay-Z, Eminem, Dr. Dre, Cash Money—Glover packaged the albums himself.

The company understood how desirable this product was becoming. Before, leaking from the plant had been a lark, one that caused small amounts of localized damage to the parent company. In the Internet age, though, a leaked album was a catastrophe. All it took was one disc in the hands of the wrong person to screw the whole release process up. Universal rolled out its albums with heavy promotion and expensive marketing blitzes, including videos, radio spots, television campaigns, and the late night circuit. The availability of prerelease discs on the Internet interfered with this schedule, upsetting months of work by publicity teams and leaving the artists betrayed.

The plant implemented a new regime of stringent antitheft measures. Driving these changes was Steve Van Buren, who managed plant security. Van Buren had worked at the plant since 1996 and had been pushing for better security since before the Universal merger. He was aware of the plant’s reputation for leaking and determined to fix it. His professional reputation was on the line, and the stakes were now higher than before.

Van Buren began hosting regular meetings with the plant’s employees. In these meetings he told them about something called the “crime triangle.” According to this behavioral theory, criminal activity resulted from a combination of three factors: desire, time, and opportunity. You needed all three factors for a crime to occur. Van Buren could not mold people’s desires, and he was not in charge of their time. So, he explained, the best way for him to reduce crime was to limit opportunity.

This was difficult to accomplish. The discs themselves were small and could easily be hidden in loose clothing. Their thin aluminum cores didn’t contain enough metal to set off a walk-through detector, and Van Buren didn’t want to humiliate the employees with invasive pat-downs. After contacting a number of metal detector manufacturers, he hit upon a solution: a specialized handheld wand that could detect even trace amounts of aluminum. But wanding was a time-consuming process, so Van Buren implemented a randomized system. Inspired by customs procedures, each employee was now required to swipe a magnetized identification card upon leaving the plant. Four out of five times, the card set off the green light and the employee was permitted to exit. One out of five, the card set off the red light and the employee was made to stand aside as a private security guard ran the wand around his torso and up and down his limbs.

Van Buren took other steps to cut the leg of the triangle. He believed in the importance of what he called a “good clear fence line,” and ordered the underbrush removed from the chain-link fence around the plant. He had closed-circuit TV cameras installed on the building’s exterior walls. He ordered a second chain-link fence to be installed around the plant’s parking lots, and created a whitelist for permitted vehicles. Approved cars were now required to install a bar code on their dashboards, and this was scanned by security on entrance. His dedication to the job even took him past the plant’s perimeter. Tipped off by employees to an illicit trade in the plant’s pre-release material, Van Buren began to frequent the nearby flea markets in search of contraband. Sure enough, he found it, in a roadside flea market off U.S. Route 321, a few miles east of the plant. The same guys who had once sold leaked discs to Glover now sold to an undercover Van Buren, and in time this led to several arrests.