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Come and hear seven brand new stories told live on stage by me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr. We think it's the best live show we've ever done. Tickets are on sale now at thisiscriminal.com slash live. See you very soon. This episode contains language that may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion.

So if you look at the 1800s, when fraternities kind of became a thing on American campuses, they weren't really necessary until middle-class students started showing up to American universities. Before that, it was basically all, you know, sons of the upper crust. And so there was no need for sort of a separate campus or a separate drinking club for these guys. But in the 1800s, all of a sudden you have fraternities

kids from rural areas, farm kids basically showing up to study to be ministers. And all these guys from sort of tonier backgrounds basically said, you know, I don't want to drink with these farm kids and let's kind of form our own drinking club. And it really ramped up from there. ♪

There's a statistic that Cornell Greek Life website used that, you know, 85% of all Fortune 500 CEOs, over 80% of senators and Supreme Court justices, and all but four presidents since 1825 have been in fraternities. You were part of a fraternity. Yes. Which one? Delta Sigma Phi. So in my mind,

A frat guy is not anyone I want to be around. Sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, what would you say your stereotype is in your mind? Privileged. White. Yes. Drunk. I mean, I'm telling you the worst in my mind. Sure, sure, sure. Right? Like that these guys don't need to care because it's all going to be okay for them. That was a lot of my feeling as well, writing the book.

Journalist Max Marshall is the author of Among the Bros, a fraternity crime story. You know, there was a saying I heard a few times, under the influence above the law. And I do think that sort of describes the mindset of a certain type of fraternity guy. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Max Marshall's book looks at one fraternity at one college in particular. You're talking about...

what Travel and Leisure named the most beautiful campus in America, in the middle of what Travel and Leisure also named the best city in the world, the College of Charleston. It really is this sort of jewel box within a jewel box. It's this incredibly beautiful, well-preserved, revolutionary era campus with Spanish moss hanging from the trees, Civil War cannonballs nestled in the dirt.

And it attracts a very sort of moneyed, out-of-state kind of student.

There's a huge pipeline of kids from places like Greenwich, Connecticut, the New York suburbs, sort of really wealthy New England towns. People call it boarding school without the nerds. And they come down on the first day of school any semester. You'll see their BMWs and Audis kind of going through the campus underneath the palmetto trees.

In 2013, one of the students arriving at the College of Charleston was Mikey Schmidt from Atlanta. And he showed up with a very clear intention in mind. You know, before he even knew where he wanted to go to school, before he even knew what he wanted to study, he knew he wanted to join a good fraternity. In his first week at school, Mikey went to the school activity fair.

And Mikey very quickly walked by the Quidditch team and the Chuck Town acapella singers. He had no interest in doing that. He had no interest in playing Ultimate Frisbee. He went straight to the fraternity tables. And his goal at the time was to join SAE, which, you know, Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

A lot of people back in Atlanta had told him this is the best fraternity at the College of Charleston. They have the craziest parties, kind of kids from the best families. And so he went looking for SAE. And while he was walking toward the SAE table, he saw another fraternity he recognized that he had heard was not as good. But he recognized the name and it was Kappa Alpha Order, K-A-A.

and walks up, meets this guy named Rob Liljerberg, who's wearing a red Kappa Alpha shirt with the gold cross on it. He's eating a very large Subway sandwich. And Mikey is pretty sure that Rob is incredibly high. And so he asks Rob, you know, do you smoke? And at least the way Mikey remembers it, Rob says, yeah, we burn.

Rob was a sophomore. He told Mikey he lived across the street and invited him over. Rob Wiljerberg was a very sort of classic all-American kid. He was captain of the soccer team. He was the son of an orthopedic surgeon in Hickory, North Carolina, which is a town known for late culture and handmade furniture. He was an Eagle Scout.

And when he arrived at College of Charleston, I think he pretty quickly realized that the College of Charleston is not a place where Eagle Scouts really have social clout. It was a school instead where Greek life is really important to a lot of people. Rob joined Kappa Alpha, just like his father and uncle. When Mikey met him, Rob was sort of in the middle of this reinvention.

