Charges dropped in ‘Hotel California’ criminal case

Three collectors were on trial for conspiring to possess handwritten lyrics from 1976 Eagles album

Eagles co-founder Don Henley gave the documents decades ago to a writer working on a biography, who later sold them to one of the accused

New York prosecutors abruptly dropped their criminal case midtrial Wednesday against three men who had been accused of conspiring to possess a cache of hand-drafted lyrics to “Hotel California” and other Eagles hits.

Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Aaron Ginandes informed the judge at 10 a.m. that prosecutors would no longer proceed with the case, citing newly available emails that defence lawyers said raised questions about the trial’s fairness. The trial had been underway since late February.

The communications emerged only when Eagles star Don Henley apparently decided last week to waive attorney-client privilege, after he and other prosecution witnesses had already testified. The defence argued that the new disclosures raised questions that it hadn’t been able to ask.

“Witnesses and their lawyers” used attorney-client privilege “to obfuscate and hide information that they believed would be damaging,” Judge Curtis Farber said in dismissing the case.

The case centred on about 100 pages of legal-pad pages from the creation of a classic rock colossus. The 1976 album “Hotel California” ranks as the third-biggest seller of all time in the U.S.

The accused had been three wellestablished figures in the collectibles world: rare books dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and rock memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski.

Prosecutors said the men knew the pages had a dubious chain of ownership but peddled them anyway, scheming to fabricate a provenance that would pass muster with auction houses and stave off demands to return the documents to Eagles co-founder Don Henley.

The defendants pleaded not guilty to charges including conspiracy to criminally possess stolen property. Through their lawyers, the men contended they were rightful owners of pages that weren’t stolen by anyone.

The defence maintained that Henley gave the documents decades ago to a writer who worked on a never-published Eagles biography and later sold the handwritten sheets to Horowitz. He, in turn, sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski, who started putting some of the pages up for auction in 2012.

Henley, who realized they were missing only when they showed up for sale, reported them stolen. He testified at the trial that he let the writer pore through the documents for research but “never gifted them or gave them to anybody to keep or sell.”