Family life appealed to him. For years, he and Karen had raised children from previous relationships. Now they had one of their own. With a newborn baby at home, Glover was working a little less. He went to church more often. He enjoyed spending time with his children and didn’t want to jeopardize all of that. Plus, the DVD hustle was starting to die down. The torrent networks had caught up to the Scene, and the leaks were publicly available within seconds of being posted to the topsites. Even through his connections, he no longer had a competitive edge, and his income from bootlegging had dropped to a few hundred bucks a week.

And then there was the Navigator. It had been his lifelong dream to own a tricked-out car, but now, after just two years, Glover was starting to feel a little silly driving around Shelby in neon lights and floaters. Using overtime income and his savings from the DVD hustle and the pirate movie server, he purchased a replacement vehicle, a new, fully loaded Ford F-150. The king of the Club Baha parking lot was ready to trade in his crown for the slippers and rake of the suburban dad.

Glover began to make his feelings known to Kali. We’ve been doing this shit for a long time, he said in their phone calls. We never got caught. Maybe it’s time to stop. Surprisingly, Kali agreed. For him, too, the attraction of the Scene was fading, and, perhaps alone in the group, he understood the lengths that law enforcement was willing to go to bring them down.

Then, in January 2007, one of RNS’ European topsites mysteriously vanished. The server, located in Hungary and containing several terabytes of pirated files, began refusing all connections, and the hosting company that ran it didn’t respond to the service tickets. Kali capitulated. There were just too many variables now, too much attention. He ordered the group shut down. RNS’ final leak, released on January 19, 2007, was Fall Out Boy’s Infinity on High, sourced from Dell Glover inside the plant. The NFO accompanying it included a brief parting message:

This is our final release. Enjoy!

After 11 years and 20,000 leaks, RNS was finally done. The last day was bittersweet. The chat channel was busy, as dozens of former members from years past flooded in to pay their respects. The members reminisced about past friendships and old exploits. Although there remained a high degree of anonymity among the group’s membership base, many friendships had formed. The participants had come of age in the Scene, and it was, for many members, a private world they carried inside themselves. Dockery, logging in as “StJames,” started changing his handle, over and over, in tribute to names long past. As the final moment beckoned, a sense of melancholy prevailed, even though there was widespread agreement that the time had come to step away. Then the #RNS channel was closed, forever.

For Glover, it was an opportunity to put childish things behind him. He remained, as always, a shadowy figure, a peripheral member of the group but also their most important asset. He had felt, toward the end, a sense of relief of finally getting out from Kali’s thumb. A return to normalcy beckoned, and he embraced it.

Within three months he was back. Some inexpressible urge came over him, some obscure desire to stay involved, and by April 2007 he was once again leaking CDs from the plant. There was no economic point to this anymore, but he simply couldn’t let go. As the chat channel was gone, he logged on to AOL Instant Messenger and contacted Patrick Saunders directly.

Saunders had known of Glover’s existence, but they had never chatted before. It was another example of how isolated Kali had kept Glover—though they’d been in the same releasing group for four years, Saunders didn’t even know Glover’s screen name. Via private chat, Glover asked if Saunders could put him in touch with any other Scene releasing groups. Saunders said yes, and referred him to “RickOne,” the head of Old Skool Classics. The introduction came with Saunders’ strongest recommendation.

Somehow Kali got word, and in July he called Glover again. He hadn’t been able to give up either. I heard you’re back in the game, he said. Well, I am too. RNS may be dead, but the leaks will continue. The new group will be downsized to only the most trusted members: just you, me, Dockery, and a couple of the Europeans. Maybe KOSDK and Fish. Maybe Saunders. We’ll continue to leak, but under random, three-letter acronyms. Our group will be so secret it won’t even have a name. We’ve spent years building this network and we have access to the best topsites on the globe. We can’t give it up now.

Glover was skeptical. Not for the first time he wondered about what really motivated Kali to do this. Before, at least, he could point to the social recognition of his online peers. This was something Glover had never personally sought, but he understood how it might have value to a certain kind of person. Now there wasn’t even that—only some mysterious sense of personal satisfaction.

Their behavior at this point could fairly be described as compulsive. Both had tried to quit the Scene two different times, but found themselves unable. Years later, Glover could not find the words to explain precisely what motivated him to keep going at this point. Perhaps he just wanted to make some kind of mark. Perhaps he just wanted to matter.

Kali explained that there was one last leak they had to have. Actually, two last leaks, both of which were scheduled to come out on the same day. There was a rivalry: 50 Cent and Kanye West had scheduled the same release date for competing albums. Now they were beefing in the press about who would sell more—and Fifty said that if he didn’t win, he would retire. The beef had made the cover of Rolling Stone.

Of course, Kali knew it was all bullshit. Better than anyone, he knew the rappers were both distributed and promoted by the same corporate parent: Vivendi Universal. What looked like an old-school hip-hop beef was actually a publicity stunt overseen by Doug Morris to boost sales. Clearly the idea was to trick consumers into thinking they were clever by buying both. Kali wasn’t fooled, and he wanted the suits at Universal to know it. RNS had leaked every release either of the artists had ever put out, including a 50 Cent album most people didn’t even know existed. The group might be shut down, but for Kali going after Fifty and Kanye was a sacred matter of tradition. Two albums: Kanye’s Graduation and 50 Cent’s Curtis. Glover told Kali he would keep an eye out for them.

Their official release date was September 11, 2007, but the albums were first pressed at the EDC plant in mid-August. Glover obtained them through his smuggling network and listened to both. Graduation was ambitious, sampling widely from krautrock to French house, with cover art by Takashi Murakami, a daring marriage of pop rap and high art. Curtis played it safer, favoring hard-thumping club music anchored by hits like “I Get Money” and “Ayo Technology.”

Glover enjoyed both albums, but he was in an unusual position. He alone had the power to decide the outcome of this overhyped feud. If he leaked Graduation and held on to Curtis, Kanye might lose. But if he leaked Curtis and held on to Graduation—well, he could make 50 Cent retire.

There was also the power he had over Kali. For years, the two had been trapped in a dysfunctional relationship of distrust, exasperation, and need. Glover was sick of it all, and he finally lashed out. He decided he would release one album through Kali, and another through his new buddy RickOne at OSC. Glover listened to both albums for a second time. It was hard to choose between the two. Finally, he decided he didn’t like Kanye’s attitude, and that Graduation was just too strange. He decided to leak it first to RickOne.