by Stephen Witt
The plant implemented a new regime of stringent antitheft measures. Driving these changes was Steve Van Buren, who managed plant security. Van Buren had worked at the plant since 1996 and had been pushing for better security since before the Universal merger. He was aware of the plant’s reputation for leaking and determined to fix it. His professional reputation was on the line, and the stakes were now higher than before.
Van Buren began hosting regular meetings with the plant’s employees. In these meetings he told them about something called the “crime triangle.” According to this behavioral theory, criminal activity resulted from a combination of three factors: desire, time, and opportunity. You needed all three factors for a crime to occur. Van Buren could not mold people’s desires, and he was not in charge of their time. So, he explained, the best way for him to reduce crime was to limit opportunity.
This was difficult to accomplish. The discs themselves were small and could easily be hidden in loose clothing. Their thin aluminum cores didn’t contain enough metal to set off a walk-through detector, and Van Buren didn’t want to humiliate the employees with invasive pat-downs. After contacting a number of metal detector manufacturers, he hit upon a solution: a specialized handheld wand that could detect even trace amounts of aluminum. But wanding was a time-consuming process, so Van Buren implemented a randomized system. Inspired by customs procedures, each employee was now required to swipe a magnetized identification card upon leaving the plant. Four out of five times, the card set off the green light and the employee was permitted to exit. One out of five, the card set off the red light and the employee was made to stand aside as a private security guard ran the wand around his torso and up and down his limbs.
Van Buren took other steps to cut the leg of the triangle. He believed in the importance of what he called a “good clear fence line,” and ordered the underbrush removed from the chain-link fence around the plant. He had closed-circuit TV cameras installed on the building’s exterior walls. He ordered a second chain-link fence to be installed around the plant’s parking lots, and created a whitelist for permitted vehicles. Approved cars were now required to install a bar code on their dashboards, and this was scanned by security on entrance. His dedication to the job even took him past the plant’s perimeter. Tipped off by employees to an illicit trade in the plant’s prerelease material, Van Buren began to frequent the nearby flea markets in search of contraband. Sure enough, he found it, in a roadside flea market off U.S. Route 321, a few miles east of the plant. The same guys who had once sold leaked discs to Glover now sold to an undercover Van Buren, and in time this led to several arrests.
And yet somehow a quiet trade in smuggled discs continued. Glover didn’t know the exact methods, but certain temporary employees were still able to get the discs past Van Buren’s security regime. One of them had even managed to sneak out an entire manufacturing spindle of 300 discs, and was selling these piecemeal for five bucks a pop. This trade was a closed circuit, and only select employees were admitted into the cabal. Most were temps, with little to lose, and some had criminal backgrounds. They were not, as a rule, familiar with computers. Glover was different from them—a permanent employee with a virgin rap sheet and a penchant for technology. But he also had a reputation as a roughrider, and he was close to the codes of the street. He knew how to keep his mouth shut, and he was welcomed as a customer.
Dockery was not. Perhaps he was seen as too talkative, or maybe simply too square. Whatever the case, he now had to rely on Glover for access. In return, he offered to cut Glover in on the mysterious current of prerelease Internet media he had somehow tapped. But the terms of this relationship were uneven, and as Dockery began to pester him for more and more titles, Glover became annoyed. Finally, one day in late 1999, he confronted his friend.
Look, I’m tired of sticking my neck out for you, said Glover. What is this all about? Why do you want this stuff so badly? And where are you getting all these movies from?
Come over to my house tonight, said Dockery. I’ll explain.
In front of the computer that evening, Dockery outlined the basics of the #warez underworld. For the past year or so, he said, he’d been uploading prerelease leaks from the plant to a shadowy network of online enthusiasts. Although chat channels like #mp3 and #warez looked chaotic, they actually relied on a high-level of structure that was kept hidden from public view. This was the Scene, and Dockery, on IRC, had joined one of its most elite groups: Rabid Neurosis.
They called it RNS for short. The group had formed a few weeks after Compress ’Da Audio, the pioneering mp3 releasing group. Within months they had eclipsed the originals, and quickly competed them out of existence. Instead of pirating individual songs, RNS was pirating whole albums, and bringing the same elite “zero-day” mentality from software to music. The goal was to beat the official release date wherever possible, and that meant a campaign of infiltration against the music majors.
The founders of RNS had gone by the handles “NOFX” and “Bonethug,” although Dockery never interacted with these two. They dated back to the distant mists of 1996, as might be inferred by the musical acts their screen names referred to. By the time Dockery had joined, in 1998, under the handle “StJames,” leadership had passed to a figure named “Havoc.”
Havoc was a legend in Scene circles. He worked at a commercial radio station somewhere in Canada. He had access. Although he never revealed his real name, he would sometimes share backstage pictures of himself at concerts, his arms draped around the shoulders of famous musicians. For a while he had been the group’s best asset, sourcing dozens of leaks, often directly from the unsuspecting hands of the artists themselves. But then, in early 1999, Havoc abruptly stepped away. He never gave a reason why.
