Because his mom had to be at work in Georgia and the judge wouldn’t let him leave South Carolina, Mikey spent most of the summer alone at the Kiawah Island Golf Resort. He woke up every morning at his family’s beach condo, where he smoked weed and Marlboro Ultra Lights and looked at the coastal foliage. He was a five-iron shot from the Turtle Point Golf Course and a cart ride from the island’s four other courses, and he played eighteen holes more or less every day. Mikey could drive it 260 yards off the tee, and when he didn’t break his clubs on his knee he had a nice short game. When he finished playing Turtle Point, which was designed by Jack Nicklaus, he walked to the Sanctuary Lobby Bar, where he talked to older women. Some nights he passed out in the sand, and one morning he woke up to a screaming call from his stepfather about a $5,000 bar tab. Another evening Mikey walked drunk into an ice cream shop wearing aviators and no shirt, and while he ate two scoops of cake batter he looked at the TV and saw himself on the news. A reporter was broadcasting live from Charleston police headquarters, where the department had just announced one of the largest narcotics busts in city history. The first name on its press release was “Michael Schmidt, 21, of Shadow Glen Court, Atlanta, GA.”
At Chief Mullen’s June 8 press conference, his officers arranged their seizures on long tables. They stacked plastic bags of coke and weed, laid out a buffet of Xanax and “Green Hulk” pills, zip-tied seven firearms into cardboard boxes, and enlarged a picture of $214,161 in bills for the TV above the podium. They charged the KAs—Mikey Schmidt, Rob Liljeberg, and Jonathan Reams—with cocaine trafficking, marijuana possession with intent to distribute, and possession of synthetic marijuana pills, and they booked SAE Russell Sliker for Xanax distribution and SAE Ben Nauss for possession of marijuana with intent to distribute and possession of Xanax. Kligman’s associate Daniel Katko faced six different charges for distributing or trafficking four different drugs, and the Citadel cadet Jake Poeschek and his girlfriend faced four counts including Xanax possession and “Possession of Cocaine with the intent to Distribute within Close Proximity to Park/Playground.” Zack Kligman, on the other hand, was charged for possessing 27 grams of cocaine but not for his assault weapons, marijuana, MDMA, and benzodiazepines. While the Charleston Police Department spread the other boys’ drugs on the tables, they never mentioned the 6,947.62 grams of alprazolam they’d seized.
After the C of C arrests, Zack wasn’t charged for the millions of Xanax pills in his Extra Space locker. When I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents, the department’s packet didn’t include any mention of the seizure. After I obtained the original affidavit describing the 6,947.62 grams of Xanax, though, Sergeant Todd Hurteau and Captain Andre Jenkins confirmed the magnitude of what they’d found in Zack’s locker. The officers said the pills had been bagged up by the hundreds in small ziplock bags, and when I asked why local and federal authorities had decided not to press charges against Zack, Sergeant Hurteau told me, “That’s something I don’t necessarily want to comment on.” When I pressed, Captain Jenkins said, “That comes from a lot of different things. The amount of cooperation he gave, what he was found with, a lot of other things involved.”
Regardless, Chief Mullen didn’t need to announce that his officers had confiscated fourteen million dosage units of benzodiazepines for their press conference to succeed. On the City of Charleston Police Department’s Facebook page, one social media user commented: “Wow! 43,000 pills? I work in a narcotic vault, and I’m pretty sure I don’t stock that many pills! Good job!” The boys’ drugs and mug shots still ran on the local news after the NBA Finals, including on the TV in the restaurant where Ben Nauss had been bartending. Two weeks later, the Charleston Post and Courier published an investigative deep dive titled “Cocaine, Pills . . . and Textbooks” about a “network of present and former College of Charleston students and other 20-somethings accused of funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars of cocaine, pills and other narcotics into downtown’s white-hot party scene.” The New York Daily News picked up the story, as did the progressive news aggregator The Raw Story, which ran the headline “Criming while White: Frat Bros Ran Massive Campus Drug Dealing Operation—Right in Plain Sight.”
