MANHATTAN (CN) — A lined yellow legal pad was at the center of a New York City criminal trial on Wednesday, in which three men are accused of stealing handwritten lyrics to The Eagles’ “Hotel California” and other hits.
Manhattan prosecutors say book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and music collector Edward Kosinski conspired to sell around 100 pages of stolen lyric manuscripts belonging to the iconic West Coast rock band.
“The defendants were not businessmen acting in good faith, but criminal actors,” Assistant District Attorney Nicholas Penfold said during opening arguments on Wednesday.
Penfold claimed that the 13 pages of “Hotel California” lyrics are worth more than $1 million alone, and the entire collection of manuscripts — which include lyrics from “Life in the Fast Lane,” “New Kid in Town,” and other classic songs — is “worth millions of dollars.”
The prosecutor added that the trio of defendants plotted to thwart Don Henley’s attempts to reclaim the manuscripts by repeatedly changing the story about where they came from.
Defense attorneys called the prosecution’s case “patently absurd” and one that contains “a mountain of reasonable doubt.”
“There is no crime here,” said Inciardi’s lawyer Stacey Richman. “I am hopeful that the people will be apologizing at the end of this case.”
Horowitz was the first of the three defendants to get his hands on the documents, which he bought in 2005 from Ed Sanders, a prominent writer and poet. Sanders claimed to have gotten the manuscripts from The Eagles themselves, while he was working on a biography about the band in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.
Eventually, Horowitz sold the pages to Inciardi and Kosinski to sell at auction. When they tried, prosecutors say Henley took notice and tried to get the sheets back.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office says Sanders stole the documents. Henley told a grand jury that the band never shared the lyric sheets with the writer to begin with. But the defendants say Sanders got hold of them “properly” and had every right to sell them to Horowitz.
“The Eagles turned over these materials to Ed Sanders with their blessing,” Horowitz’s lawyer Jonathan Bach said. “They provided him materials, including the pads of notes, so he could study them and write about them in his book… Decade after decade after decade, they never asked for them back.”
Sanders claimed Henley’s assistant mailed him whatever documents he asked for, including the lyric sheets, to aid his writing process.
“I was staying at Henley’s place in Malibu, and had total access to his boxes of stuff,” Sanders told Horowitz in an email, according to the indictment. “There was a lot, and I compiled a box of files I wanted and his assistant mailed them to me.”
He added that Henley was “very aggressive and can be quite angry, and might become conceivably upset if it gets out that these were sold.”
Once Henley’s lawyers started poking around, prosecutors claim that the defendants started telling different stories about the documents’ origin. According to the indictment, they claimed Sanders found the manuscripts backstage, and then that he'd been a gift from the band’s late co-founder Glenn Frey, among other explanations.
Sanders is not a defendant in this case, but in order for prosecutors to prove that the three defendants conspired to possess stolen property, they need to prove that Sanders stole the manuscripts.
Similarly, the defense attorneys must argue that Sanders was, at one point, a proper owner of the documents in order to clear the defendants of wrongdoing.
“Without question, the evidence will show that all of the materials were obtained by Ed Sanders properly,” Richman said.
All three defendants have pleaded not guilty. Justice Curtis Farber will decide the verdict after the defendants opted for a bench trial last week.
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