Millions of Pills

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1:07This episode contains language that may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion. So if you look at the 1800s, when fraternities kind of became a thing on American campuses, they weren't really necessary until middle-class students started showing up to American universities. Before that, it was basically all, you know, sons of the upper crust, and so there was no need for sort of a separate campus or a separate drinking club. for these guys. But in the 1800s, all of a sudden you have kids from rural areas, farm kids, basically showing up to study to be ministers. And all these guys from sort of tonier backgrounds basically said, you know, I don't want to drink with these farm kids.

1:51And let's kind of form our own drinking club. And it really ramped up from there. There's a statistic that Cornell Greek Life website used that, you know, 85 % of all Fortune 500 CEOs, over 80 % of senators and Supreme Court justices, and all but four presidents since 1825 have been in fraternities. You are part of a fraternity. Yes. Which one? Delta Sigma Phi. So in my mind, a frat guy is not anyone I want to be around. Sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, what would you say your stereotype is in your mind? Privileged? Yes. White? Yes. Drunk? I mean, I'm telling you the worst in my mind. Sure, sure, sure.

2:43Right? Like, that these guys don't need to care because it's all going to be okay for them. That was a lot of my feeling as well, writing the book. Journalist Max Marshall is the author of Among the Bros, a fraternity crime story. You know, there was a saying I heard a few times, under the influence above the law. And I do think that sort of describes the mindset of a certain type of fraternity guy. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

3:27Max Marshall's book looks at one fraternity at one college in particular. You're talking about what Travel and Leisure named the most beautiful campus in America, in the middle of what Travel and Leisure also named the best city in the world, the College of Charleston. It really is this sort of jewel box within a jewel box. It's this incredibly beautiful, well-preserved, revolutionary-era campus with Spanish moss hanging from the trees, Civil War cannonballs nestled in the, you know, the dirt. And it attracts a very sort of moneyed, out-of-state kind of student. There's a huge pipeline of kids from places like Greenwich, Connecticut, the New York suburbs, sort of really wealthy New England towns.

4:19People call it boarding school without the nerds. And they come down, you know, on the first day of school any semester, you'll see, you know, their BMWs and Audis kind of going through the campus underneath the palmetto trees. In 2013, one of the students arriving at the College of Charleston was Mikey Schmidt from Atlanta. And he showed up with a very clear intention in mind. Before he even knew where he wanted to go to school, before he even knew what he wanted to study, he knew he wanted to join a good fraternity. In his first week at school, Mikey went to the school activity fair. And Mikey very quickly walked by the Quidditch team and the Chucktown a cappella singers.

5:04He had no interest in doing that. He had no interest in playing ultimate frisbee. He went straight to the fraternity tables. And his goal at the time was to join SAE, which, you know, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, a lot of people back in Atlanta had told him this is the best fraternity at the College of Charleston. They have the craziest parties, kind of kids from the best families. And so he went looking for SAE. And while he was walking toward the SAE table, he saw another fraternity he recognized that he had heard was not as good, but he recognized the name and it was Kappa Alpha Order, K-A, and walks up, meets this guy named Rob Liljaberg, who's wearing a red Kappa Alpha shirt with a gold cross on it.

5:53He's eating a very large Subway sandwich. And Mikey is pretty sure that Rob is incredibly high. And so he asks Rob, you know, do you smoke? And at least the way Mikey remembers it, Rob says, yeah, we burn. Rob was a sophomore. He told Mikey he lived across the street and invited him over. Rob Wilgerberg was a very sort of classic all-American kid. He was captain of the soccer team. He was the son of an orthopedic surgeon in Hickory, North Carolina, which is a town known for lake culture and handmade furniture. He was an Eagle Scout. And when he arrived to College of Charleston, I think he pretty quickly realized that the College of Charleston is not a place where Eagle Scouts really have social clout.

6:49It was a school instead where Greek life is really important to a lot of people. Rob joined Kappa Alpha, just like his father and uncle. When Mikey met him, Rob was sort of in the middle of this reinvention. And part of that reinvention, at least as Mikey tells it, is that Rob had started to deal weed at a pretty decent scale as well. Mikey was also running a little business, selling fake IDs. Good ones. The kind of fake IDs that can pass a box scanner. And that's sort of the holy grail for college freshmen. And so that made him very attractive to, I think, a lot of the KAs. Mikey decided to rush Kappa Alpha.

7:33Rush is the recruitment process for fraternities and sororities. And you're trying to impress the fraternity. The fraternity is trying to impress you. There's sort of a competitive round of parties where after each party, they're sort of narrowing down who fits in with them. How well do you drink? How well do you small talk? How well do you hit on girls? Can you play beer pong without embarrassing yourself? Can you shotgun a beer without it spraying on everyone? Did you play sports in high school? Do you know the right people? At the end of this process, all the guys from the fraternity will get together and basically watch a slideshow and vote on their favorites.

