The hard partying students who were also drug lords
AMONG THE BROS: A story of a brotherhood crimeby Max Marshall
“It’s almost a sign of prestige,” an anonymous student tells journalist Max Marshall in “Among the Bros”: “While everyone is refining their lives to prepare for the professional world,” he and his fraternity brothers “go hard .” No matter what damage they do in the process, he knows he is so well connected that “I will still be taken care of.”
This confession is stunning in both self-awareness and audacity, and succinctly captures the environment in which Marshall’s gripping crime story takes place. In American higher education, the Greek system openly touts its traditions—something the author knows well from his years as a Delta Sigma at Columbia, where he graduated in 2016. But “Among the Bros” reveals an unofficial mantra that seems to underlie American higher education. core of elite Greek life: we will behave badly, and we will get away with it.
Set in South Carolina’s rural College of Charleston, the book tells the story of Mikey Schmidt, a scruffy, 6-foot-2 freshman from Atlanta who wears Augusta National jerseys and drives a Mercedes as he competes for a place among the larger students. , wealthier members of the prominent Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. Marshall doesn’t know if he’ll get an offer from SAE (“he told people he got one, but the SAEs I spoke to said they didn’t remember meeting Mikey as a freshman”), but we do know that Schmidt eventually comes to work for him. Kappa Alpha – a ‘middle class’ frat with origins linked to the Ku Klux Klan – despite coming across as a ‘try-hard’ to many of the brothers during recruitment.
Mikey soon forms the brotherly bond he hoped for with KA president Rob Liljeberg, who shares Mikey’s interests in weed and video games. After watching “Rob sell marijuana at a rapid pace” from his dorm room, Mikey leaves his business with fake IDs to dedicate himself fully to the drug trade. By 2016, the operation has grown into a multi-tiered group that supplies not only the College of Charleston, but campuses across the South, with millions of dollars worth of cocaine, narcotics, Xanax and other drugs.
After fifteen months of researching sorority culture at the University of Alabama, I got the sense that what the young women of Tuscaloosa were looking for in the Greek system was a sense of belonging. But in this page-turning triumph, 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.
Marshall cites the influence of the 1978 film “Animal House” on elite white fraternity culture, which subsequently evolved from vest-wearing campus leaders to fun-loving rule breakers who nevertheless remained above the law. With the cinematic precision of a true crime documentary (“Murdaugh Murders” I think), “Among the Bros” explains how the consequences of this paradigm shift turned deadly.
Told with journalistic integrity, sense of humor and gruesome detail, Mikey Schmidt’s rise from try-hard to major drug kingpin is as breathtaking to watch as the ring’s decline, in a 2016 bust that involved tens of millions of dollars in drugs brings the light. illegal drugs. The implosion of the brotherhood is happening quickly; as one KA reminds us, “You can’t spell frat without rat.”
The injustice of the subsequent legal process is devastating, but not surprising. Schmidt is sentenced to ten years without parole, but most of the ring’s dealers receive at most probation and can still graduate. (C of C even allowed Kappa Alpha to return to campus in 2020.) The slippery slope of impunity begins with a student-friendly local attorney who gets the brothers’ DUIs erased from their records; it ends with student drug traffickers dodging prison sentences even after one of them is murdered.
“If the fallout from the drug crisis has taught them anything,” Marshall writes, “it’s that as long as you’re one of the guys, you can usually go as fast as you want without having to learn anything.” No matter how much their classmates and victims hate them, they know: “One day they will all work for us.”
AMONG THE BROS: A story of a brotherhood crime | By Max Marshall | Harper | 291 pages | $30