No, This One Isn’t Trump… It’s The Eagles
This is a long and convoluted story and because I know so many of the characters, hard to tell. I’m going to give it a try— without getting myself subpoenaed as a witness. First a little background: I spent my professional career working in the music business— first on the peripheries as a radio dj, concert promoter, club dj, photographer, journalist, band manager… And then I started my own independent label, which I eventually sold to CBS and ran it for them; then I was hired as general manager of Sire Records , which led to me becoming president of Reprise Records.
I have tons of memorabilia and, as you may know, I use it to raise money for the Blue America candidates. Over the years, I’ve donated tens of thousands of dollars of autographed guitars, gold and platinum record awards, signed photographs, promotional items and signed handwritten lyrics. Willing to contribute to a Blue America candidate in return for some rock’n’roll history? Let me know.
I was on the nominating committee of the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame but other than that and going to their annual award dinners, I never had much to do with the organization. Once someone I had never heard of called me and identified himself as someone working for the Hall of Fame. He mentioned some friends of mine and said they had contributed rare memorabilia to the museum and asked me for some very specific items. It surprised me he knew I had them and I figured my old boss must have told him I did. I packed up a box of stuff— mostly contracts and letters if I remember correctly— and shipped them off to the museum. One more thing before I begin. The first band I ever booked to play a concert— for my college’s freshman class dance— was The Fugs and one of the founders/songwriters was Ed Sanders, who I was later arrested with at a draft protest and shared a jail cell with, my first time in jail.
OK, back to the conspiracy. I’m going to lean heavily on reports from Vulture and Rolling Stone, as well as from some people more involved with this than I am, to explain it.
So this starts with my old cellie, Ed Sanders. Eagles manager Irving Azoff— currently one of the richest men in the music business— hired Ed to write an Eagles biography in the late 1970s— this Ed— and, predictably, it didn’t work out and the book has gone unpublished… buried. But, apparently, Ed kept some Eagles material, including the original handwritten Don Henley lyrics for some of the songs that became Hotel California. He eventually sold them to shady but very big time rare book dealer Glenn Horowitz for $50,000. Horowitz later sold either all or some or all of the stolen pads to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and Ed Kosinski, owner of the Gotta Have Rock and Roll auction house, for $65,000. The approximately 100 pages or so could be worth as much as a million dollars… or maybe not. But a lot.
The first batch of pages were put up for auction in 2012 and Henley bought them himself (for $8,500), but eventually felt he was being extorted and when to the Manhattan District Attorney to lodge a formal complaint. Down the road a piece, Horowitz, Kosinski and Inciardi were arrested and in 2019, police raided their homes, seizing 84 pages of lyrics along with 1,300 pages of paperwork and multiple electronic devices. They were charged in 2022. Now they’re facing a judge without a jury in New York State Supreme Court. They all pleaded not guilty and face years in prison if found guilty.
According to the Rolling Stone report, “In opening arguments, the People argued that ‘the defendants were not businessmen acting in good faith, but criminal actors who tried to profit from property they knew to be stolen. Criminal actors who deceived and manipulated to frustrate Henley’s just efforts to recover his stolen property and to forestall legal accountability.’ At the heart of the prosecution’s case is the contention that the three defendants, who were indicted in July 2022, contrived different and ever-changing stories about how Sanders came to be in possession of the paperwork. [Assistant D.A.] Penfold alleged that Inciardi ‘made up a fiction for Sanders to puppet,’ that the lyrics were found in a backstage dressing room, and that Inciardi also ‘concealed’ background information on the lyrics from the auction house Christie’s. Penfold also claimed that Sanders had been coached to say that the lyrics may have been abandoned or were given to him by the late Glenn Frey, who died in 2016.”
In their own opening statements, attorneys for the defendants each expressed indignation over the mere fact that the case was going to trial, especially since Sanders himself has not been charged with a crime. “These individuals had absolutely no inkling, no understanding whatsoever, that there was any problem with these items,” maintained Kosinski’s lawyer, Stacey Richman, adding, “I’m hopeful that the People will be apologizing at the end of this case.”
“This entire case rises and falls on the notion of stolen property,” Horowitz attorney Jonathan Bach said. “The evidence will show that no theft occurring.”
