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Within the late Nineteen Seventies, a author engaged on a ebook concerning the Eagles that might by no means be revealed obtained 100-odd pages of notes and lyrics associated to the multiplatinum album “Resort California.”
The papers included handwritten drafts of lyrics by the band’s songwriter and drummer, Don Henley.
Many years later, in response to court docket paperwork, the author, Ed Sanders, bought the trove to a outstanding vendor in uncommon manuscripts who had positioned the papers of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe in college libraries and had labored to promote Bob Dylan’s archive for a sum estimated at as much as $20 million.
In 2022, prosecutors in Manhattan stated that the manuscript vendor, Glenn Horowitz, and two different males had been charged with conspiring to own stolen property valued at over $1 million that included embryonic variations of hits like “Resort California,” “New Child in City” and “Life within the Quick Lane.”
On Wednesday, the three males are scheduled to go on trial in an uncommon continuing which will characteristic testimony from Mr. Henley, who advised a grand jury the fabric was stolen. The trial might be determined by the choose, not a jury.
Earlier than being arrested, Mr. Horowitz had put in himself on the confluence of literature and finance in New York, dealing in big sums and equally big reputations.
After working within the uncommon ebook room on the Greenwich Village bookstore the Strand, he struck out on his personal at 23 and constructed a flourishing enterprise with workplaces in Manhattan and East Hampton, N.Y., bringing gallery-style glitz to the musty world of archives and antiquarian volumes.
His sale of Vladimir Nabokov’s literary property to the New York Public Library in 1992 was extensively thought of the primary archive deal to high $1 million. Those that knew Mr. Horowitz noticed him as a little bit of a hustler. Rick Gekoski, a ebook vendor who did enterprise with him, was quoted in 2007 describing him as “a terrific mixture of a scholar and a grifter.”
Along with Mr. Henley, who co-founded the Eagles and was instrumental in crafting the breezy, melodic country-rock sound that bought hundreds of thousands of data, witnesses may embody Mr. Sanders, a minor musical superstar in his personal proper.
Within the mid-Sixties he had co-founded the Fugs, a proto-punk folk-rock group based mostly on the Decrease East Aspect that was recognized for sometimes-literary-sometimes-scatological imagery. Mr. Sanders described himself in 1970 as “a poet, tune author, head Fug, peace creep and yodeler.”
He subsequently turned a profitable writer with “The Household,” a 1971 ebook about Charles Manson and his murderous cult. Later within the decade, he signed a contract to put in writing concerning the Eagles.
Though the ebook was by no means revealed, Mr. Sanders described the manuscript in a 1994 interview with Seconds journal as an “exhaustive” four-volume account that had included what the interviewer phrased as “sex-and-drugs-type stuff.”
“I put a pair years into it,” he stated on the time. “I bought paid very, very effectively.”
In charging Mr. Horowitz and his co-defendants, Craig Inciardi and Edward Kosinski, prosecutors stated that the Eagles materials had been “initially stolen” by an writer employed to put in writing the band’s biography. Subsequent court docket filings recognized the writer as Mr. Sanders.
There may be, nevertheless, no document of his having been charged within the case or recognized as an unindicted co-conspirator. Mr. Sanders couldn’t be reached for remark.
Protection attorneys wrote in one in every of their filings that if prosecutors didn’t contemplate Mr. Sanders a thief, then the fabric couldn’t be thought of stolen, and the choose ought to dismiss the case.
Mr. Sanders acquired the fabric for a ebook, prosecutors say in a court docket submitting, however “the lyrics turned ‘stolen’ and Sanders dedicated a larceny as soon as he didn’t return the lyrics to the Eagles inside a ‘cheap’ interval following the contract’s termination.”
Prosecutors say Mr. Sanders bought the Eagles paperwork to Mr. Horowitz in 2005. The conspiracy, they argue, started seven years later when Mr. Inciardi, who has labored as a curator for the Rock & Roll Corridor of Fame, and Mr. Kosinski, the proprietor of a web-based public sale web site for music memorabilia, purchased not less than among the materials from Mr. Horowitz.
Once they, in flip, tried to promote a few of it, prosecutors say, Mr. Henley advised them that it had been stolen and demanded it again. Ultimately, Mr. Inciardi and Mr. Kosinski went to the public sale homes Christie’s and Sotheby’s with among the materials.
No gross sales passed off, although, and in 2016 the district lawyer’s workplace seized 16 pages that had been left with Sotheby’s in addition to 85 pages saved at Mr. Kosinski’s house in New Jersey.
An indictment described what prosecutors stated had been Mr. Horowitz’s efforts to create a bogus historical past for the fabric, which included the concept it had come from the Eagles co-founder Glenn Frey, who had lately died, reasonably than from Mr. Henley. Mr. Horowitz wrote to Mr. Sanders in 2017 that figuring out Mr. Frey because the supply “would make this go away as soon as and for all,” the indictment stated.
However, in response to the indictment, Mr. Horowitz quickly appeared to acknowledge that declare can be at odds with a distinct account that Mr. Sanders had given in an e-mail 12 years earlier.
In that 2005 e-mail, the indictment says, Mr. Sanders wrote to Mr. Horowitz that he had combed by means of a bounty of archival Eagles materials whereas “staying at Henley’s place in Malibu.”
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