Columbus, Ohio \u2014 Vice President JD Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” has a storied history as a New York Times bestseller, as the then-31-year-old’s introduction to the nation as a “Trump whisperer,” as a divisive subject among Appalachian scholars and, eventually, as a Ron Howard-directed movie.<\/p>\n
Its latest role? Secretly transporting drugs into an Ohio prison. <\/p>\n
The book was one of three items whose pages 30-year-old Austin Siebert, of Maumee, southwest of Toledo, has been convicted of spraying with narcotics and then shipping to Grafton Correctional Institution disguised as Amazon orders. The others were a 2019 GRE Handbook and a separate piece of paper, according to court documents. <\/p>\n
On Nov. 18, U.S. District Judge Donald C. Nugent sentenced Siebert to more than a decade in prison for his role in the drug trafficking scheme. <\/p>\n
Siebert and an inmate at the prison were caught in a recorded conversation discussing the shipment. He either didn’t know or didn’t care that a central theme of “Hillbilly Elegy” is the impact of narcotics addiction on Vance’s family and the broader culture. <\/p>\n
“Is it Hillbilly?” the inmate asks. <\/p>\n
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Siebert replies, momentarily confused. Then, suddenly remembering, he says, “Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the book, the book I’m reading. (Expletive) romance novel.”<\/p>\n
\n More from CBS News\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Columbus, Ohio \u2014 Vice President JD Vance’s memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” has a storied history as a New York…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312831,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,6009,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-312830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-jd-vance","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312830"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312830\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}