Meanwhile, the risks were greater than ever. Between Interpol, the FBI, and the IFPI and the RIAA’s internal antipiracy squads, there were now at least four separate teams of investigators working to catch them. Earlier that year, over chat, Kali had told Saunders that he was going to visit some old friends from another Scene group who were now in federal prison. After the visit, Saunders thought Kali seemed rattled.
A few days later, Kali called Glover and ordered him to do something unusual. He told him to turn off the password protection on his wireless router. Kali explained that, normally, you locked up your router to protect yourself from cybercriminals. But in this case, Kali explained, we’re the cybercriminals. If we leave our wireless routers insecure, we can argue in court that all the evidence that traces back to our IP addresses proves nothing. Anyone could be on the network. This will give us plausible deniability in case we are ever caught.
Glover did as instructed, but the defense seemed awfully flimsy. He saw the move as evidence of Kali’s persecution complex, and he was getting tired of taking all these ridiculous precautions. But other members of the group thought the actions were justified. It was obvious that they were bringing a ton of heat upon themselves, and senior members of RNS were beginning to publicly wonder if it wasn’t time to walk away. The years 2004, 2005, and 2006 had been legendary. RNS was now the most successful music release group in history, and their dominance was so total that many of their competitors had simply given up. If they left now, they could walk away on top.
Glover, too, had been thinking about retiring from the Scene. He had started leaking when he was 25. Now he was 33. His appearance over this span had changed little: he’d worn the same haircut for ten years, dressed in the same screen-print T-shirts and blue jeans, and his face showed little evidence of age. But his perception of himself was changing. Looking back at the roughrider of his youth, he saw a person he did not understand. He no longer remembered why he had been so attracted to the street bikes, or why he’d felt it necessary to own a gun. He bore the evidence of that vanished mindset on his arm, in the form of the grim reaper walking a pit bull, a tattoo that Glover now found incredibly, impossibly stupid.
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.