After some discussion, leadership passed to another member, who went by the name of “Al_Capone.” Capone had discovered the Scene at the age of thirteen, after being banned from AOL for trolling. He’d established himself in RNS by making online friends in Europe, then arbitraging offset transatlantic launch dates to source prerelease albums. But his reign at the top was short. Capone was undisciplined, and under his leadership, the group ballooned in membership to more than a hundred members, violating basic principles of Scene security. After a few tumultuous months, Capone gave up his duties, claiming that he was “too busy” to lead the group. (In reality, he’d just turned seventeen, and was moving out of his parents’ house.)
The mantle finally passed to a permanent presence. This was “Kali,” who was selected through what amounted to an executive search committee. Kali had not previously been an especially visible member of the group. Unlike Havoc, he did not have insider access. But, unlike Capone, he never claimed to. What he did have was Scene cred. For years Kali had been a member of another Scene group, a games-cracking crew named Fairlight, and his exploits there were celebrated. Also, he was old enough to vote.
Kali’s leadership brought a kind of military discipline to the group. He was a natural spymaster, a master of surveillance and infiltration, the Karla of music piracy. He read Billboard like a racing form, and used it to untangle the confusing web of corporate acquisitions and pressing agreements that determined what CDs would be manufactured, where, and when. Once this map of the distribution channels was charted, he began an aggressive campaign of recruitment, patiently building a network of moles that would over the next eight years manage to burrow into the supply chains of every major music label.
Dockery—known to him only as St. James—was his first big break. They’d been in a chat channel together and Dockery had started bragging about an unreleased CD. Kali, skeptical, had asked him for proof, so Dockery had sent him a track. Kali, recognizing the importance of what he’d found, immediately recruited him into the group. At first a peripheral player, following the Universal merger Dockery had become RNS’ single best source. But now, thanks to the new security regime, his access had dried up, and he was proposing to pass the responsibilities on to Glover.
Dell was in an unusual position. With his street cred and his technical expertise, he was one of the few people in the world capable of securing the trust of both low-level physical smugglers and top-level online pirates. RNS invites were handed out rarely, and typically on a probationary basis, but, if Glover wanted, Dockery could arrange to have Kali fast-track him into the group this same day.
Glover hesitated: what was in it for him?
Dockery explained: Glover needed Kali just as much as Kali needed Glover. As head of RNS, Kali was the gatekeeper to the distributed archive of secret “topsite” servers that formed the backbone of the Scene. These ultra-fast servers contained terabytes of pirated media of every form. Movies, games, TV shows, books, pornography, software, fonts—pretty much anything with a copyright was there for download. The encrypted Scene servers were well hidden, access was password protected, and logons were permitted only from a whitelist of preapproved Internet addresses. All logging software on them was disabled so as not to leave a trail. The Scene controlled its own inventory as well as Universal did—maybe better.
Access to this topsite “darknet” was granted exclusively on a quid pro quo basis. To get in, you had to contribute pirated material of your own. And not just some old Shania Twain CD you found lying in your sock drawer; it had to be something new, something in high demand. The lure of the darknet—the promise of the digital library—was enough to corrupt. Somewhere out there were Glover’s counterparts: guys in the movie business, guys who worked for game companies, guys who worked in software design. (They were almost all guys.) Somewhere out there were software testers, DVD screeners, and warehouse workers. Somewhere out there, in every supply chain, someone like Glover was leaking too. The media on the topsite servers was available weeks before it could be found in stores, or even elsewhere on the Internet. The spread of files from these servers was carefully monitored and controlled; leaking to the Scene was rewarded, but leaking from the Scene was taboo. The files took a long time to migrate to the chat channels and the Web. Sometimes they never left the closed economy of the Scene at all.
If Glover was willing to upload smuggled CDs from the plant to Kali, he’d never have to pay for media again. He could get free copies of AutoCAD software that retailed for thousands of dollars. He could hear the new Outkast album weeks before anyone else. He could play Madden Football on his PlayStation a month before it was available in stores. And he could get the same access to prerelease movies that had allowed Dockery to beat him as a bootlegger. How did that sound?
Glover decided that sounded pretty good. So Dockery arranged a chat room session between Glover and Kali, and the two exchanged cell phone numbers.
Their first call was awkward. Glover, never much for conversation to begin with, mostly just listened. Kali spoke quickly and animatedly, in a strange patois of geek-speak, California mellow, and borrowed slang from West Coast rap: “Could you, like, FXP me the file, dogg?” Kali loved computers, but he also loved hip-hop. He knew its history and culture and could rhyme along with his favorite rappers. He knew all the beefs, all the disses, and all the details of the internecine label feuds. And he also knew that, in the aftermath of the murders of Biggie and Tupac, those feuds were dying down and the labels were consolidating. Death Row, Bad Boy, Cash Money, and Aftermath were all going corporate. In his relentless quest for zero-day leaks, Kali tracked these pressing and distribution deals carefully, and his research kept bringing him back to Universal. But without consistent access inside that company, rival release crews had been beating him. Glover was his ticket in.
