Color Tech, one of the Music Bank’s neighbors in the Ballard Building, went out of business, freeing up thousands of square feet of additional space. Unbeknownst to Scott Hunt at the time because his name was not on the Music Bank lease, the landlord approached Bengt Von Haartman and Gabriel Marian directly. On February 3, 1987, Marian and Von Haartman signed a thirty-one-month lease for a nearly fourteen-thousand-square-foot industrial space adjacent to the Music Bank. Under the terms of the agreement, Marian and Von Haartman would pay the landlord $3,447 in rent, and the property was to be used “only for recording and audio visual studios.” Without Hunt’s knowledge or consent, he said, his business partners “decided behind my back to rent the rest of the Ballard Building and turn it into a thirty-million-dollar … pot operation.”5 No one knew it at the time, but this was the beginning of the end of the Music Bank.
On June 20, 1988, an anonymous informant called the Seattle Police Department’s narcotics office with a tip. The informant was very specific, telling Officer Mac Gordon about a possible marijuana-growing operation at a large commercial warehouse in Ballard, providing the specific address, and noting that the power consumption for the facility was “unusually high,” according to court documents. Scott Hunt found out from Von Haartman later on that the informant was a third business partner, who was a materials expert. Marian thought the third partner was making too much money and wanted to renegotiate the terms of their deal, and allegedly threatened him. The third partner wasn’t having any of it. He took his money and his wife and fled the country, but not before tipping off the cops.
On the same day the police received the tip, Officer Mike Severance went to the warehouse and made his way up to the roof, where he noticed two vents—the exhaust from one of them emitting a “strong odor” of marijuana. Police later obtained power records for the businesses inside the warehouse from Seattle City Light. Records showed “an unusually high consumption of electricity,” Gordon wrote in an affidavit. There were two different addresses for the same building, each with a separate power meter. For the four-month period ending July 8, 1988, the two meters recorded a combined average consumption of 42,261 kilowatts per month. Put into perspective, this was “29 times higher than with the previous lessee.”6 Other power readings taken during the investigation showed similar spikes in power usage.7
Gordon contacted the Seattle office of the Drug Enforcement Agency and asked them for information on Marian and Von Haartman. The DEA search turned up a cocaine charge from 1972 in Berkeley, California, for Marian, and a pending investigation of Von Haartman by the DEA for drug conspiracy. All this evidence was cited in Gordon’s application for a search warrant on July 20, 1988. The request was approved and signed by Judge R. Joseph Wesley at 9:05 P.M. on the same day.8
Two hours later, a joint team consisting of several units from the Seattle Police Department served the warrant at the two registered addresses at the warehouse. According to a police report, “Plainclothes and uniform officers entered [the Music Bank] after receiving no response. Inside the business, numerous people were milling around the video area and the studio areas. Officers took all of the occupants into temporary custody and began searching through the maze of studios that exist within the business.”9
Darrell Vernon was the employee on duty the night of the raid. “All of the sudden, all of these people come busting through the door and the first few were plainclothes cops and there was these couple of guys in plainclothes waving guns at us. I thought we were getting robbed,” he recalled.
“They had no idea it was a rehearsal studio. They were saying things like, ‘What are all these little rooms full of drums?’ and stuff, like they had no idea where they were. I’m saying, ‘This is a rehearsal studio. This is a business. I’m the employee on duty.’ There was a black cop pointing the gun at me saying, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’”
Dean Noble had just finished rehearsing with his band and was getting ready to leave the building with his bassist, who needed a ride to the bar where he worked. The room was “like a sweatbox,” and Noble was wearing nothing but a pair of Adidas shorts. He had his car keys and a small amount of marijuana on him when the door flew open and fifteen to twenty armed police officers stormed into the building, pointing guns, yelling, “Stand against the wall!”
In a case of impeccably bad timing, Noble said Layne “had just walked around the corner and was getting ready to head out with a couple of strippers, and they were obviously coked out because they just started bitching up one side and down the other ‘These pigs,’ to the point where Layne actually told them to shut up because they were making it worse than what it needed to be,” he recalled. “It wasn’t uncommon for him to have strippers. They weren’t naked walking around, but you knew that they were strippers.”
As the manager for the Music Bank, David Ballenger had to deal with the police directly. They wanted access to all the rooms. Ballenger got the keys from Darrell Vernon. “So the guy took me with the keys and had a gun at my back and said, ‘Dave, you understand that we can shoot you, legally shoot you, if you cause us any problem,’” Ballenger recalled.
“You won’t have any problem with me,” he responded.
Ballenger went room by room, unlocking every door for the police to see. When he got to the Alice in Chains room, Jerry was in for a wakeup call. “I believe it was Jerry that was sleeping on the couch, woke up, pots strewn across his coffee table, things like that. He thought he was getting busted, but they just wanted to see what was in all the rooms.”
Steve Alley, a graphic artist who had designed logos and flyers for several local bands including Alice in Chains, was in the band’s room partying with Mike. “He heard a commotion coming from the hallway, leaned out, comes back in and shuts the door, and says, ‘It’s the cops, man! It’s the feds!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, right. Bullshit. Whatever,’” Alley recalled. “So I lean myself out the door just to prove him wrong, and sure enough there’s a dude running down the hallway with a blue jacket on and a German shepherd.” Alley closed and locked the door, and he and Mike hurriedly finished the cocaine they had in the room before police came to their door. When they came in, they were rounded up and put in a line in the hallway with musicians from other bands, with their hands against the wall. Alley saw Layne walking up the hallway—“not detained”—with two officers following him. “He was holding court and they were laughing about something,” Alley said. Layne walked up to the crowd standing in the hallway, looked around, and said, “Hey—where the fuck’s Geraldo?” This was presumably a reference to Geraldo Rivera, possibly to his infamous The Mystery of Al Capone’s Vaults special. However, Alley noted, “He had a string of shows where he was ‘embedded with the police,’ but all of the episodes were pretty hyperdramatic and cheesy.”
The band had plans the following day to record another demo to send out to record companies. All of their gear was packed up and ready to go when, in Jerry’s words, “The Seattle SWAT team comes down and takes over the whole place! It turns out the party scene that was the Music Bank—we’d been living next door to a fucking forest of pot. I can’t remember how many times we’d been like, ‘Man, we need some weed,’ and it’s right through the wall.” At the time, the police had a lockdown on everything in the building, including the band’s gear. Jerry spent the next several hours trying to convince the police that there were no drugs there and pleading with them to not confiscate the band’s gear the night before the recording session.