The rival groups’ sources tended to be further down the supply chain. They didn’t have reliable inside men, and Kali suspected they were paying off corrupt record store employees for storeroom access. Still, that meant they could post leaks up to a week in advance, and RNS couldn’t let them get too close. Three weeks early and Glover would get caught; one week early and someone could scoop them. Two weeks was the sweet spot. Under their new agreement, Glover would leak his stuff to Kali as soon as he could, but Kali would then delay releasing it to the topsites. During that grace period, Kali alone would have the most up-to-date music library on earth.
This agreement in place, Glover went into overdrive, and the discipline he brought to his professional life he now brought to the Scene. From 2003 onward he was once again the leading source of prerelease music in the world, but he surpassed even his former accomplishments. From his management position, he carefully scheduled shifts for his best leakers, the ones with the biggest belt buckles. The smugglers responded with improved tradecraft, and in handoffs far from the plant, Glover was soon receiving eight or nine different albums at a time, tied off in a surgical glove. In a new twist, one of his conspirators started bringing in microwaveable lunches. The lunches came in a plastic cylindrical bowl, the mouth of which was just slightly larger than a compact disc. Every day after eating, his confederate would wash the container clean, then bring it back to the factory floor and jam it full of discs. Then, in the bathroom, he’d reseal the lid with a glue stick, and smuggle his “uneaten” lunch back out through the guardhouse.
Glover’s leaks once again catapulted RNS to the top of the piracy league tables. He kicked off 2003 by leaking 50 Cent’s official debut Get Rich or Die Tryin’, which would go on to be the bestselling album of the year. He followed that up by leaking albums from Jay-Z, G-Unit, Mary J. Blige, Big Tymers, and Ludacris, before ending the year on a high note by leaking Kanye West’s debut, The College Dropout. Anything that Doug Morris signed, Dell Glover leaked, and, in what was becoming RNS’ signature move, all of the leaks hit the Internet precisely 14 days before they were due in stores.
Using Glover’s high-profile scores, Kali leveraged the RNS mystique, poaching aggressively from rival groups around the world. He picked up “Darkboy,” the former head of a rival group; “Yeschat,” a nü metal enthusiast who claimed to sell crack to finance his leaking habit; “Tank,” a Swedish IT administrator who ran RNS’ European topsite servers; “Srilanka,” a French DJ with connections inside that country’s electronic music scene; and “Incuboy,” two Italian brothers sharing a single chat handle, who ran some kind of “music promotion” business with connections inside Bertelsmann and EMI.
Best of all, he enlisted “Da_Live_One.” Patrick Saunders was an archetypal Scene participant who had been cracking software since the dial-up days. Raised in the suburbs of Baltimore, he had shown an early interest in computers, and this had been encouraged by his mother. At 16, he’d spent two days downloading a cracked copy of Adobe Photoshop over the dedicated dial-up connection she’d arranged for him. He hadn’t paid for software since.
The first thing you noticed about Saunders was that he never stopped talking. He spoke with animation and at great volume, though his mind was scattered and he never spent more than a few minutes on the same topic. He was black, with light brown skin, freckles, and wooly, matted hair. He wore a thin goatee and chain-smoked American Spirit cigarettes. His motivation as a pirate was almost entirely ideological. He didn’t believe in the concept of intellectual property and ran the open-source operating system Linux on his desktop. He didn’t care about popular music either. He listened only to house, and the only thing he cared about was the rarity of the release date.
Saunders had been a member of one Scene group or another since high school. He had matriculated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in 1997, but dropped out several months before graduating. From there he’d fallen in with New York City’s underground club scene and met several employees of Black Entertainment Television. A division of Viacom, the same corporate entity that ran MTV, the channel leaked like a colander. Through his connections there, Saunders scored a number of high-profile leaks.
He’d started out in Old Skool Classics, a minor group that focused primarily on archival releases from the ’70s. From there he’d joined RNS’ rival EGO. After his leaks drew attention, he’d been approached by Kali with an invite. Saunders was pleased. Kali had considerable prestige, and simply chatting with him online was a rare privilege. RNS invites were rarer still—the Scene’s version of getting into Harvard. Once Saunders joined the group, he immediately proved his value with two big gets. First he managed to sneak a burned CD-R of Outkast’s double album Speakerboxxx/The Love Below from inside Viacom headquarters. Then he leaked Britney Spears’ In the Zone by finding an advance copy for sale on eBay.
By 2004, on the strength of Kali’s recruitment campaign, RNS had the best rap leakers and the best rock leakers. Through Glover, they leaked Jay-Z’s The Black Album and Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter, and Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi, all exactly 14 days early. But they also leaked albums from British pop-rockers Coldplay (X&Y, four days early), downtown garage-rockers the Strokes (Room on Fire, one week early), Hawaiian frat-rocker Jack Johnson (On and On, three weeks early), Canadian douche-rockers Nickelback (The Long Road, three weeks early), and Icelandic post-rockers Sigur Rós (Takk, one week early).
RNS began releasing albums in every genre to every conceivable audience: hicks (Toby Keith’s Honkytonk University), hipsters (Beck’s Guero), metalheads (Corrosion of Conformity’s In the Arms of God), mallgoths (Evanescence’s Fallen), soccer moms (James “You’re Beautiful” Blunt’s Back to Bedlam), and scene queens (Björk’s Medúlla). They leaked Coheed and Cambria and System of a Down. They leaked Kenny Chesney and Incubus. They leaked the Foo Fighters and Kelly Clarkson. They leaked Kenny G’s The Greatest Holiday Classics. They leaked The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie soundtrack.
Kali’s ambitions had expanded, but the group’s ascendancy came during a period of increased attention from law enforcement. A second round of raids conducted in April 2004 had netted over a hundred people in more than a dozen countries. Among the targets was the Apocalypse Production Crew, who had in earlier times been one of the biggest players in the Scene. But then Kali had poached their leader and, bereft of direction, APC had become so marginal that RNS no longer even considered them rivals—their biggest leak of 2004 had been an album by Melissa Etheridge. Now 18 APC members were facing felony-level conspiracy charges.