If Glover was willing to upload smuggled CDs from the plant to Kali, he’d never have to pay for media again. He could get free copies of AutoCAD software that retailed for thousands of dollars. He could hear the new Outkast album weeks before anyone else. He could play Madden Football on his PlayStation a month before it was available in stores. And he could get the same access to prerelease movies that had allowed Dockery to beat him as a bootlegger. How did that sound?

Glover decided that sounded pretty good. So Dockery arranged a chat room session between Glover and Kali, and the two exchanged cell phone numbers.

Their first call was awkward. Glover, never much for conversation to begin with, mostly just listened. Kali spoke quickly and animatedly, in a strange patois of geek-speak, California mellow, and borrowed slang from West Coast rap: “Could you, like, FXP me the file, dogg?” Kali loved computers, but he also loved hip-hop. He knew its history and culture and could rhyme along with his favorite rappers. He knew all the beefs, all the disses, and all the details of the internecine label feuds. And he also knew that, in the aftermath of the murders of Biggie and Tupac, those feuds were dying down and the labels were consolidating. Death Row, Bad Boy, Cash Money, and Aftermath were all going corporate. In his relentless quest for zero-day leaks, Kali tracked these pressing and distribution deals carefully, and his research kept bringing him back to Universal. But without consistent access inside that company, rival release crews had been beating him. Glover was his ticket in.

The two hashed out the details of their partnership. Kali would track release dates of upcoming albums online and alert Glover to the material he was interested in. Glover, through his associates, would arrange for the CDs to be smuggled out of the plant. From his home computer, Glover would then rip the leaked CDs to mp3 format and transmit them via encrypted channels to Kali’s personal server. Kali would then package the mp3 files and release them according to the Scene’s exacting technical standards. In return for all this, Kali would send Glover invites to the secret topsites.

Glover had tried to clean up his act. He had given up on the guns and the bikes and the ferocious dogs. He had worked hard at several jobs, and tried to be a family man, even. But then he joined the Scene, and left one outlaw subculture for another.

CHAPTER 9

After Universal consumed PolyGram, the combined entity supplanted Warner as the dominant player in music. In the 12 months following the merger Universal Music Group pulled in more than six billion dollars in revenue, the bulk of this from the sale of compact discs. The merger brought international presence. The key markets were North America and Europe. China was potentially huge, as were Russia, India, and Brazil, but, even though representatives from those countries had pledged to respect U.S. copyright law, enforcement on the street was effectively nil. As Alan Greenspan had correctly observed, selling intellectual property meant suppressing unauthorized products with the same vigor that you created legitimate goods. Where the political will to do this did not exist, neither could a legitimate market. Still, the overall picture was fantastic. Universal was the largest music company in the world, controlling one quarter of the global market.

Morris, at the top, had a billion-dollar budget to sign and develop acts, and more than 10,000 employees under his command. He also inherited a disorderly roster of two dozen separate labels that the successive waves of mergers had picked up over the years. From the moment the deal with PolyGram closed, he set about reorganizing the chain of command. Corporate organization was viewed by all who worked for him as one of Morris’ key strengths. He knew how to motivate people, and he knew how to get the most out of them. He relied on standard business techniques like stretch revenue targets and incentivized contracts, and he also knew how to build and retain a successful management team. But there was another aspect he relied on, one that his friend Jimmy Iovine understood was a key driver for successful artists and businesspeople alike: fear.

Iovine had worked with some of the most talented musicians of his era, and he’d noticed that even established acts tended to create their best work while suffering under the weight of crippling artistic insecurity. This was doubly true for the rappers, whose external brashness and machismo often masked deep-seated vulnerabilities and sometimes even great personal shyness. Those insecurities the artists felt in the studio were mirrored by the insecurities the label heads felt in the boardroom. Music executives spent their lives looking over their shoulders, fending off the advances of opportunistic rivals plotting to poach their big acts.

Morris encouraged this fear. He had a Darwinian approach to business and he wanted his lieutenants to compete against one another directly. Although the labels under the Universal umbrella were not permitted to openly engage in bidding wars for artists, conspiratorial dealings flourished, and there was a sense within the organization that no one was safe, not even favorites like Iovine. Bolted onto the PolyGram acquisition that year had come a stake in Def Jam Recordings. The pioneering rap label had looked moribund just a few years earlier, but had been revived under the leadership of Lyor Cohen, a frothy, hard-charging scalphunter whose approach to dealmaking made even Doug and Jimmy look civilized. Cohen and Iovine immediately started feuding cross-country, cutting backroom deals to steal each other’s acts. Iovine went after Sisqo; Cohen went after Limp Bizkit. (As ever, sales were more important than artistic durability.) The rivalry between Def Jam and Interscope looked real—it was real—but the spoils of victory all went to the same place, and when you looked up from the arena to the skybox, you saw Morris applauding.

The Def Jam stake brought someone else, too. His real name was Shawn Corey Carter, but he was better known by his rap handle, Jay-Z. Even before the merger, Carter had been the label’s biggest act, but Universal’s marketing investments helped turn him into an international superstar. In early 2000 they’d scored a massive crossover hit with “Big Pimpin’,” a terrific summer jam Carter had developed with the producer Timbaland and the Texas rap duo UGK. The song represented both the best and the worst the genre had to offer. The production was superb, but the song’s hook had been lifted from a film score by Egyptian composer Baligh Hamdi, whose family would in later years allege that the sample had never been cleared. The flow was incredible, but the lyrics celebrated in plain language the forcing of women into sexual slavery. The song was addictive, sure, but intensely misogynistic, and in later years a kinder, gentler Carter would himself disown it. Then again, as Doug Morris understood better than anyone, it was exactly these transgressions that made “Big Pimpin’” irresistible.

Morris really liked Carter. He had swagger, and star presence, and his nimble delivery made other rappers sound clumsy. Like Morris, Carter had an ear for hits, but also a mind for business, cultivated by his past participation in the criminal narcotics trade. He was the CEO of his own music label and spent as much time developing and promoting other acts as he did his own. He saw himself not just as a rapper but ultimately as the head of a diversified business empire. And, like Alan Greenspan, Carter understood the importance of suppressing the bootleggers. Late in 1999, when he suspected a rival record producer of leaking his new album to the street a month before it was due in stores, Carter had confronted him on the floor of a nightclub and stabbed him.