The same week as Mullen’s press conference, the New York Daily News ran another item about the extended college narcotics network. In May 2016, Bradley Felder, the Clemson baseball star who’d allegedly sold molly and Xanax to C of C Sigma Nus and impressed Mikey with his rose gold Yacht-Master at a strip club, had pled guilty to federal drug charges. After he’d left Clemson and failed a tryout with the Atlanta Braves, Felder had joined the Hendrick Motorsports NASCAR pit crew, where he’d used his arm strength and foot speed to carry seventy-five-pound tires faster than a normal mechanic could. During a work trip to California, he’d met a man named Curly who offered to sell him marijuana in bulk. After local Missouri police found sixty pounds of weed in Brad’s truck, and after South Carolina law enforcement seized another thirty pounds he’d shipped from San Francisco, and after these cases petered out in local courts, the DEA opened a case on him. When agents intercepted nine packages from China holding nearly twenty kilograms of MDMA crystal, they decided to raid his parents’ dairy farm in Bowman, South Carolina. Out in the pasture, in a freshly stirred plot of dirt, they dug up a waterproof bag holding $1,768,031 in cash. Brad admitted to trafficking thousands of pounds of marijuana and over forty kilograms of MDMA over the previous four years. The Daily News wrote, “The field of dreams for one former college baseball player-turned-drug dealer has gone up in smoke.”
An hour north of the Bowman dairy farm, another sting began when a University of South Carolina student complained that the weed smell in her apartment hall gave her a headache. After two Columbia PD officers sniffed around the cracks of a storage unit, they called in a warrant and discovered one hundred grams of hash oil, an AR-15 rifle, Aczone topical acne medication, stacks of USPS Priority Mail boxes, two Tec-9 submachine guns, and 29,139 GG249 Xanax pills. The pills and guns belonged to Matt Garnett, a USC fraternity kid whose father was the president of the National Bank of South Carolina. When they arrested Matt his nose was scabbed from a bar fight, and when they booked him they learned he’d worked with Patrick Moffly, Zackery Kligman, and Eric Hughes. The arrest was another step toward charging Hughes, whom the DEA had tracked to a beach house in Tybee Island, Georgia. Agents watched Hughes’s pill press operation from a distance until the following summer, when Eric drove a thirty-two-inch toolbox full of pressed Xanax bars down a Georgia highway and smashed into a tow truck hitched to a boat. While Eric’s car flipped several times, a few hundred thousand white pills spilled onto the road. Federal investigators arrested him a few days after he left the hospital, and when they raided his beach house they found his employees trying and failing to clean up the alprazolam dust.
After summer break 2016, two representatives from Kappa Alpha nationals traveled to Charleston to host a mandatory meeting. Facing a room of forty or so C of C KAs, the men from Mulberry Hill told the boys that they were launching a membership review. To apply to stay in the fraternity, each brother had to sit for a one-on-one interview, turn in his College of Charleston transcript, and submit a hair follicle for a drug test. The process took about a week, and according to one of the surviving KAs, about 90 percent of the boys failed some part of the review. When I asked him what the follicle exam tested for, he said, “If they were looking for weed, I wouldn’t have made it.” (An attorney for the KA national organization stated that the drug screen “tested for a wide range of legal and illegal drugs” and that “[d]etails of that drug screen, both individually and collectively, have been discarded consistent with [KA’s] document retention policy and privacy concerns.”)
After that, the Interfraternity Council and Mulberry Hill invited the remaining brothers to campus and asked them to keep the chapter alive, but the boys didn’t want to belong to a ten-person fraternity, and they voted to shut C of C KA down. When the college publicized its decision, Total Frat Move’s Bogey Wells published a eulogy: “Writing about the closure of a chapter is right at the top of my list of the shittiest aspects of this job. . . . While I cannot make any judgment on the merits of the removal of the College of Charleston Kappa Alpha chapter, any chapter that has survived 112 years is truly a historic treasure to lose.”
