Word got around and competition began to appear. Dockery stayed off his turf, per the terms of their agreement, but other bootleggers moved in. Like Glover, they were Net-savvy middlemen arbitraging their understanding of Internet file-sharing into cash sales to less sophisticated purchasers. Glover knew these guys well. One of them was a friend whom he’d assisted in building a DVD-burning tower, only to watch a new competitor enter the market.
Glover retained the edge. His competitors sourced from public file-sharing sites like LimeWire or the Pirate Bay and didn’t have access to the advance leaks from topsites. Still, by the mid-2000s even this advantage was being eroded. Despite their best efforts, Scene leaks no longer stayed inside the topsite ecosystem for long, and leaking from the Scene was becoming as popular as leaking to it.
Glover’s own experience showed it. In 2005, RNS ran the table, leaking four out of the top five bestselling albums in America, and seven of the top ten. The number one and two slots were occupied by Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi and 50 Cent’s The Massacre, and Glover had leaked them both. The high demand for Scene material meant that RNS leaks made their way onto public file-sharing networks quickly, and within 48 hours, copies of Glover’s smuggled prerelease music could be found on iPods across the globe.
For now, though, even a narrow time advantage would do. The DVD business was almost entirely driven by new releases, even more so than music. Glover was facing the same demand curve that led video rental stores to carry one copy of City Lights and a hundred copies of Shrek. A two- to three-day head start was all he needed to maintain a reputation as the best bootlegger in the state. For he had learned that the bootlegging business was governed by the same economic principle as drugs, real estate, or any other criminal enterprise: it was all about supply.
Supply came from a variety of sources, as the Scene’s infiltration of the music business was mirrored in other forms of media. Movie-releasing groups had pushed hard into the home DVD market, leaking from video rental stores and other vendors. They tracked the dissemination of Oscar screeners to the Academy and unfailingly managed to score DVD rips of the leading contenders long before their official home release dates. Advancing technology was also revolutionizing the process of “camming”—bootlegging movies from within the theater by capturing them with digital camcorders. Camming operations could get sophisticated, synchronizing a video feed from one theater with a higher-quality audio feed from another. And the cammers, aware of the risks, had grown clever: when Canadian authorities later arrested one of Glover’s suppliers at a Pixar movie he was attending with his infant daughter, they discovered a secret camcorder rig inside her diaper bag.
Television was an emerging medium as well, and the growing popularity of prestige dramas on the cable networks was providing Glover with more material to sell. Practically anything that aired was captured on DVR, edited for commercials, compressed to a manageable size, and distributed to Scene topsites within minutes. Often, though, the Scene scooped even the network affiliates. In a notorious example, production prints of the entire fourth season of The Wire made it to the pirate underground before any of the episodes ever aired. In another legendary case, an Australian Scene pirate had realized that episodes of The Sopranos were being transmitted via unencrypted satellite feed to local stations from Los Angeles for future air dates. The transmissions were sent at a bandwidth well outside the normal commercial spectrum, but, using a backyard satellite dish, he was able to snatch the episodes from the airwaves and upload them to the topsites in advance.
Dell Glover had access to all of this and more. After years of leaking, his connections were unrivalled. The edge that gave him over other bootleggers translated directly into profits on the street. Sometimes he even supplied his competitors, carefully dribbling out prerelease media to his friends only after he had bled his local patch dry. Word of mouth fueled business, and trade at the barbershops flourished. The high point came one Saturday in 2004, when he woke up to a dozen customers parked on the lawn outside his house, waiting for him to rip the discs.
His neighbors thought he was a drug dealer. Actually it was better than that—his cost of goods sold was almost zero, and he sourced it from the topsites, not from some unhinged basement meth cook or some fearsome Mexican cartel. Blank DVDs ran about 25 cents each, and, even once the barbers took their cut, his profit margins were over 50 percent. Plus, there were other, more lucrative sidelines. If you wanted to buy Madden Football for PlayStation, it would cost you sixty bucks retail and you’d have to camp outside of GameStop while you waited for it to come out. Glover would sell it to you right now for ten. A copy of Adobe Photoshop cost 400 dollars. Glover would sell it to you for twenty, including the cracks and patches you needed to get it to work. A copy of the professional engineering suite AutoCAD would run you 1,500 retail. Glover would sell it to you for forty.
Many of his best customers came from inside the plant, and for the ones he trusted most, Glover had an even better deal. Rather than paying five bucks per movie, for twenty bucks a month you could buy an unlimited subscription—and you didn’t even need the discs. Glover had set up his own topsite, run off a home server, and once you bought yourself a password you could download anything you wanted. There you would find every movie that came out on DVD in the last five years, plus the latest copies of games, music, software, and more. If you wanted something he didn’t have, you just posted a request, and he found it for you within the hour. Video on demand was a speculative technology of the future, but if you knew Glover, it was here, now. He was running his own private Netflix out of his house.
His lifestyle was a nonstop grind. He worked 12 hours a day, came home, spent two hours on the computer burning discs, went to sleep, woke up a few hours later, brushed his teeth with his kids at his side, spent another half hour on the computer burning discs, then went back to work another 12-hour shift. But the net bottom line was a terrific influx of physical cash. Working every available overtime shift from a management position meant he pulled in nearly $1,500 a week in legitimate earnings. On top of that came another two grand in cash sales from the barbers, plus whatever he moved himself. By his mental accounting, in 2004 and 2005 he made more from bootlegging than he did from more than 3,000 hours a year of legitimate work. All told he was pulling in almost four grand a week—nearly $200,000 a year.
He began to make extravagant purchases. He bought rims for his girlfriend Karen Barrett—“Rims on a Honda,” he said, shaking his head. He bought game consoles for the kids. He took his family to Disney World. He bought another quad bike, then another. He made a down payment on a house. He paid off his child support and his credit card debt. And now, finally, Glover bought his car.
He sold the Cherokee on Craigslist and paid $24,000 cash for a fully loaded 1999 Lincoln Navigator, metallic charcoal blue exterior, leather interior. It was used, sure, but for Glover the vehicle was just the base. Using the DVD money, Glover began to pimp his ride.
First there were the tires—two thousand bucks. Then there was the hood scoop—a thousand. Then there were the xenon headlights—another thousand. Then there was the custom detailing, and the blue neon lights along the chassis. Together those cost him three. Then, of course, there was the stereo system: a grand for the custom deck, a grand for the tweeters up front, and another three for the rack of 12-inch woofers in the back. Then there were the window tints, and finally the full set of 24-inch steel rims from the online retailer DUB. For years, rappers had favored “spinners”—metal rims with independent bearings, that rotated even as the car was stopped. Glover, looking to keep things lively, had switched up the game. At a thousand bucks per, his rims were “floaters”—weighted at the bottom, they looked like they were standing still even as the car was moving.