Printed on rough gray paper, it is just a foot and a half high and about as long. But it holds an impressive amount of detail. The interior teems with woods and hills, British soldiers fighting off a skirmish of American Indians, and animals. Kaye pointed out a turkey west of Boston she said is the earliest image of the animal ever depicted on a map. The map is surprisingly full of color; pinks, yellows, and greens trace the borders of counties and colonies and fill in the clothing of the two Native Americans on either side of the cartouche.
All in all, it is a fine copy of the map—though not without a few stains, or “foxing,” as it’s called by collectors. One dark smudge below and to the left of a ship sailing past Martha’s Vineyard always gave Kaye a twinge of guilt, since she suspected she was the one who made it during her many handlings of the map over the years. She knew that smudge so well, she did a double-take one day in July 2002 when she saw it on Forbes Smiley’s website.
Smiley had just launched the site a month before, advertising Seller’s map as one of the first he offered for sale. As Kaye examined the picture on the site, she immediately noticed the smudge in the corner. Oh my God, she thought. That’s our map. The listing referred to it as “a fine dark impression, carefully colored in an original hand,” going on for several paragraphs about the history of the map and the later maps it inspired. At the end of the listing, the description noted, “Yale University is home to an uncolored copy of the first state, bound with four pages of printed text comprising a brief history of New England.”
Except that wasn’t true. The library’s curators had long ago separated the map from the pages of text, storing it separately. And now as Kaye went to look for the map to prove she wasn’t imagining things, she couldn’t find it in the drawer where it was supposed to be filed. She searched methodically through other drawers, flipping through map after map without success. That wasn’t unusual—with a quarter-million maps in the collection, it was impossible to keep all of them filed correctly. But this was a special map, one of only a handful of its kind in the world—and it shouldn’t have been missing.
Kaye printed out the page from Smiley’s site and took it to the head curator of the department, Fred Musto, to share her concerns. “What do you want me to do?” he said, according to her later recollection. “Call the police and arrest the guy?” Kaye had to admit the evidence was circumstantial. Since the Sterling didn’t keep records of maps checked out by patrons, there was nothing to prove Smiley had even looked at it, much less taken it.
All Kaye had was the smudge. But as Smiley made clear, his copy was colored, while Yale’s wasn’t. And why would he mention Yale’s copy on the site if he himself had taken it? Most important, Smiley was a respected map dealer, and Kaye was a loyal employee. Yale had paid for her master’s of library science degree at Southern Connecticut State University, where her teachers had taught her that to go over the head of superiors was “worse than the kiss of death.” She let the matter drop. But from then on, she resolved to keep a closer eye on Smiley whenever he visited.
—
SMILEY WAS IN the Sterling often in those days. At least once a month, he took a plane from his home on the Vineyard to Tweed Airport in New Haven, invariably wearing an olive-colored tweed jacket and appearing at the library full of jokes and good humor. He installed himself in the reading room and filled out slip after slip for maps he wanted to research. Sometimes, he took whole drawers out of the card catalog into the reading room to flip through.
Oftentimes the catalog listed only the drawer and folder where a map appeared along with other maps from the same time period. At his request, Musto and Kaye brought him whole folders containing dozens of maps at once. Musto had been trained as a general reference librarian and knew little about maps. According to staff who worked with him, he often took long lunches and was away from the map department for hours at a time. Even when he was there, he sometimes spent long minutes in the back room, searching for or cataloging maps.
It was during one of those times that Smiley sat in the reading room, brooding. Sebec worked, he thought. For all the problems he’d had in the map business, he’d watched family after family come up to Sebec and be happy. And now he had the opportunity to extend that happiness to others in the community—if he could see the project through. With the marina standoff brewing, his whole vision was now at risk. And he was struggling as it was to find the money to pay the workers at Sebec Village Shops. He glanced over at the circulation desk, empty again. Then he glanced at the map on the table. How many people would even know if it disappeared? Almost without thinking, he folded the map into a rectangle the size of a credit card and slipped it into his blazer pocket. He looked around again. The desk was still empty. The rest of the maps were still on the table as if nothing had happened.
He gathered them up and returned them to their folder. A few minutes later, he walked out of the room with his heart pounding, taking the elevator downstairs and walking across the flagstone floor. As he pushed open the heavy wooden door to head back outside, no one gave him a second look.
That’s the way Smiley described the first map he stole. “The Sterling Library is the first place I realized I had access to material that was not well catalogued,” he later told me, “and it wasn’t clear it would be missed.” When combined with the financial pressures he faced, that opportunity to walk out with the map became impossible for him to resist. “I am looking at a piece of paper that I can fold and put in my pocket, that people in New York expect me to show up with because I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years legitimately. And I can get thirty thousand dollars wired up to Maine that afternoon,” he explained.
Smiley told me he didn’t remember exactly which map he stole first, though in court records he claimed that his thefts started in the spring of 2002. If that is true, then the John Seller map of New England may have been among his first. After taking the map, he carefully colored parts of it to obscure its origins, dabbing paint onto the three-hundred-year-old paper just as he’d seen Mick Tooley do in London years earlier. He filled the blank shield to the left of the cartouche with a shade of salmon pink and painted the skirts of the Indians holding up the cartouche a pale green.