Kappa Alpha wasn’t the first College of Charleston fraternity to close that semester. The Alpha Epsilon Pis lost their charter at the end of August, three days after they hosted a 130-person Bid Day darty with strippers and a waterslide. At the day party, according to police records, an AEPi brother pulled a drunk seventeen-year-old freshman by the arm to a bedroom, where he locked the door, made her keep drinking and try cocaine for the first time, took her clothes off, and ordered her to perform “sex acts” while another AEPi took photos. (The AEPi photographer sent a picture to a friend, who texted back, “Ewwww. Who is she.” The photographer responded, “Lol random drunk chick that was in my room for some reason.”) AEPi nationals closed the chapter three days later, and President McConnell announced a fraternity and sorority alcohol ban the next week, right after the Princeton Review named C of C one of the twenty top party schools in America. The shutdowns continued into October, when the college suspended the Sigma Nus for “allegations involving alcohol, drugs and hazing,” and in April, when they suspended the Betas for hazing with “personal servitude and calisthenics.” The college lost a fifth chapter before the end of the year, after a Pi Kappa Phi punched a new member for flirting with his ex-girlfriend. Following the punch, another Pi Kapp called out the puncher on their “Shotcallerz OG” Facebook group, writing: “We will get 80 bros behind us to bury you fucking queer. . . . you are the biggest pussy to step foot on planet earth.” After the puncher went to bed that night, according to a later-filed lawsuit, four of his fellow Pi Kapps broke into his house, ripped his door off the hinges, turned over his washing and drying machines, broke his ribs, and allegedly beat him until he lost consciousness.
I remember wondering around then if fraternities would survive in America. It had been a rough four years for Greek life PR, from the “n——chant” at OU SAE to the hazing-related deaths of Peter Tran at San Francisco State Lambda Phi Epsilon, Michael Deng at Baruch Pi Delta Psi, Armando Villa at Cal State Pi Kapp, Tucker Hipps at Clemson Sig Ep, Nolan Burch at West Virginia Kappa Sig, Trevor Duffy at Albany ZBT, Ryan Abele at UN Reno Sigma Nu, Tim Piazza at Penn State Beta, Maxwell Gruver at LSU Phi Delt, and Andrew Coffey at Florida State Pi Kapp. Plaintiff’s attorneys were suing fraternities for sexual assaults and personal injuries at record rates, and outlets like MSNBC and The Atlantic were calling to abolish or radically transform the whole system. One Bloomberg investigation discovered over one hundred fraternities that were “shut down, suspended, or otherwise punished” during 2015’s spring semester alone, and on Wednesday, March 18, 2015, USA Today ran these three headlines: “U. of South Carolina Fraternity Suspended after Student Death,” “Wisconsin Frat Booted for Hazing New Members with Food Deprivation, Forced Drinking,” and “Party’s Over for Frat after Ski-Resort Rampage.”
By the C of C bust in the spring of 2016, it was getting harder to ignore the ways other people looked at bros. The word itself was now a vague insult, like “finance bro” or “Bernie bro.” When other university students talked about fraternities, they were less likely to even say “bro” and more likely to use such phrases as “institutional racism,” “rape culture,” “toxic masculinity,” or “fuck the patriarchy.” For a group of guys used to being the heroes of stories, this was a cold plunge. If bros saw themselves as kings or jesters, other people now saw them as villains. No one wanted to hear about philanthropy drives when fraternities went viral for Confederate uniforms or sexual assaults, and no one saw fraternity life as a National Lampoon comedy when they read about narcotrafficking and dead freshmen. (In the fall of 2016, Nick Jonas starred in a sort of anti–Animal House fraternity drama called Goat, in which fraternity brothers traumatized their pledges and pelted a boy to death with rotten fruit. The movie’s slogan was “Cruelty. Brutality. Fraternity.”) In the rapidly heating political climate, it was hard to imagine mostly white, mostly rich, all-male pleasure mansions surviving more bad press. The November election was approaching and Confederate statues were coming down, and it seemed like America wanted bros to taste the consequence of a life without consequences.
