Mapmakers and map dealers stole from one another as well—often without attribution or shame, reworking one another’s copper plates and passing them off as their own. Blaeu stole from Mercator, Jansson stole from Blaeu, Seller stole from Jansson, and so on. As the French and English fought over North America, Moll, De L’Isle, and Popple all stole from one another’s geography to create their propaganda. And after the outbreak of the American Revolution, it was the theft of a map from West Point that exposed Benedict Arnold as a traitor.
In modern times, libraries have been targeted by map thieves at least since 1972, the same year Graham Arader began dealing out of his Yale dorm room. Another dealer offered Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library a copy of a rare Dutch Atlas the library thought it already had. But when curators checked, they discovered it had actually gone missing—and that in fact, the atlas offered for sale had been taken from its shelves. The FBI traced it back to an unlikely pair of thieves—two Byzantine priests named Michael Huback and Stephen Chapo, who had apparently smuggled that book and others out of the library under their robes. When authorities searched their monastery in Queens, they found hundreds of other rare books taken from not only Yale, but also Dartmouth, Harvard, Notre Dame, and other universities. The priests were defrocked and sentenced to a year and a half in prison.
New to the business, Arader was angered by the injustice done to the Sterling, where he’d first learned about maps. He took it upon himself to police the trade, keeping a lookout for other thieves. He soon found one in Charles Lynn Glaser, a map dealer based in Arader’s hometown of Philadelphia. In 1974, security guards at Dartmouth College had found eight antique atlases, including a rare copy of Thomas Jefferys’s American Atlas, in the trunk of his car. Convicted of stealing the books from the Dartmouth library map room, he was sentenced to three to seven years in prison but was paroled after serving only seven months.
A few years later, in 1978, he called Arader offering to sell him two maps of New France by Samuel de Champlain. Knowing how rare those maps were, Arader called the FBI and then wore a wire to negotiate the deal. The evidence he gathered, in part, led authorities to determine that Glaser had stolen the maps from the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. Glaser pled guilty and spent six months in prison. But that wasn’t enough to stop him—in 1992, he again pled guilty to stealing a map from the Free Library of Philadelphia. This time, he received only probation.
Arader also played a role in apprehending another thief, Andy Antippas, a thirty-seven-year-old Tulane English professor. Arader bought five maps from Antippas at a New Orleans antiques fair in 1978, including a copy of John Seller’s seminal 1675 map of New England. As he was cleaning the maps for resale, he noticed that one had a faint Yale University stamp of ownership on it. When he called the college, it turned out that all five were missing from the Sterling.
Faced with the evidence, Antippas pled guilty to charges carrying a maximum sentence of ten years. “I can only ask for compassion,” Antippas said at sentencing, and the judge showed it, giving him only one year in prison. “We were amazed he got so little,” Yale assistant librarian Margit Kaye said at the time. “Everyone seemed shocked.” (Though Antippas lost his job at Tulane, he was soon back on his feet, opening a folk art gallery in New Orleans; later he was suspected of but never prosecuted for taking part in a bizarre grave-robbing ring.)
As part of the case, Yale completed an inventory of its collection in April 1978, finding that sixteen sheet maps and seventy-one maps from books were missing in addition to the five that Antippas had admitted stealing. Even so, it declined to release a list of the missing maps. Writing that June in AB Bookman’s Weekly, the president of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America and Yale alumnus, Laurence Witten, blasted Yale for not reporting the theft earlier. “The stolen items can be moved very quickly to remote places where they may not be recognized; and booksellers are likely to be deceived,” he wrote. After the case, the library did report to The New York Times that it was tightening its security procedures and moving most of its precious atlases to the Beinecke. The flat sheet maps, including Seller’s map of New England, however, stayed at the Sterling.
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ARADER FELT VINDICATED by his work bringing down two thieves, and he vowed to bring down more. “What I have always practiced is relentless, unyielding due diligence,” he told me in New York. “It’s almost a giveaway if someone says, ‘I got this from my grandmother.’ I mean, the direct translation of ‘I got this from my grandmother’ is they stole it.” The difficulty in prosecuting map theft, however, is that it is so hard to prove provenance. It’s not like dealing with art theft, where each item is a one-of-a-kind work or numbered edition that can usually be easily identified.
A common myth about theft of paintings is that they are taken on behalf of eccentric billionaires, who put them privately on display—an urban legend first popularized by the James Bond film Dr. No. (In one scene, Bond passes a recently stolen portrait by Goya in the titular villain’s underground lair and shrugs, saying, “So that’s where that went.”) In reality, most art thieves steal with only a vague idea of where they’ll sell their paintings and are unable to fence them. That’s why many art thieves are either caught within days of their crimes, or else their stolen artworks go underground for decades.
Maps are different. No one can know with certainty how many copies of a particular map have survived over the centuries. Like the Waldseemüller map found in Wolfegg Castle, extremely valuable maps in fact do turn up in strange places. At the Miami map fair, Harry Newman told the story of how in the 1950s or 1960s his grandfather took a house call in Brooklyn from Newman’s Sunday school teacher that led to the discovery of the original manuscript maps from Lewis and Clark’s expedition in a trunk in the attic. He had them authenticated and then sold them to Yale for $7,500. “They’d be worth millions today,” he said.