8:12Max Marshall says that some of the Kappa Alphas thought Mikey was, quote, a tryhard. Which is sort of the kiss of death in Greek life. You're like trying too hard to fit in. You're bragging about how drunk you got at some high school party or, you know, you're popping your collar or whatever it is. But Rob really vouched for Mikey, so he got the bid. He decided to pledge K.A. When you read about pledgeship, you're almost always reading about very violent hazing or hazing involving binge drinking. and the reason that gets the lion's share of the headlines is that kills about, you know, one college student per year in America.

8:52And so there's this sort of constant stream of stories about it over the years. But if you actually talk to fraternity guys, what they hate most about pledgeship is sort of the daily errands and sort of the work of being, quote unquote, the help. And so, you know, for basically hours a day, these pledges are cooking, cleaning, washing people's cars, acting as an errand boy, courier, food delivery. But it's such a full-time job that you end up missing a lot of class. And they're actually in parts of the South. And I knew guys like this. When they're applying for jobs, they know that their employers are going to bake in a GPA dip for your freshman year.

9:36knowing that your pledged ship GPA is going to be low because you don't have time to go to class. And that certainly was true for Mikey. He skipped going to class basically from the beginning. And it all leads toward something called Hell Week. You move into the fraternity house, you hand in your phone, and basically for 20 hours a day, sometimes 24, because you're really not getting much sleep, you're getting hazed. At night, all the pledges line up against the wall and basically have to do different activities. So it might be all the pledges have to go through the Greek alphabet memorized. And if you get it wrong, you have to chug and everyone is going to be chugging fireball until they throw up.

10:23Or you might have to get on your elbows and toes and do a plank on the floor, and then they'll put bottle caps under your elbows and toes, and so you're bleeding, and you just have to lie there, and if you fall, everyone has to drink until they throw up. Or maybe you're lying on your back with a blindfold, and one pledge is going to eat an egg yolk, and then he's going to spit it into the next pledge's mouth, and it's going to go all the way through the brotherhood. It all sort of culminated in a night when they They blindfolded the pledges, drove them 20 miles to a beach off the coast of Charleston, dropped them off in the sand, and told them they needed to walk home.

11:05And that all sounds pretty hard, but if you compare it to, you know, I talked to a guy who got waterboarded. So there are definitely levels to the game. The final step to joining Kappa Alpha was reading The Varlet. The K.A. guidebook for new members, a knight during medieval times, would call his apprentice a varlet. And it's this sort of a guidebook for how to be a modern knight. Max Marshall says that fraternities vary widely chapter to chapter, campus to campus, except in the case of Kappa Alpha. If there's a fraternity that has a similar reputation campus to campus, it's going to be Kappa Alpha.

11:50And that's because, from the outset, they conceived themselves as a Southern fraternity. The Kappa Alpha Order, also known as K.A., or just the Order, is one of the country's biggest and oldest fraternities. J. Edgar Hoover was a Kappa Alpha, so was Charlie Rose, and Anthony Perkins, who played Norman Bates in Psycho. and Alex Murdoch, the South Carolina lawyer who was convicted of murdering his wife and youngest son in 2023. And the fraternity has a very unusual history. So they were founded in 1865, you know, obviously end of the Civil War in Lexington, Virginia, at what was then called Washington College.

12:36And they explicitly set out from the beginning as being a way of keeping the ideals of the Old South alive. Their motto is God and the ladies. By the 20th century, they had named Robert E. Lee their spiritual founder. And so much of what you learn as a K.A. is about the sort of lost cause myth of chivalry, gentility. Up until, you know, a few years ago, their annual formal was called Old South, and people would wear Confederate greys, and their dates would wear, you know, Gone with the Wind plantation gowns. In their membership manual, a chapter is dedicated to Robert E. Lee, and he's referred to as The Last Gentle Knight.

13:26He was the president of Washington College when K.A. was founded, And right after he died, the school was renamed to honor him, along with George Washington. An odd thing happens when guys join K.A. They usually get a little more into country music. They usually get a little more into chewing tobacco. And there's a chant that some K.A.'s do before, you know, shotgunning a beer or taking a shot of bourbon or whatever it is. and it's 1-2-3, Robert E. Lee, 3-2-1, Sal should have won.

14:06After Mikey joined KA, he and Rob became close. They both loved video games. They drove the same car, a Mercedes from the 90s, and they both smoked weed. I think something that Mikey and Rob realized very quickly, honestly Mikey realized this the day he showed up to College of Charleston. He realized that the very wealthy kids at College of Charleston just lived differently. They lived in million dollar houses. Some of those houses were actually bought for them by their parents. They drove around in golf carts. They went to different bars. They knew each other. They didn't really socialize with others.

