The criminal trial of a prominent rare books dealer accused of conspiring to possess dozens of pages of handwritten lyrics by the Eagles co-founder Don Henley collapsed abruptly on Wednesday as a judge in Manhattan dismissed the charges in the case, citing concerns about how evidence had been handled.
The dismissal by Justice Curtis Farber of State Supreme Court, two weeks into the trial that had already included days of testimony by Mr. Henley, was a severe blow to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which began investigating the case several years ago.
It was also a form of vindication for the book dealer, Glenn Horowitz, and two other men standing trial along with him.
The case centered on some 100 pages of draft lyrics for hit songs by the Eagles including “Hotel California,” “New Kid in Town” and “Life in the Fast Lane.”
Prosecutors say the notes were stolen decades ago by an author who had signed a contract in the late 1970s to write a book about the Eagles that was never published. The author, Ed Sanders, has not been charged. He sold the documents in 2005 to Mr. Horowitz, who in turn sold them to the two other defendants, according to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which began investigating after complaints by Mr. Henley.
The trial took a sudden turn after Mr. Henley’s lawyers sent a trove of evidence to defense lawyers and prosecutors last weekend. That evidence, including hundreds of email messages between Mr. Henley, his agent, a private investigator and several lawyers working for him, was produced after Mr. Henley waived attorney-client privilege.
Defense lawyers were outraged that the material had not been provided earlier, telling Justice Farber on Monday that they should have been able to refer to the email messages while cross-examining Mr. Henley and one of his lawyers, Eric Custer, who had testified the previous week.
Some statements in the emails were at odds with testimony delivered in court, defense lawyers said, and they asked that the charges against their clients be dismissed.
Justice Farber told the lawyers on Monday that he was disinclined to dismiss the charges but added that there was “no question there is a discovery violation here” that “appeared designed to withhold information” about crucial elements of the case, including whether the lyric sheets had been stolen.
He asked defense lawyers to review the newly disclosed material and report back to him so he could decide on the “correct sanction.”
The trial had drawn widespread attention because it involved documents related to one of the most beloved bands of the 1970s, whose breezy country-rock style sold millions of records. The accusations leveled at a book and manuscript dealer who had placed the papers of Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe in university libraries and had worked to sell Bob Dylan’s archive for a sum estimated at up to $20 million.
Mr. Horowitz began his career in the rare book room at the Greenwich Village bookstore the Strand, then built a thriving business with offices 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 estate to the New York Public Library in 1992 was considered to be the first archive deal to top $1 million. Rick Gekoski, a book dealer who did business with Mr. Horowitz, described him in 2007 as “a terrific combination of a scholar and a grifter.”
Much of the case had centered upon questions of when and how Mr. Sanders — a founder of a countercultural Lower East Side band called the Fugs and the author of a book about Charles Manson and his cult — obtained the draft lyrics.
In 2005, Mr. Sanders wrote in an email that an assistant for Mr. Henley had mailed him some of the archival material he had examined “at Henley’s place in Malibu.”
Mr. Henley testified that he had given Mr. Sanders access to documents stored in the barn of his organic farm in Malibu, Calif., but had never surrendered ownership of that material.
Defense lawyers said their clients could not be found guilty because no theft could be proved and introduced evidence including old mailing labels that they said suggested that Mr. Henley had sent material to Mr. Sanders’s home in Woodstock, N.Y.
Prosecutors had written in a pretrial filing that a contract between Mr. Sanders and the Eagles “made clear that Sanders had had no ownership interest in the lyrics and no right to take or possess the lyrics outside of his work on the book the Eagles had hired him to write.” They added that the Eagles material “became ‘stolen’” when Mr. Sanders failed to return it to Mr. Henley within a reasonable period of time.
Decades after working on the Eagles manuscript, Mr. Sanders sold the draft lyrics to Mr. Horowitz. Prosecutors said he sold them seven years later to Craig Inciardi, a curator with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and Edward Kosinski, the owner of an online auction site. The two men sought to resell some of it through Mr. Kosinski’s site and the Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses.
The first pages of lyrics to be put up for auction were from the song “Hotel California”; Mr. Henley paid $8,500 to get them back. His lawyers informed Mr. Kosinski that the material had been stolen but did not pursue a lawsuit. After other portions of the lyrics were subsequently offered for sale, Mr. Henley went to the district attorney’s office.
Prosecutors said that while they were investigating, Mr. Horowitz tried to come up with a phony provenance for the lyrics to suggest that Mr. Sanders had received them from someone other than Mr. Henley.
In a 2017 email to Mr. Sanders that was cited in an indictment, Mr. Horowitz appeared to suggest that the lyrics may have come from Glenn Frey, another co-founder of the Eagles who had died the year before.
“He, alas, is dead,” Mr. Horowitz wrote in reference to Mr. Frey, adding that identifying him as the source “would make this go away once and for all.”
