Five days after this meeting one of Glover’s key suppliers was busted. Van Buren’s security regime had nabbed a temporary shift worker named Chaney Sims after the wand picked up on a prerelease compact disc he’d stuffed into his shirt. He was arrested on the spot and charged with felony embezzlement.

Glover was in trouble. His sideline was now decidedly unsafe. Sims had been part of his crew, and if he cooperated with the police, the whole operation would be outed. If the cops approached, Glover’s only option would be to stonewall, and pray he only lost his job. Even if he didn’t, he was known to be close to Sims and was certain to be a person of interest in the Scarface leak. His best hope for now was for the investigators to focus on the Duke lead. That was a red herring: neither Glover nor RNS had any connection to the school. Glover had no idea how The Fix had ended up on a campus server, and he didn’t care. All he knew now was that he had to shut it down.

After work, Glover called Kali and broke the bad news. They had crossed the line. They had leaked too early and the pressure was on. In their conversation, Glover put the blame entirely on Kali, avoiding mention of the movie racket. Their exchange became heated. Glover announced he was quitting RNS forever, then hung up. When Kali called him back, he didn’t answer. He drove home and packed all his contraband DVDs into the trunk of his car. There were two spindles full of merchandise, over 600 movies, worth nearly 3,000 dollars retail. In the dead of night, he drove to the Shelby city limits, and threw them in the town dump.

CHAPTER 12

By 2003 rap had gone mainstream. Rap songs dominated the Top 40, playing at dance clubs and at frat parties. The previous year The Eminem Show had been the bestselling album in America, the first time a rapper had ever held the title. Rap had eclipsed rock as the most vital and important music of its time, and Eminem would go on to become the bestselling rapper ever. And, under Morris’ leadership, Universal had taken control of it all.

The nice thing about the rappers was that they were obsessed with money. They talked about it, thought about it, wrote songs about it, and even threw it in the air. Contract negotiations were a bitch, but once you got them signed, the rappers were relentless grinders who put out albums like clockwork. And once they hit it big, they doubled up and started acting as A&R men themselves. Signing one hit rapper could spark a chain reaction that led to a dozen more. The hottest new acts on Morris’ roster all traced their lineage to signings he had made years before: the Interscope acquisition in 1996 had netted him Dre, who had led him to Eminem in 1998, who in 2002 had led him to 50 Cent, whose monster hit “In Da Club” would propel Get Rich or Die Tryin’ to succeed The Eminem Show as the next year’s bestselling release.

There was more in the works. At Def Jam in New York City, Jay-Z’s protégé Kanye West was putting the finishing touches on his debut album, The College Dropout. At Def Jam South in Atlanta, Ludacris, with Chicken-N-Beer, was proving himself to be the industry’s most consistently entertaining voice. And there was still New Orleans, where Mannie Fresh was producing Lil Wayne’s comeback album, Tha Carter.

He might have been a 64-year-old white guy, but Doug Morris was running this rap shit. He had just scored back-to-back victories from the Interscope imprint he’d spent more than a decade championing. Universal Music hadn’t existed eight years earlier. Now it commanded over a quarter of the global market share and was the largest music company on earth. Morris should have been a legend in his own time, like his mentor Ahmet Ertegun. He should have been famous, with a flattering profile in The New Yorker. He should have been, as he would have put it, in his ineradicable Long Island accent, “yooge.”

But it wasn’t to be. The rap game was expanding, but the music game was shrinking even faster. Piracy was killing sales, and since peaking in 2000, compact disc sales had fallen 30 percent. Despite the impressive growth in its market share, it was all Universal could do to keep its sales numbers flat. Everywhere else there was carnage. Tower Records was hurtling toward bankruptcy. Sony’s Columbia imprint was still fighting a civil war against its own consumer electronics division. EMI was buried in debt. Bertelsmann was offering its music assets up for sale.

And then there was AOL Time Warner. Morris’ old bosses were presiding over a titanic disaster; in April 2002 the company had announced a 54-billion-dollar loss, the largest in American history. Technically the loss had been a “goodwill impairment charge.” That was an accountant’s way of saying they’d paid too much for something—in this case, the absurdly overvalued America Online, purchased at the height of the dot-com boom. Time magazine itself had explained the loss as “a bunch of drunken sailors nursing a hangover.” Warner Music Group was just a barnacle on that sinking ship.

Not that the situation at Vivendi was much better. In July 2002, the ratings agencies cut the company’s bonds to junk after a decade of ill-advised tech investments had led it, too, to write off massive goodwill losses against shareholder capital. The corporation was losing money, and Jean-Marie Messier, the man who had orchestrated the Seagram acquisition, was bounced by the company’s board. Soon, Vice Chairman Edgar Bronfman, Jr., was out as well. The brain trust was replaced by Jean-Bernard Lévy, a respected, sober-minded businessman tasked with stopping the bleeding. Needing an immediate influx of cash, Lévy organized the sale of Vivendi’s water utility and environmental engineering assets, and began looking for other things of value to sell.

Word got around. In 2003, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made an unsolicited bid to take Universal off of Vivendi’s hands. He wanted their back catalog. He wanted his own music label. Most of all he wanted Morris. Morris was interested, but the decision wasn’t his to make. Vivendi rebuffed the offer. Even with their creditors demanding liquidity, and even with music industry revenues beginning to decline sharply, they saw UMG and Morris as key, irreplaceable assets.

Jobs himself was a lifelong music buff who occasionally compared his company to the Beatles, and the attempted acquisition of Universal was part of a broader vision. Since 2002, he had been calling Morris incessantly, trying to get him to sign off on his new iTunes Store idea, which would sell songs for 99 cents through its iTunes application. These songs would be distributed onto the new iPod devices, which suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Since its introduction in late 2001, the success of the iPod had caught everyone by surprise, even the Apple executives who’d designed it. They had underestimated the sheer volume of pirated mp3s being brought into existence, and how valuable they became once they were portable.

Jobs, like Morris, was in the middle of his second act. In 1985, he’d been forced out from the business he’d founded, only to return in conquering glory in the mid-1990s. He excelled at design, marketing, and management, and if perhaps he was not the best-liked person in the world, his vision for the future of technology was certainly compelling. Most important of all, he understood that, in an economy of abundance, people tended to invest great personal meaning in their purchasing decisions. He encouraged precisely the sort of “sentimentality” that engineers like Karlheinz Brandenburg rejected, and ultimately this made him the iconic businessman of his time.