Kali told Glover this was done for his own protection. Glover didn’t buy it. He suspected the real reason Kali kept him isolated was that he didn’t want a rival Scene crew to poach him. But he went along with it, because he needed Kali too. Estimates were difficult, but at any given time global Scene membership probably comprised no more than a couple of thousand people. Kali, with his worldwide network of leaking insiders, was the elite of elites, close to the very top. He had helped to draft the mp3 leaking standards himself. Being Kali’s source was definitely worth the headache. A typical Scene pirate, bribing record store employees and cracking software, might be granted passwords to only three or four topsites. By 2002, Glover had access to two dozen.
He parlayed this access into the bootleg movie hustle. The growing trade in pirated movies paralleled the rise of pirated music, and in 2001 the home DVD burner debuted. The move from the inferior VCD to the rental-quality DVD brought an explosion in business for Glover. He built another tower to replace the first, with seven DVD burners replacing the CDs. He upgraded his Internet connection from satellite to broadband. He downloaded the last few years’ most popular movies from the Scene topsites to his home PC, then burned a couple dozen copies each. He printed the movies’ titles on the mailing labels and then affixed them to the discs. For each film he also now printed out a full-color cover sleeve and stuck that into a photo album to create a makeshift catalog. During the sales process, customers selected the movies they wanted by pointing to the posters, and, as always, Glover then retrieved the counterfeit discs from “inventory” in the trunk of his car.
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.