Thanks to British colonial style, South Carolina calls its criminal court the “Court of General Sessions” and its attorneys general “solicitors.” After Patrick Moffly’s homicide and Mikey Schmidt’s arrest, the Charleston solicitor assigned one managing assistant solicitor to prosecute the entire C of C drug network. The same lawyer, Stephanie Linder, would try the nine suspects named in Chief Mullen’s press conference and the two men charged in the Moffly homicide. Linder, who often prosecuted gangs and sometimes handled federal cases as a special assistant US attorney, would spend much of the next four years working on the C of C trials. From her office downtown, she coordinated with local and federal agents and managed the web of informants who brought the cases together. Whenever she met the drug network’s defense lawyers, she told them that she believed many of their clients had never been checked by anyone in their lives, and she had no interest in handing out suspended sentences.
Even compared with the other boys, Mikey knew he’d struggle against Linder. Although the police hadn’t found any narcotics when they’d searched his apartments and cars, Mikey had admitted to selling cocaine and Xanax over his texts and calls with Rob and his wire recording on The Vendue hotel roof. In addition, Rob and Jonathan Reams had agreed to testify against Mikey if his case went to trial. With his friends volunteering to speak against him, Mikey found himself in the most dangerous place on the college drug informant food pyramid. While Zackery Kligman could admit that he got his cocaine from Rob without fear of violence, and Rob and Reams could admit that they got their cocaine from Mikey without fear of violence, Mikey couldn’t tell Linder the name of his cartel-linked Atlanta cocaine sources and reasonably hope to survive. Unlike fraternity drug dealers, Mikey’s Atlanta contacts might actually kill an informant, so he had to turn to Tim Kulp for other legal strategies.
Instead of cooperating with Stephanie Linder, Kulp hoped to analyze and attack the rest of her docket. His plan was to find bits of evidence that jeopardized Linder’s other cases until she felt inclined to offer Mikey a plea deal. He described this plan as “hitting the cases in the stomach everywhere I can. ‘Body blow, body blow, body blow,’ until finally I hit something that’s really sensitive.” Sitting with Mikey under Kulp’s mounted eight-point buck, which had lost the 2009 regional biggest buck contest by one pound, Kulp believed the way to pressure the assistant managing solicitor was to focus on Zackery Kligman.
After reading through hundreds of discovery files, Kulp realized that most of Linder’s cases owed their life to “Mr. Sorry.” Thanks to Kligman’s proffer interviews and controlled buys, Linder had the evidence she needed for trials against Rob Liljeberg, Jonathan Reams, Russell Sliker, Ben Nauss, and Mikey Schmidt. But if the police were supposed to use informants to build cases up the ladder toward the people in charge, here they let a trafficker near the top inform on five dealers below him. Looking at the hundreds of thousands of dollars of narcotics that the other boys had been charged with, and comparing it with the millions of dollars of narcotics that Kligman had never been charged with or publicly linked to, Kulp found something to attack. He filed motions asking the solicitor’s office for evidence about Zack’s prior arrests, and he shared Kligman’s 6,947.62 grams of Xanax with journalists like me. But the heart of Kulp’s campaign drew on the investigative skills he’d honed briefly working for the FBI in Miami during the late 1970s. Mikey told Kulp that he’d heard a theory that Zackery Kligman had been involved in Patrick Moffly’s homicide, and Kulp saw a few reasons to ask if it was true.
