(CN) — The Eagles drummer and co-founder Don Henley sued two rock memorabilia collectors in Manhattan federal court Friday, hoping to prove that he is the rightful owner of lyric sheets for the band's 1976 album "Hotel California."
The two collectors, Edward Kosinski and former Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Curator Craig Inciardi, also claim ownership over the approximately 100 pages of "Hotel California" lyric sheets, though the sheets themselves are currently in the possession of the New York County District Attorney's Office after a late February trial over their attempts to sell the lyric sheets.
Henley hopes the court will declare him the sheets' proper owner so that he can recover them from Manhattan prosecutors, he said in his 24-page complaint.
"Soon after acquiring Henley’s lyric sheets, [Kosinski] and Inciardi began a nearly five-year campaign to profit from Henley’s lyric sheets by selling or auctioning them off song by song, forcing Henley to intervene each time, including by notifying law enforcement," Henley wrote in his complaint Friday.
The New York prosecutors charged Kosinski and Inciardi — along with a rare books dealer named Glenn Horowitz — with conspiracy and criminal possession of stolen property in the first degree, among other counts. According to the trio's indictment, 13 lyric pages for the album's eponymous song "Hotel California" were worth over $1 million alone.
Assistant District Attorney Nicholas Penfold said during the trial's opening arguments that entire collection of lyrics is “worth millions of dollars.”
Henley wrote in his federal complaint Thursday that Horowitz first obtained the lyric sheets in 2007 from author Ed Sanders, whom the Eagles hired in 1979 to write a book about the band.
Henley claimed he gave Sanders some of the lyric sheets in 1980 while the author was writing his never-published book, and that Sanders also received pages from Henley's caretaker in Los Angeles. Henley wrote that despite Sanders holding onto the lyric sheets for more than two decades, he remained their rightful owner under the 1979 contract.
Henley said Sanders sold the pages to Horowitz in 2007, in violation of the contract.
“It doesn’t matter if I drove a U-Haul truck across the country and dumped them on his front door,” Henley said at trial earlier this year. “He had no right to keep them and no right to sell them.”
The drummer claims Horowitz in turn sold the pages to Kosinski and Inciardi in 2012, who then, Henley says, attempted to sell the lyric sheets both via famous art auction operators like Sotheby's, and through the online music memorabilia auction house "Gotta Have Rock and Roll."
Henley accused Kosinski of owning and operating Gotta Have Rock and Roll, and while the auction house's website doesn't list his name, a person named Dylan Kosinski is credited as its CEO.
Gotta Have Rock and Roll did not respond to a request for clarification on this issue by press time.
Regardless of Edward Kosinski's specific relationship to Gotta Have Rock and Roll, Manhattan District Attorneys agreed that he and Inciardi possessed "approximately 84 pages of developmental lyrics to songs from the Eagles album Hotel California" between 2012 and 2019, before law enforcement seized them.
The prosecutors also accused Inciardi, Kosinski and Horowitz of repeatedly trying to auction the 13 lyric pages from the song Hotel California between 2012 and 2016 despite Henley's objections.
The trio's defense attorneys claimed the trio had obtained the lyric pages from Sanders legally, and that Sanders had never stolen the pages from Henley.
“There is no crime here,” Inciardi’s lawyer Stacey Richman said at trial. “I am hopeful that the people will be apologizing at the end of this case.”
Whether or not the New York prosecutors ever apologized, they did suddenly drop the charges against Inciardi, Horowitz and Kosinski two weeks into trial. According to Justice Curtis Farber, Henley used attorney-client privilege to keep important documents out of prosecutors' hands.
Henley wrote Friday that he and his attorneys made a last-minute decision to waive that privilege "under pressure from defense counsel and the court," and prosecutors at the time agreed to abandon the case over the issue.
"Although the prosecutor told the court that the documents strengthened the prosecution case, [the] District Attorney of New York agreed to dismiss the charges on March 6, 2024, based on the midtrial production of the privileged documents," Henley wrote.
The New York County District Attorney's Office issued no news release on the development at the time.
“The district attorney in this case got blinded by the fame and the fortune of a celebrity and brought a case that would never be brought if it was just a normal person involved,” Kosinski's defense attorney Scott Edelman said. “That blinded them to the information that they weren’t being given, and led to the events of today.”
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