Inside a Fraternity’s Multimillion-Dollar Drug Ring with the Journalist Who Uncovered It

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The abuse of prescription drugs on college campuses has skyrocketed in the last 10 years—and by extension, so too has the intricate ecosystem of college-aged dealers and distribution networks. So today, we’re covering a multimillion-dollar fraternity drug ring scandal at the College of Charleston with the investigative journalist, Max Marshall, who covered it in his book, Among the Bros. We talk about power, privilege, and the near-total lack of consequences in this story — and how it serves as a bit of an allegory for the real world.

Need a primer on the various names involved in this story?

• Mikey Schmidt, the main drug plug for the fraternity with connections to cartels in Atlanta, and the contact for the fraternity’s distribution networks and runners

• Rob Liljeberg, a former Eagle Scout who went on to become the president of the Kappa Alpha fraternity

• Zach Kligman, also known as the “Charleston Kingpin,” who would help traffic the drugs into Charleston

• Patrick Moffly, a socialite, beloved party boy, and son of a big-time real estate developer and a Congressional candidate. Moffly helped create and sell the drugs sold through the fraternity.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• “RushTok” phenomenon; Alabama Rush TikTok video

• “The power of the 2” from Cornell University

• Average membership dues at University of Alabama

• Among the Bros from our guest, Max Marshall

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Max Marshall:

There’s a pretty central question in a book like this, right? Why would guys with a social safety net that’s so plush, it’s basically a hammock. Why would they deal anti-anxiety tranquilizers at scale? The sort of general reason you learn people deal drugs. If you take a criminology class or something, it’s like, oh, rational choice theory. If you’re from a community where you don’t have a chance to get a job the normal way, your best economic option might be dealing drugs. But that’s not the case for these guys at all, right? Some of them have trust funds. All of them had pretty juicy allowances. And I think the answer both for why deal and even more so why blackout all the time is it is kind of a sign of prestige to show how much you can get away with. What guys would tell me in this book is basically, yeah, I’m the only one who can black out on a Tuesday and miss class on a Wednesday, get arrested on a Thursday, go out again on a Friday, and then that weekend be on a call with my family to set up a really great internship for the summer. There is absolute prestige in being that guy.

Katie:

In 2021, a new trend hit TikTok. It was known as “RushTok” and it chronicled the cutthroat, preppy world of sorority rush at the University of Alabama. I took an interest in this unfolding phenomenon for one simple reason: I used to be in a sorority at the University of Alabama and watching videos of things like door songs, which is this tradition that involves a lot of regrettable scream singing, and the mutual posturing of active members and potential new members alike left me experiencing something like nostalgia mixed with PTSD…

Katie:

With the benefit of hindsight, I can now see things about this experience that my 18-year-old self couldn’t. The palatial sorority and fraternity houses like the $13 million Phi Mu mansion loom like monuments to tradition and prestige dotting the periphery of the football stadium in down University Boulevard, the main drag that leads to campus. Membership is expensive, if not exclusive. 92% of sorority hopefuls receive bids and each sorority pledge class numbers in the hundreds. So yeah, I am intimately familiar with the inside of the largest Greek system in the United States, which is why it’s all the more surprising that the story we’re going to tell you today was so shocking to me. Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show, Rich Coeds. I’m your host, Katie Gatti Tassin, and today we are talking about a multimillion dollar criminal drug ring run out of a southern fraternity house.

But first, some background. According to Cornell University, roughly 2% of the US population is or was involved in Greek life. Now it doesn’t seem like much does it, but consider the fact that four in five Fortune 500 executives, nearly nine in 10 Supreme Court justices and three in four US senators were in fraternities. Not to mention all but four US presidents. Cornell Unironically dub this the power of the 2%. They write, “Fraternities have grown to symbolize leadership, independence, scholastic achievement and service to their various campuses and communities.” Yeah, I don’t know about the fraternities at Cornell, but leadership, independence and scholastic achievement would not be the first three words that I would use to describe my fellow Greek men at Alabama. But the convoluted causation correlation of this 2% is probably obvious. Historically, displaying exemplary character traits or extreme intellect were not. The way that you gained access to this hallowed 2%, you had to know someone and you had to pay.

The average cost today of membership dues at Alabama, for example, is around $15,000 per year if you include room and board to live in the house. And if you opt to live off campus, membership dues alone will run you an average of $7,200 per year. Though this does include your meal plan. So I guess it’s still less than I spend on food now, which is sad.

Regardless, the wealth and prestige of these systems has captivated TikTok, accumulating billions of views, and even a disappointing HBO Max documentary that promised to blow open the machine. An underground group with ties to corrupt Alabama state politics, puppeteering campus politics in order to install their fraternity men of choice into key positions in student government…

Katie:

But instead delivered unwelcome and confusing vignettes about the director’s alopecia. Seriously, look it up. But my guest today is the bestselling author of Among the Bros, a fraternity crime story, Max Marshall. Max just so happened to go to high school with my husband and he’s been working on this story for as long as we’ve been friends. His reporting spans five arduous years of trips to the idyllic southern landscape of College of Charleston in South Carolina and all the surrounding settings in the American South where his reporting led him. Max has written some unbelievable pieces for Texas monthly, GQ, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, the New York Times, but his first book, this story is so unbelievable, so flagrant in its lawlessness and privilege that it reads like fiction.

