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.