Inside a Charleston Frat's Multimillion-Dollar Xanax Ring

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Max Marshall grew up in Dallas. He came to Columbia University for college in the early 2010s, and one of the first things he noticed was the amount of Xanax on campus. There were kids I knew who were dealing. There were a lot of kids I knew who were using it, both as like a kind of chill out drug for anxiety, but also as this party drug. People were mixing it with

Mostly alcohol,'cause it gets you about four times as drunk than if you just were drinking beer and then you wouldn't be hungover the next day. But also mixing it with kind of everything. People will call it a sidecar drug, like the little sidecar on a motorcycle. After graduation, Max moved to Vietnam to work as a journalist. He mostly wrote features about Vietnamese culture and the arts.

He wrote a story for GQ about Vietnamese-Canadian drug traffickers tied to the Mexican cartel Bas El Chapo who were smuggling drugs around the world. But he kept wanting to write about Xanax, partly as a warning to college kids. I felt like none of my friends had been warned about how addictive it is. It's one of two drugs that's so addictive you can die from withdrawals. It's not even true of heroin. And I knew multiple people had to drop out of school because of Xanax dependencies.

While still in Vietnam, Max started searching for a story about Xanax on college campuses. Instead of writing about all the kids that were using it, he wanted to write about where it was coming from. He'd belonged to a fraternity in college, and in his experience, much of the Xanax seemed to come from Frap. And so I was interested in that idea. I got on Google and I did the very hard investigative journalist thing of just searching Xanax bust fraternity.

And the first result was this article in the Post and Courier that basically described these guys who were in KA and SAE at the College of Charleston. They had these sort of Swoopy SEC quarterback, you know, golf pro haircuts that I had seen my whole life. And it said they had gotten caught with. Forty thousand Xanax pills plus a grenade launcher, a bunch of weed, cocaine, LSD. I think the federal government had seized a few of their cars, watches, all these things.

I thought, okay, there might be a story here. Max tracked down a defense attorney for one of the frat guys mentioned in the article. After some small talk, the attorney let Max in on a secret. The cops had downplayed the amount of Xanax pills they'd seized. The real number wasn't forty thousand. It was closer to three and a half million. And that's when I had a feeling, yeah, there was a bigger story here. I'm Jed Lipinski.

Max Marshall would spend years investigating what led up to the College of Charleston drug bust in 2016. Two years ago, he published a book about it called Among the Bros. The book takes a deep dive into the increasingly lawless culture of American fraternities and the shocking, if also predictable, lack of consequences for that behavior.

But it all started with that one article in the Charleston Post and Courier. The piece laid out the bare bones of the drug bust. It mentioned that nine individuals, most of them tied to College of Charleston's Kappa Alpha fraternity, had been arrested and charged with dozens of state narcotics offenses. The investigation had begun six months earlier, after a former College of Charleston student was gunned down in the middle of Smith Street, just a short walk from campus.

The cops believed it was drug related. Max wanted to talk to members of the drug ring, but none of them responded to his calls and emails, so he took another approach. Being a Southern frat guy himself, he created a LinkedIn page and connected with all of his high school buddies and friends from his fraternity.

all of a sudden I was like a few connections away from the guys in this drug rate. So I already had this sense of like, wow, okay, you know, there is this bigger network that I might be able to tap into. Soon, Max was down in Charleston, talking to fraternity and sorority members who had insight into the frat culture on campus. It was his first time at the College of Charleston, and the campus took his breath away.

Travel and Leisure, the magazine, they love to rank things as most magazines do, and they rank cities And they also rank college campuses. And I think one year they both named Charleston the most beautiful city in the world and the College of Charleston the most beautiful college campus in America.

I'm not a big ranker, but I certainly think the College of Charleston, I have not seen a more beautiful campus in America. If you ask Chat GBT or Hollywood set decorator to come up with sort of like the fever dream of the jewel box south. You know, Spanish moss hanging from live oaks. It's these pink colonial buildings with like Civil War cannonball marks.

wood shutters. It's a short drive away from all these islands and beaches and golf courses and James Beard winning restaurants and King Street, which is like Bourbon Street or 6th Street, but without as many tourists. For young men, the College of Charleston had the added benefit of a 7-2 girl-to-guy ratio. The only downside, again, mostly for young men, was that C of C didn't have a football team.

