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.