Trio charged with possessing stolen handwritten lyrics to The Eagles' Hotel California
The estimate worth of the items are valued at more than $1 million
Instead of booking themselves into the Hotel California, three men have been charged on Tuesday for allegedly crafting a plot to sell handwritten notes and lyrics stolen from Eagles’ co-founder Don Henley, reports the L.A. Times.
Valued at around $1 million by New York officials, nearly 100 poached documents included notes and lyrics from the songs “Hotel California,” “New Kid In Town,” and “Life in the Fast Lane,” all from the Eagles’ hit 1976 album, Hotel California.
The trio of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi, Glenn Horowitz, and Edward Kosinski were allegedly involved in trying to sell Henley’s handwritten notes to auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s, going on a “years-long campaign to prevent Henley from recovering the manuscripts,” says the press release from the New York County D.A.’s office.
Origins of the lost notes stem back to the late 1970s when court documents say that the manuscripts were first stolen by an author that had been hired to write a biography of the rock group. According to the press release, the biographer went on to sell the documents in 2005 to rare books dealer Horowitz, who then sold them to Inciardi and Kosinski.