And so because of that, it kind of does have this dandyish reputation of like real Southern tailgate guys wouldn't want to go to College of Charleston, but a lot of kind of prep school kids who might not care quite as much about who Clemson is playing on Saturday. They love a seven to two girl to guy ratio and then a street full of amazing bars and beaches and all the rest.

And I think that setup attracts a lot of wealth, not only from the south, but from basically the wealthiest northeastern suburbs. And yet there was a dark side to campus life. In 2012, three Kappa Alpha brothers had died within a year of one another, one from a drug overdose, another from falling off a roof, and another for an undisclosed reason. And from what Max could tell, nothing much had been done about it. The parties continued.

KA's reputation on campus was mixed. It was not among the best frats on campus, which was another way of saying it didn't have the wealthiest members. That distinction belonged to S.A.E., whose brothers tended to drive Range Rovers and hail from Connecticut Prep School. In the hierarchy of College of Charleston fraternities, KA ranked somewhere in the middle.

It's just funny, when you interview people at a college, like they're so willing to talk through the rankings of these fraternities and everyone was like, Oh yeah, K is random. And I think that they were often described to me as like a classic middle tier frat, steady middle. All these words were used to describe them. And at one point I think I asked someone, I was like,

By middle, do you mean middle class? And they were like, what are you talking about? Like, no, that's not has nothing to do with it. Unlike SAE and most other frats on campus, KA didn't have an actual frat house. Its parties were mostly held at off-campus houses. Also unlike SAE, it emphasized its southern heritage. KA was founded at Washington College, now Washington and Lee, back in 1865 when General Robert E. Lee was its president.

Lee was not a member of the Frat, but according to the Varlet, KA's official membership manual, Lee's ideals are woven into KA's soul. The manual adds that Lee is, in a profoundly real sense, our spiritual founder.

In his conversations with KA members, Max accentuated his Dallas accent and made sure to mention he belonged to a fraternity himself. Over time, he earned the brothers' respect. One of them eventually texted Max a number for what he said was a prison cell phone. He told Max to call it.

And I did and I had no idea what to expect'cause you're not allowed to have a cell phone in prison. So I had no idea what who I was calling. But turns out it was Mikey Schmidt's sort of contraband hidden cell phone. Mikey Schmidt was at the Wateree River Correctional Institution, a minimum security prison in Sumter County, South Carolina. He was a few years into a 10-year sentence for drug trafficking conspiracy.

we started talking and it sort of began this ongoing conversation that ended up stretching, you know, hundreds of hours while Mikey just kind of slowly, night by night, once the guards were asleep, would tell me his story. And that obviously opened up so so much. It was through Mikey Schmidt that Max would come to understand. How the fraternity drug ring actually works. Tyler Redding twenty three eleven race. You know what's the worst part of a race? A rain delay.

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In the mugshots taken of the nine individuals wrapped up in the Charleston drug ring, many of the guys have swoopy-looking haircuts. But Mikey's haircut, it's fair to say, is the swoopiest. As Max would later write in Among the Bros, Mikey had been late to puberty and stood just five foot six. But what he lacked in stature, he made up for in swagger and a disarming charisma.

It was this like very kind of charismatic wild stoner guy gotten kicked out of a few schools, you know, would leave high school and sell weed outside of Chick-fil-A. but didn't come from the sort of global wealth that a lot of college of Charleston fraternity kids come from. Like when you show up to College of Charleston, you just immediately notice the Audis and BMWs and Connecticut license plates and

souped up F-350s that cost even more than BMWs. And Mikey was driving a 30-year-old, it was a Mercedes, but it was a very old sedan, probably worth a few thousand dollars. His freshman year, Mikey entered Fraternity Rush. At Orientation, he met an older KA member named Rob Liljeberg, who was manning the fraternity's table. Rob drove a nearly identical 30-year-old Mercedes, and the two quickly bonded over smoking weed and playing Super Smash Brothers.

Mikey decided to pledge KA. He was from Atlanta, and the frat's overtly southern identity appealed to him more than the flashier finance bro culture of a frat like SAE. Still, the KA brothers had an affection for Martin Scorsese's film The Wolf of Wall Street. The film tells the story of Jordan Belfort, a stockbroker who amassed a fortune trading penny stocks before he was sent to prison for securities fraud and money laundering.

