COLUMBUS, Ohio — Vice President JD Vance’s memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” has a storied historical past as a New York Instances bestseller, because the then-31-year-old’s introduction to the nation as a “Trump whisperer,” as a divisive topic amongst Appalachian students, and, ultimately, as a Ron Howard-directed film.
Its newest function? Secretly transporting medicine into an Ohio jail.
The e book was one in every of three gadgets whose pages 30-year-old Austin Siebert, of Maumee southwest of Toledo, has been convicted of spraying with narcotics after which delivery to Grafton Correctional Establishment disguised as Amazon orders. The others have been a 2019 GRE Handbook and a separate piece of paper, in response to court docket paperwork.
On Nov. 18, US District Decide Donald C. Nugent sentenced Siebert to greater than a decade in jail for his function within the drug trafficking scheme.
Siebert and an inmate on the jail have been caught in a recorded dialog discussing the cargo. He both didn’t know or didn’t care {that a} central theme of “Hillbilly Elegy” is the impacts of narcotics dependancy on Vance’s household and the broader tradition.
“Is it Hillbilly?” the inmate asks.
“I don’t know what you’re speaking about,” Siebert replies, momentarily confused. Then, abruptly remembering, he says, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the e book, the e book I’m studying. (Expletive) romance novel.”
