New York prosecutors abruptly dropped their criminal case midtrial Wednesday against three men who had been accused of conspiring to possess a cache of hand-drafted lyrics to “Hotel California” and other Eagles hits.
Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Aaron Ginandes informed the judge at 10 a.m. that prosecutors would no longer proceed with the case, citing newly available emails that defense lawyers said raised questions about the trial’s fairness. The trial had been underway since late February.
The raft 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 disclosures raised questions that it hadn’t been able to ask.
“Witnesses and their lawyers” used attorney-client privilege “to obfuscate and hide information that they believed would be damaging,” Judge Curtis Farber said in dismissing the case.
The case centered on roughly 100 pages of legal-pad pages from the creation of a classic rock colossus. The 1976 album “Hotel California” ranks as the third-biggest seller of all time in the U.S., in no small part on the strength of its evocative, smoothly unsettling title track about a place where “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
The accused had been three well-established figures in the collectibles world: rare books dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi, and rock memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski.
Prosecutors had said the men knew the pages had a dubious chain of ownership but peddled them anyway, scheming to fabricate a provenance that would pass muster with auction houses and stave off demands to return the documents to Eagles co-founder Don Henley.
The defendants pleaded not guilty to charges including conspiracy to criminally possess stolen property. Through their lawyers, the men contended that they were rightful owners of pages that weren’t stolen by anyone.
|
|