After its release in 2013, the KA chapter threw a theme party based on the movie. They made t-shirts calling themselves the Wolves of King Street, the street where most of the college bars and restaurants are.

Like Jordan, Mikey was entrepreneurial. He ran his own fake ID business on campus. And like Rob, he dealt a fair amount of weed. But as Max pointed out, Selling weed is hard. There are people who scale it on college campuses, but I mean it's like it takes up a lot of space. It smells very bad and there's a lot of competition. There's just, you know, people have been dealing weed on college campuses for a very long time.

By the 2010s, drug dealing on college campuses had been transformed by the dark web. To access it, users simply downloaded a special browser called Tor, which hid your identity online. Once inside, you could order almost any drug imaginable and have it shipped straight to your mailbox or your campus mail center. Shipping marijuana wasn't practical due to the smell and the amount of space it took up. Shipping Xanax, on the other hand, was pretty easy. Xanax. is lightweight, basically odor free.

And most importantly, it's a Schedule four drug. So if you get caught with it, there's no trafficking charge. You can deal a million pills or ten pills and it's still just intent to distribute. So there's no trafficking charge. So all of that, I think, incentivizes diversifying out of weed into another space. But dealing Xanax made sense for another reason. There was a huge demand for it at the College of Charleston.

I talked to a lot of kids who are using it for anxiety. I think the first time a lot of people used it was for, you know, the quote-unquote Sunday scaries. If you go out six nights a week, which is not that uncommon at College of Charleston, Sunday is just gonna hit you like a, you know, combined permanent wave, because it's just like, you know, the Monday hangover, the Tuesday hangover, the Wednesday all the way to Sunday.

And so it became this thing where guys would kind of just sit on these big couches, take Xanax and watch football all day. But the thing about Xanax is, as we talked about earlier, it's one of two drugs that's so addictive you can die from withdrawals. And so when Monday comes around, you're actually basically going into a Xanax withdrawal. It doesn't take that much use to get to this point where your anxiety is just going to call for another Xanax.

And so that makes it very efficient for a dealer. You're just creating repeat customers. Another reason for the demand was that Xanax was a big party drug. As Max mentioned earlier, it heightens the effects of alcohol, making two beers feel like eight. His sources at C of C talked about frat guys at KA and SAE spiking punch with Xanax, with the goal of blacking out earlier than they might have with alcohol alone, and then popping a Xanax the next day to relieve the hangover.

For all these reasons, Mikey and Rob pivoted from dealing weed to dealing Xanax. Their network started inside KA, but eventually expanded to other students at the College of Charleston, then beyond the campus entirely. The media may have described it as a drug ring, but in Max's conversations with Mikey and others, Xanax dealing on campus was so widespread, it resembled more of an unregulated marketplace. It could seem like everyone was a dealer.

Basically, you had people who were buying Xanax off the dark web for maybe a cent a pill, two cents a pill, pressing using pill presses, hundreds of thousands of pills a month. dealing those pills maybe for fifty cents a pill, and then those people would buy ten thousand pills at a time. They would turn around and break it down in maybe thousand a time, sell for a dollar a pill, and this would go and go and go until some poor

Schmo would buy Xanax for, you know, I talked to someone who paid$10 for a pill. And so you can see the sort of markup happening fast. One thing that surprised Max was how many people in the operation refused to call themselves drug dealers. They'd say, I'm not dealing. I'm just a middleman. They'd buy from someone for fifty cents a pill, hold on to them for a while, then sell them for a dollar a pill. That's not drug dealing, they'd say. It's just a quick flip for some cash.

Of course, like in all of drug dealing, say heroin, unless you're growing the poppy seeds, you're a middleman. Like everyone's always a middleman. Like that's the way drug networks work. Well. So that was one way of kind of deluding yourself, but the other side was some of these guys went the exact opposite way and saw themselves as these

John Gotti, Tony Montana, drug kingpen types. And they would buy guns and attach grenade launchers to them. They would buy boats. They would get bottle service and Miami and They really played up that lifestyle. What a group of undergraduate Xanax dealers needed a grenade launcher for is unclear. But the cops would later seize one from a storage locker tied to a member of the drug ring named Zack Kligman.

