Prosecutors drop charges midtrial against 3 accused of possessing stolen ‘Hotel California’ lyrics
NEW YORK — Prosecutors in New York abruptly dropped their criminal case at trial Wednesday against three men accused of conspiring to possess a stash of hand-drawn 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 pursue the case, citing newly available emails that attorneys said raised questions about the fairness of the trial. The trial had been going on since the end of February.
“The people admit that dismissal is appropriate in this case,” Ginandes said.
The series of communications only came to light when Eagles star Don Henley apparently decided to waive attorney-client privilege last week after he and other prosecution witnesses had already testified. The defense argued that the new revelations raised questions it could not have asked.
“Witnesses and their attorneys” used attorney-client privilege “to cover up and conceal information they believed would be harmful,” Judge Curtis Farber said as he dismissed the case.
The case focused on about 100 pages of legalese from the creation of a classic rock giant. The 1976 album ‘Hotel California’ is the third biggest seller of all time in the US, thanks in no small part to its evocative, smoothly disturbing title track about a place where ‘you can check out whenever you want, but you can never leave.”
The accused were three established figures in the collectibles world: rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and rock memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski.
Prosecutors had said the men knew the pages had a questionable chain of ownership but sold them anyway, planning to fabricate a provenance that would be passed through auction houses and demanding that the documents be returned to Don Henley, co-founder founder of Eagles, would turn away.
The suspects pleaded not guilty to charges including conspiracy to criminally possess stolen property. Through their lawyers, the men claimed that they were the rightful owners of pages that had not been stolen by anyone.
The defense alleged that Henley gave the documents decades ago to a writer who was working on a never-published Eagles biography and later sold the handwritten sheets to Horowitz. He in turn sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski, who began putting some of the pages up for auction in 2012.
Henley, who only realized they were missing when they came up for sale, reported them stolen. He testified that during the trial he allowed the writer to review the documents for research, but “never donated them or gave them to anyone else to keep or sell.”
The writer has not been accused of any crime and has not taken a stand. He has not responded to messages about the trial.