📸 Photo

UBuyWeRush

The run-down strip mall was plunked down in that vast, flat interior of Los Angeles County that doesn’t make it onto postcards, far from the ocean and so distant from the hills that the squat stucco buildings could be a Hollywood set, the featureless sky behind them a blue screen to be filled in with mountains or trees in post-production.

Chris pulled his car into the trash-strewn parking lot. A marquee at the entrance gave top billing to the Cowboy Country Saloon, and below that it was the usual south Los Angeles mix: a liquor store, a pawnshop, a nail salon. And one more that was less usual: UBuyWeRush—the only retail sign in Los Angeles that was also a handle on CarderPlanet and Shadowcrew.

He walked into the front office, where an empty reception window suggested the sixty-cent-per-square-foot space had once been a medical clinic. On the wall a Mercator projection map of the world bristled with pushpins. Then Chris was greeted warmly by UBuy himself, Cesar Carrenza.

Cesar had come to the underground by a circuitous course. He graduated from the DeVry Institute in 2001 with a degree in computer programming, hoping to get an Internet job. When he couldn’t find one, he decided to try his hand as an independent businessman on the Web.