Kligman wasn't a college student at all. He drifted down from Myrtle Beach, where his dad ran a kite shop. At twenty four, he was the oldest of the crew, and by most accounts, the closest thing the ring had to an actual kingpin. And I think if you look at Zack Klingman's sort of part of the ring, they were working at a very legitimate scale.

He was working with guys that would basically buy industrial pill presses, the same kind they might use at a CVS and run them out of beach houses. They would rent a different beach house outside Charleston every month. press out hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand pills, wearing hazmat suits, and then ship them all over the US, hidden in Skittles bags, and also take them to all these college campuses.

Klingman sat upriver from Mikey and Rob on the supply chain, but in his prison conversations with Mikey, Max learned that the three of them formed a kind of interstate drug triangle. By the end of his freshman year, Mikey had stopped going to class and flunked out, but he remained an honorary member of Kappa Alpha. Back in Atlanta, he got a job as a valet at a nightclub called Tongue and Groove, which plugged him into the city's rap scene and its drug world.

Within a year, Mikey had established a cartel connection, who he referred to only as Uncle He was soon running cocaine from Atlanta to fraternity houses across the South, including back to his brothers at KA and Charleston. His buddy Rob, meanwhile, was the man in the middle. Rob would buy cocaine from Mikey and sell it to Kligman. He would then turn around and buy counterfeit Xanax from Kligman and sell it to Mikey.

For a while, it was working. Mikey bought a silver BMW convertible and was making thousands of dollars a week. Max says the crew was making so much cash, they ran out of places to hide it. But they were also vulnerable and As the ring got bigger and more brazen, they started attracting the wrong kind of attention. In the fall of 2015, one of their guys got busted for cocaine trafficking at a University of South Carolina Gamecock's tailgate. The crew worried that he would talk.

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Tell me about how this falls apart. So in March of twenty sixteen, one of the guys in this very decentralized drug network, this guy, Patrick Moffley, Sold 10,000 Xanax pills to a customer. And to this day, there's a lot of different stories about what happened. But basically, he was murdered and his body was found at the foot of his. Off-campus house, two blocks from the CFC library, his body was found surrounded by hundreds of these fake Xanax pills.

Patrick Moffley was a former College of Charleston student who drifted in and out of enrollment. He was the one who, a few months earlier, had been charged with cocaine trafficking at the Gamecox tailgate. And he had a bit of a record. Charleston police had arrested him years earlier on a misdemeanor possession charge. But his parents always helped him out. To fight the cocaine charge, they hired Jack Swerling, one of the most celebrated criminal defense attorneys in South Carolina.

You know, Patrick Maufley, his dad was a big time real estate developer in the Low Country. His mom had run for Congress. She was on the Charleston School Board. They lived in this giant equestrian farm outside Charleston. Max says the motive for the murders remains murky. Moffley's family and friends pointed the cops toward Kligman, believing he'd ordered the hit. But the Charleston PD's investigative files don't mention their suspicions.

They focused instead on a local man who'd come to Moffley's apartment to buy drugs and shot him after an argument broke out. He was later convicted of murder and sentenced to life. But the cops had other questions too, like what was Patrick Moffley doing wrapped up in a fake Xanax ring? And where had all those counterfeit pills come from?

And basically the police started to work informant after informant after informant to the point where fraternity guys kind of started flipping on each other, and it very slowly led back to Rob and Mikey. Rob was now in his senior year at College of Charleston. He'd been named a National Honors Scholar and was serving as both the president of Kappa Alpha and its philanthropy chair. Mikey, meanwhile, was living a very different life back in Atlanta.

Mikey, like, he moved back to Atlanta and and was pretty deeply involved in both the Atlanta rap scene, but also the Atlanta sort of drug trafficking world. you know, he was going to Magic City, the strip club. There's a song by the Southern rapper Waka Flock A Flame, where he says my plug is a white boy and everyone at College of Charleston was convinced it was Mikey.

Mikey had heard about Patrick Moffley's death, and not long after, he heard a rumor that Rob had been arrested. But that's about all he knew. He had no idea that the other principals in the drug ring had almost immediately agreed to cooperate to avoid prison time. According to Max, Zack Klygman was the first to flip. He began secretly recording his calls with Rob. Police then put a hidden camera and a mic in Klingman's car, and captured Rob deliving a load of cocaine.

