News

Hollow Victory

Continued from page 2

The day Hawthorne Heights' rant went up on MySpace, Victory was just a distant, painful memory for Ramsey Jabbar, better known as Ramsey Dean. But it inspired him to write his own 11,000-word essay about Victory. He titled it "The Horror."

"I didn't just know where the bodies were buried," he wrote. "I was the grave-digger."

Dean was already an industry vet when he signed on as Victory's vice president in 2002. He admitted to being seasoned in the sketchy ways of the music industry, claiming that his first job was trying to rig the Billboard Top 200 for a New York marketing company.

In the days before Nielsen SoundScan, this was easy. All Dean had to do was tell record stores to put his clients on their handwritten Top 10 lists, regardless of actual sales, and they'd be taken care of. The peak of his career, he says, was getting AC/DC to No. 3 on the charts, when they really belonged at No. 30.

"[The music industry] attracted the dregs of society," he wrote. "We always had backstage passes. Drugs and strip clubs were practically in the job description. And it seemed corruption was our main function. Corruption in the music industry is really a company's only edge."

It wasn't a startling revelation. Since the first record was pressed, labels have been bilking artists out of their royalties. When your main product -- musicians -- is long on creativity and short on business smarts, swindles take little imagination. And radio stations are always happy to play your bands -- as long as there's cash moving under the table. It's how the game is played.

Still, Brummel was in a league of his own, Dean wrote. " . . . The things Brummel was asking went against everything me and this miscreant-filled business believed in."

Dean claims that when it came time to pay out royalties, the amounts would total in the millions. But if a band had run afoul of Brummel, he would order Dean to dump the cash into marketing to prevent them from collecting.

Taking Back Sunday, for example, eventually sued Brummel and Victory, alleging that Brummel was not simply withholding the band's rightful royalties, but misspending them in the name of vengeance.

"Brummel has publicly revealed his spite and anger at TBS because it chose, as was its right, to leave the Victory label and enter into a new recording agreement with Warner Brothers Records," the lawsuit alleges. "Furious with the band's decision, Brummel designed ways to avoid paying TBS its royalties in order to punish TBS for its exit from his label."

The suit goes on to accuse Brummel of devising "ways to manipulate Victory's expenditures, accounts, and royalty reporting to TBS to prevent the band from realizing its earned royalties on sales of its records."

The last quarter Dean worked for Victory in 2006, he says he received $365,000 in Taking Back Sunday royalties. Dean claims he was ordered to dump the money into promotions. Brummel would receive a few more dollars in record sales, and Taking Back Sunday would be punished for entertaining the affections of another.

"I couldn't find enough places to dump it," Dean writes. "Television advertising, print ads, sale pricing, endcaps, and then we'd play around with dating to try and make it stick, but sometimes even that didn't purge it all."

Dean says the band intended to subpoena him, but the case was settled out of court in August, with Victory admitting no wrongdoing. (The band's manager and lawyer both declined interviews.)

Brummel's lawyer, Robert Meloni, denies that Victory purposefully misappropriated the band's money. "Categorically untrue," he says. Victory "does not have the finances for any 'unnecessary' costs of any nature . . . Those allegations were just that -- allegations. They were neither true nor ever proven as being true. The TBS case was amicably settled."

Dean also claims that he was contacted by Atreyu's manager, Tim Smith, over a similar issue. Atreyu was auditing Victory's books, believing they were owed $700,000 in unpaid royalties. The band was about to sue, Dean recalls, when they accepted a check from Brummel for an undisclosed amount in exchange for dropping litigation. The band eventually left Victory.

When Dean's story surfaced on the internet in August, Meloni sent cease-and-desist orders to every blogger who posted "The Horror." Most have since removed the piece, which Meloni describes in an e-mail as making "numerous recklessly or knowingly false and highly damaging false statements of fact about Victory Records, Inc., and its owner, Tony Brummel. The instances of false, defamatory, and unusually vindictive statements are far too numerous to mention here."

Kristin Bustamante is the archetypal Victory hire. "I grew up with Victory from when I was 15 years old," she says. "My whole life I wanted to work at a record label, and I wanted to start out at an indie label."

In 2004, the Texan got her dream. After months of hounding Brummel for a job, he gave her a position in sales. She packed up her life and headed for the Windy City.

"I loved my job," Bustamante says. "But it was 50 percent of doing my job, and 50 percent dealing with Tony, answering his ridiculous e-mails."

Brummel would often berate employees for leaving the office before 6 p.m., Bustamante says. He questioned their friendships outside of work and scolded staffers for hanging out with former workers. "It was like dealing with an overbearing parent," she says. "He was so paranoid."

Every morning, the staff was required to attend a meeting where everyone would discuss what they did the previous day and what they would accomplish that day. Once, Bustamante remembers Brummel referring to Taking Back Sunday's manager, Jillian Newman, as a "cunt."

"I'm not exactly a PC person," Bustamante says. "But it sent up a red flag."

Still, she continued to do her work, afraid that if she stood up to anything Brummel said, she'd be forced to crawl home to Texas.

But after a year of working at Victory, Bustamante was fed up.

Since her up-front pay was measly, she took the job with the promise of monthly commission checks. But six months into her job, she'd received only one. "That's how he would control you. With money."

• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
Next Page »