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":3,"featured_media":403681,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[51,2066,50,52],"class_list":{"0":"post-403680","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-jd-vance","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115610596461006268","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/403681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}