As a college student in the 1980s in Boise, Idaho, Eric Schrader started buying up Levi's

501 genes, tons of them.

I would buy, I don't know, 1500 to 2000 genes a month, just at a retail store.

Eric's college roommate had clued him in on an opportunity to sell genes on the European

Black market.

All he had to do was buy some genes, stuff them in envelopes, and ship them to people in

West Germany, who could then resell them to East Germans at a major markup.

The operation was a lot more profitable than a library study job.

I had one of those.

Eric was easily quadrupling his money, but the guys he sold to in West Germany were the

ones really making a killing.

One of them told him he once got,

Levi's tried to crack down on this kind of thing.

Eric remembers the company limited the number of genes one person could buy at any one time.

But that didn't do much.

I would just pay people outside of the store to go in and buy me four to six genes, however

many they would let you buy at a time.

By the 90s, Levi's had even gotten a law passed in Europe that said only Levi's the brand

could ship new pairs of its genes overseas.

And so then we started pulling the paper tags off the new genes and putting them in an

envelope and then we put the new genes in a bail of other clothes, all folded up and

then we'd ship the huge clothes, but they were really new genes.

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