Latest / Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott / Among The Bros - A Fraternity Crime Story

Transcript

Among The Bros - A Fraternity Crime Story · Conversations: Special Guests with Preston Scott

• 0:13
  Good amatees, Welcome to the third hour of the Morning Show with Preston's Got
• 0:18
  it Happened to be Preston? That is grand Allen over there in Studio one
• 0:21
  A at Show five thousand and forty five. As you know November, we
• 0:28
  tend to get a lot of authors on the show. I love talking about
• 0:32
  books. I don't ever have novelists on the show because I have zero interest
• 0:38
  in fictional books. I am a nonfiction guy, and this story intrigued me
• 0:46
  a lot. The books on sale now brand new book among the Bros,
• 0:51
  a fraternity crime story, and the author, Max Marshall, is with us.
• 0:55
  Max, Good morning, Welcome to the program. How are you,
• 0:58
  good morning. It's good to be here. Before we get into the book
• 1:02
  itself, I mean, your background is you've written for GQ, in Sports,
• 1:06
  Illustrated New York Times, but this is your first book. Did you
• 1:11
  plan on writing this book? No, I didn't. It started like everything
• 1:15
  else I've written as a magazine piece. I just wanted to write about xen
• 1:19
  X on college campuses. I'm the same age as all the guys in this
• 1:23
  book. I was in college from twenty twelve to twenty sixteen, and I
• 1:27
  saw a lot of Xanax when I was in college, and yeah, I
• 1:30
  thought I was just going to write kind of a smaller book about xen x,
• 1:34
  and then I ended up finding what turned out to be the biggest college
• 1:38
  drug ring ever discovered, and yeah, it kind of fractled out of control
• 1:45
  from there. There's an intersection that is noted early on, and it's the
• 1:49
  intersection with the college life with the Greek life. And is that important to
• 1:57
  the theme of this story. I mean, is there sort of an underbelly
• 2:00
  to the Greek life that it's just it sort of reminds me of Mason's.
• 2:06
  There's this little secrecy in there that at times is a little creepy. Definitely.
• 2:10
  So yeah, I mean the subtitle of a book, you know,
• 2:13
  among the bros of fraternity crime story and this drug ring. They're bringing in
• 2:20
  santax powder from China via the dark Web. Had pill presses off the coast
• 2:24
  of Charleston, South Carolina, and Ben would make hundreds of thousands of these
• 2:30
  fakes and X pills, and a lot of these pills were then distributed through
• 2:35
  the fraternity system. Attorneys would use their pledges to shift these pills around.
• 2:39
  They also had a fraternity brother in Atlanta who's bringing in cartel cocaine. And
• 2:46
  they would drive kind of from frattorney house for attorney house around the South selling
• 2:52
  all this stuff, you know, ultimately millions of dollars of drugs. And
• 2:55
  yeah, multiple guys kind of told me the Fratorney system is a drug his
• 3:00
  dream. You can show up to out of these big castles and there's you
• 3:04
  know, sometimes twenty three kids who all want to buy from you at once.
• 3:08
  Some of them have pretty good allowances from their parents, don't know how
• 3:13
  much anything costs, and the only sort of supervision in sight is the campus
• 3:17
  policeman on his golf cart. So it really fractles, like I said,
• 3:23
  out of control pretty quickly. The drug ring really grew fast, and I
• 3:28
  think it would have continued to grow if a student hadn't been murdered during spring
• 3:34
  break. And then, you know, then the adults kind of showed up.
• 3:38
  It's called Among the Bros. A fraternity crime story. Max Marshall,
• 3:40
  the author with me. Max, you mentioned you're kind of a contemporary,
• 3:45
  appear to a lot of these guys at least age wise. Take me back
• 3:50
  to when you were in school. I mean, is that the genesis of
• 3:52
  this. Did you observe this? I mean, well, I mean I'll
• 3:55
  go ahead and ask you, did you buy this stuff when you were in
• 3:58
  school? Yeah? So I took x ax a few times, but I
• 4:02
  had friends who were taking a lot more of it. I had some friends
• 4:06
  who were getting addicted, and I even had some friends who were dealing it.