And part of that reinvention, at least as Mikey tells it, is that Rob had started to deal weed at a pretty decent scale as well. Mikey was also running a little business, selling fake IDs, good ones. The kind of fake IDs that can pass a box scanner, and that's sort of the holy grail for college freshmen. And so that made him very attractive to, I think, a lot of the KAs. Mikey decided to rush Kappa Alpha.

Rush is the recruitment process for fraternities and sororities. And you're trying to impress the fraternity. The fraternity is trying to impress you. There's sort of a competitive round of parties where after each party, they're sort of narrowing down who fits in with them. How well do you drink? How well do you small talk? How well do you hit on girls? Can you play beer pong without embarrassing yourself? Can you shotgun a beer without it spraying on everyone?

Did you play sports in high school? Do you know the right people? At the end of this process, all the guys from the fraternity will get together and basically watch a slideshow and vote on their favorites. Max Marshall says that some of the Kappa Alphas thought Mikey was, quote,

A try-hard. Which is sort of the kiss of death in Greek life. You're like trying too hard to fit in. You're bragging about how drunk you got at some high school party or, you know, you're popping your collar or whatever it is. But Rob really vouched for Mikey, so he got the bid. He decided to pledge K.A. When you read about pledgeship, you're almost always reading about very violent hazing or hazing involving binge drinking.

And the reason that gets the lion's share of the headlines is that kills about one college student per year in America. And so there's this sort of constant stream of stories about it over the years. But if you actually talk to fraternity guys, what they hate most about PledgeShip is sort of the daily errands and sort of the work of being quote-unquote the help guy.

And so, you know, for basically hours a day, these pledges are cooking, cleaning, washing people's cars, acting as a errand boy, courier, food delivery. But

It's such a full-time job that you end up missing a lot of class. And they're actually in parts of the South, and I knew guys like this, that when they're applying for jobs, they know that their employers are going to bake in a GPA dip for your freshman year, knowing that your pledged GPA is going to be low because you don't have time to go to class.

And that certainly was true for Mikey. He skipped going to class basically from the beginning. And it all leads toward something called Hell Week. You move into the fraternity house, you hand in your phone, and basically for 20 hours a day, sometimes 24, because you're really not getting much sleep, you're getting hazed. At night, all the pledges line up against the wall, and...

basically have to do different activities. So it might be all the pledges have to go through the Greek alphabet memorized. And if you get it wrong, you have to chug and everyone is going to be chugging fireball until they throw up. Or you might have to get on your elbows and toes and do a plank on the floor. And then they'll put bottle caps under your elbows and toes. And so you're bleeding and you just have to lie there. And if you fall, everyone has to drink until they throw up.

Or maybe you're doing lying on your back with a blindfold and one pledge is going to eat an egg yolk and then he's going to spit it into the next pledge's mouth and it's going to go all the way through the brotherhood. It all sort of culminated in a night when they blindfolded the pledges, drove them 20 miles to a beach off the coast of Charleston, dropped them off in the sand and told them they needed to walk home.

And that all sounds pretty hard, but if you compare it to, you know, I talked to a guy who got waterboarded. So there are definitely levels to the game. The final step to joining Kappa Alpha was reading the Varlet. The KA guidebook for new members, a knight during medieval times would call his apprentice a Varlet. And it's this sort of a guidebook for how to be a modern knight.

Max Marshall says that fraternities vary widely, chapter to chapter, campus to campus, except in the case of Kappa Alpha. If there's a fraternity that has a similar reputation campus to campus, it's going to be Kappa Alpha. And that's because from the outset, they conceive themselves as a Southern fraternity. The Kappa Alpha Order, also known as KA or just the Order, is one of the country's biggest and oldest fraternities.

J. Edgar Hoover was a Kappa Alpha, so was Charlie Rose and Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in Psycho, and Alex Murdaugh, the South Carolina lawyer who was convicted of murdering his wife and youngest son in 2023. And the fraternity has a very unusual history.