The New York Times book review called it a “page-turning triumph in which the pack mentality ventures into darker more dangerous waters exposing a rigged system of money and power that is alive and well in the American South.” The boys at the center were “protected by wealthy parents, the best lawyers, and a boys will be boys culture. They were emboldened to test the boundaries of their privilege and they came out with barely a scratch,” writes The Guardian. And Max is joining me today to tell that story, so I hope we get on a true crime top chart. We’ll get into that conversation after a quick break.

With that Max, welcome to The Money with Katie Show. Thank you for agreeing to share your reporting with our audience. You are an investigative journalist. When you set foot on the College of Charleston for the first time in 2018, what were you expecting to find? What brought you there?

Max Marshall:

I’m the same age as basically all the guys in this book. So I was in college from 2012 to 2016, and basically all the guys in this book, I was in a fraternity and definitely like everyone in the book, I saw a lot of Xanax in college. I was pretty surprised how much I saw, I kind of thought of it beforehand as something that a parent might take on, I don’t know, like a flight to Europe or something, but it’s actually an incredibly common party drug. And I had friends who were dealing friends who were using friends who were dropping out. I even knew some people were making their own Xanax pills. And basically all I wanted to do was write about Xanax and fraternities. And so I did the very investigative journalist thing of Googling Xanax bust fraternity, and the first result was this article about the College of Charleston and these guys that got caught with it said 44,000 Xanax pills, which to me sounded like a lot. But then I started talking to this defense lawyer who let it slip that they had actually confiscated closer to 3 million pills and never publicized it. But yeah, it really started with that very simple thing about why are so many kids our age blacking out on anti-anxiety tranquilizers.

Katie:

Okay, so this is a good way to set the stage. So you were going there to find what you thought was going to be a relatively small scale Xanax drug ring operation operating out of a fraternity or maybe a couple fraternities?

Max Marshall:

Yeah, exactly.

Katie:

Is that what you found?

Max Marshall:

Ultimately it was much bigger than just a single ring. I think you could almost call it like an open market. Some guys compared it to Mary Kay, or Cutco, Herbalife, a multilevel marketing scheme. Some people use the word pyramid scheme.

Katie:

Interesting. So it sounds like you found that things were maybe far more complex than you had originally assumed, but quickly let’s unpack the drug at the center a little because it’s unique it a way. Most people are familiar with the drinking culture inside of fraternities, but you quoted a Total Frat Move article in your book that said, Greek life today makes Animal House look like a Pixar movie. And what I think most people would be surprised to know is how prevalent this prescription drug use is. You even alluded to the fact that you kind of thought about Xanax like something a suburban mom might take on a flight to Europe, not a party drug. So can you speak a little bit more to the drug that was at the center of your reporting and what you found?

Max Marshall:

Sure. I mean, yeah, I think it is interesting, right? If you think of the sort of it drug for different generations for our aunts and uncles in the sixties it might be weed or acid. For our parents in the eighties it might be cocaine. And in the nineties, especially in the UK, ecstasy was huge. I do think there’s something very telling that the sort of big drug of our times or one of the biggest drugs of our times is an anti-anxiety tranquilizer designed for panic attacks and the numbers are crazy.

In the same amount of time over the last 20 years that opiate overdoses have gone up, I want to say 8X,  Xanax overdoses have gone up 10X. So it’s an even faster increase and something like 40% of all opiate overdoses have a Xanax on board. Meaning kind of what scientists are saying now is we’re not in an opiate crisis, we’re in a polypharmacy crisis or a polydrug crisis because what our generation does more than any other generation before it is mix and match drugs into all these kind of crazy combinations.

And so the first student who described this to me, I met him at this beer garden. He had played lacrosse at College of Charleston on the club team, and he brought his leather briefcase from work and he was describing to me the idea of the sidecar. So the sidecar is basically the little mini rig on the side of a motorcycle in a cartoon or I guess in real life that used to combine. So he was like, oh yeah, Xanax is an amazing sidecar. So you wake up and you’re drinking a shower beer, you’re hungover, but you’re hangover so bad. So you’ll mix it with a Xanax, but then you’re a little sleepy, so you do a gator tail of coke. So now you’re awake and you got a nice balance going on. Of course, you’re smoking weed all day. You go to the darty, you start to slow down after four or five more beers, so a few more lines of cocaine, all of a sudden paranoia kicks in, you’re like, oh my God, I’m freaking out.

So then of course, another Xanax kind of even it all out and it just sort of spins and spins. And then he was describing the idea of a QB sneak to me, which he described as a roofie that you want to be a part of. And it was the idea of breaking off a QB, a quarter bar of Xanax. And QB Sneak obviously is a football term, but it’s like sneaking a QB in someone else’s beer and they blackout.

