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NEW YORK (AP) — New York prosecutors on Wednesday abruptly dropped their criminal case midway through the trial against three men who had been accused of conspiring to possess a cache of handwritten letters to “Hotel California” and other Eagles hits.
Manhattan Deputy District Attorney Aaron Ginandes informed the judge at 10 a.m. that prosecutors would no longer pursue the case, citing newly available emails that defense attorneys said raised questions about the fairness of the trial. The trial had been underway since late February.
The flurry of communications emerged only when Eagles star Don 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 revelations raised questions it had failed to raise.
“The witnesses and their attorneys” used attorney-client privilege “to obfuscate and conceal information they believed would be prejudicial,” Judge Curtis Farber said in dismissing the case.
The case centered on approximately 100 scrapbook pages of the creation of a classic rock colossus. The 1976 album “Hotel California” ranks as the third largest seller of all time in the US, largely on the strength of its evocative, gently haunting title track about a place where “you can visit whenever you want, but you can never leave.”
The defendants had been three well-established figures in the world of collectibles: rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and rock memorabilia dealer Edward Kosinski.
Prosecutors had said the men knew the pages had a dubious chain of ownership, but sold them anyway, planning to fabricate a provenance that would be approved by auction houses and avoid demands to return the documents to the Eagles co-founder. , Don Henley.
The defendants pleaded not guilty to charges including conspiracy to criminally possess stolen property. Through their lawyers, the men maintained that they were rightful owners of pages that no one had stolen.
“We are glad that the district attorney’s office finally made the right decision to drop this case. It should never have come forward,” Horowitz’s attorney, Jonathan Bach, said outside court.
Horowitz hugged his tearful relatives but made no comments as he left court, nor did Inciardi.
Henley’s current attorney, Dan Petrocelli, said in an emailed statement that the attorney-client privilege that had previously protected some of the communications “is a fundamental barrier in our justice system” that should rarely be abandoned.
“As a victim in this case, Mr. Henley has once again been a victim of this unfair outcome,” Petrocelli said. “He will exercise all his rights in civil courts.”
The defense contended that Henley gave the documents decades ago to a writer who worked on a never-published Eagles biography and then sold the handwritten sheets to Horowitz. He, in turn, sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski, who began auctioning some of the pages in 2012.
Henley, who realized they were missing only when they appeared for sale, reported the theft. He testified that at trial he let the writer carefully examine the documents for research, but “he never gave them away or gave them to anyone to keep or sell.”
The writer was not accused of any crime and has not taken the stand. He has not responded to messages about the trial.
In a letter to the court, Ginandes, the prosecutor, said the waiver of attorney-client privilege resulted in the late production of about 6,000 pages of material.
“These late disclosures revealed relevant information that the defense should have had the opportunity to explore in cross-examination of the People’s witnesses,” Ginandes wrote.