Regarding the alleged conflicting stories about the lyrics and Sanders, Bach said, “People say that these emails are suspicious. They say, ‘That is where a conspiracy begins.’ They are wrong. These emails show that Mr. Horwitz and Mr. Inciardi are seeking a simple statement from Ed Sanders to rebut an allegation they know to be baseless.”
Pointing to the fact that Kosinski advertised on his Gotta Have Rock and Roll site, Matthew Laroche, one of his attorneys, argued that his client “wasn’t hiding anything” and was “acting in good faith.” Highlighting the business backgrounds of all three men, he maintained, “This was not a transaction with some suspicious guys in a back alley where they were selling lyrics out of the trunk of their car.”
The first witness was a major one— longtime Eagles manager Irving Azoff. Wearing a dark suit with black sneakers, Azoff explained that Sanders had been a “work for hire” to write a book on the band and had been given access to materials to write an “authentic” biography. He said Sanders had ultimately received a total of $75,000 for the project, but that Henley and Frey were each “very disappointed” in the end result. Azoff said he found the material in the book about the group’s breakup “unacceptable.”
After the book was rejected by at least one publisher and started to languish, Azoff said Sanders was given permission to shop it around to other publishers, although the Eagles still would have control over its contents and he would need their okay to publish it anywhere. Azoff maintained that the band agreed to such an arrangement after a frustrated Sanders wrote, in 1982, “I should be able to place the manuscript myself. I think I have behaved with great reserve. I could have gone to Rolling Stone or the New Yorker and sold them the inside story of the breakup of the Eagles as a magazine piece, but I didn’t.” Azoff called the agreement to let him revive the book “the lesser of two evils,” since the band didn’t want dirt on their 1980 breakup to be made public.
Or, as Laroche put it, “The Eagles confided all sorts of things to Mr. Sanders about their lives, things that we are quite confident they wished they did not share at the time, and we are quite confident they wished they did not share sitting here today. And they want to get all that stuff back, and the evidence will show that team Henley is using this prosecution to try to get stuff back that they gave to Mr. Sanders 44 years ago.”
Vulture reported that Henley “told a grand jury that he never gave Sanders the lyrics, but the defense disputes this. In the indictment, Horowitz said Sanders told him that he was given his choice of Henley’s materials to use for the book. But once attorneys for Henley got involved after they attempted to sell the lyrics, Sanders offered different stories. He variously claimed he took the papers from a dressing room or stagehand as part of his research. In 2017, he said he’d gotten the manuscripts from the Eagles’ Glenn Frey, who died in 2016. Horowitz reportedly said crediting the late Frey ‘would make this go away once and for all.’… Why is this a criminal case? The defense wants to know as well. Many disagreements over memorabilia are settled, including a previous one involving Horowitz and Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell’s papers. The defense in this case claims that Henley took advantage of prosecutors who are also fans of the Eagles, leading to criminal charges rather than a civil case or settlement. Kosinski’s lawyer even said one investigator with the DA’s office asked for backstage Eagles passes, according to the AP, before a prosecutor chided them. Prosecutors called this claim ‘a conspiracy theory rather than a legal defense.’”
Henley is expected to testify this week and the trial is expected to “take a nastier turn than expected during Henley’s testimony. Ultimate Classic Rock reports that the defense attorneys will be using a newly surfaced letter in an attempt to discredit Henley’s honesty. The letter, written by Henley on an undisclosed date, has been introduced as evidence. Penned for a probation officer, the musician reportedly admits to fabricating the circumstances surrounding the overdose of a teenage escort who suffered a seizure from the aftereffects of cocaine and quaaludes at Henley’s Los Angeles home in 1980. Henley had previously asserted that the overdose occurred during a band farewell party, as opposed to his being home alone and calling an escort service due to loneliness. ‘She told me that she was only a temporary call-girl until she paid off a $2,000 cocaine debt in San Diego,’ he wrote in the letter. Henley says that they never engaged in sexual intercourse; when the paramedics arrived, she seemed to have recovered. Following an investigation from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Sexually Exploited Child Unit, Henley pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He served two years’ probation and paid a $2,500 fine.”