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Welcome to the Hotel California… the reissue of the criminal complaint in New York.
The trial of three men accused of conspiracy involving possession of the original handwritten lyrics to the Eagles’ smash hit Hotel California has unfolded and the band’s former manager describes a long effort to get the job back, longer than even the song’s epic guitar solos.
Irving Azoff, manager of the American rock band that rose to stardom in the 1970s, told a court in Manhattan on Wednesday that the group had attempted to recover approximately 100 pages of song lyrics allegedly stolen from the album Hotel California written by the band members. Eagles teammates. founders Don Henley and Glenn Frey. They were trying to get them back from rock journalist Ed Sanders, who had been hired by the band to write a biography of the group more than 40 years ago.
Sanders had apparently taken the yellow notepads, on which were handwritten now-legendary lyrics such as “you can check out whenever you want but you can never leave”, from Henley’s storage barn in Malibu, the court heard.
But in a twist as enigmatic as elements of the band’s best-known song, it’s not Sanders who is on trial.
The three defendants are rare book collector Glenn Horowitz, memorabilia dealer Edward Kosinski and former Rock and Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi. They are being tried before a New York State Supreme Court judge, without a jury, the charges They knowingly possessed and tried to sell the lyrics despite knowing, according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, “that they had been written by and stolen by Eagles founding member Don Henley.”
The men were arrested for allegedly conspiring to sell the lyrics without the band’s consent and are accused of attempting to conceal how they obtained the documents.
Prosecutors will try to prove that the lyrics were stolen, allegedly by Sanders, although he is not accused, and will also explain what the three defendants did with the notebooks that came into their hands.
Sanders’ draft of the Eagles’ “official biography” was rejected by band members, who called it “highly disappointing,” and it was never published, the court heard.
That began a long dispute with Sanders over the book, with the band’s management repeatedly facing demands from Sanders for more money above the $25,000 fee they had agreed upon. In a letter, Sanders wrote to tell the band that it was unfair that “I live a modest, middle-class lifestyle while those I write about have pylons firmly planted in mountains of moolah.”
Azoff estimated that the band ended up paying Sanders $75,000 for his work, but eventually came to feel they were being blackmailed when Sanders said he would publish an account of the Eagles’ breakup in the early 1980s. “The decision was made. of not being extorted by Sanders,” Azoff told the judge Wednesday.
The manager’s account so far, which includes colorful details like how he had to rent a separate house in Beverly Hills for Henley and Frey to write because Henley didn’t like all the empty beer cans and cigarette butts in Frey’s house, It is a backdrop for the central axis of the criminal complaint.
Lawyers for three defendants said their clients had no knowledge that the items of interest could have been acquired through theft. “Sanders is a highly respected literary figure who served as the Eagles’ authorized biographer; of course, they quickly provided him with documents,” said Horowitz’s defense attorney, Jonathan Bach.
Kosinski’s defense attorney, Matthew Laroche, argued that the case should never have been filed due to lack of evidence and would ask that it be dismissed once the prosecution rested. Inciardi’s defense attorney, Stacey Richman, later told the court: “People have accused three innocent men of a crime that never happened.”
If convicted, Horowitz, Inciardi and Kosinski face up to four years in prison. All three have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Henley, who is expected to testify Monday, said he discovered some pages of lyrics were being sold online in 2012, bought them himself for $8,500 and then filed a stolen goods report with the district attorney.
The case was filed in New York in 2022 after district attorney investigators raided Kosinski’s New Jersey home in 2019. His defense team claims they employed “strong-arm tactics… wholly inappropriate in the context of this case.” .
More letters from the disputed notebooks were offered for private sale at Sotheby’s in 2016. The auctioneer agreed to cancel the sale, but did not return the disputed items, when he heard their provenance was cloudy.
Prosecutor Nicholas Penfold claimed in court Thursday that Sanders had been trained to say the lyrics may have been left behind in a concert dressing room or given to him by Frey, who died in 2016.
Penfold said he would show the court evidence that Sanders, who sold the bill to Horowitz, wrote a letter to the dealer saying Henley “could possibly be upset” by the sales. That, the prosecutor said, casts doubt on whether Sanders believed he owned the lyrics and that Horowitz had “ignored the red flags.”
Filing the case two years ago, Bragg saying “New York is a world-class center of arts and culture, and those who trade in cultural artifacts must scrupulously follow the law.” The statement implicitly linked the processing of the letters to broader efforts by the bureau to return looted antiquities to their countries of origin.
But lawyers for the three men argue that bringing the case is not “reasonable,” since authorities are bringing it six years after they became aware of the allegations and, according For Kosinski’s defense, “the accusations refer to conduct that took place almost 50 years ago.”
The case continues.