So he told me all that and then I turned off my recorder and the interview ended and he asked if I had 15 more minutes and I said, sure. And he took out his leather folio and opened it and started pitching me on why he should be my life insurance broker and do my financial planning, which is a nice Money with Katie tie-in. But all that’s to say is this culture is so prevalent of just sort of mixing and matching, combining things that something like polypharmacy feels like a big word, but ultimately it’s just kind of how people our age, you get a nice little balance going, and I think it’s in some cases so common that you tell a story like that and then pit someone on doing their life insurance.

Katie:

Oh my gosh. So what you found was not just that Xanax was very prevalent, but that there were all sorts of drugs and really this combination of drugs that was prevalent and that it wasn’t something that was happening behind closed doors. It was very out in the open. It was very common. This person very casually described it to you and then pitched you on becoming your financial planner. So obviously this person did not think what he was telling you was all that unusual or all that upsetting, right?

Max Marshall:

Exactly. Yeah.

Katie:

Okay, cool. So I think we’re up to speed on the tranquilizer of it all, but this story isn’t really about drugs as much as it is about people and their privilege. The main character of your story, so to speak, is a kid named Mikey Schmidt. So tell me more about Mikey. How did Mikey end up on your radar?

Max Marshall:

Mikey, when he showed up to CFC, which is College of Charleston in 2013, he had this incredible confidence about him. He had a fake ID business, which is always a good way to make friends freshman year, and he joined Kappa Alpha order, which is sort of like the southern good old boy fraternity, but dealt weed, had a little too much fun, dropped out at her freshman year, entered the Atlanta nightlife as a valet driver, ended up meeting a lot of big time Atlanta rappers, and within a year was bringing cartel grade cocaine from Atlanta to fraternity houses around the south. And then picking up this Xanax that I was just talking about in Charleston and taking that back to all these fraternity guys and back into the Atlanta rap scene and kind of developed this cycle that made him very wealthy very quickly.

Katie:

Oh my goodness. Did he come from money? It sounds like he started to generate quite a bit of money through these extracurricular activities, but was his family wealthy?

Max Marshall:

So yeah, he was raised by a single mom for a lot of his life, and then he had a stepdad, and I think in some ways it was a pretty classic middle-class existence. His granddad had worked for IBM and done pretty well. But compared to kids at the College of Charleston, and this is something that a lot of people don’t realize about a school like the College of Charleston, but you have sort of in-state middle class working class kids from South Carolina, but also it was named the most beautiful campus in America. It was also named by Travel + Leisure, the most beautiful city in America. The campus is where they filmed The Notebook. And so it attracts these kids from Greenwich, Connecticut, Westchester, really wealthy New England suburbs, and you have Rockefellers, Rothchilds, a lot of kids with black cards, kids flying private, and a lot of kids going out six or seven nights a week and getting bottle service. And only really, really wealthy kids can afford to do that while they’re in college. And I think for a lot of kids who might only be getting say $500 a month from their parents, which still in the grand scheme of things is a lot, but compared to kids with a black card with no limit, you have to find some way to fill the gap.

Katie:

You mentioned that Mikey joined a fraternity known as Kappa Alpha Order or KA for short, and you discovered some things over the course of your reporting about the origins of KA that seemed to take you by surprise. Can you elaborate?

Max Marshall:

Sure. So I mean KA is known as a predominantly southern fraternity. The difference between say, Kappa Sig at UT and USC, there might be no commonalities at all besides the fact that they’re both fraternities, but KA is known kind of everywhere as being pretty southern. For a long time they didn’t allow member chapters north of the Mason Dixon line, and even now their spiritual founder is what they call him, is Robert E. Lee. And so that’s something we all knew going to college, but it’s not something you really talk about that much. It’s kind of a joke. Certainly you don’t know the full history of it going in, but when I was looking into the history of the College of Charleston Kappa Alpha order, I found basically the guy who founded it in 1903, he gave this speech about how he called it KA and KK, and he was saying basically in the ashes of the Civil War in 1865, 2 organizations were founded at the same time with the same mission of sort of upholding the values of the Confederacy. And one was Kappa Alpha Order, the other was KKK.

You go a little deeper into the sort of literature of Kappa Alpha Order. There’s actually a lot of this stuff, and especially in the 1920s, you go through their alumni magazine or every month, there was a thing about how they sort of shared a mission with the Ku Klux Klan, how they saw themselves as sort of the education wing as opposed to the, I guess, violent wing. And yeah, the guy who wrote Birth of A Nation was KA alum and they’re very proud of that. And the way it plays out now is mostly the fact that up until a few years ago, people would wear Confederate grays to a gala called Old South and the girls would wear plantation uniforms. It’s like been in the news in some sense. I guess it’s not surprising, but I think just how open they were about it in the alumni magazine a hundred years ago, it was kind of like, oh, wow.