• 4:11
  And what kind of confused me, Well, it was a few things.
• 4:13
  One was these guys didn't need the money. Two, it was kind
• 4:18
  of fascinating to me if you think of what the it drug is for different
• 4:21
  generations, And obviously you're just sort of speaking broadly, but you know,
• 4:25
  acid or weed for the sixties, or cocaine for the eighties, Why is
• 4:30
  an anti anxiety tranquilizer the sort of drug of the day for my generation?
• 4:36
  So that was something I really wanted to look into. And then the third
• 4:39
  thing was the pills I was seeing flying around. They weren't coming from Pfizer
• 4:44
  or CBS. There were fake sanx pills that were kind of chalky, and
• 4:46
  they show up to guys dorms and you know, ups boxes, and so
• 4:53
  I also just wanted to know, like, where's this fakes ax coming from?
• 4:57
  And that's what led me to this drug ring. Were the days when
• 5:00
  times were good and life was simple. He still lives there. The Morning
• 5:03
  Show with Preston Scott on News Radio one hundred point seven WFLA, it is
• 5:14
  Harper Books and on sale now where you get your books. Among the bros
• 5:17
  of Fraternity Crime Story, the author Max Marshall with me, Max, you've
• 5:24
  used the term fake xanax. Define that for me, sure, So this
• 5:30
  is xanax that's being made from alpraslempowder coming from Chinese factories, so not the
• 5:40
  sort of supply chain that you would get with legal drugs and being ordered on
• 5:44
  the dark web of the black market and then being smuggled into the United States.
• 5:50
  And then these boys had pill presses, so their own sort of industrial
• 5:55
  system, and they would rent these beach houses and basically make a few hundred
• 6:00
  un pills a month and then ship them out. So it was a bunch
• 6:02
  of you know, eighteen to twenty five year old guys basically making their own
• 6:08
  xanax from scratch kind of whatever sort of chemical mixture they came up with,
• 6:14
  and then selling it. But it's fag sanx not in that they're trying to
• 6:19
  sell it to a customer at a pharmacy and trick them into thinking that they're
• 6:25
  buying real XANX. Right, it's fake san x that they're making so that
• 6:29
  they can sell, usually to other guys their age kind of like I said,
• 6:32
  it's this party drug. So they're not really a middleman here. They
• 6:36
  are manufacturing a drug and selling it to the user. Yeah, exactly.
• 6:42
  And that's something that the dark Web really changed. It used to be if
• 6:45
  you wanted to deal drugs on a college campus, you had to kind of
• 6:48
  be that middleman, and you had to find some criminal organization, gang,
• 6:53
  cartel source to kind of bring you these drugs. But now you can,
• 6:58
  you know, stay in the safety of his WiFi and basically just had it
• 7:00
  shipped to you. And so the barrier to entry just got so much lower.
• 7:05
  The College of Charleston, you went there in twenty eighteen. Did you
• 7:11
  go there because of an arrest? Did you go there because of a rumor?
• 7:15
  Why did you go there? Yeah? So there had been a press
• 7:18
  release about eight guys who had been arrested with a pound and a half of
• 7:25
  cocaine, about a dozen pounds of weeds, an assault rifle grenade, launcher,
• 7:30
  they'd had their cars confiscated. These were fraternity guys, or about half
• 7:33
  of them were, and it said they had been confiscated with forty four thousand
• 7:38
  pills. But then I did some investigating and found out it was actually much
• 7:43
  closer to three million pills, and the police had just never released that fact.
