The Justice Department’s statement of facts in Glover’s case made reference to the scope of the conspiracy. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Prabhu explained his position that RNS was a criminal organization, one that operated for the benefit of its members. He explained how the topsite economy provided members with in-kind benefits for sustained and deliberate copyright infringement—an arrangement that provided material rewards for breaking the law. He emphasized the way in which RNS was indeed a criminal conspiracy:

Rather than operating as a group of friends interested in music, it operated as a business, and, rather than money, that business was designed to get access for its members of every copyrighted work that ever existed.

In the sentencing guidelines, he made his point even more clearly:

RNS was the most pervasive and infamous Internet piracy group in history.

It sounded like flattery, but the numbers backed it up. RNS had leaked over 20,000 albums over the course of 11 years, numbers independently sourced to the FBI’s investigation, the RIAA’s internal tracking database, and the group’s own NFOs. During most of this reign of terror the group’s key asset was Glover, another point the FBI now well understood. His leaks had made their way through topsites across the globe, and from there to private trackers like Oink, and from there to public sources like the Pirate Bay and LimeWire and Kazaa. He was the primary source of contact for hundreds of millions of duplicated mp3 files—perhaps even billions—and, given Universal’s predominant position during this period, there was scarcely a person under the age of 30 who couldn’t trace music on their iPod back to him. He was the scourge of the industry, the hero to the underground, and the king of the Scene. He was the greatest music pirate of all time.

He got a job at Wal-Mart. Working in the distribution center wasn’t glamorous, and the company was stingy with benefits, but as always he volunteered himself for every available overtime shift. Things began to look bleak in the months before his arraignment. He had a mortgage. He had credit card debt. Karen was pregnant again. The economy was tanking in spectacular fashion.

But at least he had a job. In February 2009, the inevitable arrived, and the Entertainment Distribution Company declared bankruptcy. The Kings Mountain plant was shut down, hundreds of employees were laid off, and the compact disc production line was sold to buyers in Latin America. The workers filed for unemployment and faced an uncertain future amidst the worst economic crisis in modern American history. Glover, barred from interacting with his former colleagues, could only learn about the plant’s closing secondhand.

On September 9, 2009, Glover surrendered himself to the Feds at a courthouse in eastern Virginia and was indicted on a single felony count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement. A month later he pleaded guilty. The decision to plead was a difficult one, but Glover thought his chances of acquittal were poor. Fourteen years after he’d signed it, Glover’s “No Theft Tolerated” agreement from PolyGram was now admitted as federal evidence. Dockery, who loved to talk, had told Vu everything. Glover’s computers and hard drives contained volumes of incriminating evidence. And so far the FBI’s conviction rate in Operation Fastlink was 100 percent. Hundreds of convictions had been obtained, mostly through plea bargains, and the maximum penalty for copyright infringement was five years in prison. The few who had tried to fight the charges had lost.

At his indictment in Virginia, Glover saw Adil Cassim for the first time. From the moment he lay eyes upon him, Glover was certain that this man was Kali. An unassuming presence, Cassim was clean shaven and wore his hair cropped short. He was dressed in a tasteful suit jacket and a quiet tie. He was stocky, and he packed a noticeable paunch. His skin was nearly as dark as Glover’s own.

Wal-Mart found out about the conviction and promptly fired Glover for cause. He was now a black unemployed convicted felon cut loose in the worst economy in seventy years. For the first time in his life he began to have serious financial worries. Money for Glover had always been a transitory asset, one you traded quickly for something with actual utility, like a hood scoop. Now jobless and facing a pile of legal bills, he began to rethink this profligacy. He needed cash badly, and although he knew that prison time was inevitable, he suspected he could minimize his term through cooperation. Facing a desperate situation, he agreed to testify against Cassim.

The FBI needed the help. Sure, Cassim fit Glover’s preexisting mental profile of what Kali should look like. He was South Asian. He smoked weed. He lived in California with his mom. Patrick Saunders independently corroborated these details, and noted further that he and Kali had celebrated several birthdays together online and were almost exactly the same age. Sure enough, the records showed that Cassim and Saunders had been born less than two weeks apart. Like many influential members of the Scene, both Saunders and Cassim belonged to the same matriculating class of 1997. (So did I.)

But all of this evidence was circumstantial. There were hundreds of people who might fit this description. The Granada Hills raid in 2007 had ended with both Cassim and his mother in handcuffs, but the evidence obtained from the search warrant was not overwhelming. The only computer the Feds had found was a laptop, with nothing incriminating on it. They had found a bong, too, and marijuana, but nothing that would make a charge stick. In his audience with Vu, Cassim had said little, and, alone among those hit in the RNS raids, he did not admit to being a participant in the group.

Glover suspected that Cassim had dumped the evidence in the wake of their final phone call. But if so, it seemed he had not managed to do so completely. On a burned compact disc from his bedroom, the FBI found a copy of Cassim’s résumé, and there, in the “Properties” tab, Microsoft Word had automatically included the name of the document’s author: “Kali.” Plus, his subscriber records showed he had called Dell Glover hundreds of times, and, sure enough, his mobile phone contained Glover’s cell number. The contact’s name was listed only as “D.”

Cassim maintained his innocence. While he provided no explanation for the phone calls to Glover, his lawyer would later contest that the CD alone was not enough to tie the ethereal screen name “Kali” to the actual human being Adil Cassim. And although Glover’s FTP logs showed that someone at his mother’s IP address had been uploading pirated material, that didn’t mean Cassim was responsible. It could have been anyone. After all, when the Feds took his wireless router, it wasn’t even password protected. Cassim was using the “unsecured wireless” defense—the same one Glover had talked about on the phone with Kali.

Matthew Chow was fighting the case too. Even the Feds conceded that his involvement in RNS was minimal. He hadn’t been an active participant in the group for years, and the CDs he had ripped had been purchased legally from stores. Chow’s main contribution to RNS had been his design of the ASCII marijuana leaf on the group’s old NFOs—not exactly evidence of active participation in a criminal conspiracy to defraud. But the case against him was strong. In his first interview with the FBI, he had signed an affidavit confessing that he was a member of the group.

The two would be tried together. Cassim was represented by Domingo Rivera, a self-described “Internet Lawyer” who specialized in defending hackers. For an attorney, Rivera had an unusual amount of technical expertise: he had served in the U.S. Navy as a computer engineer and later worked as a cybersecurity expert for the Department of Homeland Security. He had used the unsecured wireless defense several times before, and had an impressive track record of acquittals.