In 2016, police uncovered a multi-million dollar drug ring operated by fraternity brothers at the College of Charleston. The police report reads like a Breaking Bad episode, complete with firearms, grenade launchers, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in hidden cash. Read Max's book about this story: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/among-the-bros-max-marshall?variant=41509299290146 For a transcript of this episode: https://bit.ly/campusfiles-transcripts To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the theme of 'The Party Never Ends' podcast episode?
I'm Margo Gray. This week on Campus Files, the story of a multi-million dollar drug ring run by fraternity brothers at the College of Charleston.
So my name's Max Marshall. I'm an investigative journalist from Texas.
Max has written for a bunch of publications, including The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and Esquire. And back in 2016, he was working on a story for GQ about cocaine smuggling in Ho Chi Minh City. it got him thinking about a different drug, a drug that he'd seen everywhere back when he was in college, Xanax.
Xanax is an anti-anxiety pill, and it's often referred to as a bar because of its rectangular shape.
There's a lot of demand both for Xanax as sort of an anti-anxiety drug that you could take if you're stressed out for a test or you're trying to sleep or you're trying to get over a breakup, but also it had this huge demand as a party drug.
Xanax has been around since the 1980s, but it's only in recent years that it's become so popular as a recreational drug.
People would mix it usually with, you know, four or five beers and it felt like you had 12 or 13 beers. And that was actually a very, very popular, very sought after outcome. I do think it's really telling if you think of the sort of go-to it drug of a different generations, like weed or acid in the 60s, cocaine in the 80s, ecstasy in the 90s.
Like the fact that our generation's go-to drug is a anti-anxiety tranquilizer designed for panic attacks, that really says something about our generation.
But Max was less interested in why Xanax was so popular with Gen Z. He wanted to know where all the Xanax on college campuses was coming from, because it definitely didn't look legit.
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Chapter 2: Who are the main figures behind the drug ring at the College of Charleston?
Eight guys, all between 19 and 25 years old. Most were current or former fraternity members.
I saw this sort of row of mugshots, and it was all these guys with kind of the perfect frat swoop haircut. They all kind of had the tans that you get from like playing golf. It actually looked like a fraternity composite.
While the guys arrested may have looked like amateurs, their operation was anything but. In fact, the police report sounded like a Breaking Bad episode, complete with hundreds of thousands of dollars in hidden cash and tens of thousands of black market Xanax pills.
I think it said 41,000 pills. But then, of course, I started talking to some defense lawyers in Charleston, and one of them let it slip that the police had found something closer to 3 million pills. And that's when I knew there was definitely a story there.
Pretty soon, Max was on a flight to South Carolina, bound for the College of Charleston.
Travel and Leisure named College of Charleston the most beautiful campus in America. It's all these revolutionary era colorful buildings under palmetto trees and there's Spanish moss hanging from right above you. It's very much out of like a Nicholas Sparks novel or something. And because of that, it attracts a lot of very wealthy out-of-state kids.
Some of the kids in the College of Charleston would pull their literal yachts up to the Charleston deepwater dock and they would fly private to Aspen. And they had allowances to basically go out six or seven nights a week.
When Max first got to the College of Charleston campus, fraternity guys weren't exactly lining up to talk to him about the drug operation.
I mean, at first, really, very few people wanted to talk. And I remember I was telling an editor, I was like, Oh, if I'm going to do this story, I need contacts. And he was like, Oh, yeah, contacts are important. You know, list of names. I was like, No, I need contacts. Like, I can't wear glasses, because I need to look more like these guys.
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Chapter 3: How did the fraternity drug operation manage to distribute Xanax?
Something a DEA agent told me is that the U.S. Postal Service at this point is the largest drug trafficker by bulk in the world because it's just very easy to send drugs over the mail. You know, I even had a high school friend who was dealing at another school in the South, and he would just get it shipped to the campus mail center hidden in Rob Schneider DVD jackets.
The next step in the operation was to transform the powder into pills. This took place in beach houses off the coast of Charleston.
And these guys would basically rent one beach house about every month. They had an industrial pill press that could print out a few hundred thousand Xanax pills a month, and they would make hundreds and thousands and ultimately millions of these pills.
The pill press had also been ordered from China through the dark web, and the pills it produced varied in strength. Some contained barely any alprazolam powder, while others had two to three times the recommended dose.
And they would wear hazmat suits because these machines kick up so much alprazolam dust, and if it gets on you, you can black out pretty quickly.
The pills were carefully packaged inside emptied Skittle bags. Then, they were ready for sale.
They would sell them to the fraternity guys at anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar a pill. And they would buy in bulk. They would buy 10,000 at a time. And then these guys would turn around and they would sell them for a lot more.
And the beauty of being in a fraternity was that they had a large client base right at their fingertips.
You know, something a lot of these guys would tell me is you can walk into a fraternity house and there might be 30 customers waiting for you at one time. They like to buy from guys they know. So you sort of have this incredibly centralized system with a lot of customers in one building.