• 7:46
  And that's how the story got much bigger. At what point did this
• 7:53
  transition then for you? Because you know, you mentioned that you went there
• 7:57
  to investigate this little trafficking ring on a college campus, and then it changed
• 8:01
  what were you digging and going through? Where you suddenly kind of had that
• 8:07
  your eyes are open and this is a much bigger story, definitely. So
• 8:11
  there are a few moments. One was a defense lawyer very early on sort
• 8:16
  of slip me the affter David, that showed that they've been confiscated with seven
• 8:20
  thousand grams of alpreslin, which comes out to three and a half million pills
• 8:24
  if you're doing two milligrams for pill. So the difference between forty four thousand
• 8:31
  and three and a half million. I was going, Okay, well,
• 8:33
  why why didn't the police publicize this and what's going on? Another is when
• 8:39
  I found out about Patrick Moffley, who's this student that culture Charleston. Like
• 8:43
  I said, it was murdered during spring break and they found his body surrounded
• 8:46
  by all these counterfeit sant X pills, and kind of finding out the extent
• 8:50
  to which he was involved in this drug operation and how his murder was the
• 8:54
  way it all unraveled. And then the last thing I think was finding out
• 9:00
  how many of the guys got away with it. So you have this massive
• 9:01
  drug ring, but as it say, there's only one boy who's in jail.
• 9:07
  Two did very short jail sentences, and the rest either got probation,
• 9:11
  suspended sentences, and a lot of them were never even charged. So you
• 9:16
  know, when you have a drug ring of that scale plus a murder,
• 9:18
  plus most people getting away with it, it feels like a you know,
• 9:22
  a big story WFLA at w FLA fam dot com on your phone with the
• 9:26
  iHeartRadio app and on hundreds of devices like Alexa, Google Home, Xbox,
• 9:31
  and Sonos and Iheart's radio station. Final segment Now, author Max Marshall the
• 9:41
  book Among the Brows, a fraternity crime story, talking about a crime sort
• 9:48
  of a small time trafficking ring that wasn't quite so small. Did law enforcement
• 9:52
  just turn a blind eye to a bunch of the story or did they just
• 9:56
  not have evidence? So yeah, I mean I think I was saying earlier.
• 10:01
  For a while, the only law enforcement that was around is the sort
• 10:05
  of campus cop with his flashlight in walkie talkie. And it really wasn't until
• 10:11
  this murder that all this interest sort of flooded in because the boy he was
• 10:16
  murdered was the son of a very prominent real estate developer, his mom had
• 10:20
  run for Congress, and you know, it was a block from campus,
• 10:26
  So all of a sudden, there was this this sort of interest of like,
• 10:28
  why is this kid lying surrounded by hundreds of these stake pills? And
• 10:33
  that's when the DEA steps in. That's when the postal service steps in because
• 10:37
  a lot of these doorgs were being shipped over the mail, and the FBI
• 10:41
  steps in, and also state and local law enforcement, and they you know,
• 10:46
  had like a thirty person task force. But yeah, for the first
• 10:50
  couple of years, I think the police just kind of drive around campus for
• 10:56
  the most part when they're passing through. This involved the fraternity Kappa Alpha.
• 11:03
  What happened in the wake of this story what what's happened on campus? What's
• 11:07
  on campus now? Sure? So when the bust happens, Kapa Alpha very
• 11:13
  quickly was kicked off campus. Some other fraternities were as well. But four
• 11:18
  years later Cap Alpha came back. SAE the other main drug ring, or
• 11:22
  a part of the drug ring, they were allowed to just stay on.
• 11:26
  They never left. And it's crazy. I mean, you can talk to
• 11:31
  some of these younger guys in these fraternities. Some of them don't even know
• 11:33
  this happened, And certainly the parents don't know this happened. And it's actually
• 11:39
  harder than you'd think to even get information as a parent about if you want
• 11:46
  your kids to join extra y fraternity. And this is true at any school,
• 11:50
  what hazing, deaths, or drug accusations or just general crimes have been
• 11:56
  committed in that group. It's it's actually pretty hard to know. Which is
• 12:01
  kind of a crazy thing. I'm sitting here in a state of almost disbelief
• 12:09
  that these secret fraternal organizations, and let's face it, it's generally the frat
• 12:16
  boys. We don't have a lot of this type of thing going on with
• 12:18
  the sorority sisters or do we? No, No, not as much I
• 12:22
  mean, sorties aren't allowed to throw parties for the most part, so most
• 12:26
  of what we're talking about happens at fraternities. I personally think Tories should be
• 12:31
  allowed to throw parties because the fact that they can't they're always on the back
• 12:37
  foot. You know, they never get to host, they never get to
• 12:41
  make the punch, so they don't know what's in the punch. And I
• 12:43
  think there's a lot of reasons why they should. But yeah, as of
• 12:46
  now, the party world really runs solely through the fraternities in Greek life.
