Trial over stolen 'Hotel California' lyrics abruptly ends after prosecutors drop charges, citing new emails
New York prosecutors abruptly dropped their criminal case midtrial against three men accused of conspiring to possess hand-drafted lyrics to “Hotel California” and other Eagles hits.
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.
The case was brought in 2022 was against three men well-known in the collectibles world — rare-book dealer Glenn Horowitz, former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and memorabilia seller Edward Kosinski.
The case centered on roughly 100 pages of legal-pad pages from the creation of the 1976 classic rock album "Hotel California" — the third-biggest seller of all time in the U.S.
When lyric sheets started to pop up in auctions in 2012, it drew the ire of Eagles co-founder Don Henley.
Those pages had been shared with Ed Sanders, a writer who worked on an Eagles band biography that never got published. He sold them to Horowitz, who in turn sold them to Kosinski and Inciardi, and from there the pages made it to auctions. Henley had bought back some of the material for $8,500 but also reported the documents stolen, court filings said.
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