So they were founded in 1865, you know, obviously end of the Civil War in Lexington, Virginia, at what was then called Washington College. And they explicitly set out from the beginning as being a way of keeping the ideals of the Old South alive. Their motto is God and the ladies. By the 20th century, they had named Robert E. Lee their spiritual founder.

And so much of what you learn as a K.A. is about the sort of lost cause myth of chivalry, gentility. Up until, you know, a few years ago, their annual formal was called Old South. And people would wear Confederate grays and their dates would wear, you know, Gone with the Wind plantation gowns. In their membership manual, a chapter is dedicated to Robert E. Lee, a

and he's referred to as the Last Gentle Knight. He was the president of Washington College when K.A. was founded, and right after he died, the school was renamed to honor him, along with George Washington.

an odd thing happens when guys join KA. They usually get a little more into country music. They usually get a little more into chewing tobacco. There's a chant that some KAs do before shotgunning a beer, taking a shot of bourbon or whatever it is, and it's one, two, three, Robert E. Lee, three, two, one, South shoulda won.

After Mikey joined K.A., he and Rob became close. They both loved video games. They drove the same car, a Mercedes from the 90s, and they both smoked weed. I think something that Mikey and Rob realized very quickly, honestly, Mikey realized this the day he showed up to College of Charleston. He realized that the very wealthy kids at College of Charleston just lived differently.

They lived in million-dollar houses. Some of those houses were actually bought for them by their parents. They drove around in golf carts. They went to different bars. They knew each other. They didn't really socialize with others. They got bottle service at nightclubs, which can cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. They went out seven nights a week, which is very expensive. And so Mikey and I think later Rob realized that if they wanted to sort of keep up, they needed more money.

And so pretty quickly, when Mikey joined KA, he helped set up this sort of freshman dorm weed distribution network. We'll be right back. Thanks to Squarespace for their support. These days, whenever you're curious about a business or brand, the first place you usually look is online. That first impression matters. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that lets you stand out and build a beautiful, functional website.

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New customers on first three-month plan only. Speed slower above 40 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. Mikey Schmidt and Rob Liljeberg were heat-sealing weed and storing it inside red tomato cans. They started selling to their friends and then branched out to the broader College of Charleston Greek Life world and soon were making a lot of money.

Mikey told Max Marshall, we were best friends from day one. When I say that me and Rob were connected at the hip, we were really connected at the hip. Rob was a good student. He played soccer and pick-up football. He never missed a fraternity meeting. He lifted weights. He was elected to the student senate. He was interested in marine biology and wrote essays about ecology and sustainability. He was planning a summer research project in Bali, studying coral reefs.

Mikey had stopped going to class. His grades got so bad that he eventually dropped out and moved back to Atlanta. He moved back in with his mom. He got a job parking cars at a nightclub and kept selling drugs on the side, sometimes with Rob and sometimes on his own. Sometimes when it was a fancy car he was parking, Mikey left a small sample bag of weed in the person's cup holder to try to generate business. It worked.

He would see Rob's posts from parties and wished he was back at school. Rob had been elected the 2014 Kappa Alpha president and had started selling Xanax. As one student told Max Marshall, quote, "There's like a high pressure scene in Charleston of being cool, of being rich, of putting on a lot of show. It takes a toll on your psyche. And Xanax was almost like a cheat code. Very easily, you could just be a loose goose."

You can mix Xanax with weed and sort of deepen the high. You can mix it with cocaine and sort of ease the paranoia. You can take it on an acid comedown to help you fall asleep. But the biggest and most popular mix by far is you can take a bar of Xanax with, say, five or six natty lights, and you black out. It's like you drank 15 natural lights already.

And for a lot of guys in Greek life, believe it or not, that's a very desirable thing. And for Rob and Mikey, leveling up to Xanax was a very easy business decision for a lot of reasons. One is the demand was huge. Two is...

Compared to marijuana, which is a Schedule 1 drug, Xanadu is Schedule 4. And so there's no trafficking charge. And so in a way, it wasn't a step up, it was a step down. It's not a risky drug to deal. And the biggest change, and this is, I think, really why they were able to sort of get into this world,

is around the beginning of the 2010s, you have the arrival of the dark web. You could get Xanax shipped to your door without leaving the safety of campus Wi-Fi. Rob and Mikey were looking for a Xanax Connect. Neither of them were very techie, so they weren't going to be necessarily working the dark web themselves.