To Kulp’s eye, Kligman had a reason for wanting Patrick Moffly dead. According to the Moffly family themselves, Patrick had been arrested trafficking Zack Kligman’s cocaine at a Gamecocks football tailgate. The Columbia solicitor’s office had almost certainly promised to ease Patrick’s fifteen-to-thirty-year sentence if he told them where he’d gotten his drugs, which meant informing on the Kligman network. During these meetings, Patrick had used his parents’ lawyer and denied Zack’s alleged request to control his legal defense, a decision that left Patrick so afraid that he’d hidden on his parents’ farm for a month. He’d returned to campus on March 3 and he’d been murdered the next day, one month before he was supposed to go to trial. Of course, Zack didn’t fit the description of any of the three men who sprinted toward the red Jetta after the shooting, but Kulp believed that Kligman had the means and the motivation to set up a hit. Not only did Zack sit near the top of a multimillion-dollar narcotics operation, but according to David and Elizabeth Moffly, Patrick had said he was afraid of what Zack might do to him.
To undermine a key informant against them, Kulp and Mikey set up their own gumshoe Kligman investigation. Mikey listened for any information about Zack that his friends heard on King Street, and he also used Google to research Albert Kligman, a Pennsylvania dermatologist who’d tested prisoners with Agent Orange during the 1950s and ’60s and who probably wasn’t related to the Myrtle Beach Kligmans. In the meantime, Kulp traveled around town with a 191-page black Shinola hard linen journal. In the center of one page he wrote KLIGMAN in black ink, circled the name in orange, and drew more than twenty different arrows toward the names of different associates and girlfriends. In his spare time, he poured through the Kligman family’s property holdings and went on his own surveillance missions, staking out Zack’s house north of campus from a friend’s place across the street. When he saw Kligman walk outside with what Kulp remembers as a labradoodle, he called Mikey. “He’s a dog guy?” Mikey didn’t know Zack personally, but he said he’d heard that Kligman kept a pet with him to throw off K-9 units that tried to sniff his Cadillac.
Without the power to compel any witnesses, Tim and Mikey could learn only so much. Kulp asked the Charleston Violent Crimes Unit to look deeper into Zackery Kligman, but the police had every reason to focus on convicting Charles Mungin III and finding the other men who’d run into his Jetta. The detectives continued to build their surveillance case against Mungin, who refused to cooperate, and in early 2017 they tracked down one of his passengers. Presented with a lineup, a 97 Smith Street housemate identified a twenty-two-year-old named John “Jonny” Glover as the man he’d seen walking into Patrick’s bathroom before the gunshot. After another witness corroborated the ID, the police had a second arrest to broadcast on the local news. Talking to the press, the Charleston PD explained the homicide as a “drug robbery gone wrong.” They’d learned that Patrick had texted Charles Mungin on the morning of March 4, saying, “Looks like I’ll be here if you need anything. I broke my arm in 4 places so I can’t go on the snowboarding trip.” Mungin had responded, “U got 10,000 bars?” The detectives believed that Mungin, Glover, and another, as-yet unidentified man had driven to Smith Street planning to rob the dealer with the broken arm, and when Patrick fought back they’d shot him and fled. This version made sense for a few reasons: the torn bag of pills, the commotion going down the stairs, the shared belief among friends and family that Patrick was the kind of person to fight three people with a broken arm. It also explained why the men shot Patrick at the foot of the stairs instead of in his bedroom, and it accounted for the lack of evidence that Kligman and Mungin knew one another. Still, the “robbery gone wrong” narrative didn’t satisfy Mikey, Kulp, or the people in Patrick’s life who’d repeatedly told the police that they should investigate Zack.