Katie:

So it sounds like some of the more maybe implicit assumptions that people have about the predominantly wealthy white culture of Greek life was made a little more explicit in some of these founding documents and alumni journals or magazines…

Max Marshall:

It’s not just the sort of literature around race. If you look at the history of Greek life and fraternities specifically, it’s always been a way of creating a separate campus for the elite in the 1800s. Up until the mid-1800s, they didn’t really need fraternities because only elite students went to university. And then all of a sudden in the 1800s, you started to have these sort of farm kids show up to college to learn to be ministers, and all the guys from the Greenwich, Connecticut equivalent, the New York City kids or whoever it was, they’re like, well, we don’t want to drink with the Farm Boy ministers, so how are we going to start our own separate campus? And it’s kind of continued to whittle down. The more and more people who get invited to come to American universities, the more exclusive the Greek life system becomes, and you really can see the amount of wealth in the system is wild. It’s 75% of all donations given to universities are Greek life alumni, and that’s 2% of the population. So it’s basically the way the elite drinks together, hazes each other, networks with each other, has fun together and then helps each other for the rest of there our lives.

Katie:

We’ll get right back to it after a quick break.

It wasn’t just Mikey though, right? Mikey was in a fraternity with these other guys. Yeah. So can you tee up the other cast of characters that you took interest in? If this story were the Sopranos, and Mikey is Tony, who are the other capos that are calling the shots here?

Max Marshall:

Sure. So when Mikey shows up to the College of Charleston, the guy who sort of ushered him into KA was this guy Rob Liljeberg, who much more traditional background than Mikey who had a single mother and was getting in trouble his whole life. This guy was like an Eagle Scout altar boy who I think up until he joined KA thought that was going to be his way of socializing, was meeting people through the Catholic Students Association and then realized at CFC, that doesn’t go a very long way. And Rob went on to be president of KA and be a very central figure in the strong ring.

We also have the guys in SAE, which is kind of considered the best fraternity at College of Charleston, wealthier guys from the northeast and old southern families. They had their own drug ring. There’s this kind of local bodybuilder named Ben Nauss who was pretty big in SAE. And then you have Zach Kligman, who is a Bassnectar-loving long boarder whose dad ran a big gag gift shop in Myrtle Beach who was really connecting a lot of these dots, and he was known as the Charleston Kingpin bringing in really millions of Xanax pills into Charleston. And then Patrick Moffly is a socialite, very beloved kind of party boy. His dad is a big time real estate developer. His mom ran for Congress. He grew up on this horse farm on Paradise Island, it’s literally called.

Katie:

So we have Mikey, who’s our main character, who was the main cocaine plug for the fraternity who had these cartel connections and Atlanta and was orchestrating some of the distribution network in the runners. And as we saw from his days dealing weed at a young age had this sort of elicit entrepreneurial spirit. Then we have Rob, who’s the KA who kind of brings Mikey into that KA fold who was formerly, you referenced him as an altar boy, Eagle Scout. I think the audience can probably picture a little bit more about what Rob was all about, his involvement here. And you have Zach, who was the, I think you called him the Charleston Kingpin.

Max Marshall:

Yeah, that’s what others called him,

Katie:

Right. He was the person that in many cases was responsible for bringing in or maybe had those external connections to get a lot of the drugs into Charleston. Then you had Patrick Moffly who was this beloved party boy. So we’ve kind of got this cast of characters here, and the sense that I’m getting is that this was a pretty sophisticated operation and it involved not only a wide network of these boys, but some of that maybe more typical drug related territorial turf war style conflict too. So can you detail their supply chain for us?

Max Marshall:

Ultimately, it was this pretty complicated drug network where guys were getting unpressed alprazolam powder. So that’s the active ingredient in Xanax, shipped from southern China, shipping it through Canada. This guy in Canada was hiding the powder inside printer cartridges, shipping the printer cartridges to beach houses outside Charleston. And these guys would rent a beach house a month and they had an industrial pill press inside the beach house, and they could make hundreds of thousands of pills a month. They’re wearing hazmat suits, the pill presses kick up all this dust everywhere, and they’d have to use an industrial vacuum. And then they were doing a few things. They would empty out Skittles bags and then fill the Skittles bags with the Xanax, the fake Xanax, and then heat seal it, and then send that out again on the dark web for a really nice profit. But also they’re using the fraternity system specifically, often fraternity pledges to sort of drive this stuff to a lot of the biggest fraternities around the south.

And ultimately it was, yeah, multimillion dollar drug network. And something a few fraternity dealers told me is you really couldn’t dream up a better system for dealing drugs at scale than a fraternity house on the dealer side. I mean, one, you have pledges, right? So you have these 18-year-old kids who aren’t allowed to ask any questions, have to do exactly what you tell them, would much rather be moving an unmarked package across state lines than probably having to be doing planks on top of bottle caps or getting paddled or whatever it is. And so you just basically have this free labor of guys who will do whatever you want, but then on the demand side, it’s even better. You show up to these houses and there might be 40 customers waiting for you all at once in this big mansion, and a lot of them have money from their parents.

