Adil Cassim got a new job as an IT administrator and moved out of his mother’s house. Fearing a civil suit from the RIAA, he refused to speak to the press. Through his lawyer, Domingo Rivera, he continued to maintain that he had no connection to the Internet presence known as “Kali.” Matthew Chow, his codefendant, also refused to speak to the press, and deleted his Facebook profile. Patrick Saunders, the informant, avoided jail time, served probation, and eventually got a job as a paralegal. Simon Tai, RNS’ old ripping coordinator, was never charged with a crime. Tony Dockery served a brief prison sentence, then got a job working the graveyard shift at Shelby’s Super 8 Motel. Bruce Huckfeldt and Jacob Stahler, the APC pirates from Iowa, served probation, then took up powerlifting.
Alan Ellis remained reclusive. After the Oink trial, he never gave another interview, and all trace of him on the Internet was gone. I was unable to discover his current employment status or his precise whereabouts. In the end, after months of effort, I received from him a single email regarding his time at Oink: “It’s a part of my life which I’m happy is now behind me.”
And then there was Dell Glover. In March 2010, he reported to a federal minimum-security prison and began a three-month term. Club Fed proved bearable—more boring than hellish—and he was released in June. He was legally barred from contact with his fellow conspirators, and his friendship with Dockery came to an end. Still on probation, he worried about his ability to find work. But Glover was a grinder, and soon enough he had a job, installing the front-plate grilles at the Freightliner truck factory in Cleveland, North Carolina.
We met for the first time in 2012. Returning from prison, he, too, had developed an interest in weight lifting, and hit the gym with characteristic discipline, adding twenty pounds of solid muscle to his frame. But as his body grew intimidating and bulky, I could see from photographs that his face had actually relaxed, and when he reflected on his life the familiar grimace would fade into an expression of fatherly tenderness. I don’t think he’d ever really considered the risks he was running as a bootlegger. He’d just wanted something and had impulsively gone after it. Nevertheless, his encounter with America’s criminal justice system had marked him, and sometimes, when he was telling me the juicier bits of his story, he would go to the window and pull aside the curtain to scan the block, as if the Feds might still be out there, waiting for him to slip up again.
By the end of the year he’d begun to wonder if there wasn’t an easier way to make money than working 16-hour shifts on a production line. Capital had gone global, and bounced from New York to Montreal to Paris to Japan. Labor stayed local, stuck in Shelby, North Carolina. That geographic disconnect was a key driver of inequality, and Glover was beginning to see it. He enrolled in night school and began pursuing a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He worked fewer hours, and his life became more stable. He regularly attended services at Friday Memorial Baptist. He sold the Navigator—rims and all—to a buyer he found on Craigslist.
Inevitably, though, the sidelines remained. Glover, now 40 years old, continued his work as a self-described “tinkerer.” For small cash payments, he did low-level computer maintenance and repair. He installed software on friends’ computers. He set up wireless routers for the elderly, careful always to protect their networks with passwords. He formatted hard drives and reinstalled frozen operating systems. For twenty bucks, he would jailbreak your iPhone.
The sideline extended to optical disc technology. Xboxes, PlayStations, Wiis, Blu-ray—if your device wasn’t working, you took it to Glover, who would fix it for a small cash fee. Most of the time, somebody had inserted a second disc on top of a first, or maybe the laser had burnt out. The fixes were simple and required no more than a screwdriver and a single replacement part. Meaning, if you had a busted CD player, Dell Glover could fix that for you too.
As technology evolved, such physical relics were left behind. I could relate to Glover’s fondness for obsolete tech—looking to hold on to my music collection, I’d saved every hard drive from every computer I’d ever had. There were nine of them, dating back to 1997, each one double the capacity of the last. The earliest, with just two gigabytes of storage, contained the first few songs I’d ever pirated. Now, across all the drives, I had more than 100,000 mp3s.
It had taken me 17 years to amass all these files, but the rise of cloud computing made the whole thing pointless. My hoarding instincts were fading, curating the library was growing more tiresome by the year, and the older drives didn’t even work with modern systems. Finally I caved, bought a Spotify subscription, and accepted the reality: what I’d thought of as my personal archive was just an agglomeration of slowly demagnetizing junk.
How to dispose of it? I googled “data destruction services” and soon found myself in a warehouse in Queens, carrying the drives in a plastic bag. I was prepared to pay for the service, but the technician told me that, for such a small job, he’d be willing to do it for free. He led me around back, through a massive warehouse shared by a variety of industrial firms, to a small chain-link partition that belonged to his company. Once we arrived, I watched as he donned a pair of safety goggles, then picked up a large pneumatic nail gun. He took a drive from the bag, placed it on a workbench, and systematically blasted a half dozen nails through its metal housing. Then he picked it up and shook it next to his ear, to listen for the telltale rattle of its shattered magnetic core. One by one he repeated this process, until the bag was empty. When he had finished, he gathered the ruined drives in his arms, then threw them in a nearby dumpster, on top of thousands of others.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It took me nearly five years to write this book, and the list of people who assisted me is long. Several professors at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism provided invaluable guidance and support, particularly Sam Freedman, Kelly McMasters, Kristen Lombardi, John Bennet, and the trustees of the Lynton Fellowship. I’d especially like to thank Jim Mintz and Sheila Coronel, who taught the best class I have ever taken.
Reporting is an intrusive process, but my sources have been exceptionally cooperative and kind. In Ilmenau, Karlheinz Brandenburg was an almost embarrassingly gracious host. So too was Bernhard Grill in Erlangen. Matthias Rose and Susanne Rottenberger at Fraunhofer arranged a half-dozen interviews for me, and also helped me rescue my rental car after I backed it into a ditch. At Sony, Doug Morris was generous with his insight and time, as were Julie Swidler and Liz Young. In New York, Patrick Saunders and Simon Tai provided invaluable information and context. Above all, though, I have to thank Dell Glover for sharing his incredible story with the world.
I will never forget the day (my birthday, coincidentally) that my agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, pulled my manuscript out of the slush pile and told me I had something worth publishing. As a writer I was unheralded and unknown, attempting to effect a lateral career transition at the age of 34, with no platform, no name recognition, and no published work. But Chris—possibly suffering from some sort of head trauma—decided that I was going to be his next client, and his decision changed my life. Without his business sense and editorial guidance, this project would have foundered. The reader will, I hope, forgive this treacly Rod Tidwell moment, but he really is that good. So are Will Roberts, Andy Kifer, Rebecca Gardner, and the rest of the team at the Gernert Company.