And those are very rare maps with only a few copies—plenty of maps worth thousands still exist in dozens or even hundreds of copies. Forget Dr. No. Someone could hang a stolen map in his house without anyone—including himself—knowing it was stolen. Outside of a giveaway such as a library marking stamp, it’s very difficult to tell which copy of a given map has come from where. And unlike art, maps aren’t hung in galleries or museums, off-limits to inspection. They are mostly kept in libraries, where they are meant to be handled. Gilbert Bland used a razor to slice out maps, but others have used a wet string, balled up in their mouths and then placed in the binding of a book, to take maps. In a few minutes, saliva deteriorates the ancient paper to the point where the page can be easily removed.
No profile exists for those who steal maps. In most cases, the motive is simply the hope for a quick payday with little risk; in some cases, however, possession itself is the goal. In 1986, the curator of University of Georgia’s rare-books library, Robert “Skeet” Willingham, was discovered with at least seventeen maps from the collection framed in his home. Arader helped in that case as well, providing the initial tip that led police to suspect Willingham. (Sentenced to fifteen years in prison, he was paroled in two and a half.) Such “insider” theft accounts for some 75 percent of thefts from libraries and museums. The Beinecke Library had its own brush with it in 2001, when curators discovered that a twenty-two-year-old student volunteer named Benjamin Johnson was stealing from the stacks. In all, he stole $2 million worth of rare books and letters—though most were recovered from his dorm room before he could sell them.
“It’s the same old story, a person recognizes libraries have the best material and don’t have the money to protect these things,” Travis McDade, a University of Illinois librarian and lawyer who has written extensively about map theft told me. “So people cut out two or three maps, go to a dealer, and say my uncle died or my grandfather died, are they worth anything?” The secrecy and competition among dealers, said McDade, aid thieves, who find the deals simply t
oo good to pass up. “If they don’t buy it, he’ll sell it to a competitor. It’s a cutthroat business where ultimately it pays not to be as discerning a buyer as everyone else is,” he said. “If you have been in the business long enough, you have dealt in stolen items.”
No library is immune. Even the Library of Congress was vandalized by a sixty-two-year-old Alexandria bookstore owner named Fitzhugh Lee Opie, who raided the library’s stacks for ten years before he was finally caught in 1992 with two Pacific Railroad survey maps under his sweater. He received six months in prison. For years, such lenient prison sentences were the norm in book and map theft, with none of the thieves serving more than two and a half years. That was probably a combination of who was doing the stealing—mostly middle-aged white men without any criminal past—and what they stole—mere pieces of paper. Prosecutors and judges often failed to appreciate the inherent value of items known to only a small community of specialists. With another case that hit the courts the same time as Bland’s, however, that was about to change.
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DANIEL SPIEGELMAN WAS both cautious and daring in his thefts. Cautious, because unlike most map thieves, he didn’t try to sneak material out in front of onlooking guards. Daring, because instead he broke in to commit crimes at night, after the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University had closed. Spiegelman started stealing at the same time as Bland—the spring of 1994—by shimmying up an abandoned dumbwaiter from below the locked stacks where the rare books were kept.
He visited night after night for months, stealing hundreds of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts and dozens of letters written by US presidents from George Washington to Woodrow Wilson. Among his targets was one of Columbia’s gems: a nine-volume German edition of Blaeu’s Atlas Maior from 1667—one of only two copies in the world. One by one, Spiegelman razored more than two hundred maps out of the volumes. When he was done, one volume had only three maps left.
The library didn’t discover the thefts until Fourth of July weekend, when a librarian realized a sixteenth-century liturgical manuscript was missing from its case. After a wider search revealed a dozen empty manuscript boxes, director Jean Ashton called in the FBI. Columbia broke with the discretion embraced by most libraries victimized by thieves, privately circulating a list of stolen items. It caught the attention of a Dutch dealer the following spring, when a man approached to sell books and manuscripts, all of which were on the list.
Police set up a sting, surrounding Spiegelman at a Holiday Inn in Utrecht as he tried to make the sale. Later they raided a storage locker in New York, where they found dozens of letters, manuscripts, and, in the last locker, many of the maps severed from the Blaeu atlas. The ensuing legal case took years to unfold. Spiegelman successfully fought extradition from the Netherlands for more than a year—in part, bizarrely, because he was for a time falsely rumored to be a suspect in the April 1995 Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, and the Dutch wouldn’t extradite him if he was facing the death penalty. He returned to the United States in November 1996 and made a plea bargain in April 1997, a month before Bland left prison.
As Travis McDade described in The Book Thief, the plea bargain started routinely. Spiegelman detailed his crimes, and prosecutors agreed to follow the sentencing guidelines. Since the 1980s, the federal system has followed a fairly straightforward table to calculate sentences, with the level of severity of the offense on the horizontal access, and the degree of defendant’s criminal history on the vertical. To find the sentencing range, all the judge has to do is identify where they intersect.