When it was ready, he brought the map to his friend Harry Newman, knowing it was just the kind of map he loved—crudely drawn and primitive, with lots of stories written into its blank spaces of exploration and American Indian wars. He offered the map at $75,000—easily half of what it was worth on the market. Since Smiley’s costs were zero, however, he could afford to sell on the cheap. But this wasn’t a map Newman would want to sell; this was one he’d want to frame and keep, and having recently bought a house, he was in no position to buy it. After he turned it down, Smiley called another client, Harold Osher, a doctor and map collector from Portland, Maine, who had turned his collection into a map library based at the University of Southern Maine. Osher was thrilled to see such a rarity at such a good price and gladly bought it from him.
The stealing became easier after that. He was at the Sterling and other libraries all the time doing research. It was easy enough when he saw an opportunity to slip a map into his pocket and walk out undetected. For all the ease with which he stole the maps, however, he was mistaken in thinking that no one noticed.
—
AFTER THAT FIRST INCIDENT with the John Seller map, Margit Kaye began to carefully watch the maps that Smiley requested on his visits to the Sterling. Over the years, she had gotten to know him well—and had always been impressed with how well dressed and full of knowledge he seemed. She’d even found herself wishing her daughter could meet a nice man like that.
Now, however, she noticed a change in him. He always seemed to be in a rush, arriving late on a Friday with excuses of plane delays, and then hastily requesting dozens of map folders. As Kaye went to collect them one by one from the back room, she often had to leave him unattended in the reading room. She tr
ied to keep an eye on him, but all she saw was a harried map scholar, eagerly turning over pages.
When Smiley wasn’t at the library, Kaye continued to monitor his website for any other maps that Yale might be missing. That October, she discovered four maps on the site that Yale had in its catalogs but weren’t in the drawers. Three of them were important early state maps—of Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and South Carolina from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—while the last was a sea chart of the Pacific Ocean by Samuel Thornton, John Thornton’s son and successor in producing The English Pilot. Again she printed out the pages and brought them to Musto’s attention—but once again, he told her there was nothing he could do without proof.
As she continued to look at the website, another image continued to bother her: a map of Boston that Henry Pelham made in 1777, just after the Revolutionary War had broken out. She was sure that she’d seen that map in Yale’s collection, but there was no card in the catalog to indicate it. Finally, in February 2003, it suddenly occurred to her that there was another source she could check. Back when the library began digitizing its card catalog some twenty-five years earlier, staff made a microfilm copy of it, exactly as it appeared on June 30, 1978.
Kaye spooled through the roll to the place where the maps of Boston were catalogued, and there she found the image of the card: “A plan of Boston in New England with its environs . . . Henry Pelham . . . 1777.” She went back to the card catalog, but the card definitely wasn’t there. As she looked at the evidence, she suddenly realized: If someone could steal maps, they could also steal cards. That meant the library could be missing maps of which it had no record at all.
—
ONE SUCH MAP, in fact, had gone missing along with its card the previous spring—and Kaye failed to realize it. It was the most valuable of all of the maps Smiley had stolen so far, a plan of Boston made by John Bonner in 1743, which Smiley listed on his site for $185,000. A sea captain in the Indies trade, Bonner first made the plan in 1722 at the age of seventy-seven, the only map he’d ever made. At the time, it was the first city plan ever engraved and printed in America, and it’s the only map of Boston that survives from the period when the capital of New England was growing in prosperity.
After Bonner’s death, map seller William Price acquired the plates and revised it eight times. Yale owned the fifth state, which featured some of the most significant changes, such as the addition of Faneuil Hall, where the Sons of Liberty met a few decades later to plan the Boston Tea Party. Only five copies of this state were known to exist—and only three copies of any state of Bonner’s plan were now in private hands. Even Norman Leventhal, the great Boston collector, owned it only in facsimile.
Smiley brought the map to Harry Newman, who’d never held an original copy of Bonner’s map in all of his years as a map dealer. This one was in rough shape, folded into six sections and nearly falling apart. Knowing what it would go for in good condition, however, Newman bought the map and sent it out to his restorer, who painstakingly reconnected the pieces in time for it to appear in the Old Print Shop’s 2002 summer catalog, which was shipped—among other places—to the Sterling’s map room.
The following summer, one of the maps Smiley stole ended up in an even stranger place. Every two years, the prestigious International Conference on the History of Cartography took place in a different part of the world. In 2003, the conference chose the Harvard Map Library in Cambridge and the Osher Library in Portland, Maine, to host the get-together. Hundreds of map scholars, dealers, and collectors were set to attend. To celebrate the honor, Osher arranged with the Portland-based Shipyard Brewing Company to produce a special label of beer to be sold at the conference.
Attendees arrived to find a limited-run edition of Shipyard’s 2003 Summer Ale in large-format bottles, described as a “2-row British Pale Ale” with a “mellow malted wheat flavor” that was “great with seafood.” Wrapping around the label was the library’s newly acquired John Seller map of New England, with “ICHC 2003” replacing the title in the cartouche. On either side were the Native Americans whose loincloths Smiley had painted green (Figure M).