The two hashed out the details of their partnership. Kali would track release dates of upcoming albums online and alert Glover to the material he was interested in. Glover, through his associates, would arrange for the CDs to be smuggled out of the plant. From his home computer, Glover would then rip the leaked CDs to mp3 format and transmit them via encrypted channels to Kali’s personal server. Kali would then package the mp3 files and release them according to the Scene’s exacting technical standards. In return for all this, Kali would send Glover invites to the secret topsites.
Glover had tried to clean up his act. He had given up on the guns and the bikes and the ferocious dogs. He had worked hard at several jobs, and tried to be a family man, even. But then he joined the Scene, and left one outlaw subculture for another.
CHAPTER 9
After Universal consumed PolyGram, the combined entity supplanted Warner as the dominant player in music. In the 12 months following the merger Universal Music Group pulled in more than six billion dollars in revenue, the bulk of this from the sale of compact discs. The merger brought international presence. The key markets were North America and Europe. China was potentially huge, as were Russia, India, and Brazil, but, even though representatives from those countries had pledged to respect U.S. copyright law, enforcement on the street was effectively nil. As Alan Greenspan had correctly observed, selling intellectual property meant suppressing unauthorized products with the same vigor that you created legitimate goods. Where the political will to do this did not exist, neither could a legitimate market. Still, the overall picture was fantastic. Universal was the largest music company in the world, controlling one quarter of the global market.
Morris, at the top, had a billion-dollar budget to sign and develop acts, and more than 10,000 employees under his command. He also inherited a disorderly roster of two dozen separate labels that the successive waves of mergers had picked up over the years. From the moment the deal with PolyGram closed, he set about reorganizing the chain of command. Corporate organization was viewed by all who worked for him as one of Morris’ key strengths. He knew how to motivate people, and he knew how to get the most out of them. He relied on standard business techniques like stretch revenue targets and incentivized contracts, and he also knew how to build and retain a successful management team. But there was another aspect he relied on, one that his friend Jimmy Iovine understood was a key driver for successful artists and businesspeople alike: fear.
Iovine had worked with some of the most talented musicians of his era, and he’d noticed that even established acts tended to create their best work while suffering under the weight of crippling artistic insecurity. This was doubly true for the rappers, whose external brashness and machismo often masked deep-seated vulnerabilities and sometimes even great personal shyness. Those insecurities the artists felt in the studio were mirrored by the insecurities the label heads felt in the boardroom. Music executives spent their lives looking over their shoulders, fending off the advances of opportunistic rivals plotting to poach their big acts.
Morris encouraged this fear. He had a Darwinian approach to business and he wanted his lieutenants to compete against one another directly. Although the labels under the Universal umbrella were not permitted to openly engage in bidding wars for artists, conspiratorial dealings flourished, and there was a sense within the organization that no one was safe, not even favorites like Iovine. Bolted onto the PolyGram acquisition that year had come a stake in Def Jam Recordings. The pioneering rap label had looked moribund just a few years earlier, but had been revived under the leadership of Lyor Cohen, a frothy, hard-charging scalphunter whose approach to dealmaking made even Doug and Jimmy look civilized. Cohen and Iovine immediately started feuding cross-country, cutting backroom deals to steal each other’s acts. Iovine went after Sisqo; Cohen went after Limp Bizkit. (As ever, sales were more important than artistic durability.) The rivalry between Def Jam and Interscope looked real—it was real—but the spoils of victory all went to the same place, and when you looked up from the arena to the skybox, you saw Morris applauding.
The Def Jam stake brought someone else, too. His real name was Shawn Corey Carter, but he was better known by his rap handle, Jay-Z. Even before the merger, Carter had been the label’s biggest act, but Universal’s marketing investments helped turn him into an international superstar. In early 2000 they’d scored a massive crossover hit with “Big Pimpin’,�
�� a terrific summer jam Carter had developed with the producer Timbaland and the Texas rap duo UGK. The song represented both the best and the worst the genre had to offer. The production was superb, but the song’s hook had been lifted from a film score by Egyptian composer Baligh Hamdi, whose family would in later years allege that the sample had never been cleared. The flow was incredible, but the lyrics celebrated in plain language the forcing of women into sexual slavery. The song was addictive, sure, but intensely misogynistic, and in later years a kinder, gentler Carter would himself disown it. Then again, as Doug Morris understood better than anyone, it was exactly these transgressions that made “Big Pimpin’” irresistible.
Morris really liked Carter. He had swagger, and star presence, and his nimble delivery made other rappers sound clumsy. Like Morris, Carter had an ear for hits, but also a mind for business, cultivated by his past participation in the criminal narcotics trade. He was the CEO of his own music label and spent as much time developing and promoting other acts as he did his own. He saw himself not just as a rapper but ultimately as the head of a diversified business empire. And, like Alan Greenspan, Carter understood the importance of suppressing the bootleggers. Late in 1999, when he suspected a rival record producer of leaking his new album to the street a month before it was due in stores, Carter had confronted him on the floor of a nightclub and stabbed him.