The guidelines also give judges some leeway to take into account the particular details of the case and the defendant’s level of cooperation, allowing them in some circumstances to opt for a “downward departure” to decrease the sentence or an “upward departure” to increase it. Downward departures were actually quite common in the Southern District of New York, where Spiegelman was prosecuted, used in 34 percent of cases at the time. Upward departures, meanwhile, were rare, used in only 1 percent of cases.
In Spiegelman’s case, the guidelines put the sentencing range at between thirty and thirty-seven months, or about a year more than the twenty-two months he’d already served. When library director Jean Ashton heard about that range, she was appalled. Here was a man who had systematically desecrated Columbia’s rare-book holdings, forever altering and destroying documents that had survived for hundreds of years.
“The very existence of rare books and manuscripts provides the basis for new discovery and interpretation in almost every area of study,” she wrote the judge. “[T]he destructive acts of one person can cause a piece of history to be lost to all future generations.” The argument had its effect. When the parties met again for the sentencing hearing in June, Judge Lewis Kaplan surprised the court by announcing he was considering an upward departure. Spiegelman’s defense attorneys protested, demanding hearing after hearing to argue against the move.
If anything, the strategy hurt their client by giving the library a forum in which to present its case. In the final hearing in March 1998, Ashton brought several items, including two volumes of the Blaeu atlas. “They are considered the great glory of the golden age,” she began, as she held one of them up with a pair of white gloves. Opening the cover, she displayed row after row of page stubs that had once held maps. That afternoon, Kaplan granted an upward departure of five levels, increasing the sentence to sixty months in prison.
Since Spiegelman had now been in prison for three years, that added another two. But he had no intention of serving out the entire sentence. A year and a half into it, in September 1999, Spiegelman escaped from a halfway house in Manhattan. Rather than go into hiding, he recovered a cache of stolen items and offered them to a rare-book dealer in Connecticut. Police caught him in a sting almost identical to the one in the Netherlands, and the judge added another two years to his sentence. He finally left prison on July 19, 2001, after serving more than six years.
The hefty sentence for Spiegelman in comparison to those given to other convicted map thieves was a victory for Columbia. But it was also a victory for the idea that the value of rare maps and books went beyond the dollar amount they commanded on the market. After the Supreme Court affirmed this idea in another case, the US Sentencing Commission revised its guidelines in November 2002 to add a new category for “Theft of . . . Cultural Heritage Resources,” with a base level two steps higher than simple larceny, and even more steps added if the object was stolen from a library or museum or if it was taken for monetary gain.
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THE BLAND AND SPIEGELMAN thefts were a wake-up call to the cartographic community. Maps had never been stolen this brazenly, or on such a large scale. Conference panels were called, best practices shared on library Listservs. Starting in the late 1990s, some libraries began installing security cameras in their reading rooms; others began to make digital images of their most valuable maps in order to identify them in case of theft. There was only so much they could do, however. When a recession hit a few years later, funds for additional security dried up, and many efforts were put on hold.
On the other side, map dealers started becoming more wary about where they bought material. One strident advocate of self-policing was Tony Campbell, a London map dealer and former librarian at the British Library, who sent out a call for dealers to band together against theft in 2001. “It is essential that formal, international networks are established, to circulate immediately news about thefts and about the suspects involved,” he wrote. His pleas to set up a centralized list of stolen maps fell on deaf ears. But individual dealers began more closely scrutinizing where they got material and became more suspicious about those who sold them maps—if only to protect their own reputations.
One person who came under increasing attention was Forbes Smiley. His reputation for slow payment and bounced checks was well-known, but at least one dealer suspected him of worse. Bill Reese,
the New Haven dealer who’d been burned in the purchase of the Matthew Clark atlas, became suspicious of some of Smiley’s goods. As he tells the story, he was doing some research on the map of New England made by John Foster, the first map printed in America. Produced in Boston in 1677, the map is incredibly rare, existing in just four known copies. Another version, however, was printed in London the same year; it’s notable for a typo designating the White Hills of New Hampshire as the “Wine Hills” (Figure 10).
At some time in the 1990s, Reese acquired a London Foster and thought it would be fun to compare it to the Boston version, a copy of which was held down the block at the Beinecke Library. When he requested the book in which it ordinarily appeared, William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England, he found the map was missing. Immediately, Reese thought of Smiley—whom he remembered boasting of handling a Boston Foster a few years before. He shared his suspicions with the library and was later told the FBI investigated but nothing came of the tip.
He wasn’t the only one, however, who distrusted Smiley. Reese told Norman Fiering, the head of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and he in turn told his map department curator, Susan Danforth. The Brown library had lost several maps to Gilbert Bland, and Danforth vowed not to lose any more. After hearing about Smiley’s poor reputation, she always made sure to sit next to him whenever he visited the library. “To be honest, I looked forward to it,” Danforth later told me. “He had great stories, and I learned a lot about maps from him.”
The Map Thief Page 14