Most of them grew up in sheltered backgrounds and have no idea how much an eighth of anything should cost. All of them would much rather do business with their boys than anyone else. And the only policeman nearby is a campus cop on a segue with a flashlight, Paul Blart style. Guys would tell me, oh yeah, I could move $10,000 of product in an hour without really getting up. I would just stand in the fraternity library, which usually has notebooks and a leather sofa. People just come in and you just get it done in an hour, and then you go to another house on frat row and you can just knock these out very quickly. These guys had quite a system where they would either themselves or they would send pledges just to Oxford and they would do all the fraternities at Ole Miss, and then they would go to Athens and do all the fraternities at Georgia, and then they could just do a bunch of these, and then some of those guys would then deal again and again and again, and a pill that might start at 2 cents a pill could end up at, if you find a real mark who doesn’t know what anything should cost, might pay $10 for a Xanax pill.

And so the margins are just wild and obviously completely unregulated. And so they really were able to move millions of pills around the fraternity system, and you would talk to guys at Oxford or UGA or whatever, and they’ll go, yeah, oh yeah, we all know this starts in Charleston, but then it just trickles down everywhere and it’s this giant open market.

Katie:

Wow, that sounds pretty flagrant. Well, I assume that moving millions of illicit drugs can get you into some legal trouble.

Max Marshall:

I guess the other advantage of doing this through the fraternity system is you’re really dealing with kids who can afford really good legal help and alumni to step in to pay for things. And so you just see through the book in the beginning, the SAEs rent a cabin for their mountain weekend and have this big sort of a coke and acid sort of naked party in the mud that involves someone driving a Hummer into a lake and then basically burning a log cabin down. They stripped everything from the log cabin, created a bonfire, the park ranger comes and can’t really do anything. He’s still beyond his authority. And then the alumni sort of step in and take care of everything. It’s just like DUI, parents lawyers come and take care of it, simple possession, lawyers take care of it. Mikey almost got a kidnapping charge for something that they were doing during hazing where they duct taped the kid and threw him in the back of an Audi and we’re going to drive him to an island and leave him, police find him, but of course basically gets off without a charge, besides driving without a license.

And that just continued with each sort of leveling up. There really were no consequences. And so I think when parents read this book, they often think this is a story of the consequence of a life without consequences because you really can see, well, if you can get away with anything, what won’t you try?

Katie:

The Paul Blart analogy you made a moment ago is a good one because there’s one young man in particular that we’ve mentioned briefly already, Patrick Moffly, who was as a reminder, the son of this wealthy real estate developer and leading this rather wheels off above the law in and out of peril lifestyle with other dealers in town and rampant to drug and alcohol use. You get the sense from the way Zach and Mikey are running things that it’s this kind of very buttoned up organized operation, whereas Patrick introduces this element of chaos and unpredictability. So can you tell us more about that?

Max Marshall:

Sure. So yeah, I mean Patrick grew up kind of just outside Charleston, like I said, on Paradise Island. And from age 13, he was getting in trouble for pretty wild things. I think when he was 13 or 14, he robbed his weed dealer and the dealer started calling Patrick’s family and basically saying, I’m going to kill your son. And Patrick was sleeping with a shotgun under his pillow, and this is at the age, some kids are having their bar mitzvahs and Patrick’s family basically had to pay off the dealer. Patrick went on Outward Bound after that, dropped out of school, but then he would just kind of continuously get in trouble for a DUI here, a simple possession there. He even left a Facebook review for the Mount Pleasant Police force basically complaining about how many charges they were giving him, and he had ultimately the best one of the two or three best lawyers in the southeast, this guy named Andy Savage, and really got out of a lot.

Katie:

So Patrick had excellent legal representation, the best money can buy, and it sounds like they’re kind of untouchable. They’re at the top of their game, but ultimately something this far reaching and out in the open is going to eventually hit a boiling point, right. Was there a boiling point for Patrick where things started to take a turn?

Max Marshall:

Ultimately, as he got deeper and deeper in this drug ring? Once he got to College of Charleston, he was the guy who was often wearing the hazmat suit, packing the Skittles bags full of Xanax and shipping them out. And he got arrested with a trafficking level amount of cocaine at a fraternity tailgate at a USC Gamecock game. And that’s one of the big inciting incidents of everything unraveling because it was cocaine from this drug ring, and there was a lot of fear that he was going to flip. And he basically went into hiding in his house and told his family, I’m so worried that people are going to think I’m going to rat and maybe kill me. He goes back to campus to pay his electric bill, and the next day he’s found murdered with hundreds of these fake Xanax pills around his body, and he’s holding a Chipotle napkin to his chest.

Katie:

So someone didn’t want Patrick either selling on his turf or as you mentioned, there was maybe some fear that he was going to flip because he had just gotten charged with this pretty serious cocaine trafficking charge. And so what typically happens when you get charged for something really serious, they go, oh, well, if you inform on the other people you’re working with, we’ll let you off on lesser charges. So someone took him out when they had the chance, when he went back to campus, was anyone ever arrested and charged with his murder?