Before the trauma surgeons had even declared Patrick dead, Patrick’s friends and family had started asking the Charleston PD to look into Kligman. When I visited the Moffly farm on Paradise Island, David Moffly told me that he’d alerted officers during Patrick’s surgery that his son had a cocaine trafficking trial coming up, and that he’d spent the last month at home afraid of Kligman. Sarah Moffly told me she’d arrived at the hospital a few minutes later, and when a detective had asked her if anyone had wanted Patrick dead, she’d said, “the Charleston Kingpin,” a nickname for Zack that the officer already knew. When I talked to Patrick’s friend Summer McNairy, she said that she’d told officers twice that she believed Zackery Kligman had set Patrick up, and later a defense lawyer who represented one of Kligman’s top associates told me that the client believed Zack had been involved in the shooting too. Over the next few years, David Moffly called the detectives several times to remind them that Patrick had expressed fears that Zack might come after him. According to David, one detective responded, “We’re familiar with Kligman, but he’s not the guy.”
Later, when I found the unredacted Patrick Moffly homicide packet, the Charleston PD didn’t mention any of these statements about Zack. The investigative files recapped the detectives’ hospital interviews with David and Sarah Moffly and described their conversations with Patrick’s friends, but they never mentioned anyone’s suspicions about Zackery Kligman. Instead, officers focused on gathering as much information as they could about Charles Mungin III. When I asked Sergeant Todd Hurteau whether he ever considered Kligman a suspect in the Moffly homicide, he told me, “As far as I’m concerned, Zack’s not a killer, from what I’ve learned with him. I can’t say that with one hundred percent certainty, but I spent time with him enough.”
When I arrived outside the Charleston courthouse in September 2019, I assumed the news trucks had come to follow Charles Mungin’s homicide trial, but they were actually there to watch Southern Charm’s Thomas Ravenel plead guilty to sexual assault and battery on his nanny. Besides a few lawyers and me, the only visitors to courtroom 4C were Charles’s and Patrick’s family and friends. The dozen visitors on the left side of the pews could’ve been mistaken for a Black Baptist congregation with Sunday florals and wood canes, and the dozen on the right looked like white Presbyterians in khaki pants. The separation continued toward the bench, where the only nonwhite person among the lawyers, bailiffs, and judge was Mungin’s defense attorney, Jason Mikell.
Mikell was known in the community for his work on DUI cases and smaller criminal charges. Several lawyers had told Charles’s mother that it’d cost six figures to defend her son, but Mikell had charged $20,000 for a retainer and allowed her to pay in installments. He’d never tried a murder case before, and his plan centered on getting Charles a good plea deal. From the summer of 2016 to the fall of 2019, Mikell had negotiated with Stephanie Linder, doing what he could to escape the risk of a jury trial. During their conversations, he’d reminded Linder that Charles Mungin was a young man with no record of significance facing a case that relied solely on circumstantial evidence. Linder had started by offering Mungin twenty-five years in exchange for a guilty homicide plea, but after years of persuasion Mikell had gotten her down to ten years for voluntary manslaughter. Because a guilty charge in court would almost certainly mean life in prison, Mikell had left Linder’s office feeling ecstatic, but when he’d told his client about the offer, Mungin had declined.
With the trial coming up, Mikell had gathered a half dozen people at the Berkeley County courthouse to ask Charles to take the deal. First, Mikell had enlisted a friendly judge for an off-the-record conversation that compared a ten-year manslaughter plea to an armed robbery and homicide conviction. Then the Moffly family lawyer had warned Mungin that the judge presiding over his case was known for handing out life sentences. After that, Mungin’s mother, Evette, had taken Charles out to the hallway. Looking at her son, she’d said, “I know you didn’t do it, God knows you didn’t do it, but I need you to take the deal.” Her oldest son had grown up a happy-go-lucky kid—his little cousin had once asked if he’d come out of the womb smiling—and Evette believed he hadn’t lived enough to understand the justice system yet. “They want to put somebody in jail to close this case,” she’d said. “You’re Black, and if you don’t have any money to hire somebody powerful to fight for you, then you can forget it. When they call this the Dirty South, they don’t call it the Dirty South for nothing.” Charles had told his mom and his grandmother he wasn’t going to do any time for something he didn’t do. Then he’d gone back inside and told his lawyer, “Mr. Mikell, I want you to know this about me: I’m a strong person.”