And they meet this guy who is already dealing to SAE, their rival fraternity, and, you know, can sell bulk order counterfeit Xanax at a good price. His name was Zachary Kligman. Zachary Kligman was a guy from Myrtle Beach, the same age as Rob and Mikey, roughly. He didn't go to college. He was kind of known as sort of this like skater stoner type, you know, listening to dubstep music.

He was on his longboard walking his dog. He's not the kind of guy you'd usually see hanging out with KAs, but to those who knew him, they called him the Charleston Kingpin because he had enough Xanax to supply basically Charleston by himself. And he was part of this bigger supply chain that was bringing in unpressed Alprazolam powder via China from the dark web to

shipping this powder in printer cartridges through Quebec down to the coast right off Charleston. And these guys would rent beach houses, one beach house a month. And in these beach houses, they would set up an industrial pill press that could make a few hundred thousand Xanax pills a month.

And they would wear hazmat suits because the pills would kick up all this dust. And they would press out hundreds of thousands of pills. And then they would take Skittles bags or Chips bags. They would empty them out, fill them up with Xanax, heat seal the bags, and then ship them around the U.S.,

And they would also give them to Zachary Kligman, who had a secret compartment in his Cadillac sedan. And he would drive these pills into Charleston and basically start to sell them and flush them through the fraternity system. And these fraternity guys would buy, you know, 10,000 pills at a time and then use their fraternity pledges and sort of their fraternity network to offload them very quickly to

And, you know, in doing so, hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions of pills started to sort of move through Southern Greek life. Max Marshall says that Rob became Zachary Kligman's number one customer.

And so it just became a very efficient sort of spin cycle where these pills would come in from China, move through the pill press, go through Zach's Cadillac, get to Rob, and then Rob could sell in bulk to Mikey. And Mikey could really move them very quickly through fraternities at Ole Miss, at Georgia, USC, and Columbia, really all over the South. And then he would get to Atlanta, sell more of them there.

And then things really ramped up once Mikey started sourcing cocaine in Atlanta and bringing it back to Charleston. And sort of the spin cycle would continue. So Zach would give it to Rob and then Rob would give it to Mikey. Yeah.

Yeah, basically. I mean, there's all sorts of vectors. It was a very complicated supply chain. Something a few guys told me is, you know, this isn't a drug ring in the sort of classic Hollywood sense of the term where you can have a cork board or, you know, a pyramid with one guy on top.

They instead, they compared it to Mary Kay or Co or a multi-level marketing scheme where there's all sorts of suppliers and basically it's just who's ever selling it at the biggest bulk at the cheapest price is going to have customers who are then going to turn it around and try to find a dupe who will buy it at a more expensive price and up and up it would go until you would find someone buying something for $10 a pill. But yes,

Ultimately, Zach was the main supplier to Rob, and Mikey was Rob's biggest customer. And so there were, you know, thousands and thousands of pills that would basically go from Zach to Rob to Mikey. Mikey often transported drugs in a used Prius. He put a baby on board, sticker on the back window, an idea he said he got from watching the show Weeds. I mean, how big did this get? I mean, these guys must have been making a lot of money.

Yeah, and so ultimately you're talking about a drug network with millions of pills and millions of dollars. They would launder money through the fraternity slush funds, you know, making it look like it came from a donor or was going toward a party. But ultimately these were drug profits that they were able to sort of wash because there was so much money that you couldn't just keep it under your mattress. I mean, even with the money laundering, how are they not getting caught? How is someone not speaking out?