Max Marshall:

Yeah, so a kind of smaller time dealer named Charles Mungin, who lived on the other side of the Ashley River, was charged with the murder. No one, even the police believed that he pulled the trigger, but there’s something called the hand of one hand of all rule, which is basically like if you and I robbed a bank together and you were the getaway driver and I killed the bank teller, you would also be charged with murder. And so that’s basically what happened here. But to this day, I was talking to Patrick’s family after the book came out, and there’s still just so many questions of who did it. And of course, the book goes into different theories, and there are moments where you feel like, oh, it’s going to be solved, but it’s just one of those things where we’ll probably never know.

Katie:

It sounds like the people involved, the police, Patrick’s family aren’t even really convinced necessarily that this is the person that pulled the trigger. But as you just outlined, if you’re involved at all, you can be found guilty for the charge. Who is this Charles guy? Where does he come into play? He’s not one of these players that we’ve just discussed insofar as the rest of the cast of characters goes. So who is Charles?

Max Marshall:

Yeah, so something Patrick’s dad said in Patrick’s eulogy is that unlike a lot of guys in the sort of college of Charleston kind of country clubby bubble, Patrick had an insane array of friends. I think he would be friends with guys in Country club Polos, and then guys who didn’t wear shirts or shoes. He was friends with the Christian kids and the party kids, unlike a lot of guys in this world, he had white and black friends, and this is something that caused a lot of conflict with his housemates. He had one black friend who was homeless that Patrick met at a bar, and Patrick basically said, you’re homeless, you’re trying to figure your life out. Why don’t you make a pallet on my floor and live with me? And they lived together for three months. It was the last three months of Patrick’s life.

But that’s just to give a sense of the sort of characters that were coming in and out of Patrick’s life. Charles was another guy that Patrick had met at the same bar. It was called the Silver Dollar Bar on King Street. So we called him Dollar Tea, people called Charles T or Trey, because he was Charles Munjin III, and he was a local fry cook trying to make his way into community college and dealing ultimately a pretty small amount of Xanax compared to the rest of these guys. But you can see on the day of Patrick’s murder, Patrick, on March 3rd goes back to College of Charleston, he is supposed to go snowboarding with his family in Vail, and that night he went skateboarding and broke his arm, so he had to cancel the veil trip. So he texts Charles and says, Hey, I broke my arm. I can’t go on this skiing trip. Let me know if you need anything. And Charles texted back, do you have 10,000 bars?

 And Patrick was like, yeah, I can put that together if you need that. So he goes out and gets 10,000 Xanax bars. And the working theory is basically Charles and two other guys showed up thinking, well, this guy is a broken arm. No way he’s going to fight back. We can just take 10,000 Xanax bars from him. And Patrick was quite the fighter and did fight back, and the fight rolled down the stairs. His housemates heard him say, are you really going to shoot me? Someone pulled the trigger. And then the Xanax pills spilled all over the floor, and one of the most tragic things is Patrick’s housemates who are also part of this drug network. They go downstairs and they see Patrick lying surrounded by these pills holding the Chipotle napkin to his chest.

And instead of helping him or calling the police, one guy grabbed two other bags of Xanax and ran to hide them in a trash can. Another tried to bury his own Xanax in the yard. A third was flushing Xanax down the toilet, and it was only a guy who had come over to buy some Xanax who didn’t even really know Patrick, who tried to apply pressure and tried to help him.

It’s funny, you talk to people and you tell ’em you’re writing a crime book and you’ll meet people and say like, oh, I love murder. And then you go to a murder trial and it’s, I mean, sitting behind Patrick’s family while they showed the camera footage of the policeman trying to keep him alive, and then sitting next to Charles’ family when they sentence him to life plus 30, and there was nothing sort of juicy or fun or salacious about it, it was just, just truly devastating.

Katie:

This is where the story branches into a few different paths, some of which are incredibly devastating and final. In the cases of Patrick and T, how did things unfold for the rest of the young men involved?

Max Marshall:

Yeah, so up until this point, they really were just making more and more money, selling more and more pills. Mikey got a Porsche and a BMW and an Infiniti and would sort of cycle through them, although he would often deal using a Prius with a baby on board, sticker on back so that he would never get pulled over. I think he stole that from Weeds, the TV show. But yeah, it really did seem like there was no risk of anyone getting caught for anything until Patrick was killed.

And then all of a sudden you have the prominent son of a big time real estate developer. His mom had, like I said, run for Congress. It’s a block from the College of Charleston campus. And all of a sudden the FBI, the DEA and even the postal service all got involved and basically got boys to start wearing wires on each other. And very quickly, kids in fraternities started flipping on each other. Kids started putting hidden cameras in their car and doing cocaine deals, and all of a sudden just the dominoes fell very quickly, but we can get into it in some ways. There were lots of consequences, and in some ways there were very few.

Katie:

So where are guys like Rob and Zach Kligman now? What happened to them for their involvement? What about some of the other guys?

