Beach Boys file $20-million suit

The Beach Boys have filed a $20-million federal lawsuit against a warehouse owner and others, charging them with the theft of original recordings, business documents, rare photos, sheet music and memorabilia that had been put into storage in North Hollywood but ended up on the auction block in London last fall.

That planned October sale of 28 lots by the British auction house Cooper Owen was canceled less than an hour before bidding was to begin after protests by representatives of the famed Southern California group.

Attorneys for the group’s Brother Records Inc. filed the complaint in federal court in Los Angeles on Wednesday. It claims that warehouse owner Allan Gaba kept more than a dozen crates of Beach Boys property when the group moved their property out of the site in 1994. The suit further argues that Roy Sciacca of Gem Systems Inc., a production and memorabilia company with offices in Agoura Hills and Nevada, then approached Cooper Owen and described the items as a trove that had been purchased decades earlier.

Gaba could not be reached for comment Thursday, and Sciacca did not returns calls.

-- Geoff Boucher