So, yeah, I mean, the, you know, a lot of guys told me it's basically impossible to reverse engineer a better setup for dealing drugs at scale than a big Southern fraternity. And that's for a lot of reasons. One, the simplest is you can walk into, you know, a mansion at Ole Miss and

And there might be 40 customers waiting for you right there. And in an hour, you can sell to 40 customers. They're the kind of people who want to deal with guys who look like them or who are from their sort of social network. You know, they want to deal with their boys. And most importantly, the only police presence nearby is a campus cop on a golf cart with a flashlight, um, who is not really looking to unravel, uh,

a nationwide benzodiazepine trafficking network. He's looking for parking violations. And so the ring really just was able to grow and grow, more pills, more money, and it probably would have continued that way indefinitely, or at least through graduation, and then been handed off to other kids, if not for the murder of Patrick Moffley.

Patrick Moffley came from a very prominent, low country, South Carolina family. His father was a big time real estate developer. His mother ran for Congress. She was on the Charleston school board. And he had, in some ways, this Edenic childhood on a place that was literally called Paradise Island.

outside Charleston in this big equestrian farm. His parents were into horse jumping. They built him a half pipe for skateboarding. You know, they had a boat for fishing. He would go catch alligators. Just, you know, kind of the dream childhood. And obviously hindsight adds to a lot of this, but you talk to people in Charleston and he was this kind of legendary party figure and

One time he was on the second floor of a bar on King Street. He saw a beautiful woman walking down the street and he said, "I'm going to get her number." He jumped off the balcony, shattered his ankle. The woman ran up to make sure he was okay and he got her number. In 2016, he had finally start to put things together. He had been working in some kitchens, taking community college classes, and he got into the College of Charleston.

And he moved into an off-campus house with all these guys on Smith Street. And they liked him because he, quote unquote, came from a good family and liked to party like they did. And he obviously didn't realize it at the time, but the house that he moved into was a major part of sort of Zachary Kligman's distribution network. And pretty quickly, Patrick fell into that, um,

His dad told me it didn't take too long for Patrick to be wearing the hazmat suit and heat-sealing Xanax and the Skittles bags. And he was also dealing cocaine. And that fall, he went up to University of South Carolina to deal cocaine to a bunch of frat guys at the frat lots, is what they call them. It's where the fraternity guys tailgate.

And he looked over and sees a policeman and, you know, gets arrested with what would come out to be just over the limit for trafficking cocaine in the state of South Carolina. And he was working with these other guys who were supposed to bail him out. Instead, those guys take the money and flee back to Oxford, Mississippi. And he calls his dad from the jail cell and basically says, Dad, I'm in jail.

Don't come bail me out. This guy, Zach, is going to pay for my legal defense. His dad, you know, is a very boisterous Southern figure and basically says, fuck that, Patrick. I'm not going to let anyone control my son's legal defense. And so he drives to Columbia, bails him out, and finds him what he deems the best lawyer in Columbia.

Max Marshall says that when Patrick Moffley's family hired their own attorney, Zachary Kligman cut off all communication. And Patrick, understandably, begins to spiral into a very deep state of anxiety. He's looking at decades of prison.

And so he went to his parents' farm in Paradise Island, turned off his phone, and basically tried to detox from the Xanax he had been taking and went into very intense Xanax withdrawals, suicidal ideations, panic attacks, I think a very deep depression. But coupled with that was this sort of constant chorus that he would tell his parents that he was afraid for his life.

because people were going to think he was a rat. We'll be right back. The Walt Disney Company is a sprawling business. It's got movie studios, theme parks, cable networks, a streaming service. It's a lot. So it can be hard to find just the right person to lead it all. When you have a leader with the singularly creative mind and leadership that Walt Disney had, it like goes away and disappears. I mean, you can expect what will happen.

The problem is, Disney CEOs have trouble letting go. After 15 years, Bob Iger finally handed off the reins in 2020. His retirement did not last long. He now has a big black mark on his legacy because after pushing back his retirement over and over again, when he finally did choose a successor, it didn't go well for anybody involved.

And of course, now there's a sort of a bake-off going on. Everybody watching, who could it be? I don't think there's anyone where it's like the obvious no-brainer. That's not the case. I'm Joe Adalian. Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network present Land of the Giants, The Disney Dilemma. Follow wherever you listen to hear new episodes every Wednesday. What happens next? On March 3rd, the day before College of Charleston spring break...