14:47They got bottle service at nightclubs, which can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars. They went out seven nights a week, which is very expensive. And so Mikey and I think later Rob realized that if they wanted to sort of keep up, they needed more money. And so pretty quickly, when Mikey joined KA, he helped set up this sort of freshman dorm weed distribution network. We'll be right back.

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16:52December 12. Mikey Schmidt and Rob Liljaberg were heat-sealing weed and storing it inside red tomato cans. They started selling to their friends and then branched out to the broader College of Charleston Greek life world and soon were making a lot of money. Mikey told Max Marshall we were best friends from day one. When I say that me and Rob were connected at the hip, we were really connected at the hip. Rob was a good student. He played soccer and pick-up football. He never missed a fraternity meeting. He lifted weights. He was elected to the Student Senate. He was interested in marine biology and wrote essays about ecology and sustainability.

17:38He was planning a summer research project in Bali, studying coral reefs. Mikey had stopped going to class. His grades got so bad that he eventually dropped out and moved back to Atlanta. He moved back in with his mom. He got a job parking cars at a nightclub and kept selling drugs on the side. Sometimes with Rob and sometimes on his own. Sometimes when it was a fancy car he was parking, Mikey left a small sample bag of weed in the person's cup holder to try to generate business. It worked. He would see Rob's posts from parties and wished he was back at school. Rob had been elected the 2014 Kappa Alpha president and had started selling Xanax.

18:29As one student told Max Marshall, quote, There's like a high-pressure scene in Charleston of being cool, of being rich, of putting on a lot of show. It takes a toll on your psyche. and Xanax was almost like a cheat code. Very easily, you could just be a loose goose. You can mix Xanax with weed and sort of deepen the high. You can mix it with cocaine and sort of ease the paranoia. You can take it on an acid come down to help you fall asleep. But the biggest and most popular mix by far is you can take a bar of Xanax with, say, five or six natty lights and you black out. It's like you drank 15 natural lights.

19:20and for a lot of guys in Greek life, believe it or not, that's a very desirable thing. And for Rob and Mikey, leveling up to Xanax was a very easy business decision for a lot of reasons. One is the demand was huge. Two is compared to marijuana, which is a schedule one drug, Xanax is schedule four. And so there's no trafficking charge. And so in a way, it wasn't a step up, it was a step down. It's not a risky drug to deal. And the biggest change, and this is, I think, really why they were able to sort of get into this world, is around, you know, the beginning of the 2010s, you have the sort of arrival of the dark web.

20:12You could get Xanax shipped to your door without leaving the safety of campus Wi-Fi. And Rob and Mikey were looking for a Xanax Connect. Neither of them were very techie, so they weren't going to be necessarily working the dark web themselves. And they meet this guy who is already dealing to SAE, their rival fraternity, and can sell bulk order counterfeit Xanax at a good price. His name was Zachary Kligman. Zachary Kligman was a guy from Myrtle Beach, the same age as Robin Mikey, roughly. He didn't go to college. He was kind of known as sort of this skater, stoner type, listening to dubstep. He was on his longboard walking his dog.

21:01He's not the kind of guy you'd usually see hanging out with KAs. But to those who knew him, they called him the Charleston Kingpin because he had enough Xanax to supply basically Charleston by himself. And he was part of this bigger supply chain that was bringing in unpressed Alprazolam powder via China from the dark web, shipping this powder in printer cartridges through Quebec down to the coast right off Charleston. And these guys would rent beach houses, one beach house a month, and in these beach houses they would set up an industrial pill press that could make a few hundred thousand Xanax pills a month and they would wear hazmat suits because the, you know, the pills would kick up all this dust and they would press out hundreds of thousands of pills and then they would take Skittles bags or Chips bags, they would empty them out, fill them up with Xanax, heat seal the bags and then ship them around the U.S.

22:06and they would also give them to Zachary Kligman who had a secret compartment in his Cadillac sedan and he would drive these pills into Charleston and basically start to sell them and flush them through the fraternity system. And these fraternity guys would buy 10 ,000 pills at a time and then use their fraternity pledges and sort of their fraternity network to offload them very quickly. and, you know, in doing so, hundreds of thousands and ultimately millions of pills started to sort of move through Southern Greek life. Max Marshall says that Rob became Zachary Kligman's number one customer. And so it just became a very efficient sort of spin cycle where these pills would come in from China, move through the pill press, go through Zach's Cadillac, get to Rob.

23:01And then Rob could sell in bulk to Mikey, and Mikey could really move them very quickly through fraternities at Ole Miss, at Georgia, USC and Columbia, really all over the South. And then he would get to Atlanta, sell more of them there. And then things really ramped up once Mikey started sourcing cocaine in Atlanta and bringing it back to Charleston, and sort of the spin cycle would continue. So Zach would give it to Rob, and then Rob would give it to Mikey. Yeah, basically. I mean, there's all sorts of vectors. It was a very complicated supply chain. Something a few guys told me is, you know, this isn't a drug ring in the sort of classic Hollywood sense of the term where you can have a cork board or a pyramid with one guy on top.

