Fraternity, Power, and Xanax in Max Marshall’s “Among the Bros” https://ift.tt/SMp0qoj
Max Marshall’s Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story is a propulsive and at times unsettling read. Marshall is a writer and journalist whose work has been published in GQ, Texas Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and The New York Times. Raised in the South and having himself been a member of a fraternity, he’s ideally suited to tell a tale about a drug trafficking ring implicating multiple fraternities across the Southeastern United States.
The “crime story” mentioned in the book’s subtitle revolves around Mikey Schmidt, who arrived at the College of Charleston from Atlanta, Georgia in the 2010s and decided to pledge the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity. He entered what I can only describe as a 24/7 amusement park as opposed to a place of learning — “the most decentralized network of fun you’ve ever seen,” says a Kappa Sig fraternity brother, Marshall quotes. This same brother described the environment on campus as follows:
“You can get hammered in your house, walk two blocks to a party, walk two blocks to a bar, wake up the next morning and get a five-star brunch. It’s beautiful, there’s three girls to every guy, and everyone is rich and willing to throw down.”
Marshall details Schmidt’s arrival on campus, his recruitment into the “KA” fraternity, his pledgeship (hazing), his drug use and near-constant partying, his involvement with the rap scene in Atlanta, and his evolution into one of the kingpins of a multimillion-dollar interstate drug trafficking and money laundering operation.
This evolution is fascinating. It starts out with binge drinking and weed smoking with friends, then escalates to “sidecar-ing” Xanax to “black out.” It proceeds to his buying Xanax and cocaine, first from the dark web and then from dealers; then dealing Xanax and cocaine himself at the College of Charleston and at universities (especially fraternities) throughout the Southeast. It ends with his arrest, criminal prosecution, and incarceration.
In addition to reviewing police records, Marshall spoke with several individuals involved in or adjacent to the drug ring, including Schmidt himself. The technique Marshall uses of quoting these individuals and arranging those quotes into a narrative is highly effective, and reaches its pinnacle in the chapter “Patrick,” about the murder of a boy named Patrick Moffly, who also dealt drugs at the College of Charleston.
The crime story itself is compelling for sure, and I particularly admired how Marshall described Schmidt’s arrest, then went back in time to explain how the police put all the drug trafficking pieces together, after Patrick’s murder.
But it’s the backdrop that I found riveting. That backdrop is a peek into the hallowed halls of elite American fraternity life in the U.S. South, and, let me tell you, it’s not pretty. Far from it.
One telling detail about the character of these wealthy, white, straight boys is that they revered the movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “didn’t see it as satire.” I can see how we’ve gotten to the low point we’ve gotten to in our civic and political life if these fraternities are in fact the breeding grounds for America’s powerbrokers.
“These boys were profiting off a nationwide wave of Xanax addiction that kept growing,” Marshall writes – one that contributed to the deaths of lots of people who were taking both opioids and benzos. And, unsurprisingly, because of their wealth, their privilege, and their place at the top of the sociological food chain, they didn’t expect to face consequences.
In the words of a University of Texas “Sig Ep,” “It’s the whole notion of like, ‘I’m connected to enough people that I can be a cocksucker, and I’m still going to be taken care of.’”
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