Tangled web ,just keeps getting more tangled.
Drug empire thing I think. Hattiesburg has around 48,000 residents, and you can figure that there’s five-percent of that crowd buying something of an illegal nature on a weekly basis. No other significant town/drug empire around for at least fifty miles. My humble guess is that they had a fair amount of investment (drug shipment) in the vehicle and could not afford some cop searching the vehicle.