JD Vance’s memoir just played surprising role in prison drug scheme, and what smugglers did with it is wild

Vice President JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, just ended up being part of a crazy drug trafficking plan that targeted a prison in Ohio. If you know what the book is about, you’ll see how weird this whole situation is. The main point of Vice President Vance’s book is about how drug addiction destroyed his family and hurt many communities.

So for someone to use this exact book to secretly bring drugs into a prison? That’s really bold, and it looks terrible. According to CBS News, the guy who got caught running this whole thing is 30-year-old Austin Siebert from Maumee, which is southwest of Toledo. Siebert was caught spraying drugs onto the pages of the book.

He then sent those drugged-up pages to the Grafton Correctional Institution, hoping to sneak the drugs past the guards. Siebert tried to be smart by making the packages look like normal Amazon orders. That’s a pretty clever trick, but it clearly didn’t work for him.

The smuggler hilariously called this memoir a romance novel

Court papers show that the Vance book wasn’t the only thing Siebert used in this fancy smuggling plan. He also used a 2019 GRE Handbook and another piece of paper, and all of them were sprayed with the same drugs. The whole plan fell apart when Siebert and a prisoner were caught talking about the illegal package on a recorded phone line.

It’s obvious that Siebert either didn’t know or didn’t care what the book was actually about. This is where the story gets really weird and honestly kind of funny, even though this is a serious crime. When the prisoner asked about the package, their conversation was recorded. Vice President Vance has been making headlines lately, including when he mocked an ex-MSNBC host over resurfaced tweets.

“Is it Hillbilly?” the prisoner asked. Siebert answered, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” sounding confused for a moment. Once he figured out what they were discussing, Siebert quickly said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the book, the book I’m reading. F***ing romance novel.”

Calling Hillbilly Elegy a romance novel is a really funny mistake, but it cost Siebert big time. This conversation proved that Siebert was involved in the drug trafficking plan. Before this weird story, the book had a pretty big life in public.

It became a New York Times bestseller that basically introduced the then-31-year-old Vance to the whole country. The book caused arguments among many Appalachian experts, but it definitely made Vance known as a “Trump whisperer” in politics. It even became a movie directed by Ron Howard. Meanwhile, Vance has also been revealing his stance on legal immigration in recent discussions.

In the end, Siebert is paying a huge price for his part in this plan. On November 18, U.S. District Judge Donald C. Nugent sentenced Siebert to more than ten years in prison for his role in the drug trafficking operation. That’s a serious sentence, and it shows that using famous books to smuggle drugs is a plan that just isn’t worth it. You definitely can’t try to smuggle drugs into a prison and then call the package a “f***ing romance novel” on a recorded phone line.