Hollow Victory

"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."

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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."

When Bustamante eventually decided it was time for law school, she sent Brummel a resignation letter. The owner even agreed to write her a letter of recommendation, she says.

But one day, when Bustamante was returning from lunch, Brummel summoned her to the conference room. "He was pacing back and forth. His face was red," she recalls.

"How are the interviews going?" he asked, insinuating that she'd been looking for other jobs.

Bustamante had no idea what he was talking about. She asked him to explain. "You fucking cunt -- get out of my office," she remembers Brummel saying.

Bustamante was stunned. She asked to get her purse from her desk first. Brummel said no. "I'm not leaving without my purse," Bustamante insisted.

She burst into hysterics, crying for her things until he finally relented. It was the last she saw of him. "That was, bar none, the worst experience of my life," she says.

Meloni denies Bustamante's claims: "This fictitious event never happened."

But it took Patrick Grueber only three months to realize that Brummel's anti-corporate tirades were little more than show.

Grueber wasn't a typical Victory hire. The 47-year-old was an industry vet when he was hired to do Victory's radio promotion. He'd worked for Reprise for 14 years, leaving in 2002 when the label refused to release Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. "I was the band's biggest cheerleader," he says. "When they wouldn't put that record out, I left in protest."

An avid punk and hardcore fan since his teens, Grueber thought Victory a perfect fit. He'd heard the stories about Brummel, but believed in Victory's philosophy. "I worked for some pretty tough guys in the business," Grueber says. "How bad could it be?"

During his interview, Grueber says he was taken by Brummel's intensity and passion. When Grueber mentioned he had two daughters, Brummel explained that he came from a big family and that there was nothing more important in life.