When Charles Mungin III walked into the courtroom, his hair was tied in braids. He wore a button-down shirt, and his tie stopped above his belly button. His face looked almost tranquil, but his eyes didn’t make contact with anyone. He sat next to Mikell, and after the judge warned the jury not to expect the “high drama, intense action, and riveting circumstances” of legal TV, Linder began her case against him. Over the next three days, she called more than thirty-five witnesses for the prosecution. The police had never found a murder weapon or a direct witness to the killing, so Linder retraced Charles Mungin’s digital footprints instead. Through his text messages, Linder knew that Mungin had organized a ten-thousand-pill order with Patrick on the morning of March 4. Thanks to cell tower geolocation, she could suggest that Mungin drove around Charleston picking up accomplices while he delayed his meeting with Patrick. Pulling from security footage at the restaurants and prep schools near 97 Smith Street, she could hand out screenshots of a red Volkswagen Jetta approaching Patrick’s house minutes before the murder. And citing data from something called a Spireon GPS auto tracking device, which sent Charles’s location to the DriveTime dealership every time he started or stopped his car, Linder could map his trip around downtown Charleston. In addition, thanks to the recording devices inside jail phones, Linder was able to give the jury a transcript of a call in which Charles Mungin told his girlfriend, “Hey, make sure you tell granny, my mama, and all of them my name is Charles, because they’re looking for a nickname. No Tee or Trey or nothing, just Charles.”
As exhibit 9, Linder played Officer Jonathan Fowlkes’s body camera footage from 97 Smith Street. The camera’s dutch angle mostly shows Officer Fowlkes’s legs and Patrick Moffly’s feet, but the sound picked up Patrick’s gurgling while he tried to speak. In the pew in front of me, Elizabeth Moffly had kept her posture straight all week, but when the screen played the video her back started to curl. While Patrick’s legs laid still and the officer kicked him in the foot, Elizabeth said to herself, “Kick my son one more time . . .” Near the end of the recording, when Officer Fowlkes asked who did this to him, the jury heard Patrick respond, “Jordan Piacente and Dollar Tee robbed me.”
When the jurors walked into downtown for lunch, Linder and Mikell talked with the judge about Linder’s next witness. To my surprise, the prosecution was going to call Jordan Piacente to testify. When the jurors returned, Piacente walked in alongside her own lawyer. When she stated her name, her voice was a half octave higher than Linder’s. Piacente told the jury that she’d been friends with Patrick Moffly, and when Linder asked if she knew someone named “Tee,” she said yes. Jordan added that she and Patrick had met “Tee” at the Silver Dollar bar on King Street in the fall of 2015, and she’d contacted Tee for Xanax a few times since then. When Linder asked if she’d heard from Tee the day Patrick died, Jordan admitted that he’d offered her “Zans for two a pop,” and she’d responded, “Word, save some for me.” Jordan added that she and Patrick sometimes called the Silver Dollar bar “the Dollar,” and when Linder asked if she could identify Dollar Tee, she pointed at Charles Mungin.
When Linder finished, Jason Mikell stood up for his cross-examination. Walking toward the stand, he asked Jordan if she’d dated Patrick. After she said, “There were romantic gestures, but it wasn’t a romantic relationship,” he moved onto a short question about her own Xanax use. Mikell didn’t push on her inconsistent alibis from the morning of Patrick’s death—first she’d told police that she’d flown to New York for a wedding, and then she’d told the jurors she’d gone for a cousin’s baptism—and he didn’t give the jury many reasons to question her testimony. He didn’t ask Jordan why she’d originally told the police she didn’t remember texting Charles Mungin on March 4, and he didn’t mention that her cell phone had fallen into the Atlantic Ocean before the DEA had a chance to look at it. Taking a nonconfrontational approach, he never reminded the jurors that “Jordan Piacente” are the first words in “Jordan Piacente and Dollar Tee robbed me.” Instead, he asked Jordan if she and Patrick ever went to other bars besides the Silver Dollar. After she responded that they also went to Midtown and Public House, she thanked the judge and left the courtroom with her lawyer.