His family is planning a ski trip to Vail. Patrick's a big snowboarder. He was going to join them. And throughout his time on the farm, he had been getting all these texts that he wasn't answering of basically, hey, you owe us electric money. His roommates had all these utility bills that needed to be paid, and Patrick had basically gone MIA.

And so his dad told him, Patrick, I'm going to write a check. You're going to take this into Charleston. You're going to pay your roommates. Take that all. Take care of everything. And then the next day we'll meet in town and we'll fly to Vail. Patrick Moffley went back to Charleston. And in Charleston, he went skateboarding and broke his arm. He couldn't go on the ski trip. His cocaine trafficking trial was set to start in a month.

He texts some of the guys that he dealt Xanax with, like, hey, I'm back in town, back in business. Basically, I broke my arm. I can't go on the snowboarding trip. So let me know if you want to buy anything.

A guy named Charles Mungin replied asking for 10,000 Xanax. So Patrick's on the sofa, he's watching The Wire, and he realizes he's in trouble because Zachary Kligman has cut him off. He can't get pills from Zachary Kligman. But his housemates are still dealing with Zach, and so he asked one of his housemates, hey, can you get me 10,000 sticks?

and his housemate basically makes a quick profit. He charges Patrick a dollar a pill, he gets them for Zack for something like 50 cents a pill, and Patrick now has 10,000 Xanax bars to deal to Charles Munchen. A few hours later, his housemates are playing Call of Duty in their room, hearing the fake gunshots with lots of reverb on their Xbox,

and they hear a numb pop that sounds very different than the gunshots on the video game. And they open the door and they see three men fleeing from the house. And they see Patrick lying on the ground with a bullet wound in his chest. And he's surrounded by a few hundred Xanax pills. And one of the many tragedies here is that

Instead of helping him right away, the first thing one housemate does is take two other bags of Xanax pills that are on the ground and runs to hide them in a trash can under a bunch of beer behind the house. And then another housemate comes out

And Patrick's lying there. And instead of helping Patrick, he leans down next to him, picks up a Xanax pill and takes it and then goes to hide his Xanax because he knows the police are coming. And it isn't until another guy who doesn't even know Patrick very well, but who was there to buy a Xanax.

comes up and sees Patrick lying there, that he runs into the kitchen, tries to find some sort of rag or some cloth to put on Patrick's bullet wound. He can only find a Chipotle napkin. So he takes the Chipotle napkin, he runs, and he presses the napkin into Patrick's bullet wound. And another housemate calls the police. Patrick's mother got a call from the hospital chaplain saying that her son had been shot.

And she said, no, that's not right. He had a broken arm. The hospital chaplain replied, the broken arm was last night. Tonight, he's been shot. He died at the hospital. You have, you know, the son of a prominent real estate developer murdered a block from the campus library, surrounded by hundreds of counterfeit Xanax pills. And so one of the early questions is,

Where did all this counterfeit Xanax come from? The police searched the house where Patrick Moffley was shot and found a lease agreement to another house, nicknamed the Tree House. Zachary Kligman paid one of Patrick's roommates to have the lease in his name. Max Marshall reported that Zach refused to take anyone to see it unless they agreed to wear a blindfold, and that he kept it stocked with 20 pounds of marijuana and nearly a million Xanax pills.

After Patrick Moffley's murder, people started talking, pointing fingers at one another. From there, the boys very quickly start wearing wires on each other. Police surveillance gets set up on Zachary Kligman, and the sort of dominoes of police cooperation fall very quickly. Zachary Kligman was arrested. He agreed to cooperate and began secretly recording his phone calls with Rob Liljeberg.

And then he worked with police to set up a hidden camera and microphone in his car and film Rob delivering cocaine. After Rob was arrested, he's sitting in the police station. He gets offered to call a lawyer. He says he doesn't need a lawyer. And Detective Patrick Gill comes in and basically asks very bluntly, you know, where did you get this cocaine?

And in that moment, Rob has to make a decision. He can either give up his best friend and tell him where the cocaine came from and lay out the many details of this drug conspiracy. Or he can look at a 25-year minimum for the Xanax and cocaine that he had just handed a police informant.

