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.
The case was brought in 2022 was against three men well-known in the collectibles world — rare-book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski.
The case centered on roughly 100 pages of legal-pad pages from the creation of the 1976 classic rock album "Hotel California" — the third-biggest seller of all time in the U.S.
When lyric sheets started to pop up in auctions in 2012, it drew the ire of Eagles co-founder Don Henley.
Those pages had been shared with Ed Sanders, a writer who worked on an Eagles band biography that never got published. He sold them to Horowitz, who in turn sold them to Kosinski and Inciardi, and from there the pages made it to auctions. Henley had bought back some of the material for $8,500 but also reported the documents stolen, court filings said.
The defendants had pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to criminally possess stolen property and other charges.
Charges dropped
The trial, which started in late February, came to a surprise halt Wednesday.
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 defense lawyers said raised questions about the trial’s fairness.
The raft of communications emerged only when Henley apparently decided last week to waive attorney-client privilege, after he and other prosecution witnesses had already testified. The defense argued that the new disclosures raised questions that it hadn’t been able to ask.
Judge Curtis Farber said in dismissing the case that “witnesses and their lawyers” used attorney-client privilege “to obfuscate and hide information that they believed would be damaging.”
In a letter to the court, Ginandes, the prosecutor, said the waiver of attorney-client privilege resulted in the belated production of about 6,000 pages of material.
“These delayed disclosures revealed relevant information that the defense should have had the opportunity to explore in cross-examination of the People’s witnesses,” he wrote.
Prosecutors had argued 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 Henley.
Through their lawyers, the men contended that they were rightful owners of pages that weren’t stolen by anyone.
The defense maintained that Henley gave the documents to Sanders decades ago, starting the chain of events that ultimately landed with the pages up for auction.
Henley testified that at the trial that he let Sanders pore through the documents for research but “never gifted them or gave them to anybody to keep or sell.”
Sanders wasn’t charged with any crime and hasn’t taken the stand. He hasn’t responded to messages about the trial.
“We are glad the district attorney’s office finally made the right decision to drop this case. It should never have been brought,” Jonathan Bach, an attorney for Horowitz, said outside court.
Horowitz hugged tearful family members but didn’t comment leaving the court. Neither did Inciardi.
Henley’s current lawyer, Dan Petrocelli, said in an emailed statement that the attorney-client privilege that had previously shielded some of the communications “is a foundational guardrail in our justice system” that should rarely be forsaken.
“As the victim in this case, Mr. Henley has once again been victimized by this unjust outcome,” Petrocelli said. “He will pursue all his rights in the civil courts.”
The Manhattan district attorney's office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.