Linder rested her case at the end of the third day, and when it was his turn, Mikell didn’t call a witness. The next morning they both presented their closing arguments. Before Linder recapped her case against Mungin, she told the jury about South Carolina’s “Hand of One, Hand of All” principle. Under this legal doctrine, which is also the standard in federal court, any accomplice to a robbery that leads to a murder is also considered guilty of that murder. To the South Carolina justice system, Mungin didn’t need to hold a gun or pull a trigger to go to jail for the Moffly homicide; he just needed to have set up the ten-thousand pill robbery and driven the car. With that in mind, Linder had only to remind the jurors to read Mungin’s texts and follow his red Jetta. After Linder finished, Mikell focused on the legal principle of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” holding up a chart showing the gradations of burden of proof. He asked whether anyone could trust the testimony of Patrick’s housemates, and then we left the jury to deliberate.
Less than three hours later, the jury foreman announced the verdict. The bailiff cuffed Mungin’s hands before his nose hit the table. Without his arms to shield his face, we all saw him lean on his forehead and weep. I do think the Mofflys got some of the closure they’d hoped for—they’d asked the judge for the maximum sentence, and that’s what Charles received—but when the right side of the pews got up to leave, one of Patrick’s family members looked back and said, “Now there have been two lives ended.”
One month later I drove to Klig’s Kites in Myrtle Beach. I understood why Zack Kligman and his lawyers refused to speak with me, but I wanted to see if I could at least talk to his father. I drove past a family-friendly wax museum and a spring-break-friendly tiki bar, but when I walked into the kite shop Zack’s dad wasn’t there. Before I drove back, I decided to take some notes on the gag gifts. I took pictures of rainbow kites and Confederate flags, and I found the plastic bum shorts he wore in his mooning videos. I filmed some rubber band guns shaped like AR-15s, and then I heard a voice humming along to the guitar solo from a live version of “Dazed and Confused.” I looked in the next aisle and saw Zack Kligman sweeping the floor. He hadn’t seen me yet, but I lost control of my breathing. I shut my eyes next to a four-foot cutout of Donald Trump giving two thumbs-up, and after I slowed my heart and pulled up Voice Memos on my phone I walked toward him. When I told Kligman that my name was Max, he said, “Yo, Max, how’s it going?” and pulled me in for a hug.
Zack’s jorts extended below his knees, and while he smiled his weight bounced from his right foot to his left. When I told him I was writing about the College of Charleston drug ring his grin went flat. He told me he didn’t want his name or his family’s business involved in the story, and when his body started to quiver he said, “Sorry, this shit has me shaking.” He was still waiting on his trial against the state of South Carolina, and while his carotid artery pulsated he told me he didn’t want to schedule an interview. “I mean the only thing I would say is just that I’m regretful. Very regretful. I’m also sad about what happened to Patrick. He was one of my best friends.”
A little while later, Zack left midsentence and walked to the back of the store. Before that, though, he wanted to ask me a question. He said, “Let’s go over here for a second” and led me to a quiet aisle. He asked, “Did they get someone for Patrick’s murder yet?” When I said that someone had gotten a life sentence for the homicide plus thirty years for the armed robbery, Zack went “Shhoooohh.” When I said the man’s name was Charles Mungin, his face stayed blank. Then Zack looked around the aisle and asked, “How did they get the information to get him?” I told him they’d convicted Charles with digital surveillance and testimony from the dealers at 97 Smith Street, and Zack said, “Good. I’m glad they got him.”