Max Marshall:

As of now, Mikey Schmidt is the only person from the story who’s in prison. Everyone else either got a very short jail time. Rob did two years. Zach didn’t receive any jail time, and most of the guys in the book either got suspended sentences, probation, or they weren’t charged at all. Ka got kicked off campus for four years and then came back. SAE never left. And you can go on CFC, KA and SAE’s Instagrams, they’re public and they’re still having very wild parties. So except for Mikey, there really were even in the end, no consequences.

Katie:

So Patrick’s dead, he’s in jail, Mikey’s in jail. Why couldn’t Mikey get off too? Wearing wires in one another, informing got a lot of them to walk for almost free. I mean, two years in jail is obviously no walk in the park. But given the stakes of what was happening, it’s a pretty minimal sentence. Why not Mikey?

Max Marshall:

See, it’s a few things. All these other guys could flip on their Xanax dealers and not really fear for their lives basically being like, yeah, my friend in KA gave me this Xanax or yeah, this guy in SAE or this guy in Myrtle Beach. But Mikey was getting cocaine from a cartel source in Atlanta, and that’s just a completely different world. He was also involved, like I said, in the Atlanta rap scene, that’s a completely different world. And so it’s one thing to sort of betray the fraternal bond and rat on a fellow. It’s another to betray the cartel bond and rat on a guy who’s bringing stuff up from the Texas Mexico border. And so Mikey didn’t flip on anyone. He didn’t talk. And I think that’s the main reason. Also, the prosecutor really didn’t like him, thought he was pretty cocky, and I think very much had him in her sights from the beginning. They definitely made him out to be the kingpin of everything, which if you look at the numbers of what was seized is not exactly true, but maybe his story was the most cinematic.

Katie:

Yeah. When you say look at the numbers of what was seized that Mikey, it probably wouldn’t be fair to say that Mikey was the kingpin. Just going purely off of numbers, who would you say would be implicated with that?

Max Marshall:

Well, I mean people call Zach Kligman, the Charleston kingpin and his storage locker had the millions of Xanax pills. He also got caught with a dozen plus pounds of weed, an assault rifle with a grenade launcher. And through his life, he’s been caught with everything LSD, Molly, ketamine, just to sort of take your pick, when people called him the Charleston kingpin, that’s kind of what they meant.

Katie:

So it sounds like we’ll say two or three men faced consequences here for this multimillion dollar drug ring, the two that are in prison, one for life, one for, I believe Mikey sentence was 10 years.

Max Marshall:

Yeah, exactly. And

Katie:

Patrick who lost his life, right? Yeah. But it’s interesting because Mikey was one of several ringleaders and T when I was reading this book, it struck me that this is kind of one of the only black kids in this story who seems a little like a non-player character to me. Within this whole ordeal, kind of appearing only briefly to be charged with murder, what impressions did your reporting leave you with about wealth power in the justice system?

Max Marshall:

I think most of us know there’s separate systems depending on how much money you have. The difference in being able to afford a public defender who has a docket of 60 cases and is just trying to plea everything out as quickly as possible, and the south’s defense lawyers who are playing golf with the judge or going sailing with the other lawyer they’re going up against and can pour just vast amount of resources into an immaculately crafted legal defense. It really makes all the difference in the world. And yeah, I mean that very much played out in how this story went in that sense, it is a story, I guess, about the consequence of a life without consequences.

And there’s this lesser Quentin Tarantino movie I was thinking about the other day called Death Proof, and it’s about a stunt driver who basically builds a car that has kind of padding around the driver’s seat.

And no matter what crash you get in, or no matter how fast you’re going in that crash, the driver will always be okay, but if you’re in the passenger seat or if you’re in another car, you’re probably going to die in collision with this massive machine. And I think life for these guys can kind of feel like that. It’s like I’m in this seat where nothing bad can happen to me, so why wouldn’t I drive as fast as I can? Why wouldn’t I crash into that wall? And if someone in the passenger seat or another car, something happens to them, I’m going to be okay. And when you’re in that seat, you just drive faster and faster and faster and faster and in a way to show how much you can get away with. Yeah, I think that’s the life for a lot of these guys. And I think in my head I kind of thought, well, at some point a big enough crash will happen where that seat won’t protect them, but for the most case, didn’t they got in sort of the most spectacular crash and imaginable and stepped out of the car and walked on into corporate America.

Katie:

You are in a fraternity at Columbia, and usually journalists like yourself have to hunt down sources for inside scoops because you’re not really all that close to the story. And you did interview hundreds of sources for this book, but you were also able to consult your friends for insight too, because you had friends that were in KA chapters around the south, so you could be like, Hey, does this sound right to you, or how does this compare to your experience? I’m curious if at all how your feelings about Greek life evolved over the course of your reporting. And I think there was one quote that jumped out at me a lot, which was that there is something about this system of the life without consequences, that it’s almost a sign of prestige. So I would love for you to tell us a little bit more about that.

