(New York) New York prosecutors reversed course and dropped charges Wednesday against three defendants accused of concealment of manuscripts of the famous song Hotel California of the Eagles, an about-face which ended the trial.
It’s an abrupt and unexpected end to this tortuous affair, which dates back to the late 1970s, and saw one of the founders of the Californian rock group, its singer and drummer Don Henley, take the stand to introduce himself. as the victim of “extortion”.
“The prosecution’s confidence in the solidity of this case is not sufficient,” said, at the opening of the hearing on Wednesday, and in the middle of the trial, one of the prosecutors from the local Manhattan prosecutor’s office. , Aaron Ginandes.
“The decisions taken by the witnesses during the trial to invoke and then waive the right to secrecy of correspondence with their lawyer, resulted in the late submission of approximately 6,000 pages of documents” which the defense was unable to use, said added the prosecutor.
” Handling ”
Judge Curtis Farber, who presided over the trial, sharply criticized Don Henley’s attitude.
“An examination of these documents shows and emphasizes that Mr. Henley and Mr. [Irving] Azoff”, the manager of the Eagles, “used their right [au secret] to protect himself from thorough and complete cross-examination,” he said.
According to the magistrate, witnesses and attorney “used this right to obscure and hide information that they believed was prejudicial to their position that the manuscripts had been stolen.” According to the judge, prosecutors were “apparently manipulated.”
One of Don Henley’s lawyers, Dan Petrocelli, on the contrary reaffirmed to several American media that his client was “a victim of the affair” and of “this unjust development”, and that he would “assert his rights before civil courts”.
On February 26, Don Henley, 76 years old, the only founder still active within the rock group, came to court to assure that the hundred pages scribbled at the heart of the file, were “the product of our work”, “the things stupid things that we wrote” before arriving at the final work and that “they were not intended to be seen”, nor sold.
Facing him, three defendants, including a former curator of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum in Cleveland (Ohio), Craig Inciardi, a rare book dealer, Glenn Horowitz, and a third person in the collector community, Edward Kosinski, were accused of having acquired and then attempted to resell the manuscripts at auction, despite knowing their dubious origin.
Biography
The affair dates back to the end of the 1970s. The rock group The Eagles was at the height of its glory, after the release of its first compilation, Their Greatest Hits (1971 – 1975) then from the album Hotel California (1976), two of the three best-selling records of all time in the United States with Thriller by Michael Jackson.
Ed Sanders, a jack-of-all-trades author, poet, activist, and musician, is hired to write a biography of the group. He was entrusted with handwritten notes which were used to write the lyrics of several songs, including the global success Hotel California. The biography will never be released and Sanders will never return the writings. A flight for Don Henley. Not for defense.
According to Manhattan prosecutors, the pages were then sold in 2005 to Glenn Horowitz, a rare book dealer, who then passed them on to Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinski.
Don Henley had seen them come back at auctions in the 2010s.
According to the prosecution, the value of the manuscripts amounted, at the time of the defendants’ indictment in 2022, to more than a million dollars.