NEW YORK (AP) — From the start, the case was highly unusual: The focus of the prosecution was the controversial possession of a cache of handwritten lyrics to “Hotel California” and other Eagles hits.
His end was even more unexpected.
Midway through the trial, New York prosecutors on Wednesday abruptly dropped their case against three collectibles experts who were accused of conspiring to keep and sell the pages. Eagles co-founder Don Henley claimed they were stolen, private artifacts from the band's creative process.
In explaining the surprising turn of events, prosecutors agreed that defense attorneys had been virtually blindsided in recent days by receiving 6,000 pages of communications from Henley and his attorneys and associates. The material was only made available to both sides in recent days, after Henley and his lawyers apparently decided late in the game to waive their attorney-client privilege in order to keep legal discussions confidential.
“These late disclosures revealed relevant information that the defense should have investigated,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Aaron Ginandes told the court as Henley and other prosecution witnesses were on the stand.
With that, rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and rock memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski were acquitted of all charges, which included conspiracy to commit criminal possession of stolen property.
At the heart of the case were around 100 notepad pages from the creation of a classic rock colossus. The 1976 album “Hotel California” is considered the third biggest seller of all time in the United States, not least because of its atmospheric, gently unsettling title track about a place “where you can check out at any time, but you can never leave.”
Prosecutors had said the defendants knew the pages' chain of ownership was dubious but tried to keep and sell them anyway to fabricate a proof of provenance that would hold up at auction houses and fend off Henley's demands for the documents' return.
Through their lawyers, the defendants claimed that they were the legal owners of pages that had not been stolen from anyone.
“The next step is to restore our reputation,” Inciardi said in a written statement after the firing. As Kosinski left court, he said only that he felt “very good” about the conclusion of the proceedings.
Horowitz hugged crying family members and then left the courtroom without comment. One of his lawyers, Jonathan Bach, said the case “should never have been brought.”
A lawyer for Henley, meanwhile, signaled that he was not yet done with the matter.
“As a victim in this case, Mr. Henley has once again fallen victim to this unfair outcome,” attorney Dan Petrocelli said in a statement. “He will enforce all his rights in the civil courts.”
One of Kosinski's lawyers, Scott Edelman, said they were also “exploring next steps.”
“The district attorney in this case was blinded by the fame and fortune of a celebrity,” Edelman said in court, “and that blinded him to the information that was not given to him.”
When Judge Curtis Farber formally dismissed the case, he said prosecutors were “obviously manipulated.” Without naming names, he said witnesses and their lawyers used attorney-client privilege “to obscure and conceal information that they believed would be damaging.” The communications that led to the dismissal of the case were not publicly released.
The defense claimed that Henley gave the pages of text decades ago to an author 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 offering some of the sites for auction in 2012.
Henley, who only realized they were missing when they were put up for sale, reported them stolen. He testified that at trial he let the author go through the documents for research purposes but “never gave them away or gave them to anyone to keep or sell.”
The author has not been accused of a crime and has not taken the stand. He did not respond to messages about the trial.