Muso plans to fight on over Hotel California lyrics
From the start, the case was highly unusual: A criminal prosecution centred on the disputed ownership of a cache of hand-drafted lyrics to Hotel California and other Eagles hits.
Its end was even more unexpected. In the middle of trial, New York prosecutors abruptly dropped their case this week against three collectibles experts who had been accused of scheming to hang on to and peddle the pages, which Eagles cofounder Don Henley maintained were stolen, private artifacts of the band’s creative process.
In explaining the stunning turnabout, prosecutors agreed defence lawyers had essentially been blindsided by getting 6000 pages of communications involving Henley and his attorneys and associates. The material was provided to both sides only in the past few days, after Henley and his lawyers apparently made a late-in-the-game decision to waive their attorney-client privilege to keep legal discussions confidential.
“These delayed disclosures revealed relevant information that the defence should have had the opportunity to explore” when Henley and other prosecution witnesses were on the stand late last month, assistant Manhattan district attorney Aaron Ginandes told the court.
With that, rare books dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and rock memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski were cleared of all the charges. They had included conspiracy to criminally possess stolen property.
The case centred on roughly 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 US, in no small part on the strength of its evocative, smoothly unsettling title track about a place where “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”.
Prosecutors had said the defendants knew the pages had a dubious chain of possession but sought to keep and sell them anyway, contriving to fabricate a provenance that would pass muster with auction houses and stave off Henley’s demands for the return of the handwritten sheets.
Through their lawyers, the defendants said they were rightful owners of pages that weren’t stolen by anyone.
“The next step is building back our reputations,” Inciardi said in a written statement after the dismissal. Kosinski, leaving court, said only that he felt “very good” about the case’s end. Horowitz hugged tearful family then left court without commenting.
A lawyer for Henley, meanwhile, signalled he isn’t done.
“As the victim in this case, Mr Henley has once again been victimised by this unjust outcome,” said Dan Petrocelli. “He will pursue all his rights in the civil courts.”
One of Kosinski’s lawyers, Scott Edelman, said they also were going to “evaluate next steps”.
“The district attorney in this case got blinded by the fame and fortune of a celebrity,” he said later, “and that blinded them to the information that they weren’t being given.”
Judge Curtis Farber said prosecutors “were apparently manipulated”.
Without naming names, he said witnesses and their lawyers used attorney-client privilege “to obfuscate and hide information that they believed would be damaging.”
The communications that led to the dismissal weren’t released publicly. But in court earlier this week, defence lawyers said the trove had identified additional potential witnesses and raised questions about some testimony from Henley and others.
The defence said Henley gave the lyrics pages 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 realised 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 pages for research but “never gifted them or gave them to anybody to keep or sell”.
The writer, Ed Sanders, wasn’t charged with any crime and wasn’t called to testify. He hasn’t responded to messages about the trial.
Defence lawyers said in court that emails they’d just received showed Henley initially suspected someone else, before someone reminded him of the decades-old book project.
They said the emails also showed Henley’s lawyers and investigator initially decided to characterise the pages’ disappearance as a burglary — and make no mention of Sanders’ 1979 book contract — because they believed that referring to a burglary would help their cause.
The non-jury trial provided sometimes gossipy peeks into the Eagles’ career and the workings of the music business. Henley answered questions on matters ranging from creative methods to contracts to cocaine.