Rob was arrested. Facing a stiff sentence, he quickly agreed to give up Mikey. But the police needed Mikey to come to them, so Rob lured him back to Charleston. If you read the text between them, he's an incredibly charming person. And he was just able to sort of convince Mikey, he was like, You know, with the connections that you have, you would know if I got arrested and you know, if I had been arrested with the cocaine you sent me, I wouldn't be

here at this bar on King Street drinking a corona and you would send a photo of him with the corona and he basically was able to calm Mikey to the point of talking him back to Charleston because they had to sort out Some money from some dealing issues. And Rob invited Mikey to his favorite rooftop bar in Charleston, the Vindu Hotel.

Mikey loved the Vendue Hotel's truffle fries. Over dinner, Rob and Mikey talked about everything that had happened in their dealing career, as well as the money Rob owed him for some drug shipments. The next day Rob graduated from the College of Charleston. And the police arrested Mikey and he found out that Rob had been wearing a wire on the roof and that had been sending the police all of his text messages with Mikey. He was wearing a a wire and all of their phone calls.

And basically had enough to show that Mikey had smuggled cocaine from Atlanta to Charleston. A real betrayal, right? It is, undoubtedly. But if you think of what Rob was facing, it's basically, I wanna say, twenty five year minimum in prison. He's twenty one years old, twenty-two years old. I had this conversation with some of my friends with my fraternity and I was telling them about this.

And they basically all said, Max, I love you, but if it came between uh me and you doing twenty five years in jail, like you're going to jail if we both did the crime. After the twenty sixteen drug bust, most of the defendants got off lightly. Rob received a short sentence under the Youthful Offender Act. Others got suspended sentences or probation. Mikey was the exception. He was convicted of cocaine trafficking and sentenced to ten years.

There were a few reasons for this. One was that Mikey was the only one who declined to cooperate, partly out of fear that he'd have to reveal his cartel sources in Atlantic. Everyone else cut deals. Another reason was that most of the students in the ring had access to top-tier attorneys who got the charges dismissed or reduced.

I think for a lot of this book, if there was a through line that I was tracing, it was the consequence of a lack of consequences, right? Because it's like Most of the guys in this story had times when they were arrested for simple possession or a DUI or a hazing incident. And without fail, the combination of expensive defense lawyers and sort of this just like system of boys being boys, like they got away with it. The case reminded Max of Quentin Tarantino's 2007 film, Deathproof.

The movie's about a stunt driver who, no matter how hard he crashes, will always be protected by the cushioning and steel frame of the car, which isn't true for the passenger or the other drivers on the road. And so you're basically driving as fast as you want, as wild as you want, through whatever you want, through walls, into other cars, and other people might be hurt, but you're gonna probably be okay.

Today, Mikey is the only member of the ring who's still locked up. The rest have gone on with their lives, Max says, or found lucrative jobs in corporate America. Meanwhile, party footage posted on the Instagram accounts of C of C's, KA and SAE fraternities suggests that not much has changed.

You can't really understand fraternities unless you understand just what a deep appeal they have. Even knowing the consequences for other people, I think there's something in human nature, it's like, if I could get away with anything, like, that sounds amazing. And I think in a funny way, that's kind of what Wolf of Wall Street's about too, right? It's like there's this spiritual toll.

You know, Scorsese is a Catholic, right? Like I think he does see this like spiritual toll to a life without consequences. But on another level, if you just look at the material toll, it pays to be Jordan Belford and it pays to be a C of C fraternity, bro. If you have information, story tips, or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone South team, please email us at gone southpodcast at gmail.com.

That's gone southpodcast at gmail.com. For bonus content, you can follow us on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram at GoneSouthPodcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on Substack at Gone South with Jed Lipinski. Gone South is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written, and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Leah Reese Dennis, Matty Sprunk Kaiser, and Lloyd Lockridge.

Our story editor is Katie Mingle. Gone South is edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Basil. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josephina Francis. Kurt Courtney and Hilary Schuff. Thank you for listening to Gone South. The Second World War is the largest event in human history. A 20-part series with Tom Hay. No part of the globe was untouched, no life unchanged. Experience the ultimate account of World War II. Every single person had a story.

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