Max Marshall:

Definitely. So yeah, I mean there’s a pretty central question in a book like this, right? Why would guys with a social safety net that’s so plush, it’s basically a hammock. Why would they deal anti-anxiety tranquilizers at scale? The sort of general reason you learn people deal drugs. If you take a criminology or something, it’s like, oh, rational choice theory. If you’re from a community where you don’t have a chance to get a job the normal way, your best economic option might be dealing drugs. But that’s not the case for these guys at all, right? Some of them had trust funds, all of them had pretty juicy allowances. And I think the answer both for why deal and even more so why blackout all the time is it is kind of a sign of prestige to show how much you can get away with. There’s this study that a few sociologists did about a decade and a half ago.

They got published in a book called Paying for the Party, and basically they followed a bunch of sorority members at a big 10 sort of Midwestern school through their time in the sorority system. And basically what they found was only really wealthy students can afford to do Greek life at its biggest. And it’s not only because they’re dues and dues can be very expensive, they can be 10 grand at the biggest schools, but sometimes they can be pretty small, like a few hundred dollars. But to go out five or six nights a week is incredibly expensive. And the only students who can afford to basically go out six nights a week, be hung over at class, miss things black out, break the law and get away with it, you have to have money to do that. It’s not negotiable. You have to have money to do that.

If you’re a middle class student trying to pay off your student loans, maybe work a side job, you can’t be going out on a Tuesday night. That’s just not an option. And so I think what guys would tell me in this book is basically, yeah, I’m the only one who can black out on a Tuesday and miss class on a Wednesday, get arrested on a Thursday, go out again on a Friday, and then that weekend be on a call with my family to set up a really great internship for the summer. I’m going to be taken care of. There is absolute prestige in being that guy. I think it’s also true in hazing in a weird way, really bad hazing, you basically can’t afford to go to class a lot of the year. Your GPA takes a big dip, but it’s a sign of prestige like, yeah, I’m going to do that. I’m still going to get a good job. In a way that’s rational choice theory too, I guess. It’s basically you think it all through, you realize that you’re going to be taken care of and you realize that people sort of gravitate to the guy who can get away with the most, and you get away with as much as you can.

Katie:

Yeah. I am so well connected and so rich that look at how badly I can behave. And really there’s, I mean, you look around the corporate world, you see the same thing. I think that’s why this story is so interesting to me because it strikes me as a bit of an allegory for just the way life is within pretty much any organization. You see these themes, maybe not with millions of Xanax pills, but to close this out, I read an interview that you did for The Guardian and the subject of empathy came up. And I have to be honest that as a woman reading this book and reading both what a lot of these guys were able to get away with and also the way that they spoke about women, it was very difficult for me to have empathy for any of the characters. I’m curious for you the role that empathy played in uncovering the story, sitting with it for years and years and finally telling it and presenting it to everybody else.

Max Marshall:

Yeah, it’s funny. In the book, in the story, a lot of the guys that I talked to, they loved the movie, the Wolf of Wall Street. They even printed out shirts. They called themselves the Wolf of King Street. The Kas had Wolf of King Street T-shirts with a photo of Leo on them. There was another Xanax dealer who also called himself the Wolf of King Street. And when I was hearing that, I was like, damn, you guys really took the wrong message from the Wolf of Wall Street. You just see. They were like, yeah, I mean, it’s awesome. He had this really brilliant fraud, made a lot of money and hot girls on his boat, and isn’t that crazy?

And this is something you see over and over again, right? People see war movies and the director might want to make an anti-war movie, but at the end people are like, oh, that battle scene was dope.

And it certainly is true with drug kingpin movies. A lot of these guys loved The Wire the same way and saw it kind of as a how-to manual and setting out to write this book. I was aware that this story could just repeat that entire dynamic. Somebody might read this book and just be like, wow, these guys are dope. I can’t believe that they pulled this off and most of ’em got away with it. And there’s kind of two ways you can respond to that. One is the more eat your vegetables sort of at the end, I go, and the message here is that these guys are toxic and therefore American institutions need to be reformed. And some writers do that very well, but I just wanted it all to be present in the story. And so if I show an SAE getting waterboarded, my feeling is that I don’t need to tell people, man, it’s kind of crazy to waterboard an 18-year-old so that they can join a drinking club and the way this ends with the murder and the devastation of these lives.

And I think that’s all present in the book and you can pick it up. But at the same time, if you spend enough time, I think hearing anyone’s life story, no matter what they’ve done, and especially when you start turning in people’s family situations and their mental health and their fears, their suffering, it’s impossible no matter what they’ve done. Not to kind of feel that too. And ultimately, I wanted that to be part of the story. I don’t know. There’s this cliche in MFA classes of you just want to hold a mirror up to the world. And I just picked up the mirror I found, and it happened to be smeared with cocaine, but that was the mirror they were using. So that’s the mirror I held up.

Katie:

Thank you so much for being here. This was incredible.

Max Marshall:

I really enjoyed it. I’ve been so excited for this.

Katie:

That is all for this week. I’ll see you next week. Same time, same place on the Money with Katie Show. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content Officer, and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.