• 12:52
  Since this book, I mean, this book's been out a couple of days,
• 12:54
  but you know, people knew about this book for a while. Now,
• 12:58
  have you got an other have you gotten follow up? I mean,
• 13:01
  have you gotten any tips or inclinations about how widespread this problem is? Definitely
• 13:07
  yeah, I mean even before the book came out, people will continue to
• 13:11
  text me because you know, the book runs from twenty twelve to twenty sixteen,
• 13:16
  but then you know there's sort of the coda after and really starting in
• 13:20
  twenty eighteen, that's when fentanyl hit the scene, and you know, also
• 13:24
  drug buying kind of moved from the dark web to snapchat, so you'd have
• 13:30
  kids, and I get these texts sadly kind of often if you know,
• 13:35
  oh, my friends bought dan x on Snapchat and a single pill was caut
• 13:39
  with Sentinel and it's a it's a one one pill kill system. And so
• 13:45
  I think in some ways it's got it's just gotten more dangerous. I guess
• 13:48
  I've never put my I can't get my brain around the fact that that fentanyl
• 13:52
  is a thing simply because the people that deal it are literally killing their market.
• 13:58
  Yeah, it's true, but I think the markets are so diffuse and
• 14:03
  international that it's not the idea of like the local drug dealer is killing his
• 14:09
  local client that he knows. It's sort of this amorphous thing of you're buying
• 14:13
  it on a Snapchat and it's coming from China, Mexico or you know,
• 14:20
  across the country, and the dealer you know, doesn't never will never see
• 14:26
  they're victim, and there will never really be consequences because it's you can't really
• 14:31
  just go across town and say, like, here's the guy who sold it
• 14:35
  to me. Max. Over the years, I've probably done about seven or
• 14:37
  eight thousand interviews in the course of doing this show for over twenty years,
• 14:41
  and I've done a fair share of authors, and I ask authors from time
• 14:46
  to time, what do you want a reader to get out of this?
• 14:50
  What do you want them to take away? Some authors say I got nothing.
• 14:52
  I'm reporting, I'm writing, I'm telling the story. What they get
• 14:56
  out of it is up to them. What about you? Yeah, I
• 15:00
  mean I definitely empathize or I think I'm kind of in that school. I
• 15:05
  definitely don't want to hold a reader's hand and tell them what to think and
• 15:07
  tell them what to feel. I like that, you know, people can
• 15:11
  have different readings of this book or of this story. At the same time.
• 15:15
  I do think, you know, a few questions that I was raising,
• 15:18
  or one kind of what's the consequence of a life without consequences? If
• 15:24
  you can get away with so many things, what does that do to your
• 15:28
  life? Because I think that's a lot of these guys, and that's kind
• 15:31
  of the bubble I grew up in as well. And I think the other
• 15:33
  thing is, and we touched on it earlier, but why are all these
• 15:39
  guys who have, you know, a safety net that's so plush is basically
• 15:43
  a hammock. Why are they blocking out on anti anxiety tranquilizers. What is
• 15:46
  it about our generation in our time that makes a drug design for panic attacks
• 15:52
  and seizures sort of the party drug? And you know, I think reading
• 15:58
  this book you can kind of draw out your own conclusions. There's a lot
• 16:02
  of answers in there, and then there's a lot of things you can kind
• 16:04
  of gleam or think yourself. But definitely looking forward to the conversation. One
• 16:10
  thing's for certain. It is a never ending party, as you write about
• 16:14
  Max, Max, thanks for the time this morning, best of success.
• 16:18
  Thank you really enjoyed it, appreciate it. Max Marshall with us this morning.
• 16:22
  The book among the Bros. A fraternity crime story. I'm still getting
• 16:26
  my brain around this. Millions that a pill mill frat Boyce College of Charleston.
• 16:37
  What twenty eight minutes after