—
A HUNDRED MILES farther north, the feud in Sebec was escalating. Charlene Moriarty’s list of complaints about Smiley’s shops had been mostly dismissed by Sebec’s code enforcement officer, Bill Murphy. But he did “withhold final judgment” in the issue of parking. Smiley’s project had been “grandfathered” to allow parking space to take up 20 percent of the property, while the rest had to remain vegetated land. If Smiley went over that amount, he would be in violation of his permit. The planning board, which included several of the Moriartys’ supporters, also filed a complaint with the selectmen, charging that Smiley’s parking took up 32 percent and demanding that Smiley submit new plans. “We have an obligation to uphold the laws of the town and the state,” planning board member Walt Emmons said at the selectmen’s meeting that November.
Smiley countered with a formal appeal of the Moriartys’ marina permit, which earned an angry response from the Moriartys’ lawyer. “Consider this a shot across Mr. Smiley’s bow,” he wrote. “If he continues to engage in meritless meddling into the Moriartys’ affairs, we will respond in a very aggressive manner, putting Mr. Smiley and Mr. Fariel at considerable legal risk.” Glen Fariel resigned from the board of selectmen nine days later, citing “increased responsibilities and demands” at his work. Smiley refused to withdraw his appeal, which was denied by the remaining two selectmen in short order.
On December 2, 2002, the selectmen finalized a new agreement with the Moriartys, stating that the original permit was “ambiguous” and granting the Moriartys permission to operate the marina so long as they obeyed all state and local environmental laws. The same day, the town’s code enforcement officer, Bill Murphy, opened a formal investigation into the alleged violations at Smiley’s shops.
Smiley was furious. He had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to help his neighbors, and now instead of being thanked, he was being persecuted. Put on the defensive, he gave an interview to the local paper, The Piscataquis Observer, saying the town had simply been “overwhelmed with all of our plans and details.” His lawyer, Greg Cunningham, however, was more forceful, alleging the investigation into Smiley’s property was nothing but payback for his opposition to the Moriartys’ permit. The town’s response was “to have our property investigated and put under the microscope,” he said. “I think that’s a unique way of handling local land-use issues.”
Backing down wasn’t in Smiley’s nature. Concluding that fairness was impossible to find in Sebec, he filed a new appeal—this time against the town as well as the Moriartys—in the county superior court a week before Christmas. The town had “exceeded its authority” in signing the deal with the Moriartys, he charged, engaging in actions that were “arbitrary, contrary to law, and not supported by evidence in the record.”
Of course, not everyone saw the situation that way. The town’s two selectmen, Buzz Small and Susan Dow, publicly contended that they were simply trying to forge a compromise that would allow everyone the freedom to pursue their projects. With the help of one of Smiley’s friends, they each arranged to meet with him separately to plead with him to withdraw the lawsuit. Smiley refused, telling them, “I don’t like to lose.”
The town continued to pursue its investigation into the parking at Smiley’s shops, with the code officer declaring in February 2003 that he was in violation of exceeding the permitted amount. Smiley’s lawyer insisted that the property lines Murphy used were incorrect and that by his calculations, Smiley had been grandfathered parking on 41 percent of his property. At a meeting that April, the Portland attorney stood over a desk in a jacket and tie while selectman Small reviewed the plans in a red-checkered flannel shirt. By his calculations, he said, Smiley was allowed 35 percent—but he might be willing to concede another 3 percent, to bring the total to 38. Smiley had unti
l October to correct the problem, the selectmen said.
Still no word had come from the superior court on the Moriartys’ permit. The town was now solidly split into two camps, one that ate at Smiley’s café in Sebec Village Shops and mailed their letters from his post office, and another that ate at the diner down the street and drove a dozen miles to the next town to send mail. In February 2003, some residents charged the Big Bear Snowmobile Club, where Glen Fariel was president, with discrimination because it had two tiers of dues, one for long-term members and one for newer members. They formed their own snowmobile club called the Sebec Freedom Riders, unsuccessfully petitioning the town for a share of Big Bear’s state funds for trail maintenance.
When the Moriartys finally built their boat dock and moorings in the summer of 2003, they put up a sign prohibiting any boater from docking there in order to visit Sebec Village Shops. According to Smiley and his friends, speedboats began buzzing Smiley’s house, drawing figure eights in the water with their outboards, while riders waved American flags and screamed obscenities. Finally, one summer night, Smiley and his family were woken up by the sound of a gunshot followed by breaking glass. Smiley panicked and threw on the outside lights to find that one of his barn windows had been shattered.
—
SMILEY’S LEGAL BATTLES in Sebec put new pressure on his finances. In order to pay his bills, he expanded his list of targets. By 2003, they included the Boston Public Library (BPL), which had exhibited the Norman Leventhal collection a few years earlier. Unlike the New York Public Library, the BPL didn’t have a dedicated map room, or even a map curator to look after its collection. Maps were included as part of the rare-books and manuscript department, housed in a nearly forgotten room on the library’s third floor.
The Map Thief Page 17