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NEW YORK – In the mid-1970s, the Eagles were working on a creepy, cryptic new song.
In a lined yellow notebook, Don Henley, with the collaboration of the band’s co-founder, Glenn Frey, jotted down thoughts about “a dark desert road” and “a lovely place” with a luxurious surface and a sinister undertone. And something on ice, maybe caviar or Taittinger… or rosé champagne?
The song “Hotel California” became one of rock’s most indelible singles. And nearly half a century later, those handwritten pages of letters in progress have become the center of an unusual criminal trial set to begin Wednesday.
Rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and memorabilia dealer Edward Kosinski are accused of conspiring to possess and attempt to sell manuscripts of “Hotel California” and other hits by the Eagles without the right to do so.
All three pleaded not guilty and their attorneys said the men committed no crime with the documents, which they acquired through a writer who had worked with the Eagles. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office says the defendants conspired to conceal disputed ownership of the documents, despite knowing that Henley said the pages were stolen.
Clashes over valuable collectibles abound, but criminal trials like this are rare. Many fights are resolved privately, in lawsuits, or with agreements to return items.
“If you can avoid prosecution by turning over the item, most people just turn it over,” said Travis McDade, a law professor at the University of Illinois who studies disputes over rare documents.
Of course, the case of the Eagles manuscripts is also distinctive in other ways.
Prosecutors’ star witness is precisely that: Henley is expected to testify between stops on the Eagles’ tour. The bench trial could offer a glimpse into the band’s creative process and life on the fast track to 1970s stardom.
At stake are more than 80 pages of lyric drafts from the hit 1976 album “Hotel California,” including the words to the chart-topping, Grammy-winning title cut. It features one of classic rock’s most recognizable riffs, its best-known solos, and its most quoted (possibly overquoted) lines: “You can listen whenever you want, but you can never leave.”
Henley has said that the song is about “the darkest part of the American dream.”
It was still streamed more than 220 million times and garnered 136,000 radio plays last year in the United States alone, according to entertainment data company Luminate. The “Hotel California” album has sold 26 million copies nationwide over the years, surpassed only by an Eagles greatest hits album and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
The pages also include lyrics to songs like “Life in the Fast Lane” and “New Kid in Town.” Eagles manager Irving Azoff called the documents “irreplaceable pieces of musical history.”
Horowitz, Inciardi and Kosinki are charged with conspiracy to possess stolen property and several other crimes.
They are not actually accused of stealing documents. Neither will anyone else, but prosecutors will still have to establish that the documents were stolen. The defense maintains that this is not true.
Much revolves around the Eagles’ interactions with Ed Sanders, a writer who also co-founded the ’60s counterculture rock band The Fugs. He worked in the late ’70s and early ’80s on an authorized biography of the Eagles that was never published.
Sanders is not charged in the case. He left a phone message seeking comment.
He sold the pages to Horowitz, who then sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski.
Horowitz has handled large deals for rare books and archives, and has been embroiled in some property disputes before. One of them involved articles linked to “Gone with the Wind” author Margaret Mitchell. It was resolved.
Inciardi worked on notable exhibits for the Cleveland-based Rock Hall of Fame. Kosinski was the director of Gotta Have It! Collectibles, known for auctioning off personal possessions of celebrities, so personal that Madonna unsuccessfully sued to try to stop a sale that included her latex underwear.
Henley told a grand jury that he never gave the lyrics to the biographer, according to court documents from Kosinski’s attorneys. But defense attorneys have said they plan to investigate Henley’s memory of that time.
“We believe Mr. Henley voluntarily provided the handwriting to Mr. Sanders,” attorney Scott Edelman said in court last week.
Sanders told Horowitz in 2005 that while he was working on the Eagles book, all the documents he wanted were sent to him from Henley’s home in Malibu, California, according to the indictment.
Then Kosinski’s business offered some pages at auction in 2012. Henley’s lawyers came knocking on his door. And Horowitz, Inciardi and Sanders, in various combinations, began searching for alternative versions of the manuscripts’ provenance, the indictment says.
In one story, Sanders found the discarded pages in a backstage dressing room. In others, he obtained them from a stage assistant or while accumulating “a lot of Eagles-related material from different people.” In another, he obtained them from Frey, a tale that would “make this thing go away once and for all.” “Horowitz suggested in 2017. Frey had died the year before.
“He simply needs gentle treatment and assurance that he won’t go to the can,” Horowitz emailed Inciardi during a 2012 exchange about how to get Sanders’ “‘explanation’ into a communication” to auctioneers. , says the accusation.
Sanders provided or approved some of the various explanations, according to the indictment, and it is unclear what he may have conveyed verbally. But he apparently rejected at least the dressing room story.
Kosinki sent an explanation, approved by Sanders, to Henley’s attorney. Kosinski also assured auction house Sotheby’s that the musician “had no right” to the documents and asked to keep potential bidders in the dark about Henley’s complaints, the indictment says.
Sotheby’s included lyrics to the song “Hotel California” in a 2016 auction, but withdrew them after learning the ownership was in doubt. Sotheby’s is not a defendant in the case and declined to comment.
Henley purchased some lyric drafts privately from Gotta Have It! for $8,500 in 2012, when she also began filing police reports, according to court documents.
Defense attorneys say Henley found dazzled prosecutors who took up his case rather than file a civil suit himself.
The district attorney’s office worked closely with Henley’s legal team, and one investigator even hoped to obtain backstage passes to an Eagles show, until a prosecutor said the idea was “completely inappropriate,” the prosecutors said. Kosinki’s lawyers in court documents.
Prosecutors have dismissed questions about his motivations as “a conspiracy theory rather than a legal defense.”
Last year, they wrote in court papers: “It is the defendants, not the prosecutors, who are on trial.”