It’s one of those secrets of New York City commerce: a little bit dirty, but open anyway, like buying beer underage or hailing a gypsy cab. Everybody either does it or knows somebody who does it, Tavion said. The man wouldn’t disclose his last name because of the less-than-legal nature of his business. “You’d be amazed at our clientele,” he said.”I get everyone. I get the businessmen with the $300 shoes.”

Tavion, 29, is in the business of peddling bootleg DVDs. And he has more ambition and savvy than the typical DVD vendor spreading wares on the sidewalk. Instead, he’s taken the underground economy underground. His business plan runs on the subway’s electric rails, which offer both a reduced risk of arrest and the opportunity to provide unusual customer services.

When he and his partners enter a subway car, they skip the standard sales pitch and whip out a portable DVD player, to assure the customer that that the disc is not defective.

“Most people in New York are skeptics,” Tavion said. “Everyone’s a hustler.”

So when a man shoots his hand up and asks for a copy of the Brad Pitt film “Troy,” Tavion slides his 6-foot frame over, hunkers down, cocks his dreadlock head, and presses Play.

Sold, for $5, to the man getting off at the next stop.

Tavion said he can sell up to $400 worth of products in a solid day’s work. He buys the discs for about $2.50 from distributors, but that’s where his knowledge of the supply chain ends, he said.

He splits the take with his two partners and said he uses most of his share to support his 5-year-old daughter and her mother. He lives with them in Brooklyn.

Tavion also overcomes customer doubts about quality by offering exchanges. He’ll scrawl out his phone number – he’s having business cards printed soon, he said – and meet you at the subway station of your choosing, although he does the bulk of his business on the 1/9/2/3 line between 59th Street and Utica Avenue.

He’ll even make deliveries, up to seven a day – which is where Tavion sees his future. That would cut the police out of the equation almost entirely.

As it is, he’s prey for the police, but he turns his choice of turf to his advantage. When he enters a subway car, he said, he uses those first few seconds to scan it for undercover cops, who are more obvious than they think.

They tend to disguise themselves as construction workers, and their clothes are worn but their shoes are too new. Or their badges, hidden underneath their clothes, are hanging from a telltale cord visible around their necks. But the most obvious identifier is the glare.

“With the NYPD, there’s a certain level of arrogance, a certain demeanor,” Tavion said. “Anybody else, if you stare at them, they look away after a few seconds, but the NYPD, they just stare back.”

Tavion has been nabbed, but he was dismissed with a warning and a flash of that hidden badge. That cop probably had a bigger game going on, the entrepreneur said.

“He should consider himself lucky that he ran into a cop who’s doing something else,” Detective Walter Burns, a spokesman for the Police Department, said. The NYPD has cops assigned to the bootleg beat, Mr. Burns said, but if an officer is on another assignment, he might not want to blow his cover on Tavion.

Tavion knows this, and works it.

“To them it’s minor, it’s petty,” he said. “It’s not worth going through the paperwork.”

And given the excesses of the entertainment world, Tavion is not uncomfortable being a bit of an outlaw.

“I take $300 or $400 off a multi-billion-dollar business,” he said. “That’s not even a scratch, not even a bottle of their shampoo.”

That rationalization couldn’t be more specious, a deputy director of anti-piracy operations for the American Motion Picture Association of America, Bill Shannon, told The New York Sun.

Movies might be a multibillion-dollar business, he said, but piracy inflicts a multi-billion-dollar hit. The industry loses $3 billion annually worldwide to piracy, including $300 million in America, Mr. Shannon said.

“It’s an enormous business, but it’s made up a lot of little people, projectionists and popcorn makers, whose jobs are jeopardized by piracy,” he said.

Tavion himself said he doesn’t “peddle poisons.”

“I can’t throw stones. It’s not like I’m legal. But at stuff like that, I draw the line.”