23:50They instead, they compared it to Mary Kay or Co. or a multi-level marketing scheme where there's all sorts of suppliers. And basically it's just who's ever selling it at the biggest bulk, at the cheapest price is going to have customers who are then going to turn it around and try to find a dupe who will buy it at a more expensive price. And up and up it would go until you would find someone buying something for$10 a pill. But yes, ultimately, Zach was the main supplier to Rob. and Mikey was Rob's biggest customer. And so there were, you know, thousands and thousands of pills that would basically go from Zach to Rob to Mikey.

24:30Mikey often transported drugs in a used Prius. He put a baby on board, sticker on the back window, an idea he said he got from watching the show Weeds. I mean, how big did this get? I mean, these guys must have been making a lot of money. Yeah, and so ultimately you're talking about a drug network with millions of pills and millions of dollars. They would launder money through the fraternity slush fund, you know, making it look like it came from a donor or was going toward a party. But ultimately these were drug profits that they were able to sort of wash because there was so much money that you couldn't just keep it under your mattress.

25:09I mean, even with the money laundering, how are they not getting caught? How is someone not speaking out? So, yeah, I mean, the, you know, a lot of guys told me it's basically impossible to reverse engineer a better setup for dealing drugs at scale than a big Southern fraternity. And that's for a lot of reasons. One, the simplest is you can walk into, you know, a mansion at Ole Miss, and there might be 40 customers waiting for you right there. and in an hour you can sell to 40 customers. They're the kind of people who want to deal with guys who look like them or who are from their sort of social network.

25:45You know, they want to deal with their boys. And most importantly, the only police presence nearby is a campus cop on a golf cart with a flashlight who is not really looking to unravel a nationwide benzodiazepine trafficking network. He's looking for parking violations. And so the ring really just was able to grow and grow, more pills, more money, and it probably would have continued that way indefinitely, or at least through graduation, and then been handed off to other kids, if not for the murder of Patrick Moffley.

26:28Patrick Moffley came from a very prominent, low-country, South Carolina family. His father was a big-time real estate developer. His mother ran for Congress. She was on the Charleston School Board. And he had, in some ways, this Edenic childhood on a place that was literally called Paradise Island, outside Charleston in this big equestrian farm. His parents were into horse jumping. They built him a half pipe for skateboarding. You know, they had a boat for fishing. He would go catch alligators. Just, you know, kind of the dream childhood. And obviously hindsight adds to a lot of this, but you talk to people in Charleston, and he was this kind of legendary party figure.

27:20One time he was on the second floor of a bar on King Street. He saw a beautiful woman walking down the street and he said, I'm going to get her number. He jumped off the balcony, shattered his ankle. The woman ran up to make sure he was OK and he got her number. And, you know, in 2016, he had kind of finally start to put things together. He had been working in some kitchens, taking community college classes, and he got into the College of Charleston. and he moved into an off-campus house with all these guys on Smith Street. And they liked him because he, quote unquote, came from a good family and liked to party like they did.

27:58And he obviously didn't realize it at the time, but the house that he moved into was a major part of sort of Zachary Kligman's distribution network. And pretty quickly, Patrick fell into that. You know, his dad told me it didn't take too long for Patrick to be wearing the hazmat suit and heat sealing Xanax and the Skittles bags. And he was also dealing cocaine. And that fall, he went up to University of South Carolina to deal cocaine to a bunch of frat guys at the frat lots is what they call them. It's where the fraternity guys tailgate. and he looked over and sees a policeman and gets arrested with what would come out to be just over the limit for trafficking cocaine in the state of South Carolina.

28:54And he was working with these other guys who were supposed to bail him out, but instead those guys take the money and flee back to Oxford, Mississippi. And he calls his dad from the jail cell and basically says, dad I'm in jail don't come bail me out this guy Zach is going to pay for my legal defense his dad you know is a very boisterous southern figure and basically says fuck that Patrick I'm not going to like let anyone control my son's legal defense and so he drives to Columbia bails him out and finds him what he deems the best lawyer in Columbia Max Marshall says that when Patrick Moffley's family hired their own attorney, Zachary Kligman cut off all communication.

29:45And Patrick, understandably, sort of begins to spiral into a very deep state of anxiety. You know, he's looking at decades of prison, and so he went to his parents' farm, you know, in Paradise Island, turned off his phone, and basically tried to detox from the Xanax he had been taking, and went into very intense Xanax withdrawals, you know, suicidal ideations, panic attacks, I think a very deep depression. But coupled with that was this sort of constant chorus that he would tell his parents that he was afraid for his life, because people were going to think he was a rat.