


Jennifer Peltz And Tom Hays, The Associated Press 






Revealed Wednesday, July 13, 2022 6:20AM EDT




NEW YORK (AP) — A rock memorabilia vendor and two other guys had been billed Tuesday with scheming to promote allegedly sick-gotten, handwritten lyrics to the vintage rock juggernaut “Hotel California” and other hits by the Eagles.
Prosecutors said the trio lied to auction properties and purchasers about the manuscripts’ fuzzy chain of origin, coaching the man or woman who supplied the product about what to say. In the meantime, the adult men tried to thwart Eagles co-founder Don Henley’s efforts to reclaim the goods, according to prosecutors.
“They manufactured up tales about the origin of the documents and their proper to have them so they could transform a revenue,” Manhattan District Lawyer Alvin Bragg mentioned.
By their legal professionals, rock auctioneer Edward Kosinski and co-defendants Glenn Horowitz and Craig Inciardi pleaded not guilty to conspiracy fees. Kosinski and Inciardi were also charged with prison possession of stolen property, and Horowitz was billed with tried criminal possession of stolen home and two counts of hindering prosecution. They ended up released with no bail.
Their attorneys insist the men are harmless.
“The DA’s office alleges criminality where none exists and unfairly tarnishes the reputations of properly-revered pros,” protection lawyers Antonia Apps, Jonathan Bach and Stacey Richman said in a assertion vowing to “fight these unjustified charges vigorously.”
Apps, who signifies Kosinski, afterwards named the charges “the weakest legal scenario I have noticed in my complete job,” characterizing it as a “civil dispute” above ownership.
“Despite 6 many years of investigating the circumstance, the DA hasn’t integrated a solitary factual allegation in the indictment showing that my shopper did anything at all mistaken,” she mentioned in a statement.
The trove of files bundled Henley’s notes and lyrics for “Hotel California” and two other singles from that eponymous, blockbuster album: “Life in the Fast Lane” and “New Child In Town.” Prosecutors valued the material at more than $1 million.
The writings are “irreplaceable items of musical history” and “an integral element of the legacy Don Henley has created around the system of his 50-moreover-year vocation,” longtime Eagles manager Irving Azoff explained in a statement.
He thanked prosecutors for bringing a case that exposes “the real truth about songs memorabilia product sales of really private, stolen objects concealed driving a facade of legitimacy.”
The chart-topping, Grammy-Award-winning single “Hotel California” is a touchstone of 1970s rock, with a person of the era’s most memorable guitar solos capping a musical tale of getting lured into a glitzy, mysterious resort in which “you can verify out any time you like, but you can under no circumstances leave.” Theories about its indicating abound Henley has stated it really is about surplus and a dark side of the American aspiration.
The Grammy-successful album has offered more than 26 million copies since its launch in 1976, building it one particular of the greatest marketing in background.
In accordance to prosecutors and an indictment, Horowitz bought the paperwork close to 2005 from a author who labored on a never-posted ebook about the Eagles in the late ’70s.
The author, who is not identified in the indictment, gave a wide variety of explanations to Horowitz over the a long time of the place the files arrived from.
In one particular e mail provided in the indictment, the writer suggests Henley’s assistant despatched them from the musician’s Malibu, California, property soon after the writer picked them out in an additional, the writer uncovered them discarded in a dressing place backstage at an Eagles live performance in a different, another person who labored for the band gave them to him.
“It was about 35 many years in the past and my memory is foggy!” the writer claimed in a 2012 email.
By then, Kosinski and Inciardi had purchased the paperwork from Horowitz Kosinski experienced outlined them for sale on his on the net auction website and inquiries about their origins ended up looming.
In subsequent email messages, Horowitz and Inciardi worked to have the writer’s “`explanation’ formed into a communication” – ultimately, an April 2012 e-mail saying that he failed to recall who gave him the files. Kosinski sent it to Henley’s attorney, according to the indictment.
Afterwards that month, Kosinski sold some “Hotel California” lyric sheets to Henley for $8,500, in accordance to the indictment.
Inciardi and Kosinski then tried to peddle extra of the Eagles documents to other opportunity customers by means of Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction properties, while also offering to sell some to Henley, in accordance to the indictment.
By 2017, with not only Henley’s attorneys but the district attorney’s business inquiring questions, Horowitz requested the author regardless of whether he’d gotten the resources from an additional founding Eagles member, Glenn Frey, the indictment explained. Frey had died the 12 months before.
“Once you discover GF as the resource of the tablet, you and I are out of this photograph for good,” Horowitz wrote in a observe-up email.
The writer then presented a notice to that effect, according to the indictment.