And so basically immediately he gives up Mikey and also gives up basically everyone in the fraternity drug ring. He gives them names, phone numbers, addresses. Even, you know, one of the policemen takes out Facebook and asks, you know, show me their Facebooks. And he does that too. But the more difficult request is...

So they need Mikey to admit on recording that he had sold the cocaine and Xanax to Rob and they need to get him to Charleston. One of the things Rob gave the police was years of text messages between Rob and Mikey. And you really do see the portrait of their friendship, the way they talk, the humor, the sort of absurdity, the high jokes, all of it. But in the last months, you see...

Rob's very efficient seduction act of getting Mikey to Charleston. Rob says, I'm graduating next week. I have two extra tickets for you and your mom. It would mean a lot to me if you came to Charleston and saw me graduate. And sort of for their friendship, Mikey decides to go.

And they have this sort of long talk on the Vindu rooftop bar. It's Mikey's favorite bar in Charleston. He loves their mustard truffle fries. And they kind of talk through everything, the money that Rob owes Mikey, the cocaine deal, their years in college, their friendship, Mikey's paranoia, the lawyer he's getting.

And when they walk and go their separate ways, you know, Rob's walking toward the graduation stage. But first he hands off the wire recording to the Charleston police. And the next morning, Mikey gets in his convertible, his BMW convertible, and the Tahoe's and DEA guys and windbreakers step out and arrest him.

In June of 2016, the Charleston police held a press conference announcing the arrests of nine people, including Zachary Kligman, Mikey Schmidt, and Rob Liljeberg. The police chief said it was one of the largest drug busts in the city's history. We've recovered over 43,000 Xanax and synthetic marijuana pills, 734 grams of cocaine, over 2,400 grams of marijuana.

$214,000 in U.S. currency, seven firearms and four vehicles. Mullen says all nine suspects knew each other and worked together to distribute drugs. Police have not said whether Moffley was part of the... Charles Mungin, the man who had texted with Patrick Moffley about buying 10,000 Xanax, was arrested and charged with murder and armed robbery. He was 21. In 2019, he was found guilty and given a life sentence.

A second man, John Glover, 22, was arrested and sentenced to 15 years, which was suspended to seven. But the third person has never been identified. Max Marshall says that detectives believe that the men planned to rob Patrick, whose arm was broken. But Patrick fought back, and they shot him. The investigation into his death brought down the entire drug ring.

As of now, Mikey's the only person from this ring who is still in prison. Rob got a short sentence, a youthful offender act sentence at a sort of adolescent prison. But most of the guys, including Zachary Kligman, got suspended sentences, probation, or, you know, actually the bulk of them weren't charged at all. I mean, why is Mikey the only one with a real sentence? It's a few things. I mean, I think one...

The police...

said as much. They take cocaine much more seriously than they take Xanax. Xanax is a Schedule IV drug. Cocaine makes for very splashy headlines. And, you know, Mikey was the cocaine supplier. Connected to that is the fact that everyone else in the drug ring could cooperate with the police without worrying about their safety. So, you know, if you flip on your fraternity brother, the worst thing that could happen to you is social death. You know, you get ostracized from the fraternity. And,

But if you flip on your cartel supplier, the worst thing that can happen to you is actual death. You know, like Mikey had to actually fear for his life if he told the police where he got his cocaine. And so while Zach could, you know, flip on Rob without fear for his life, while Rob could flip on Mikey without fear for his life, Mikey could not flip on the sort of cartel links in Atlanta and hope to survive. Mikey is still in prison.

He declined to be interviewed. The Kappa Alpha order at the College of Charleston was suspended in September of 2016. K.A. was kicked off campus for four years, but came back, and their parties are actually crazier than they've ever been. Max Marshall reports that fraternity and sorority alumni contribute about 75% of all money donated to universities. ♪

Thank you.

You can learn more about this story and about fraternities in America in Max Marshall's book, Among the Bros, A Fraternity Crime Story. We'll have a link in the show notes. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. We hope you'll join our new membership program, Criminal Plus.

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I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.