Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story

by Max Marshall

Overview

“Among the Bros is a harrowing and disturbing book. I have read about fraternity life but nothing like this. This book will blow your mind, each page digging deeper into the unimaginable. Except every word is true.”—Buzz Bissinger, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Mosquito Bowl and Friday Night Lights

A brilliant young investigative journalist traces a murder and a multi-million-dollar drug ring, leading to an unprecedented look at elite American fraternity life.

When Max Marshall arrived on the campus of the College of Charleston in 2018, he hoped to investigate a small-time fraternity Xanax trafficking ring. Instead, he found a homicide, several student deaths, and millions of dollars circulating around the Deep South. He also opened up an elite world hidden to outsiders. Behind the pop culture cliches of “Greek life” lies one of the major breeding grounds of American power: 80 percent of Fortune 500 executives, 85 percent of Supreme Court justices, and all but four presidents since 1825 have been fraternity members. With unprecedented immersion, this book takes readers inside that bubble.

Under the live oaks and Spanish moss of Travel + Leisure’s “Most Beautiful Campus in America,” Marshall traces several “C of C” boys’ journeys from fraternity pledges to interstate drug traffickers. The result is a true-life story of hubris, status, money, drugs, and murder—one that lifts a curtain on an ecstatic and disturbing way of life. With expert pacing and a cool eye, he follows a never-ending party that continues after funerals and mass arrests.

An addictive and haunting portrait of tomorrow’s American establishment, Among the Bros is nonfiction storytelling at its finest.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063099548
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	02/25/2025
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	239,978
Product dimensions:	5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Max Marshall is a writer and journalist. Raised in Texas, he attended Columbia University, where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 2016. He served as a Princeton in Asia Media Fellow in Hanoi, Vietnam, and his work has appeared in GQ, Texas Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and the New York Times.

Editorial Reviews

Updated descriptive copy for Untitled to added shortly.

From the Publisher

09/04/2023

In this sobering debut, journalist Marshall digs into the deadly hubris underpinning an organized crime ring at the College of Charleston. In 2016, a task force busted five Charleston Kappa Alpha fraternity members and three of their friends for running a $400,000 narcotics network. After the news broke, Marshall—fresh out of college himself—flew to Charleston, S.C., to interview key players in the story, including family and friends of the arrested, and the group’s ringleader, Mikey Schmidt, who’s currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for drug trafficking. Schmidt, who knew he wanted to pledge Kappa Alpha before he knew what he wanted to study, fit the Southern frat boy stereotype to a tee, but unlike his peers, he didn’t stop at selling weed to procure party money: fueled by a sense of entrepreneurial greatness, he built a major operation that supplied Xanax, cocaine, and other drugs to a chain of colleges across the South. As Marshall spent more time with Schmidt and his accomplices, he pieced together a lurid tale of adolescent ego (Schmidt cops to much of his criminal activity, but bristles when Marshall suggests that a rival frat had more clout than Kappa Alpha) and unchecked privilege that culminated in the murder of one of the ring’s distributors. Through chilling, candid conversations with his sources, Marshall convincingly illustrates how these young men allowed greed to wreck their lives. The result is a fast-paced and frightening campus crime saga. Agent: Luke Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Among the Bros is a harrowing and disturbing book. I have read about fraternity life but nothing like this. This book will blow your mind, each page digging deeper into the unimaginable. Except every word is true.”

#1 New York Times bestselling author Buzz Bissinger

11/01/2023

Investigative journalist Marshall intertwines the history of fraternities with a portrayal of Michael "Mikey" Schmidt, who was accepted into the Kappa Alpha Fraternity at South Carolina's College of Charleston. The book portrays Schmidt as one who enjoys fraternity life, takes Xanax, and skips classes. Eventually, he decides to get into the trafficking business, which later included cocaine transactions. The 2016 murder of a student instigated an investigation by local police, which resulted in the confiscation of $150,000 worth of pills, $200,000 in cash, and several arrests, including Schmidt, who took a plea deal that landed him 10 years in prison. The author initially thought he was investigating a small-time crime, but he ended up spending four years researching this major drug bust. While the book is meticulously researched, it occasionally gets bogged down with details from Marshall's interviews with more than 180 individuals. Readers learn about the murder halfway through the book, and Schmidt's arrest is detailed in the final third. VERDICT Parts of this book stretch the story longer than necessary. But this is still an important title for community college or university libraries since it offers difficult-to-find details about the culture and history of fraternities.—Michael Sawyer

Library Journal

2023-09-05
How the wealthy fraternities of the storied College of Charleston became the hubs of an interstate drug ring.

According to Charleston police working the 2016 case, the drug dealers of Kappa Alpha and Sigma Alpha Epsilon sold Xanax, cocaine, and marijuana, mostly to college students across the South. “One of the largest busts in the city’s history, a six-month collaboration between local police, state law enforcement, the DEA, the FBI, and the US Postal Service,” it was connected to the murder of the son of a real estate developer who was also a board member at the college. Police seized hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, 43,000 pills, seven firearms, and a grenade launcher. Marshall, a freelance journalist, dives deep into fraternity life and drug dealing to figure out how this happened. His ability to identify with the fraternity bros at the center of the drug ring helped him get access to sources. However, it soon becomes clear that his interest lies more with the drug dealers—especially one of the ring’s leaders, Mikey Schmidt—than their numerous victims. “When Mikey and I were in school,” writes Marshall, “most boys in our bubble shared a dream of what college might look like….There’d be white pong balls splashing in red Solo cups, and hot girls who wanted to wrestle in mud or Jell-O.” The author refers to most of his anonymous sources by their fraternity or sorority affiliation, as if that is someone’s most distinguishing trait, and he seems overly enamored of his subjects’ connections, wealth, and hard-partying lifestyles. While he does expose a dark side of campus life, he misses an opportunity to offer a deeper, more interesting story with appeal beyond the Tucker Max demographic.

A flashy disappointment, leaning more on drug dealer fantasy and frat-boy excess than real crime drama.

Kirkus Reviews