Prosecutors in New York have dropped a criminal case against three men accused of a conspiracy to sell stolen legal pads with hand-written lyrics to the Eagles’ Hotel California and two other songs after emails came to light that undercut the premise of the complaint.
The Manhattan assistant district attorney Aaron Ginandes told the court on Wednesday morning that they no longer wished to proceed with a prosecution that last week saw the band’s co-founder Don Henley take the stand over two days to claim that the legal pads had been burgled from his Malibu home.
“The People concede that dismissal is appropriate in this case,” Ginandes said.
The collapse of the case against the three men – rare-books collector Glenn Horowitz, memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski, and former Rock and Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi – comes after nearly two weeks of testimony. The defendants had pleaded not guilty.
The court heard that the Eagles commissioned the writer Ed Sanders to write an official account of the band around the height of their fame in the late 1970s. But the members had not liked the pages Sanders turned in, stating in court that it was too full of “beatnik” jargon.
They then suggested Sanders look at their work process and gave him access to roughly 100 pages of lyrics. In 2012, some of the lyrics came up for sale at an online rock’n’roll memorabilia site, and again at Sotheby’s two years later.
After the case collapsed, a lawyer for Henley said the musician still wanted his work returned to him.
“As the victim in this case, Mr Henley has once again been victimized by this unjust outcome,” attorney Dan Petrocelli said in a statement. “He will pursue all his rights in the civil courts.”
Prosecutors alleged the three men knew the pages had a dubious chain of custody and conspired to sell them despite questions about their provenance. At trial, Henley said he “never gifted them or gave them to anybody to keep or sell”.
But as a witness for the prosecution, Henley was exposed to questions about his memory and his personal circumstances in the late 1970s when the band was about to break up.
He said he could not remember what he had for breakfast last Friday but could remember that the Eagles had played Wembley Stadium in London in the summer of 1975 and a bill with Elton John and the Beach Boys.
He was also queried about cocaine use, saying he had never been a “drug-filled zombie” and if he had been he would never have “accomplished everything I accomplished before 1980 and after 1980”.
Henley was also asked about his arrest in 1980 when authorities said they found a 16-year-old girl naked and overdosed in his home. The drummer and singer pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and was sentenced to probation and fined $2,500.
The case collapsed after Henley agreed last week that communications with his attorneys could be entered into the court record. Defense lawyers then argued that about 6,000 pages of material contained information that they had not been able to use for cross-examination.
“These delayed disclosures revealed relevant information that the defense should have had the opportunity to explore in cross-examination of the People’s witnesses,” Ginandes wrote.
In dismissing the case, Judge Curtis Farber said that “witnesses and their lawyers” had used attorney-client privilege “to obfuscate and hide information that they believed would be damaging”.
Outside the court, reported the Washington Post, Horowitz’s attorney Jonathan Bach said: “We are glad the district attorney’s office finally made the right decision to drop this case. It should never have been brought.”
