In 2016, several young men were arrested in Charleston, South Carolina, as part of a small-time drug-trafficking ring. Their choice of drug was Xanax, which Americans were overdosing on at a tenfold rate between 1999 and 2015 (more than double the opioid overdoses during the same time frame) and which college students flocked to as a way of alleviating anxiety and stress while keeping up grueling schedules—especially if they belonged to fraternities, where there’s no such thing as downtime.
The men in question either went to or knew people at the College of Charleston, a bucolic campus for budding power brokers, seemingly the last place one would expect a drug enterprise to flourish. But as Max Marshall details in his deeply reported debut, Among the Bros, “C of C,” and particularly its Greek life, was rife with criminal doings—including a murder that remained unsolved.
Though Marshall, a reporter in his 20s whose work has appeared in GQ and Texas Monthly, interviewed well over 100 people to figure out the ins and outs of the drug-trafficking ring, his chief perspective comes from Michael “Mikey” Schmidt, one of the ringleaders. Schmidt, roughly the same age as Marshall, arrived at C. of C. in the early 2010s from a less-than-privileged Atlanta family and, upon joining Sigma Alpha Epsilon, found his people. The endless parties, drinking, and not-so-casual misogyny spiraled from there.
The goal of joining a frat is to be catapulted into elite status, summed up by a statement on Cornell’s Web site: “While only 2 percent of America’s population is involved in fraternities, 80 percent of Fortune 500 executives, 76 percent of U.S. senators and congressmen, 85 percent of Supreme Court justices, and all but two presidents since 1825 have been fraternity men.” Even more astounding, as Marshall discovers, is that about 75 percent of all donations to universities are made by Greek alums.
The stakes, in other words, are about as high as they can get. Add the Dark Web, the U.S.P.S.—one of the many astonishing asides Marshall includes in his book is that, according to a D.E.A. agent, the postal service is the “largest drug trafficker in the world”—and a seemingly bottomless appetite for uppers and downers, and no wonder people like Schmidt, or the murder victim, Patrick Moffly (gunned down not long after trying to do an end run around the major Xanax kingpin in the South), cast aside academic pursuits for the quick riches of criminality. They bought and sold Xanax to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but did so much more. (The arrest netted seven guns and a grenade launcher.)
There’s a jauntiness to Marshall’s voice that makes Among the Bros a contradictory reading experience: it’s entertaining, in the way that reminded me of a certain type of magazine journalism that largely died out in the past decade. His decision to present many of his interviews in oral-history style generally works, too. But because the story Marshall tells is marinated in the toxicity of being a young man in contemporary America, particularly one where access to whatever you want without real consequence produces even greater dissonance, there’s a jarring quality overall.
Marshall is well aware of this contradiction, and more or less states it outright near the close of his investigation: “If the fallout from the drug bust has taught them something, it’s that as long as you’re one of the boys, you can usually go in as hard as you want without having to learn anything. If someone tries to stop your fun, you’ll find good lawyers and reasonable judges, and if the outside world sees you as a villain, you can always play the heel.”
There have been some brief moments in the past few years when fraternity bros seemed to face actual reckoning, but as evidenced by Trump’s election in 2016 and the backlashes to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, such moments quickly evaporated. These men are on a pre-destined highway towards permanent elite status, and if they take the wrong exit ramp, well, it doesn’t take long to get back on course. Another frat member or group will be there to catch them when they fall and prop them further upward.
Among the Bros is a sobering tour of the mindset of such men and how even when the party curdles into violence, drug dealing, and murder, it doesn’t really stop.
Sarah Weinman is the author, most recently, of Scoundrel and the editor of Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning
