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volunteered by Dotcom. While Paul Davison said it was a sign of "good faith" and Dotcom should be recognised for his honesty in volunteering the account, Anne Toohey said it showed there was money yet to be found. McNaughton accepted this: "I cannot exclude the possibility there are other bank accounts and other sources of cash available to him at short notice." McNaughton dismissed the application and returned the men to jail.

The matter of the bank account was again raised in a High Court appeal seeking to overturn the bail decision. Justice Raynor Asher was told by Davison the failure to seize the $300,000 showed Dotcom's honesty — it was, after all, not on the list of accounts put forward by the FBI. Again, Toohey warned of the scale of the Megaupload operation and the doubt that existed over the seizure of Dotcom's assets. Asher found: "The scale and complexity of (Dotcom's) financial dealings means that it is far from certain that the FBI's efforts would have uncovered all bank accounts. There remains the possibility there are other accounts in other names."

During the time in which they fought to get free, the four accused men had varying degrees of access to the outside world. Van der Kolk only won approval to call his wife, Asia, and his father three days before he was released from prison on 9 February. Asia visited with a package of books, socks and underwear. Van der Kolk had spent the weeks inside hand-washing the single set of underwear he had, only to have the package delivered the day before he was bailed.

Batato was bailed next, leaving jail on 13 February. Both were confined, electronically, to van der Kolk's palatial hillside home in Orakei. As part of their bail conditions they were forbidden to leave the property and were banned from accessing the internet.

Ortmann, meanwhile, had to spend another weekend in jail. Judge David McNaughton was now hearing bail applications from a new courthouse, the Manukau District Court. The North Shore courts were in the midst of comfortable middle class suburbs while the Manukau courts were in the centre of the poorest parts of Auckland. It took Ortmann from sharing cell space with white collar-type criminals to a completely different class of criminal. Ortmann had already had a day in the cells there. "The people you are put in the cells with — they are not as nice as the North Shore clientele. They are . . . different," he says. He didn't want to return, the only man in the cells with a carefully cleaned and smoothed white shirt, the uniform of the ubergeek. He considered making a remote application by camera, broadcasting his appearance into the courtroom. He decided to make the court appearance in person, determined to appear before Judge McNaughton to make the best impression possible.

The persistence was rewarded with freedom, of a limited sort.

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