The West Hollywood Business License Commission on Tuesday asked for additional information before it would make a decision on whether to revoke the license of Zen Healing Collective, one of the city’s larger marijuana dispensaries.
The dispensary, at 8464 Santa Monica Blvd. near North Alfred, has been owned by Andrew Harrison Kramer, who pleaded guilty in March to a number of criminal charges stemming from a dispute he had with the former landlord of another dispensary that Kramer once owned on Sunset Boulevard.
The hearing drew a relatively large crowd, with neighbors of the dispensary supporting revocation of the license. A number of others, including Tom DeMille, who has said he is a candidate in the 2015 City Council election, spoke against the revocation. Some attendees said they had been offered cash payments to speak in behalf preserving the license.
Jeffrey Aubel, the city’s manager of code compliance, said the information the commission is seeking includes proof that neither Kramer nor members of his family are any longer involved in the business, a copy of the business’s ledger showing its actual revenue and expenses and that Kramer is not owed money by the business.
Among the 26 charges to which Kramer pleaded guilty were conspiring to rob his former landlord’s Beverly Hills home, to stalking and attempting to burn that home and to hiring others to attack the landlord, George Lanning, and members of Lanning’s family. He also pleaded guilty to hiring others to throw Molotov cocktails onto an apartment roof above the Sunset Super Shop dispensary at 8921 Sunset Blvd. near Hilldale that Lanning owned.
“While the licensee was purporting to operate a marijuana dispensary as permitted under state and local law, he was in fact a conspirator in a sophisticated criminal enterprise involved in the operation of multiple retail marijuana dispensaries, which engaged in violence and intimidation to expand its operations and dissuade competition,” says a report prepared for the license commission.
The Zen Healing business has been enmeshed in a number of controversies. In 2013, federal Drug Enforcement Agency agents raided the business, seizing more than 300,000 grams of marijuana and 45,000 grams of hashish along with various foods and candies containing marijuana.
At the time, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office said that Kramer “is the head of a marijuana trafficking organization operating in the Los Angeles, California area that distributes marijuana retail through his store locations, as well as, wholesale to other marijuana stores. “[Mr.] Kramer also directed and/or is involved in the distribution of marijuana to other areas of the United States, including New Jersey, South Carolina, and North Carolina.”