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Chapter 4: What role did the dark web play in the fraternity's drug trade?
And so if you give a pledge 10 Skittles bags and say, you've got to take this over to Sigma Nu, no questions asked, that's what they would do. It just became this very efficient way of moving these Xanax pills all over Greek life, all around the South.
They were able to move and sell such huge quantities of Xanax at once because the drug doesn't carry a trafficking charge in South Carolina.
You know, you can get caught with 10 pills, you can get caught with 10,000 pills. It's still going to be a possession charge, not a trafficking charge.
Xanax is also much easier to smuggle than a drug like marijuana since it's lightweight and doesn't have a smell.
Who is going to open a Skittles bag expecting to find a bunch of drugs in there, especially if you're a frat kid driving a Mercedes? And so I think it was just sort of this perfect storm of like there was so much money to be made and it seemed like there was so little risk. And so you combine all that and it's a pretty quote unquote rational way to make a nice profit pretty quickly.
The thing is, most of these guys didn't need to make a profit.
People often sell drugs because it's their best and sometimes only economic option. But these were kids who had four-figure allowances, and some kids had much bigger allowances than that.
So it begs the question, why start dealing in the first place?
The other words of the year, they were just as online. You know, Oxford's was brain rot. If you can believe it, its first use was in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau. R.I.P. Henry David Thoreau. You would have hated TikTok.
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Chapter 5: Why did wealthy college students engage in drug dealing?
Because on one level, it's like they're the best fraternity because, well, listen to how wild this party is. But it's also they're the best fraternity because they got away with all of that. When you start to break shit and you start to burn things and you start to break the law, it takes money to get away with it.
Max thinks breaking the law became something of a status symbol. It signaled that you had the money, connections, and power to get away with criminal activity.
Something people often miss when they talk about Greek life is how much it's sort of this never-ending status Olympics. Like you can really go to any campus in America and ask, what are the three best fraternities and the three best sororities here? And people will immediately have an answer. But what makes one fraternity better than another?
Like the best college football team is the one that wins the most games or the best hospital is going to do the best job of saving your life. Why are some fraternities better than others? A lot of it comes down to wealth.
Once you understand that about Greek life, Max says, it's easier to see why these guys would start dealing drugs. There was no quicker way to gain clout or boost status than dealing. And the profits didn't hurt either.
Some of the guys were ultimately making so much money that they had to launder their profits through the fraternity's books, disguising drug money as fraternity donations or party expenses.
One of the guys in K told me, he was like, oh yeah, by the peak of this, our fraternity had, I think his quote was, we had a few million dollar guys and a few six figure individuals. I do think there's some exaggeration there, but certainly there was very real money to be made.
The money would have kept flowing, and the guys could have continued living above the law, if not for the events of March 4th, 2016. Events that revealed just how reckless and out of control their operation had become. On the afternoon of March 4th, 2016, two College of Charleston students were playing Call of Duty in their off-campus apartment when a real gunshot rang out.
Their housemate and fellow College of Charleston student, Patrick Moffley, had been shot in the chest. Instead of administering first aid, Patrick's housemates frantically set about destroying evidence, flushing drugs down the toilet, and burying their pills in the neighbors' trash.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of Mountain Weekend in the fraternity's story?
Patrick was rushed into surgery at a nearby emergency room, but by that evening, he was pronounced dead. The coroner found Elprazolin in his bloodstream. Seemingly unfazed by their friend's death, Patrick's housemates left the next day for their spring break trip to Puerto Rico.
But in the wider Charleston community, the murder sent shockwaves and dominated local headlines, especially because of the Moffley name.
His dad was a big real estate developer. He built all these houses on Kiowa Island. His mom had run for Congress, and she was on the Charleston school board.
Police were under intense pressure, not just to find out who killed Patrick Moffley, but also to trace the source of the pills scattered around his body. As it turned out, the two were deeply connected. Investigators soon discovered that Patrick had been murdered by two men he'd met through off-campus drug deals. They'd shown up that night, intending to rob him of his Xanax supply.
While Patrick himself wasn't a member of a fraternity, he was tied to the fraternity-run drug operation. And as police dug deeper into where Patrick got his pills and who else was selling, they began to unravel the massive drug operation featuring dark web alprazolin powder, freshman pledges recruited as drug runners, and distribution networks spanning the Southeast.
The DEA got involved, the FBI got involved, U.S. Postal Service got involved. Things kind of started to unravel from there.
Charleston City Police hope one of their biggest drug busts ever will help curb crime on the streets. We're talking about Xanax, cocaine, and drugs.
In June 2016, six months after Patrick's murder, the Charleston police chief held a press conference. He announced that the investigation had resulted in one of the biggest drug busts in the city's history.
Over 43,000 Xanax and synthetic marijuana pills, 734 grams of cocaine.
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